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      Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

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      The British Congolese playwright earned the $25,000 prize for her memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      The Shakespearean Tall Tale That Shaped How We See Starlings

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      Researchers debunked a long-repeated yarn that the common birds owe their North American beginnings to a 19th-century lover of the Bard. Maybe this ubiquitous bird’s story is ready for a reboot.In 1890, a mustachioed eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin released a few dozen European starlings into New York City. His supposed goal? Introduce all the bird species mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays to America.More than a century later, the European starling is one of the most plentiful bird species in North America. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit this continent, from Alaska and Newfoundland all the way to Mexico. The animals are gorgeous, with polka-dot feather patterns and a purply-green sheen. They fill the skies in great numbers, flying in synchronized patterns called murmurations.But they are also considered a pest, said to spread disease to livestock and cause $800 million worth of agricultural damage each year. The species is believed to take over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Add it all up, and it makes one heck of a story about how even the tiniest of actions can trigger profound consequences. The butterfly effect, there for all to see in every roadside murmuration. A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and around 130 years later, a woodpecker loses its nest and a dairy farmer loses their livelihood.“If true, it would suggest that a long-dead dramatist totally reshaped the ecosystem of a foreign continent, which is a fascinating connection between literature and science,” said John MacNeill Miller, an assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.However, Dr. MacNeill and a Lauren Fugate, a student who worked with him, recently concluded that crucial parts of the story are not true. And that made them wonder: What else have scientists and naturalists gotten wrong about the European starling’s narrative? Is there more to this bird known mostly as an invasive pest?The Bird and the Bard-LoverThree starlings collected in Central Park, including, from left, two juveniles collected in 1892 and an adult collected in 1890, in the American Museum of Natural History’s historical collection.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeathers of one of the European starling study skins from 1890. The museum’s starling collection includes specimens from their native, as well as introduced, range.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller has long been fascinated by the tale of Eugene Schieffelin. But there was a problem with the narrative.“In all the places that I had seen this story before,” he said, “I never saw a single reliable source from the time period when this supposedly happened.”So he and Ms. Fugate, started digging through archives and databases for any link between the Bard-lover and the bird. According to their findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Humanities in November, Schieffelin did release 40 pairs of European starlings into New York City twice in the springs of 1890 and 1891. But Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller failed to find evidence that Schieffelin was the Shakespeare superfan he has been made out to be.They found in an essay collection published in 1948 that Edwin Way Teale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nature writer, was the first to link the two. He referred to Schieffelin’s “curious hobby” of introducing “all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”Determined to find the source for Teale’s claim, Dr. Miller drove to the University of Connecticut to sort through a collection of Teale’s archives. (He died in 1980.) In a draft of the essay, Teale muses that perhaps Schieffelin had been influenced by a Shakespeare garden being started in Central Park around the same time — a botanical homage to the Bard that sought to nurture plants, not birds, mentioned in his plays.However, Teale got the timing wrong. The Shakespeare Garden — which you can still visit today — wasn’t planned until a decade after Schieffelin’s death, or 22 years after he first released starlings. Therefore, the garden could not have been a factor. The final version of the essay omitted the mention of the garden but left the connection between Schieffelin and Shakespeare. This statement of fact has since been repeated again and again without challenge in magazines, newspapers of record and birding websites.Several starlings in Fort Tryon park.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“Long story short, we concluded that this commonplace story is mostly fictional,” Dr. Miller said.Dr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also question whether today’s birds are uniquely descended from Schieffelin’s flocks, as is often parroted. Numerous records exist of earlier European starling introductions, starting in 1872, to locations including New York City, Ohio and even as far away as Oregon. Such releases were part of a movement at the time known as “acclimatization” where people deliberately experimented with transplanting species into new areas, either to see how they would adapt or because those species were seen as beneficial in some way.Some tellings of the Schieffelin starling origin story note these earlier introductions but suggest that those birds failed to survive. However, wild starlings were caught in Massachusetts in 1876, far from any of the documented introductions. Likewise, there is a record of wild starlings in New Jersey in 1884. And who knows how many birds truly survived in nature beyond human notice, the researchers argue.