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      Review: Finding Community in ‘As You Like It’

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      This shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater retains the outline of the original, while making space for songs. You don’t have to sing along, though you may want to.The Forest of Arden is where you head when the city won’t hold you. When laws are unjust, when custom constricts, when institutions squeeze and shrink you, here, at last, is space to breathe and to be. Manhattan razed its woodlands long ago, of course. (A lone stand of trees, in Inwood Hill Park, remains.) But on a summer night, in Central Park, squint a little and you can imagine a forest here — the refuge, the bounty, the hush.You won’t have to squint hard at “As You Like It,” the shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater, courtesy of Public Works. Adapted by Laurie Woolery, who directs, and the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who provides the music and lyrics, this easeful, intentional show bestows the pleasures typical of a Shakespeare comedy — adventure, disguise, multiple marriages, pentameter for days. And, in just 90 minutes, it unites its dozens of actors and its hundreds of audience members as citizens of the same joyful community.Taub and Woolery’s adaptation retains the outline of the original, while shortening and tightening the talkier bits, making space for songs. Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior (Darius De Haas), falls instantly for Orlando (Ato Blankson-Wood), the younger son of a dead nobleman. Threatened by the current Duke (Eric Pierre), they flee, with friends and servants, to the Forest of Arden, where Duke Senior has formed an alternate, more egalitarian court.Taub has cast herself as Jaques, the emo philosopher, who opens the show with the limpid ballad, “All the World’s a Stage,” singing: “All the world’s a stage/And everybody’s in the show/Nobody’s a pro.”These lyrics do a lot of work, work that transcends paraphrase. “As You Like It” is a production of Public Works, a division of the Public Theater that partners with community groups. So the song serves as a kind of pre-emptive apology, an acknowledgment of amateurism. Yet the lines function as an invitation, too, an inducement to imagine yourself as part of the show, to join in its creation. A big ask? Maybe. On a breeze-soothed evening, with the city quieted and the lights aglow, it won’t feel that way. And for those who blench and tremble at the thought of audience participation, take a breath. You don’t even have to sing along, though you may want to.I first saw “As You Like It” during a short run at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2017, after the travel bans had been instituted, but before the widespread adoption of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. All scrolling felt like doom scrolling then; to open the morning paper was to start the day with some fresh horror. Things could — and did — get worse. I remember experiencing the show, profoundly and with some tears, as a temporary respite.From left, Idania Quezada, Christopher M. Ramirez and Rebecca Naomi Jones in the Public Works adaptation of “As You Like It” at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo revisit it now, when disaster seems less immediate, is to relax into the brisk pleasure of the work. Jones, an actress with a voice of steel and sweetness, like a knife baked into a birthday cake, is a dynamic Rosalind. And if you admired Blankson-Wood in “Slave Play,” you will enjoy his playful turn here, as in the exuberant R&B number, “Will U Be My Bride.” But the show’s success owes less to any individual performer than to the generous and sociable whole. Taub’s lyrics are simple, but it takes effort to write lines that feel effortless. The same goes for Sonya Tayeh’s fluid choreography, restaged by Billy Griffin and achievable for all kinds of bodies, and Woolery’s insouciant use of stage space.The stage itself has an oddly flimsy set, by Myung Hee Cho, a turntable dotted with trees that don’t look a lot like trees. But Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Isabella Byrd’s lights provide happy splashes of color. James Ortiz designed the deer puppets; if they lack the emotional heft of the cow he designed for the current revival of “Into the Woods,” well, you can’t have everything. That “Into the Woods” revival is directed by Lear deBessonet, who inaugurated Public Works, which Woolery now leads. Small wonder then, but wonder all the same, that the two most joyous shows in New York right now, the two most engaged with questions of community and duty and care, have this shared maternity.If “As You Like It” succeeds as entertainment — and it does, fluently, enough to make you wonder if Shakespeare in the Park should stick to comedies and musicals and maybe the occasional romance — it articulates and answers graver concerns. There is a persistent fear in American politics that to grant freedom is to invite anarchy. “As You Like It” offers another possibility. There is no rule of law in the Forest of Arden. But rather than descend into riot, its inhabitants practice mutual aid. They live in harmony, figuratively and — when De Haas swoops over and around the melody — literally.This confirms Woolery and Taub’s adaptation as a kind of thought experiment: What might happen if a community were free to determine its own best principles and practices? Because “As You Like It” swells its cast with the members of partner organizations — Domestic Workers United, Military Resilience Foundation and Children’s Aid, among them — the show is also proof of concept. There is hierarchy here, of course. The direction is by Woolery alone and the folks with Equity cards occupy the prime roles. (To put the lie to Taub’s lyrics, somebody’s a pro.)But if the theater were really made welcoming and accessible to all, this is what it might manifest — a stage bursting with performers diverse in age, race, size, habit and circumstance, an audience distributed across a similar spectrum. “As You Like It” offers that rare thing — a New York theater that looks like the city itself and feels like a promise of what the city, at its best, could be.What a feat that is. And what a gift. So go ahead. Wait in line and then walk to the theater through the canopy of trees. Shelter here awhile.As You Like ItThrough Sept. 11 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Laura Linney to Return to Broadway in New David Auburn Play

