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      Feature: Sophie Swithinbank on writing Bacon

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      Award-winning new play, Bacon, explores masculinity, sexuality and class through the eyes of an unlikely friendship.

      “London, present day, it’s Year 10’s first day back at school. Mark is new, Darren is out-of-control. Mark is too scared to make friends, Darren too scary. These boys need each other, but neither of them is going to admit it.”Extract from Bacon

      Bacon is about what happens when teenagers learn to bully and humiliate each other before they learn to love and accept themselves. The play is based on real events. It’s two central characters, Mark and Darren, were born from a real act of bullying I witnessed whilst working as a nanny. I began to wonder if the seven-year-old boy I was looking after might grow up to copy that behaviour, which led me to explore the idea of learning negative behaviours in my writing. Subsequently, other experiences attached themselves to the story. I began to connect the bullying incident to an intense and semi-toxic relationship I had experienced growing up. It was a confusing, dangerously exciting time; and through the play I intend to encompass that light, teenage, carefree lack of perspective, full of blindness. Remember, if you will, how difficult it is to learn how to be an adult when you are still a child. 

      Some people have asked me why I chose to write from the perspective of two teenage boys. Others seem surprised to discover that I am not male, while the play is seemingly rooted in masculinity. It is true to say that I have observed the behaviour of men more than the behaviour of women because men, historically, have been more visible. This is perhaps why I am drawn to writing male-dominated stories. I often feel my natural viewpoint is an open one, not particularly connected to gender. Mark and Darren are the characters through which I can best tell this story and their journey makes perfect sense to me. A number of people, regardless of age or gender, have said on reading the play, ‘this is my story’. The notion that the boys’ story is, in some ways, everyone’s story, is what makes it a complex and vital narrative through which to explore identity and sexuality. The play also explores the binaries of class in relation to sexuality, and how confidence and acceptance can be closely related to social standing, from family to family. 

      The play’s own journey to stage has not been an easy one. Thanks to the pandemic, it has faced two postponed runs, one in London, one at the Edinburgh Fringe, but being able to at last share it with audiences at the Finborough Theatre is something I am hugely grateful for. Seeing it come together in the lively buzz of rehearsals fills me with joy and the playful energy that the cast and director are bringing to the piece is really breathtaking. The production is fearlessly directed by Matthew Iliffe and stunningly designed by Natalie Johnson, who have worked in collaboration to physicalise the central notions of unevenly distributed power and control within the play. Mark is played by Corey Montague-Sholay, who will melt your heart, and Darren is played by William Robinson, who will break it.

      Bacon is a relationship drama for the modern age. At once tragic and euphoric, it questions whether we can do better to guide teenagers through the process of becoming adults. At the heart of Bacon, is the study of the journey from boy to man, and why so often, boys fail to make it there. 

      Bacon won the Tony Craze Award at Soho Theatre in 2018. It plays at the Finborough Theatre from 1-26 March 2022.

      You can also read our 5-star review of the play here. More

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      Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

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      His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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      Muriel Miguel and the Native American Bohemia in Brownstone Brooklyn