“From the perspective of an invasion biologist, most invasions come from multiple introductions,” said Natalie Hofmeister, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University.In 2019, Ms. Hofmeister published a study in the journal Molecular Ecology of the European starling’s genetic variation across North America. If all the birds came from Schieffelin’s small flock, then you’d expect to see a tight genetic bottleneck in the data. Likewise, if the other, earlier introductions had been successful, that should have injected more diversity into the results. But her findings landed somewhere in between.“It does seem like there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether or not the New York birds were really the beginning of the starlings’ expansion,” said Ms. Hofmeister, who has a follow-up study in the works.Hell Is Empty and All the Starlings Are HereA scavenging starling near the southwest entrance to Central Park. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit North America — they are one of the most plentiful bird species on the continent.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also take issue with the depiction of starlings as biological terrors. As evidence, they point to a well-regarded study from 2003 that found out of 27 native cavity-nesting birds, only one showed hints of decline that might be attributed to the introduction of starlings: the small woodpeckers known as yellow-bellied sapsuckers.Nicole Michel, director of quantitative science for the National Audubon Society, sees it differently. It’s her job to drill down into bird population data. And she says looking for declines as a result of any one variable sets “too high of a bar.”“There are many factors out there that we know are impacting birds — cats, building collisions, pesticides,” she said. “And yet it’s very difficult to determine population level impacts.”She added: “So do starlings affect other birds? Definitely. Are they the only ones that affect other birds? No.”Nearly three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. The European starlings here are counted among them, actually, with an estimated decline of 49 percent over the same time frame. (Starlings are also “declining rapidly” in Europe.)Even on the downswing, with about 85 million animals, starlings are bound to create an impact. The more likely scenario is that scientists don’t know enough to see the effects of starlings, said Daniel Simberloff, a biologist at the University of Tennessee.“We have no idea what its real impact is on insect populations, for example,” said Dr. Simberloff, who is also the editor of the journal Biological Invasions. Nor do scientists know much about more subtle but no less important impacts, such as the way starlings may affect how nutrients cycle through an ecosystem, he said.Anti-perching spikes are used to discourage birds, including starlings, from resting near the runways and taxiways at LaGuardia Airport.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesStarlings are believed to threaten native birds by taking over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesOne factor that’s not subtle is the way European starlings descend on feedlots and dairy farms by the tens to hundreds of thousands. Starlings usually eat insects during the winter, but when livestock feed is available, they’ll pick through it for steam-flaked corn, which is higher in protein and fiber than other parts of the feed. And when that many birds are taking the M&Ms out of the trail mix, so to speak, it can affect growth and milk production in cows and cost dairy farmers millions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.The birds are also suspected of transmitting diseases to livestock, though proving how this happens exactly has been as slippery as deciphering the impacts on native birds. While feedlots with more starlings had higher incidences of antibiotic resistant E. coli, killing more than 70 percent of the starling flock did not change how much E. coli the cows had. It’s also unclear if starlings are bringing microbes into the feedlots or simply spreading microbes that are already there.A research economist for the U.S.D.A.’s National Wildlife Research Center, Stephanie Shwiff has seen how starlings congregate at dairy lots firsthand and, she said, it is “impressive.” But as she tallies up losses to the agricultural sector, she sees no redemptive arc for these birds — only financial harm.“A lot of producers know exactly the damage that the birds are doing, but they have this overwhelming sense that it’s just the cost of doing business,” Dr. Shwiff said. She said blueberry farmers and wine grape vineyards also get slammed: “They have an almost defeated attitude.”To help farmers and livestock owners, the U.S.D.A.’s Wildlife Services program helps disperse, relocate or eradicate starlings. In 2020 alone, the program shooed away nearly eight million European starlings, and killed another 790,128 of them. A vast majority of these animals were killed with a poison invented specifically for them called DRC-1339, or Starlicide.Starlings and Arrows of Outrageous FortuneJoan Berry Hale of Stockbridge, Ga., a survivor of a 1960 Eastern Airlines plane crash that was the result of a bird strike.