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      “Summer, 1976,” about a friendship between two women in Ohio, will open next spring at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Laura Linney will return to Broadway next spring, in a new play by David Auburn about a friendship that arises between two women during America’s bicentennial.The play, called “Summer, 1976,” will be presented at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater by the Manhattan Theater Club, or M.T.C., which is one of four nonprofit organizations with Broadway houses. M.T.C. had previously announced plans to stage the play this fall, Off Broadway, but on Tuesday announced that Linney had agreed to lead the cast and that the production would now be delayed to spring and moved to Broadway.Linney, 58, is well known for her work on film (“The Savages”) and television (“Ozark”); she has won four Emmy Awards and has been nominated for three Academy Awards.She has returned often to the stage, performing in 12 previous Broadway productions, and has been nominated five times for Tony Awards. Her most recent Broadway role was in early 2020, just before the pandemic closed theaters, when she starred in the solo play “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” which was also produced by M.T.C.Auburn, the playwright, is best known as the author of “Proof,” which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in drama, as well as the Tony Award for best play. That play was also produced on Broadway by M.T.C.“Summer, 1976” will be directed by Daniel Sullivan, who won a Tony for directing “Proof,” and who also directed Auburn’s 2012 Broadway play, “The Columnist.” Sullivan has directed Broadway productions featuring Linney three times previously, including most recently a 2017 revival of “The Little Foxes.”M.T.C. said that previews for “Summer, 1976” would begin April 4; it did not announce an opening date or other members of the cast. The organization described the new play as about an unexpected friendship between two Ohio women, “a fiercely iconoclastic artist and single mom” played by Linney, and “a free-spirited yet naïve young housewife.” The characters “navigate motherhood, ambition and intimacy, and help each other discover their own independence.” More

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      Gabriel Byrne’s ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Is Heading to Broadway

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      The play, adapted from his memoir of the same name, will run for 75 performances starting in October.To Gabriel Byrne, his play “Walking With Ghosts,” adapted from his memoir of the same name, doesn’t refer to haunting phantoms but the lost people and places that we carry within us.“Who we are now is the result of what we were,” Byrne said in a video interview.In this autobiographical solo show, he tackles identity as an immigrant separated from his Irish homeland, along with memories of love and failure as people age. The play, directed by Lonny Price, will begin performances in October on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.The show premiered in January at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and will continue from Sept. 7 to Sept. 16 in London’s Apollo Theater before it begins 75 performances in New York.Byrne described the feeling of returning to the New York City stage as a soup of nerves and excitement. As both a writer of and performer in the show, he said he wants the message surrounding the human experience to be and feel universal.He makes reference to what it means to be an immigrant and to be home.“As soon as you leave your place of belonging, in a strange way, you don’t belong anywhere else,” Byrne said.Although Byrne lives in Rockport, Maine, he grew up outside Dublin, in Walkinstown, the oldest of six. He left Ireland at age 11 to enroll in a Catholic seminary in England, but renounced his faith after he said he was sexually abused by a priest.He later joined an acting troupe in college. Byrne was most recently on the New York City stage as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in 2016. He played a survivor in a BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” in 2019.Lonny Price first directed Byrne in the New York Philharmonic’s “Camelot” in 2008. Impressed with Byrne’s performance, Price, who directed “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” and “Sunset Boulevard,” said he was thrilled to work alongside Byrne again, as the actor embodies the friends, teachers, religious figures and family members that influenced his life.“I think the play has a kind of healing quality to it where people look at their own lives and find peace,” Price said.Byrne said that in the play, he aims to provoke the audience into thinking about their lives, their parents and their decisions.“My own belief is that every single person has an extraordinary story to tell and what I’ve done is I’ve put mine down, not because I want people to think or look at my life,” he said. “I want people to look at their own.” More

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      Interview: What Should We Wear for The King of Nothing?