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      Indigenous rodeo riders and Wild West actors all gathered at an unassuming townhouse in Boerum Hill. Listening to the grown-ups under the kitchen table, a future experimental theater director.On a quiet street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, there’s an unassuming yellow-brick house that once served as an unofficial community center for Native Americans in show business. The theater director Muriel Miguel grew up there, and lives there still. When she was a child, in the 1930s and ’40s, Native dancers and actors from all around the country would stop by the house while working in New York. Some would stick around for months, or even years.Ms. Miguel still remembers sitting under the kitchen table and listening to her parents trading songs and stories with these visitors. Sitting Bull’s grandson Crazy Bull, a national archery champion who advised Rodgers and Hammerstein on their production of “Annie Get Your Gun,” was an occasional presence. Douglas Grant, a trick rider from South Dakota, got stranded in New York while on tour with the rodeo and ended up staying with the Miguels for two decades. And then there were the Big Mountains, a family of Mohawk, Comanche and Apache dancers who lived in the back of a gift shop at a so-called Indian village in Wild West City, a theme park that still lies off Route 206 in New Jersey.As a young woman, Ms. Miguel mostly felt embarrassed by the work her parents and their friends did for money — jobs that required them to dress up in ceremonial costumes and act out white people’s fantasies of how Indians behaved. But now, at 84, she wonders if the fake Indian villages and Wild West shows of that era inadvertently contributed to the survival of real Native culture, if only by bringing such a vibrant community together in New York.At a time when the authorities out West were forbidding Native people from practicing their traditions, Ms. Miguel’s family and friends shared their songs and stories freely with one another, planting what Ms. Miguel described as kernels of inspiration in their children. “Today, I’m collecting the corn,” she said. “And it’s overwhelming.”Ms. Miguel during a break for rehearsals of “Misdemeanor Dream.”Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesMs. Miguel and her two older sisters, Gloria (95) and Lisa Mayo (who died in 2013 at 89), have often been described as the matriarchs of Indigenous theater in North America.“They made a space for so many people and companies,” Penny Couchie, an actor and choreographer of Ojibwe and Mohawk ancestry, said. “They made no apologies for the way that we tell stories.”In recent weeks, Ms. Miguel has been scrambling to finish preparing for the debut of her latest production, “Misdemeanor Dream,” a collaboration between her company, Spiderwoman Theater, and Aanmitaagzi, an arts group led by Ms. Couchie and her husband, Sid Bobb, on Nipissing First Nation territory in Ontario. The show, which will open on March 10 at La MaMa, the experimental theater in the East Village, represents the culmination of her life’s work so far, she said.Ms. Miguel has been working in the world of experimental theater since the ’60s, when she was an actor in the Open Theater, a pioneering avant-garde ensemble founded by the visionary director Joseph Chaikin. Like many of her past projects, the new play explores the ways in which old stories shape the lives of Indigenous people in the present, for better and worse. Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it takes place in a magical realm where fairies, humans and other beings share stories drawn from the performers’ ancestral traditions and personal memories — a father disappearing in the wilderness of northern Quebec, a mother spurning her daughter because she’s so afraid of losing her.The performers, who trace their roots to a dozen Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States, Canada and the Philippines, created the piece using the “story weaving” method. Spiderwoman Theater developed the technique in the 1970s, when the group was a fixture of the downtown theater scene. Over the years, the company has used it to intertwine narratives about everything from family violence to cultural appropriation with pop songs and bawdy jokes and dreamlike images.