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhile starlings’ impact on native birds is still debated, no one can question the effect they’ve had on American aviation. Just ask Joan Berry Hale.On Oct. 4, 1960, Ms. Hale was working as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines when the Lockheed L-188 Electra she was crewing scared a flock of starlings as it took off from Boston en route to Philadelphia.“I could see out the window in the back, and I saw all these black birds fly by,” said Ms. Hale, now 85. The plane’s propellers ingested hundreds of starlings, which disturbed the engines and forced the craft to pitch left and crash nose first into the bay. “They didn’t find the front-end crew until they pulled the nose up out of the mud the next day,” she recalled.Of the 72 people on board, only 10 survived. Most were severely injured, but Ms. Hale emerged unscathed and helped survivors exit the wreckage, put on life preservers and board rescue boats.The Electra crash remains the deadliest accident resulting from a bird strike in world history. It was also a turning point in aviation safety.“That was the crash that started it all,” said Carla Dove, program manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab, which was created in response to the Electra accident.Since its formation, the Feather Identification Lab has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to make air travel safer. Using the Smithsonian’s vast collection of feathers, Dr. Dove and other experts can take a piece of “snarge,” what they call bits of bird that have gone through a jet engine, and figure out which species it belonged to. Then, airport managers and wildlife biologists can work together to make the facilities less attractive to those species.For starlings, says Richard Dolbeer, a science adviser for the U.S.D.A.’s Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, something as simple as letting the grass grow can discourage the birds from landing. Spacing out trees also cuts down on large, communal overnight roosts that might keep the animals near an airport.This Great Breach in the Starling’s Abused NatureRyan Kronenbitter, the operations group supervisor for the team at LaGuardia Airport that helps manage wildlife.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut while starlings have caused plenty of wreckage to agriculture and aviation, the birds may have some admirable qualities that are typically overlooked.Dr. Simberloff, a pioneer in the field of invasion biology, said that it was a great tragedy that starlings had been introduced, but that some of the rhetoric around them is overblown.“You see a lot of these popular papers that talk about it as one of the great scourges of North America,” Dr. Simberloff said of starlings. “And they don’t seem to be that.”Dr. Dolbeer, who is also an ornithologist, said he had “great admiration for starlings because they are so adaptable.” He’s also fascinated by the way starlings can intermingle and even roost with native species, such as red-winged blackbirds. “It’s sort of like the analogy of America being a melting pot, with all the people coming in and gluing together,” he said.Dr. Simberloff said his daughter rescued a starling and raised it up from a chick. “It knows its name very clearly,” and will sometimes say it — Blue — when prompted, he said.There may even be reasons to further consider the birds’ ecological impact. The 2003 paper on starling dominance found three species of woodpeckers experienced population increases since the European birds arrived, although it does not make a case for causation. And Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller point to a 1915 study by U.S.D.A. scientists who concluded that starlings gobbled up fewer crops and ate more crop pests than native species.And while his research has made the Shakespearean starling legend seem well and truly dead, the question of how to view the European starling these days seems very much to depend on whom you ask.After more than 60 years, Ms. Hale thinks about the crash anytime she sees a large flock of birds. So many innocent people lost their lives, and she’ll never forget the cold bite of the water. Ultimately, she thinks she became a better person because of the accident.And while she “doesn’t care much for those pesky birds,” she also doesn’t blame the European starling. “It wasn’t their fault,” Ms. Hale said. “That’s just nature.”A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and a life changes course in the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.A starling undeterred by an anti-perching device on a lamppost at LaGuardia.Karsten Moran for The New York Times More

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      ‘Birthday Candles’ Review: Another Year, Another Cake, Another Profundity