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      Ben Glasstone on Monstro Theatre’s The King of Nothing

      This autumn, Monstro Theatre present The King of Nothing at the Little Angel Theatre. Promising musical madness and puppets aplenty, this is a reimagined version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes; a popular story, often staged – but perhaps not like this. We donned our finest outfit to chat with Artistic Director Ben Glasstone to find out why this production is somewhat different from all the rest.

      Ben, there have been a billion trillion versions of The Emperor’s New Clothes over the years, but I suspect that Monstro’s will be somewhat distinctive. It’s a puppet musical version of the classic story to start with, so not a stuffy morality tale as we might sometimes see it?

      It’s a long way from stuffy! Yes, it’s full of rollicking songs, clowning and lovably daft puppets, so that helps. But also, any ‘morality tale’ that’s survived as long as this one is bound to have a lot more to it than a simple lesson-to-be-preached. As I discovered years ago when adapting various Aesop’s fables to make Monstro’s first co-production The Mouse Queen, what might seem to be a story with a moral often turns out to be a lot more complex and ambiguous than that…

      Our version of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale explores the way the story seems to have two, quite opposed, protagonists: there is the King, who is vain and neglectful of his subjects and has a journey to go on, as he is literally exposed and must somehow brazen it out and (we hope) take his responsibilities more seriously; then there are the Swindlers, who, on the face of it are total scoundrels – but then don’t we all love a scoundrel…? We have made the whole show into a kind of game with the audience where the two Swindlers are constantly making us question what is true and who is in charge of telling the story.  There’s also an upstart puppet mouse who, to the surprise of the main characters, takes it upon herself to be the narrator of the story.  

      What kind of puppets do you use in the show?

      As the story moves rapidly between characters and is told by two performers, the puppets need to be simple enough to be operated by a single puppeteer. To keep a variety and playfulness within that constraint, we have given different puppets different qualities in terms of their movement and construction, depending on their different characters and roles. So, for example, there is a Courtier with the title of Keeper of the Royal Trousers, whose main feature is her legs – it’s a type of glove puppet where the fingers are placed in the legs, which can then cross and uncross and flick around expressively. Another character has a muppet-like lip-synching style with a hand in the mouth, and makes use of a performer’s real hand as its hand – creating a very pleasing illusion.

      The great thing about puppetry is that it is so far from the literal, that you can mix scales and styles at will, and no-one is going to say “you’re breaking the rules”. Or if they are: bring it on, I say.

      How about the music and songs? Have you devised them yourselves?

      Song-writing is my bread-and-butter. As well as the Puppet Musicals I’ve written with Monstro, Little Angel, Polka etc I write actual human-sized musicals and I also do a lot of song-writing teaching. So I wrote the songs, because no-one else was going to.

      Tell us a bit about the performers. What skills do they bring to the stage?

      Gilbert Taylor and Karina Garnett are highly skilled puppeteers but are both also wonderful improvisers and clowns, which is exactly what this particular show needed. And, of course, they can sing. And play the ukulele. It does take a very particular sort of multi-skilled performer to be able to deliver a show like this.

      We reviewed director Steve Tiplady (who’s practically puppetry royalty!) at Little Angel earlier this year in his hilarious version of Pinocchio: can we expect to enjoy some of his bonkers audience engagement?

      Absolutely! I’ve been working with Steve on shows for nearly 20 years now and have been very much influenced by his sense of humour, inventive approaches and total lack of shame!

      Steve was very much in mind when I first had the idea for this show: I remember telling him: “imagine a puppet version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, with NO puppets! Instead, the swindler-performers keep telling the audience there are puppets and the audience believes them!”  I knew he would share my enthusiasm for this preposterous idea and it’s been a delight to go on this journey with him.  (Spoiler alert: there ARE actual puppets in the show, but we have gone to town on playing with this idea of the Performers-as-Swindlers-Fooling-the Audience….as you will see when you come to the show!)

      The King of Nothing is targeted at ages 5-11, but you’re known for productions with very universal appeal, enjoyable both for children and their adults as well: is this going to be a fun day out for the whole family?