“It’s important to tell these stories, but they have to be done in a certain way where people don’t feel like they’re being hit over the head,” Ms. Miguel said. “You can tell a painful story and then tell an awful disgusting joke and give a raspberry. You can take things and turn them around.”On a recent Monday, Ms. Miguel took a break from her rehearsal schedule to ride around her neighborhood, telling stories about her own childhood. She sat in the back of a 2012 Toyota Matrix, a red leather hat trimmed with wolf fur resting on the seat beside her, while her wife, Deborah Ratelle, handled the driving. Ms. Miguel has short, silvery hair and a cascading, shoulder-shaking laugh. She wore turquoise rings on most of her fingers and had on mismatched earrings — one turquoise, the other made of oyster shell. “I don’t like sameness,” she said.Heading down Court Street, she pointed at Cobble Hill Cinema, a longtime movie theater that used to be called the Lido. “That was one of the places that my father used to stand outside in his outfit to ballyhoo all these movies,” she recalled. Her father, a Kuna from Panama, would supplement the money he earned as a dockworker by donning the war-bonnet of a Plains Indian chief and beckoning people into the theater to see the latest John Wayne picture. He had lots of jobs like that: playing a generic Indian at Thanksgiving pageants, performing at ceremonies commemorating the supposed sale of Manhattan to the Dutch.In the summer, he would take Ms. Miguel’s older sisters to Golden City, a long-since-forgotten amusement park in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they would dance and sing and sit around in teepees. Gloria, who plays the role of The Elder in “Misdemeanor Dream,” dreaded these outings. “People would come and look and say, “Oh, look at the Indians, they’re eating spaghetti,’” she recalled. It turned her off from doing any theatrical work that involved her heritage until, as a divorced mother of two in her late 40s, she joined her sisters in establishing Spiderwoman Theater. “We got to tell our stories our own way,” she said.“Misdemeanor Dream” features Ms. Miguel’s sister Gloria, in the role of The Elder.Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesThe Toyota stopped outside P.S. 146, a massive brick building with an imposing stone archway. Gazing through the car window, Ms. Miguel remembered a social studies teacher telling the class that Indians were a thing of the past. “I got up and I said, ‘No, we’re here,” she recalled. She laughed at the memory, her shoulders bouncing. “I had such a big mouth.”That attitude of spirited defiance ripples through her work. When Spiderwoman Theater was formed, in 1975, she conceived of it as a feminist response to the sexism that she says was plaguing the American Indian Movement at the time. The company’s first play, “Women in Violence,” was a vaudevillian clown show that addressed the abuse of women, something that she and her sisters had all endured. “Somehow I was taught that you have to push back,” she said. “Maybe it was my sisters — they taught me that I could do anything I wanted, that I could be anything I wanted.”Ms. Miguel’s family in her mother’s traditional Rappahannock dress, circa 1930.via Gloria MiguelOn the corner of State and Nevins Streets, Ms. Miguel noted that the surrounding blocks had once been home to a community known as Little Caughnawaga. In the first half of the 20th century, Mohawk ironworkers from Canada settled in the area while helping to build the skyscrapers that now dominate the skyline: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Plaza. The Rev. David M. Cory, a white pastor who learned Mohawk and gave sermons in the language, allowed Ms. Miguel and her friends to rehearse authentic Native dances in the basement of a church a few blocks away. They formed a dance group, the Little Eagles, that eventually grew into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a widely known company that still performs and teaches at schools, theaters and museums.As the car pulled up to the corner where that church once stood, Ms. Miguel groaned. “Ay, yi, yi,” she said. A wooden construction barrier guarded a white condo complex that would not have looked out of place in Miami. Ms. Miguel got out and approached a young man who stood outside the gate in a hard hat, smoking a Newport. “Excuse me,” she said. “What happened to the church that used to be here?”“It got abandoned a few years back,” he said, in an accent that proved to be Turkish.“How sad,” she said. “When I was growing up, a lot of the people who lived here and on the next blocks were Native people. Indian people.”He nodded politely.“It was really wonderful,” Ms. Miguel said.She spent the next 10 minutes regaling him with interesting facts and anecdotes about that time. She praised the minister (“a socialist”) who let them use the space to dance and laughed about how the ironworkers would pile into their cars for the 12-hour trip back to their reservation every weekend, switching seats while driving so they wouldn’t have to waste time pulling over. “Crazy men!” she said.The contractor gave her a contemplative look. “I didn’t know there were Native people living in this neighborhood,” he remarked.She studied his face. “You didn’t know?” She shared a few more details and thanked him for listening. Walking back to the car, she called out, “Tell people the story.” More