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      Debra Messing expounds on the preciousness of life in a production that aspires to convey eloquent whimsy, but too often feels methodically sentimental.Repetition can make magic happen: repeat a word or a phrase enough times and it breathes new life, fresh meaning. Or repetition can strip language until all that’s left are empty rhythms and sounds. Words are funny like that.Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, tries to build poignancy and depth through moments that repeat like a record needle stuck in a groove. Instead, this Roundabout Theater Company production gets caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes.“I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!” So declares the precocious 17-year-old Ernestine (Debra Messing) as the show opens. It’s her birthday, and her mother (Susannah Flood) is making golden butter cake; it’s a tradition, one that Ernestine clings to for years, baking the same cake for herself over 90 birthdays, which we live through with her in the course of the 90-minute play.Messing, center, as the teenage Ernestine and Susannah Flood as her mother.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith a fanciful offstage chime Ernestine instantly skips from one age to the next, though at an inconsistent clip — sometimes a year, sometimes a decade, but we’re always on her birthday, and she’s always baking her cake. (Messing beats the eggs, creams the butter and mixes the batter in real time, making this sugar-addicted critic wonder: Where are our slices?)As she bakes, the details of her life fill in around her: Family members and friends enter and exit, are born and die. With a chime her high school crush, Matt (John Earl Jelks), becomes her husband. Another and they have a teenage son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), and a daughter in college, Madeline (Flood, heartachingly tragic), and before Ernestine knows it Billy is ready to propose to his hopelessly neurotic girlfriend, Joan (a delightful Crystal Finn).All the while Ernestine’s lovesick friend Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni, adorable at any age) casually strolls in unannounced, carrying a torch for her for decades.With ordinary characters expounding on the preciousness of life, “Birthday Candles” aspires to convey eloquent whimsy — births, deaths, love, despair, whole constellations of human feelings and thoughts — but it’s Christine Jones’ wondrous set design that wordlessly manages the trick.A homey powder-blue kitchen is framed by three door-less thresholds on the left, right and center — each one representing passage into the house or the outside world, or a more metaphysical passage into the afterlife. Dwarfing the kitchen is a night sky messy with floating objects — keyboard, tricycle, dollhouse, umbrella, soccer ball, a teddy bear with his right arm extended, left paw positioned over his face as though in embarrassment or fear.It’s there that we neatly see how the personal can meet the universal. Down below, though, we are dutifully following an unrelenting parade of progeny embodied, “Lehman Trilogy”-style, by Flood, Finn, Jelks and Livingston. At some points it becomes a hassle to see the view from Ernestine’s family tree, given how quickly figures in her life disappear, and how children transform into grandchildren, then great-grandchildren.These shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their characters’ varied ages in succinct lines: a lifetime in just a few minutes. Most of the cast, particularly Messing, who delivers an awkward caricature of a teen and then the exaggerated hand-wringing and dithering warble of an old woman, struggle in the sunrise and sunset years.Vivienne Benesch’s direction exaggerates the methodical sentimentality of Haidle’s script, allowing broad, clichéd gestures to do shorthand work. The teens, slouching from one end of the stage to the next, are unbearably self-righteous. (“You’re a shadow in a suit posing as a human, you should be ashamed of yourself,” sneer the teenage avatars of two generations, in one of the play’s funnier repetitions.) And the middle-aged adults wilt into the weary postures of seniors, with their sighs and ailments, right before our eyes.The shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their aging characters in a few lines. Late in life, Messing’s Ernesteine is flanked by (from left) Flood, Enrico Colantoni, Christopher Livingston, Jelks and Crystal Finn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Ernestine shuffles closer to a century of birthdays, the metamorphoses lean into emotional manipulation. We watch one character suddenly going slack, his face twisting and his hands stiffening in place, as if suffering a stroke. It’s unsettling, but for anyone who has seen family affected by illness, such transitions feel gauche; a quick change in posture and a handful of lines meant to represent the monumental losses we reckon with in, as Ernestine calls it, “the daily human errand.”“Birthday Candles” nearly suffocates in such grandiloquent pronouncements and existential metaphors. Ingredients for the birthday cake include not just the usual pantry staples but “stardust, the machinery of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.” Characters recite lines from “King Lear” so as to share the mad monarch’s rantings about the nature of life and the passage of time.Even a poor goldfish, a nonunion actor in a round bowl on the kitchen table, works his tail off as a stand-in for what Kenneth calls “the divinity within yourself.”In some ways this reach for the cosmic comes with the territory. In surreal plays like his 2016 “Smokefall,” Haidle aspires to mix multigenerational family drama and poetic musings. And he acknowledges that this work, his Broadway debut, is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” which, like his classic “Our Town,” employs chronological jumps as a means of considering love, life and death