      Is the Pope a Catholic? Is there dog poo on the streets of London? Of course it’s going to be a fun day out for the whole family! Monstro Theatre’s whole philosophy is about making shows that appeal regardless of age. Making shows that work for children requires a discipline in story-telling that a lot of grown-up shows could do well to learn. And once you know how to tell a story with humour and energy and keep the kids engaged, the world is your oyster: you can pack in all the wit and sophistication and thoughtfulness you want.

      Some of it will go over the kids’ heads, but the great thing to me is: we can’t really know what they will understand or not understand or question or think about in the future. We have all forgotten what it is to be a child and what thrills me is to put a piece of work in front of a young audience and let their wild imaginations transform it in ways we can never fathom. Sure there’s a 5-11 tag on the show, but to me theatre is social and to be enjoyed in the most inter-generational and multi-layered spirit.

      Thanks so much to Ben Glasstone for taking the time to chat with us. You can enjoy The King of Nothing at the Little Angel Theatre from 24 September until 20 November 2022.

      Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      Interview: Where Next For Wolf?

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      Cameron Corcoran on taking Wolf to Camden Fringe 2022

      Normally here at ET Towers we tend to do interviews before a show starts its run. We like to have a chat with some of the people involved and we hope you like the results. But this time we have something a little different. We reviewed Wolf at Camden Fringe and by chance exchanged a couple of emails with author Cameron Corcoran afterwards. Out of this we thought it might be interesting to talk with him after Wolf had finished its short run for a slightly different perspective than usual.

      First, let’s talk Wolf, how would you describe it and what can audiences expect?

      Wolf is a play about domestic and sexual abuse; it considers the more realistic likelihood of these crimes: that they’re committed in the home and it is often the father and not some imagined stranger. I think audiences can expect to feel uncomfortable and also reflect on our ideas of abuse and how complicit people can be/feel for their actions, whether it be ignoring it or acting against it.

      Wolf has finished its short Camden Fringe run, how do you think it went? Did anything surprise you about the audience reception?

      Given that we only performed it twice, I think it’s fair to say we were all gutted we couldn’t do it at least one more time – you discover things in the room that weren’t present in rehearsals and things also come across differently to a live audience, so it would have been nice to have a few more performances. I think we forgot just how uncomfortable and awful the situation in the story is: we’ve sat with this information for a while and as soon as we finished the first performance we noticed a quiet in the audience, which informed us just how dark the story is.

      As well as writing Wolf, you play the character of Sam. Did you write Sam with the intent to also take on the role or did that come later in the process?

      For me, I’m starting an MA in acting at Rose Bruford College in October and I wanted to do a play before I start so I could get back into the swing of things. I did always envision playing Sam because I knew it was really outside of my comfort zone as a performer, so felt it was the best experience before October. I felt I could do the role competently enough not to sabotage the other actors too, so it was very early into writing I knew I’d be playing Sam.

      Wolf is at times quite heavy, with a lot of tension early on. Our review mentions it’s the only show where it was so tense the reviewer didn’t end up taking a single note. When you are on stage with the lights on and the audience around, were you aware of this?

      That’s very kind of you to say and very humbling too. Our director (Naomi Wirthner) and assistant director (Polly Waldron) worked very hard to trim the fat on the script, to keep the tension high and sustained. The original script was an hour long but after cuts it was just 32 minutes. They’re both experts in creating tension so I can’t really take the credit for that. Certainly, I felt I had written a few lines, small little bits of humour that received a muted response from the audience. Maybe they weren’t funny, but it felt like the stakes in the scenes were far too serious for laughter. I felt that too, it all seemed very real and we could sense how engaged the audience were with what was happening in the scene.

      When you kindly invited us to see Wolf, you said you had invited some theatres along in the hope of finding a run for it. How is that process going, have you had any nibbles?

      I think with theatre nowadays it’s extremely difficult to get theatres to come and watch a play. I often get replies asking to provide them with a recorded version of the play, which doesn’t seem to add any further dialogue… It can be quite frustrating getting little feedback from theatres. I know there are lots of plays on and resources are limited, so it is a godsend to have Camden Fringe because otherwise it’s very difficult to get plays on, even for extremely limited runs. Nevertheless, we are toying with the idea of performing Wolf locally. I’ll have to let you know.

      Camden Fringe is over and we reviewed 38 productions: did you have a chance to see any other shows?