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      ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

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      Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Interview: Erupting onto the stage with Volcano

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      Proforca’s David Brady talks about upcoming play Volcano

      For our latest interview on Runn Radio we spoke to David Brady. He’s been a guest on our show before, talking about Lately (you can catch up with that interview here). So it was our pleasure to welcome him back to talk about their latest show, Volcano. This show is a collaboration with Chewboy Productions‘ Georgie Bailey, who were in fact they were our first guest on our podcast (here).

      Volcano is billed as “One Man. One City. One Night to Remember.” It sees Max embark on a 12-hour odyssey across London that will change his life forever.

      We talk with David about the play, why he teamed up with Chewboy Productions for this play and whether they have succeeded in his desire to create a piece without any set. And we also discuss how fringe theatre can find a home outside of London.

      Volcano plays at Lion and Unicorn Theatre from 8 to 12 March, tickets are £14 from here. More

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      This Play Is Touring Europe. But No One’s Going Anywhere.

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      By 2024, the British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” will have been shown in 10 countries. Yet neither Mitchell, nor any cast or crew, will cross a single border.The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theater?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, in conjunction with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “touring score” — an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production — that is handed to local artists in theaters at each stop. But those artists have creative control, too: “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by the American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, will have a different director and look everywhere it goes.This commitment to zero travel is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt for climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have started to rethink their reliance on easy, yet environmentally costly, international travel.At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where the show opens Thursday, Mitchell’s vision has been reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. “You have the artistic freedom to make your own show,” Mitchell’s instructions read, “while working within the parameters outlined below.” Those include casting, music and technical requirements — down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a member of lacasadargilla who directed the Milan version, called Mitchell’s production, which she saw over Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero.” Now, it felt as if she and Mitchell were co-directing from a distance, she said.The Rome-based theater collective lacasadargilla rehearsing  “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan. All the show’s electricity is generated from stationary onstage bicycles.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt is an unusual production model in European theater, where directors tend to have the final word on every iteration of their work. The goal, Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to figure out new avenues for theater-making in the face of an environmental threat. “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies, systems, structures, or control, because the subject is so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “You have to relinquish artistic control.”Mitchell, who is 57 and renowned across Europe as a theater and opera director, said that she could afford to experiment with what she called “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not at the beginning, so I don’t have anything to lose if I mess up artistically. I’d like to keep the young generation free of that, and they just get the outcome.”The “Sustainable Theater?” program started with virtual conversations. To come up with a feasible production model, Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, the French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel, held online meetings twice a month for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller, the artistic director of Vidy-Lausanne Theater, and Caroline Barneaud, its director of international projects.The team also linked up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to evaluate the theater’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-evaluation process is a requirement for the Vidy-Lausanne’s European partners, which include theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall has also signed up.)Production-wise, the partners signed on sight unseen: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they might create a single production (and script) together. Instead, each theater will get two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a work by Bel, called “Jérôme Bel,” will also be restaged by participating theaters.The play is about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment. A tree onstage represents the only tree left on the planet.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis for a decade, onstage and off. She stopped flying entirely in 2012, she said, after meeting the British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. The zero-travel rule for “Sustainable Theater?” was her idea — and “irritated people, definitely, to begin with,” she said. Since she is based in Britain, she directed “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely over Zoom ahead of its Lausanne premiere last September (which she attended virtually).Cameras were positioned inside the theater to relay rehearsals to Mitchell, and operated by a dedicated technician. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room, and you can’t pick up the little micro-conversations that are going on. We had to have a different protocol of communication,” she said. “You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”Barneaud, from the Vidy-Lausanne, said that the experience was a positive one for the theater’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. The sound engineer, for instance, had to act as ‘ears’ for the composer, Paul Clark, since he wasn’t in the room.”Out of the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few are set in stone. One is to take performances entirely off the electrical grid. Instead, to generate electricity, Mitchell positioned stationary bikes onstage that performers ride throughout the show. Mitchell said this was about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are tutorials in the touring score on how to build the bikes, too.)The Milan version, made for a larger stage than in Switzerland, and with more elaborate sets, employs four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the show’s requirements still forced its members to rethink some habits, Ferlazzo Natoli said: “Normally, we work much more with video, but video consumes a lot, and it requires a stable quantity of energy.”Working with constraints had proved stimulating, she added. “It’s so exciting, because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before.”Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, left, a lacasadargilla member, directing the show in Milan. ”We discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before,” she said.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe artists and producers involved all stressed that the model they had developed was just one option to limit theater’s impact on global warming, rather than a one-and-done answer. “I think we’re really at the beginning of this journey,” Claudio Longhi, the director of the Teatro Piccolo, said. “This project is a way to ask questions, a provocation.”When the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” premieres on Thursday, Mitchell will be watching — over Zoom, of course. But there will be no notes from her afterward, she said. “It belongs to the local artists in Milan. They’re free to do whatever they want.” More

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      New Takes on Old Myths (With No Gods or Dragons)