in the stories of everyday people.At its most strained, “Birthday Candles” feels like an imitation of a superior work. The time-hopping conceit doesn’t allow us to get a real sense of the world beyond Ernestine’s kitchen. That said, there were plenty of empathetic sniffles and sighs in the audience during the performance. The most moving moments to me were those quiet exchanges that functioned as silhouettes for unspoken griefs. After one devastating loss, Ernestine and Matt bake a cake together in a weighty silence; after a few seconds he walks away, head hanging like a half-mast flag on a windless day.Ernestine’s story predictably finishes by circling back to the beginning — cake, stardust and atoms. Allow me to end with my own dose of carefully administered déjà vu: repetition can make magic happen. But real magic comes from the forward-march of a life whose everyday rhythms may repeat, sure, but still leave room for accident and chance — the most sensational improvisation.Birthday CandlesThrough May 29 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org; Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Sweeps Olivier Awards

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      The musical won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. A puppet-filled adaptation of “Life of Pi” and a “Back to the Future” musical also won big.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been the talk of London’s theater world since opening in December, on Sunday swept the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.Starring Eddie Redmayne in his first London role in a decade, “Cabaret” collected seven awards during a ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Its haul included best musical revival, best actor in a musical (Redmayne), best actress in a musical for Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, and best director for Rebecca Frecknall.Britain’s newspaper reviewers sometimes struggled for superlatives to describe “Cabaret.” Nick Curtis, writing in The Evening Standard, summed it up with a simple: “Wow. Just wow.”Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said that Frecknall had made a “remarkable entry into musical theater” after several lauded stage productions here, including of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke.” “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors,” he added.The musical has gained as much attention for its staging as its performances, with audiences made to enter the Playhouse Theater through a side door, only to discover the building has been transformed to look like a 1920s Berlin nightclub. Ticketholders — some of whom criticized sky-high ticket prices — have to work their way through a labyrinth of corridors filled with dancers and drinks to get to their seats.Redmayne, center, as Master of Ceremonies with the company of “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerOf the actors in its original cast, Redmayne won particular plaudits. Arifa Akbar, writing in The Guardian, said he was “electric,” adding: “He gives an immense, physicalized performance, both muscular and delicate, from his curled limbs to his tautly expressive fingertips.”The other big winner on Sunday was “Life of Pi” at Wyndham’s Theater, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about a zookeeper’s son who, after a shipping accident, is stuck on a lifeboat at sea with only animals for company. It took five awards including best new play and best actor for Hiran Abeysekera, as well as a crowd-pleasing best supporting actor award for the seven puppeteers who bring a 44-pound puppet tiger to life onstage. Hiran Abeysekera won best actor for “Life of Pi,” and a best supporting actor award went to the puppeteers who bring the tiger to life onstage.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For SoltReviewers had often singled out those puppeteers for praise. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said they made the tiger exude “a watchful malevolence and innate magnificence,” as he “moves from brute prowling threat to personality in his own right.”Some other shows did manage to get prizes at the Oliviers. “Back to the Future: the Musical” at the Adelphi Theater, a show that has grabbed attention for its flying car as much as its songs, won best new musical, beating shows including “Get Up! Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical” and the London debut of “Frozen.”The best comedy play went to “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” at the Criterion Theater, a fast and loose retelling of Jane Austen’s novel, which closed in February citing a lack of audiences returning to the West End.The other notable winner was a revival of “Constellations” by the Donmar Warehouse at the Vaudeville Theater, which took awards for best revival and best actress in a play for Sheila Atim. That 70-minute, one-act play, about a couple falling in and out of love, was a hit last summer as British theater came back to life after multiple lockdowns. More

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      ‘Penelope’ Review: Adrift Between Ithaca and Progress