      Regrettably not this time! I think the cost of living is affecting everyone. We had liaised with a number of companies on social media; however, both sides were unable to attend each other’s plays. I think in these times the theatre industry does have to fight very hard to get an audience in. I’m not cynical, I’m sure things will get better – it just felt like a bit of a perfect storm to hinder access to watching theatre this summer.

      Finally, while I imagine your main focus is on Wolf at the moment, are you working on anything else? Might we see another piece of writing or acting from you or Off Main Stage in the near future?

      Notwithstanding a potential performance of Wolf locally, I’ve been under strict instructions to focus on the MA for the next 12 months. However, after a run of our play Mosquito at the Seven Dials Playhouse (a truly amazing venue), I have been writing a new play called Nook, which focuses on family relations, and I’d like to approach Seven Dials with the hope of putting the play on there. It does feel like my best work to date.

      Thanks to Cameron for taking the time to chat to us. We wish you the best of luck with the MA and with Wolf. We are also big fans of Seven Dials Playhouse and would love to see Nook make an appearance there down the line.

      You can keep up with Off Main Stage via their website and Twitter More

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      Review: A Faithful ‘Kinky Boots,’ With All Its Pizazz and Pitfalls

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      The Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical, in which the drag queen Lola saves a provincial shoe factory, makes an Off Broadway return at the spacious Stage 42.You can’t keep a drag queen down, at least not for long. It was only April 2019 that the Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein musical “Kinky Boots” closed on Broadway after a six-year run, and already it’s back in town. The Britain-set show, in which the statuesque performer Lola saves a provincial shoe factory by inspiring a line of toweringly outré footwear, is now running Off Broadway.But unlike the comebacks of shows such as “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” which both reopened at the underground theatrical mall New World Stages, “Kinky Boots” is at the spacious Stage 42, which stands on 42nd Street and is large enough to accommodate a 25-person company and a minimally downsized version of the director Jerry Mitchell’s va-va-voom production.But enough about real estate: How is Lola?This, after all, is the role for which Billy Porter won a Tony in 2013, and it is a textbook Fierstein creation — bold and brassy, with big hair, bright nail polish and quick-fire quips barely concealing the scars of pain and rejection. There are expectations.Happily, Callum Francis, who has played the part in Britain, Australia and, briefly, on Broadway, meets them. He is a delight not just as Lola but as her alter ego, Simon — it is hard to tell who the real person is, what real means in this context and whether it even matters. Unlike Porter, whose physical intensity often came across as combative swagger, Francis moves with a dancer’s grace, and Lola’s confidence has a slinky playfulness that is especially fun to watch in her early scenes with Charlie (Christian Douglas, whose performance is a little stiff).Charlie is the earnest bloke trying to save his late father’s failing shoe company because the jobs of people he has known since he was a child depend on it. Lola provides him with life coaching and the idea that will eventually reinvent the business — to create and build “tubular sex,” that is, boots that are simultaneously strong and sexy. Both characters have complicated relationships with their fathers, and Lola shows not just Charlie but everyone onstage that there are many ways to be a man. That thread was also in the 2005 movie that inspired the musical, but here, the message feels super-Fiersteinian.Simon’s wounded vulnerability is never too far underneath the glitter and takes center stage in the 11 o’clock power ballad “Hold Me in Your Heart.” The reveal of that song’s context hit harder in the original production because we had seen a little more of Lola’s back story — the roles of Young Simon and Young Charlie have been cut here. More subtle are tiny tweaks such as Lola’s welcome greeting, which has been expanded to “Ladies, gentlemen, theys, them and those who have yet to make up their minds!”But, overall, the show looks and feels like a slightly sized-down photocopy of the original. Danielle Hope, for example, is very funny as Lauren, an employee at the factory, and her big solo, “The History of Wrong Guys,” is perfectly calibrated, but the rendition faithfully duplicates Annaleigh Ashford’s, who originated the role on Broadway. It looks as if Hope might be capable of coming up with her own shtick, and it would have been interesting to see the supporting cast receive a little more agency. But don’t worry, the conveyor belts still turn into treadmills for the exhilarating “Everybody Say Yeah” — a sterling example of Mitchell’s showmanship.Considering this faithfulness to the original template, it is not surprising that the story’s less successful moments remain, too. Among them are the slightly preachy tone as well as Charlie’s sudden dark turn. According to Fierstein’s recent memoir, “I Was Better Last Night,” the show took nearly five years to complete, so you have to wonder how nobody could find an hour to refine this temporary personality transplant. The book also suggests an intriguing line of thought when Fierstein writes that the number “What a Woman Wants” expresses Lola’s “daring sexuality — as a cross-dressing heterosexual male.” You will have to stare extra-hard and perhaps do a bit of projecting to see that onstage, where Lola essentially manifests as a magical being. “The sex is in the heel,” as one song proclaims, but it would have been nice to transfer some from the boot to the character.One seemingly big change that turns out not to matter is the shrinking of the band to half of its Broadway size. But here it is perfectly fine to go big on synthesizers because Lauper’s songs, packed with hooks, and Stephen Oremus’s sharp arrangements and orchestrations always made terrific use of electronics. This is the only score in recent Broadway history that sounds as if it were written by people who had set foot in a nightclub within the past 40 years, and the hi-NRG finale, “Raise You Up/Just Be,” sounds like it’s booming out of a float at a Pride parade. That’s a compliment, of course.Kinky BootsAt Stage 42, Manhattan; kinkybootsthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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      In a Small Mountain Town, a Beloved Theater Company Prevails