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      A theatrical reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” and a feminist revision of some Greek classics show how ancient legends can illuminate contemporary obsessions.ZURICH — At the start of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” a new play at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, the writer Necati Oziri makes the audience a promise: During the next four hours, we won’t hear a single phrase from Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy about gods, giants, dwarves and dragons.In an eloquent and deeply personal address, Oziri, a young German playwright, describes his conflicted feelings at being asked by Christopher Rüping, an in-house director at the Zurich theater, to tackle Wagner’s epic in a new stage work.After Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist gloss in the book-length essay “Rein Gold,” and a “Ring” rewrite with an environmental message by Thomas Köck last season in Berlin, Oziri is the latest in a recent series of playwrights who have mined Wagner’s dramas for contemporary relevance. Although he rejects Wagner’s text, Oziri takes the composer’s characters and themes seriously, and treats them, for the most part, with respect.In his lengthy prologue, Oziri grapples with the perceived elitism of opera and the difficulty of approaching a work regarded as the apotheosis of German genius. He compares himself to a “cultural terrorist planning an attack at the opera.”Oziri then introduces “The Ring’s” dramatis personae through a series of involving monologues for the seven actors who share the stage with him and the American poet and rapper Black Cracker, who D.J.s for much of the evening. (The original soundtrack, contributed by eight artists and musical groups, quotes Wagner only a handful of times.) The house lights remain on for much of the lengthy production, with the entire cast onstage to listen to one another’s speeches.Rüping is particularly adept at creating a relaxed and even playful environment for the piece to develop organically and at an unhurried pace. The down-to-earth performances and the pulsating music help make this a loose-limbed production that quickly settles into a comfortable groove. In the best possible way, the production cuts the myth down to size.As Alberich, the dwarf who sets the saga in motion by forging an all-powerful ring from stolen gold, Nils Kahnwald delivers a rancor-filled monologue about loneliness. Maja Beckmann’s Fricka first appears on a video screen to record a message to her husband, Wotan, the chief god, recalling the bliss of their early love. Wiebke Mollenhauer, as Brünnhilde, the daughter whom Wotan punishes for disobedience, bids a tearful farewell to her Valkyrie sisters and rails against the patriarchy. “The only way to rise to the throne is by sitting on daddy’s lap,” she says, bitterly. When Wotan finally appears, toward the end of the evening, he unleashes an epic whine that parodies white male fragility.Matthias Neukirch’s comically raving, mansplaining performance in that role won him spontaneous applause at the performance I attended, but the segment feels less original or pointed than some of Oziri’s other writing, for instance a soliloquy he gives the exploited giants who construct Wotan’s castle, Valhalla. Oziri recasts them as Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers who were invited — as cheap labor — to help rebuild West Germany in the postwar period.This isn’t the first time that Rüping, one of Germany’s most celebrated young directors, has created startlingly contemporary (and lengthy) theater out of ancient myth. His 10-hour, classically inspired “Dionysos Stadt,” unveiled at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2018, is a monument of recent German-language theater. (The epic production will return to Munich later this season). “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines” at Munich’s Residenztheater, directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach.Sandra ThenAnother young German director, Elsa-Sophie Jach, attempts something like a feminist version of “Dionysos Stadt” with “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines,” at Munich’s Residenztheater. With its long narrations, installation-like set and percussive live music, there’s much about the production that feels similar to Rüping’s work.In the intimate confines of the Marstall, a small Residenztheater stage in the former imperial stables, six actresses cavort around a hot-pink fountain as they recount the myths of Echo, Medusa, Cassandra, Medea, Philomela and Penelope — some of antiquity’s best-known and bloodiest. There’s no shortage of killing, sexual violence and wanton cruelty in these tales, often narrated in the first person, about women who suffer at the hands of gods and men. (The performing text is itself a patchwork of ancient and modern texts, from Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sappho up to modern feminist authors, including Christa Wolf and Hélène Cixous.)Although these stories are well known, the actresses succeed in making us feel discomfort and rage at the sickening violence enacted against women over and over. By giving voice to wronged or misunderstood female figures, “The Outrageous Ones” sticks it to the patriarchy, as represented by Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo.It’s a stylish and assured production. An onstage band, Slatec, helps to channel the female fury with its dynamic improvisations. The eclectic quartet — two sets of percussion, synthesizers and a trombone — performs what might best be described as techno meets big band.The musicians drive the evening with momentum and energy, while the band’s colorful outfits contrast with the somber black worn by the actresses for most of the performance — as does the blood that shoots out of the fountain by the gallon toward the end of the evening. Aleksandra Pavlovic’s playful set and Barbara Westernach’s stark, dramatic lighting help turn the small brick interior of the Marstall into a kooky nightclub with a haunted-house vibe.As the performance draws to a close, however, it strains for relevance by including the real-life story of Nevin Yildirim, a woman who in 2015 was sentenced to life imprisonment in Turkey for killing a man who had raped her. Jach’s decision to add Yildirim to the pantheon of cruelly mistreated queens, princesses and nymphs feels out of place. Such editorializing seems tendentious, as if Jach and her performers lacked faith in their classical material. Before this modern-day interpolation, however, the production speaks up for the silenced women of antiquity in sensitive, eloquent and artistically unexpected ways.“Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths,” wrote the American literary scholar Joseph Campbell. Can it be any wonder that theatermakers continue to turn to our most ancient legends to dream through our contemporary worries, obsessions and fears?Der Ring des Nibelungen. Directed by Christopher Rüping. Schauspielhaus Zurich. Through March 27; guest performances at the Wiener Festwochen June 1-3.Die Unerhörten. Directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach. Residenztheater Munich. Through April 26. More

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      Interview: Escaping into real life with DeFriest

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      Aaron-Lee Eyles and Jay O’Connell on new play DeFriest

      We’ve interviewed Unmarked Theatre‘s Aaron-Lee Eyles previously about I Didn’t Want This, I Just Wanted You, so it was a pleasure to invite him back onto our Runn Radio show to chat about his latest show DeFriest. And this time he brought along his lead actor, Jay O’Connell.

      DeFriest, much like I Didn’t Want This, I Just Wanted You, is based on real life. It tells the story of Mark DeFriest, an American who has spent much of his adult life in prison. He earned some attention when he was dubbed the Houdini of Florida due to his numerous attempted prison escapes; it is claimed he has made 13 attempts to escape, succeeding on seven occasions. But the play isn’t about prison escapes, but more about the man who has been in and out of prison most of his life, even though it is widely agreed that the reason for much of it is his mental health, something that has never been fully addressed.

      The play is on at Lion and Unicorn Theatre from 10 – 15 March. Tickets can be booked here. More