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      A new musical-comedy retelling of “The Odyssey” from the York Theater Company tries to center a powerful woman but feels like a show about and for men.For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. He was forced to go in the first place, but now the fighting has been finished for a decade and still he stays away — a king seemingly forsaking his kingdom and his queen.The mob of creeps who began sniffing around seven years ago, salivating at the prospect of the cushy life that marriage to Penelope would bring, think it is well past time for her to choose one of them as her new husband. And, hey, who wouldn’t be drawn to these guys, really, what with their demonstrated ability to show up where they aren’t wanted, become live-in guests and spend lazy days consuming copious amounts of their hostess’s food and drink.Also, they sing a cappella harmonies together. Relentlessly.Penelope would like them gone, but in the meantime, she has to stave off any trip to the altar. And in “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written,” Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner’s new musical-comedy retelling of the epic poem traditionally credited to Homer, she does so by concocting letters from her husband.In them, Odysseus recounts the misadventures that delay him: a Cyclops, a shipwreck, the wrath of Poseidon — the usual spousal excuses. She reads these gripping inventions aloud to her freeloading suitors as proof that her king is en route.“Hope to see you soon,” she has him sign off, affectionately. “Your Odysseus.”Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, “Penelope” paints its title character as the author of “The Odyssey.” It’s a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that “The Odyssey,” a work abundant with substantial female characters — Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis — is not a male creation.The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves — whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, “Homer’s Daughter,” imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of “The Odyssey” — called it “a poem about and for women,” its hero notwithstanding.“Penelope,” at the Theater at St. Jean’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly “female-centric” show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. “Penelope” snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In “The Odyssey,” she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseus’s nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but where’s the rest of her orbit?If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), “Penelope” may be a good fit.Ben Jacoby makes a likable Odysseus, who enjoys a sweet reunion with Telemachus (a charming Philippe Arroyo, in his Off Broadway debut), and has instant sexual chemistry with Penelope — a shock to her chaste system that Simpson conveys with tender, comic nuance. Maria Wirries is also funny as Daphne, Telemachus’s cleareyed, pig-slaughtering love interest.This is the kind of show, though, that gestures toward open-mindedness by having the women explain to the men that they must abandon some of their entitled ways.“I’ll adapt,” Odysseus vows.But “Penelope” itself? It’s a bit of a throwback, in the guise of change.Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really WrittenThrough April 24 at the Theater at St. Jean’s, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘Chasing Andy Warhol,’ Street Theater Goes Pop

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      From Bated Breath Theater Company, the antics of this show, which winds through the East Village, offer little insight into Andy Warhol or his work.It’s so easy. A Breton shirt, a silver wig, sunglasses with acetate frames — and there, suddenly, is Andy Warhol. There on a Citi Bike and there again on roller skates. Playing chess, striking a ballet pose, scooting through the drizzle. In “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a slapdash work of street performance by Bated Breath Theater Company, the pop artist, who died in 1987, has repopulated select blocks of Manhattan’s East Village.Bated Breath’s previous show, “Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec,” a louche tribute to the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, made its flâneur’s way through the West Village in the pandemic’s first winter, earning mostly favorable reviews. So maybe blame pandemic fatigue, the wet spring weather or Warhol’s distinct ability — in life, in art — to elude attempts to pin him down, but the antics of “Chasing Andy Warhol” register as mostly empty space, blank canvases that offer little insight into the man or his work.Created and directed by Mara Lieberman, the show, which lasts just an hour, begins in Astor Place. A jean-jacketed tour guide (Fé Torres at the performance I attended) buckles himself into a daffodil-yellow airplane seat. From behind his seat emerges Andy Warhol (Kyle Starling, one of many Warhols). Warhol then leads the guide — and ticketed spectators — across streets, through plazas, into the window of a gym. Throughout, Torres offers tidbits of biography, which are almost entirely obscure if you are unfamiliar with Warhol’s history (“Was that Charles? Was that before you went to Hawaii? I thought you didn’t fall in love until later.”) and unilluminating if you are.The text would matter less if the visuals were more dynamic. But, despite a few witty touches, like the framing of the Empire State Building, in homage to Warhol’s durational film “Empire,” the staging and the design feel shambolic and the choreography, by Rachel Leigh Dolan, rarely inspired. The vibe is cheerful, unrigorous and pointedly amateur, as in one scene when the actress playing Edie Sedgwick falls to the sidewalk. Edie has just died of an overdose; the actress is very clearly still breathing.Just a moment later, an older man walking by noticed the commotion. “I knew Andy,” he said, sounding bemused. “I mean it.” Then he walked on.