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      CREEDE, Colo. — Last summer, I stumbled onto one of the most singular — and joyful — experiences of my life: a small community, high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, that has been sustaining a thriving professional theater company since 1966. And I did not even see the regular version of Creede Repertory Theater — because of the pandemic, it had put on a smaller season of down-to-basic productions on a makeshift outdoor stage.Not only were the people uncommonly nice and the shows good, but here was a place where theater was an integral part of the civic fabric. As soon as I left, I dreamed of returning.So there I was last month, on vacation. I wanted to introduce the region to my spouse, but I was also curious to see a normal season, done indoors and in repertory (meaning that the resident acting company alternates shows). And I was really looking forward to seeing Creede Rep’s reigning divas, Christy Brandt and Anne F. Butler, do “Steel Magnolias.” (Brandt’s first season was in 1973, and this is Butler’s 19th season.)John DiAntonio, the producing artistic director at Creede Rep, spoke of the additional expenses the company endured during a Covid-19 surge.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“This company is founded on everybody working together,” said Kate Berry, the associate artistic director.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesNestled in the San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado, Creede is a former mining town whose residents decided to start a theater festival after falling on hard times in the 1960s.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesWe came really close to that plan tanking.On July 18, I received an email from the theater informing me that all performances had been canceled because of a coronavirus outbreak. The shows would “return in full swing on Tuesday, July 26” — just two days before our arrival. Admittedly, my stress level was nothing compared to what those on the ground were experiencing.“I’m glad I’m not in charge,” Brandt said when I caught up with her in Creede. “Especially this summer.”Ironically, the very thing that has kept Creede Rep going for decades also helped fuel the Covid surge: “This company is founded on everybody working together,” Kate Berry, the associate artistic director, said. “This becomes your community and your friendship circle.”Berry and the producing artistic director, John DiAntonio, looked visibly weary when I met with them, maybe because they have had to solve one problem after another for months on end. Since some of the staff members live in shared accommodations, for example, isolating during the latest crisis was difficult. “The community really stepped up to help us in that regard,” DiAntonio said. “People went to guest rooms, apartment garage, hotels in South Fork,” he continued, referring to a town 25 minutes away. “Some of these were favors, but some were just additional expenses.”Anne F. Butler, left, with her dog Hercules, and Christy Brandt. The two actresses have been performing with the company for decades.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesEventually the shows resumed, with a mask requirement for audience members. (Keep in mind that Creede draws many visitors from states like Texas and Oklahoma, where mandates don’t go over well.) Brandt said that one night, before “Steel Magnolias,” a couple of women had yelled, in her recollection, “We wouldn’t have come to this stupid theater if we’d known we were going to have to wear a mask!” They ended up staying for the show, but not before screaming out choice expletives in the restroom, making sure everybody heard.But they have been in the minority. DiAntonio pointed out that most audience members had gone along. “These are folks that maybe haven’t worn a mask much in the last year, or ever,” he said, “but they’re like, ‘I’ve seen a show every year for 35 years, you bet I’m going to see one with my family this trip, and I’ll wear a mask if I have to.”Lavour Addison in “Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe biggest casualty was Marco Ramirez’s boxing drama “The Royale,” which was supposed to hold its technical rehearsals during the temporary shutdown. Things became so logistically complicated that the show had to be pushed to the 2023 season.At least I was able to catch five performances during my three-night stay, a minimarathon not uncommon among Creede Rep’s patrons.John Gress, 59, and Gwen Farnsworth, 56, from Boulder, Colo., were in town in 2017 to hike the nearby San Luis Peak, when they stumbled onto an unexpected sight. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a theater here. Let’s go!’” Farnsworth said. “And the play was so amazing. I immediately wanted to come back.” The couple’s return was delayed by the pandemic, but the pair made up for it by seeing four shows in a weekend; they even brought along Farnsworth’s 87-year-old mother and a 91-year-old friend.After a temporary shutdown because of a Covid-19 outbreak, the shows resumed with a mask requirement for audience members, which has mostly gone over well.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesPacking one’s schedule is a great reminder of the joys of rep theater. I watched Brandt play half of a genteel couple battling their neighbors in the Karen Zacarías comedy “Native Gardens” at a matinee, then smoothly switch to the witty Clairee from “Steel Magnolias” that evening. Butler was also excellent as the perpetually cranky Ouiser in that show, but she truly killed as Prince John in Ken Ludwig’s rambunctious “Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood,” in which she delivered one flamboyant comic flourish after another.In other signs of a halting return to normal, Creede Rep’s Headwaters New Play Festival is back in person (Aug. 26-28), and the hope is that the actors in the Young Audience Outreach program will perform unmasked, unlike last year. (The latter initiative is expected to bring an original bilingual musical to rural and historically neglected schools in at least seven states.)Where the old normal is not welcome anymore, however, is in some work practices. Like many other companies, Creede Rep is reconsidering the way it makes theater: The company now has a free child care program, and it is trying to shrink the workweek — a challenge in the demanding rep format, but one dear to DiAntonio.“Our vision statement is ‘CRT will be a haven for artistic excellence, belonging and intrinsic joy,’” he said. “It’s that mountain up there in the distance that we’re working toward.” More

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      in Theater

      At Salzburg Festival, Directing Slow and Fast

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      Thorsten Lensing takes years between shows; Ewelina Marciniak puts on several each season. Both theater makers are presenting new work in Austria.SALZBURG, Austria — The German director Thorsten Lensing has astonished and provoked for the past three decades, but he feels like one of theater’s best-kept secrets.In the fast-paced world of German theater, where hundreds of playhouses churn out productions by the dozen, Lensing develops his works gradually and in intensive collaboration with his actors and artistic team. His deliberate method makes him a rare practitioner of what might be called slow theater. A new Lensing staging is a big deal — and worth waiting for.“Crazy for Consolation,” which premiered this month at the Salzburg Festival, is only Lensing’s 16th production in 28 years. The previous one, in 2018, was a towering adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s epic novel “Infinite Jest”; before that he tackled works by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and William Carlos Williams.Like “Infinite Jest,” “Crazy for Consolation” unfolds on a mostly empty stage. The four actors, all Lensing regulars, perform in front of, and on top of, a massive steel roller. With minimal props (a swinging rope, fizzing cans of beer, hundreds of walnuts raining down onto the stage), the play sketches a series of vignettes centered on the siblings Charlotte (Ursina Lardi) and Felix (Devid Striesow), who are orphaned at an early age and go through life processing (or failing to process) their trauma and grief.In the opening scene, sister and brother, aged 10 and 11, play their favorite game at the beach: pretending to be their dead parents. They kiss, lather each other with sun lotion and bark at their (imaginary) children not to swim too far out. A deep-sea diver (Sebastian Blomberg) surfaces and startles the children out of their fantasy world and into even stranger realms where books and dreams come to life. As the play’s narrative becomes increasingly surreal and fragmented, the actors inhabit a variety of roles, not all of them human.The production is full of unpredictable developments and arresting metamorphoses. The adult Felix, incapable of feeling pleasure or pain since his parents’ death, enters into a sexual relationship with an older man (André Jung) who tries to break through Felix’s protective shell. Charlotte, transformed into an octopus, confronts the deep-sea diver with a rancor-filled monologue about life as a cephalopod. What good are her nine brains and three hearts, she asks, when an octopus’s average life span is only four years?Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow as unhappy siblings in “Crazy for Consolation.”Armin Smailovic/Salzburg FestivalIn this very talky play, Lensing and his actors tackle serious issues with a light touch. Even while examining grief and the craving for human connection, the production lands with ease, modesty and warmth. Throughout, the actors switch fluently between registers, from emotional rawness to slapstick to absurdist comedy, in performances that are closely observed, credible and moving.As a freelance director, Lensing works outside Germany’s subsidized theater system and relies on producing partners. “Crazy for Consolation” has no fewer than eight, including theaters and arts organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The show’s next stop, in late September, will be the Sophiensaele, in Berlin.The leisurely pace at which Lensing works is the main exception in the German theater landscape. It’s not unusual for in-demand theater makers to take on heavy workloads — and even the most gifted are likely to stumble from time to time.A contemporary update of“Iphigenia” at Salzburg caps an enormously productive year for the young Polish director Ewelina Marciniak. It’s a co-production with the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, where Marciniak has directed acclaimed