“Chasing Andy Warhol” joins recent works, like the immersive Van Gogh exhibits, which reimagine modern art into contemporary experience. It’s the refrigerator magnetization of genius, which Warhol, who had a hearty appreciation and talent for the commercial, would have perhaps enjoyed. There’s a reason Warhol’s work is again in vogue (though, arguably, it never fell out of vogue) in a moment in which the categories of art, entertainment and business feel particularly confused. The show could be in conversation with these ideas. Mostly, it seems in conversation with itself.Just about everyone knows Warhol’s adage, which today reads a lot more like a prophecy, that “in the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Watching “Chasing Andy Warhol,” I was reminded of another axiom, from Warhol’s friend Marshall McLuhan: “Art is anything you can get away with.”Chasing Andy WarholThrough June 12 at Bated Breath Theater Company, Manhattan; batedbreaththeatre.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘Kinky Boots’ Sets Summer Return Off Broadway

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      A revival of the Tony-winning Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration will begin performances at Stage 42 in July.The sex is back in the heel.The producers Daryl Roth and Hal Luftig announced on Thursday that an Off Broadway revival of “Kinky Boots,” the Cyndi Lauper-Harvey Fierstein collaboration that won the Tony Award for best new musical in 2013, would begin performances at the theater in July.The revival at the 499-seat Shubert theater is set to be directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell (“La Cage Aux Folles,” “Legally Blonde”), who directed and choreographed the original Broadway production, which won him his second Tony for choreography.The feel-good musical tells the story of a young Englishman, Charlie Price, who attempts to save his family’s shoe factory by making boots for drag performers. The Broadway production — which starred Stark Sands as Price and Billy Porter as the drag queen Lola, a performance for which Porter won a Tony — closed in April 2019 after 34 preview and 2,505 regular performances.In his critic’s pick review, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the musical, which features music and lyrics by Lauper and a book by Fierstein, “a shameless emotional button pusher.” He described its pulsing, earworm-y score as performing “like a pop star on Ecstasy.” (The cast recording won a Grammy for best musical theater album.)“Kinky Boots” has been a significant hit in the nine years since it opened on Broadway, where it grossed $297 million and won six Tony Awards. The show has toured North America and Britain, and productions have been staged in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Poland and Spain.The Off Broadway production is scheduled to begin performances July 26 and open Aug. 25 at Stage 42 in Hell’s Kitchen. No casting has been announced. More

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      At the FIND Festival, Different Ways of Staging the Real

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      At Berlin’s FIND festival of new international drama, several productions use transcripts to explore questions of state power and identity.BERLIN — Outside a small stage at the Schaubühne theater here on Tuesday evening, a sign cautioned that the Chilean production “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”) featured strobe lights and onstage nudity.In retrospect, that caveat seemed comical, a bit like warning viewers that a Tarantino film might be somewhat bloody. Over the play’s 90-minute run time, the audience sat in stunned silence as a band of eight performers enacted a macabre and ritualistically precise examination of violence’s corrosive effect on the individual and the social body. Scenes of torture and violence, including sexual violence, tumbled forth with balletic elegance. The production’s delicacy of feeling and theatrical finesse were disturbingly at odds with the horrors it depicted.Created by the director Marco Layera and his company La Re-Sentida, “Oasis de la Impunidad” is a harrowing artistic response to Chile’s recent wave of social unrest, which has been described as the country’s worst since the end of the Pinochet regime. Like the other standout productions at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND, “Oasis” takes nightmarish and surreal contemporary events as starting points for provocative theatrical explorations.In late 2019, Chile was convulsed by social unrest after a fare hike on the Santiago subway inspired mass demonstrations and riots against rising inequality. The government declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to restore law and order. In the first weeks of unrest, 18 people were killed and nearly 3,000 detained, including hundreds of women and children, according to a report issued by the National Institute for Human Rights. Since then, there have been numerous reports of security forces torturing and raping protesters.To develop “Oasis,” Layera held a series of theater labs and workshops in Chile. Two hundred people participated, including many survivors of state-sponsored repression and brutality. The resulting show, described as “an investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” is a series of