adaptations of recent Polish novels, including the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Books of Jacob.” This year, Marciniak’s feminist deconstruction of Schiller’s “The Maid of Orleans” was invited to two of Germany’s most important theater festivals — Theatertreffen, in Berlin, and Radikal Jung, in Munich — and the director made her Deutsches Theater Berlin debut with a cheeky and energetic production of Goethe’s “Werther.”Yet I was disappointed that Marciniak’s Salzburg Festival debut lacked the freshness and verve of her earlier productions. The play, a reworking of Euripides and Goethe by the Polish writer Joanna Bednarczyk, strives to reinterpret the character of Iphigenia, whose father, the Greek king Agamemnon, sacrifices her to appease a vengeful goddess.In constructing her contemporary parable about victimhood, Bednarczyk draws on Soren Kierkegaard, the #MeToo movement and debates around cancel culture. The play’s excruciatingly long first half plays out as a dysfunctional family drama in which Iphigenia is a budding pianist in an intellectual household. She grows up surrounded by hotshots: her father, a professor of ethics who is about to publish his magnum opus; her mother, Clytemnestra, “the best actress in town”; and her uncle, Menelaus, “the best lawyer in town.” Her parents are dismissive of her boyfriend, the athletic Achilles, who is all muscle and no brains. And her aunt, Helen, is such a nymphomaniac that she needs to periodically be kept in isolation.“Iphigenia,” directed by Ewelina Marciniak. Krafft Angerer/Salzburger FestivalEarly in the production, Bednarczyk subjects us to a lengthy lecture drawn from Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” to establish the family’s intellectual credentials (and perhaps her own) and set up the play’s moral stakes. Shortly after, Agamemnon’s high-minded ethical ideas and his research into the psychology of perpetrators and victims are put to the test after Iphigenia makes a bombshell revelation: For the past decade, her uncle has been molesting her. Agamemnon insists on her silence to save face and protect his career.Agamemnon’s willingness to sweep the abuse under the rug should outrage, but Bednarczyk’s depiction of him as a spineless pseudo-intellectual makes it difficult to feel even a tremor of indignation. The father’s subsequent confrontation with Menelaus is so stilted and jumbled that it nearly derails the play. Only the scene where Clytemnestra counsels her daughter to grit her teeth and bear it is persuasive and sobering.The eight-person cast, drawn largely from the Thalia’s acting ensemble, is uniformly committed, but there’s only so much they can do with such weak dramatic material. The production’s final act, set 20 years later on an island where Iphigenia has fled, is full of poetic monologues and imagery, including a piano on fire in the middle of an onstage pool, but after slogging through the twisted soap opera of the first half, it’s difficult to focus on these scenes that seem to belong to a different production entirely.Part of what makes this “Iphigenia” so awkwardly unconvincing is that moral psychology is a poor substitute for the fury of the gods and the vicissitudes of fate. (Similar problems plagued Maja Zade’s recent version of “Oedipus” at the Schaubühne Berlin.) There have been more successful recent attempts to update the saga of the house of Atreus, the calamity-stricken clan at the center of “Iphigenia,” including a campy sitcom version, by Christopher Rüping, and Robert Icke’s straight-faced rewrite. For all their differences, though, neither of those stagings fully rejected the ancient Greek belief in deities who meddled in human affairs.It’s understandable that emerging directors like Marciniak want to make a splash by staging as many productions as they can each season, but maybe slowing down isn’t the worst thing in the world.Verrückt nach Trost. Directed by Thorsten Lensing. Sept. 30 through Oct. 9 at Sophiensaele Berlin.Iphigenia. Directed by Ewelina Marciniak. Salzburg Festival until Aug. 28; Sept. 22-25 at Thalia Theater Hamburg. More