sinister and menacing episodes laced with dark comedy.At the Schaubühne, the actors, a mix of professionals and nonprofessionals, pulled on their genitalia, pinched their teeth and flesh with tools, erupted into paroxysms of hysteria and grief, and lovingly exhibited broken, bloodied bodies in a fun house of horrors. After its world premiere in Berlin, the show will travel to Santiago, Chile, in late May.Toward the end of the performance, an actor pushed through a row of spectators with an apparently passed-out, naked woman limply dangling from his shoulder and slumped her down on an empty seat. She remained there motionless until well after the curtain call. Several audience members stayed with her, cradling her head, until she revived once the theater had emptied out. It was a measure of the production’s success that it was far from clear what was real and what was simulated. By forcing the audience to confront aestheticized violence at such close range, “Oasis de la Impunidad” raised uncomfortable questions about power, art and ethics.Katherine Romans in “Is This A Room,” directed by Tina Satter.Gianmarco BresadolaThe struggle between the individual and the repressive force of the state was also at the center of “Is This a Room” by the American director Tina Satter, also showing at FIND. The play’s text is the verbatim, unedited transcript of an F.B.I. interrogation: In 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old Air Force veteran, linguist and intelligence specialist, was arrested for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the news website The Intercept. She was sentenced to more than five years in prison. Satter’s production dramatizes the hour on June 3, 2017, when F.B.I. agents surprised Winner at her home in Augusta, Ga., with a search warrant.This short, absorbing production was one of the most daring and adventurous plays on Broadway last year (it had earlier runs both Off and Off Off Broadway), and it arrived at FIND as part of its international tour, with its small cast intact from Broadway, with the exception of Katherine Romans stepping in as Winner. (Emily Davis originated the role.) Itchy footed and garrulous, Romans is convincing as the whistle-blower, who seems more worried about the well-being of her pets and the fate of her Yoga music playlist on her phone than spending years behind bars. She chitchats with the F.B.I. agents, who, like her, seem to be sizing up the situation second by second, about her professional ambitions, the languages she knows and her enthusiasm for CrossFit.At the Schaubühne, the actors performed from Parker Lutz’s simple, unfurnished set with the audience seated on either side of the oblong stage. Watching as Winner’s life comes crashing down around her in the space of an hour, one marvels at how perfect the dramatic timing is and how the revelations generated by the twists and turns of the interrogation build to something like catharsis. Even the non sequiturs, including the title question, uttered by a character identified by the transcript as “unknown male,” are beautifully timed and add a note of mystery as well as comic relief to this clammy production.Another FIND offering, Marcus Lindeen’s “L’Aventure invisible” (“The Invisible Adventure”), was also based on verbatim sources. That production — taking its dialogue from interviews, rather than an interrogation transcript — was more immersive than “Is This a Room,” but less convincing as a work of drama.From left, Isabelle Girard, Tom Menanteau and Franky Gogo in “L’Aventure Invisible.”Gianmarco BresadolaThe most immediately striking aspect of “L’Aventure invisible” was its physical format. The audience and performers sat together in a small wooden arena. The round seating area suggested an anatomical theater or amphitheater. The actors, facing one another, were easy to spot even before the performance began because they were the only three people not wearing medical masks.Once the house lights went down, they assumed the personas of people whose experiences suggest that identity is an unstable notion subject to profound and unexpected transformations: Jérôme Hamon, the first person to get two full face transplants; Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke and had to completely reinvent herself at 37; and Sarah Pucill, who made a film about the French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, a gender-nonconforming pioneer.The dialogue is drawn from interviews Lindeen conducted with the trio, and in “L’Aventure invisible,” the three actors take turns questioning one another. While much of what they recount is fascinating, the format felt contrived and was occasionally awkward, with cookie-cutter interview prompts (“How did that make you feel?” or “And then what happened?”) that broke up the lengthy monologues.The actors brought the French text to life in serious, mostly understated performances (the audience could view subtitles in English or German on their smartphones). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamon’s testimony is the most riveting. Tom Menanteau, the young actor playing Hamon, calmly described the degenerative disease that used to disfigure him, and how he now lives with the face of a dead man, 21 years his junior.When fact is stranger — and more frightening — than fiction, how can theatermakers stage the contemporary in artistically sensitive and politically urgent ways? That is the question this year’s FIND invites us to consider.FIND 2022 continues at the Schaubühne through April 10. More