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      I Love London Theater. But Not London Theatergoing.

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      While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.LONDON — On the February morning when England’s National Health Service pinged me, saying I’d been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.Not out of fear of getting sick; I’m boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably be fine. But the last time I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-arrival, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 solitary, asymptomatic days. Was I about to get stuck here again?I’d only seen one friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My mind scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.S. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front of me who’d sneezed mid-show. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask.Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely world-beating theater but audience Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to cavalier, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to have seen, that lack of stringency dampened my anticipation of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.Because even in this not-yet-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I’m used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one another, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house healthy, in pursuit of this art that we love. It’s not a minor thing, this feeling; it’s rooted in empathy.And on a purely practical level? We Americans do have to test negative before we’re allowed to fly home — on planes that are still nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.TRAVELING TO SEE THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has yet to return for most of us, and it’s been driving me a little bit crazy.I am one of those people — maybe you are, too — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to be in the room with them, burns with envy of those who can be, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of “Can I risk it yet?” against “Can I bear one more second not to?” Evelyn Miller and James McAvoy in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The production was wonderful, but the audience at a return performance — not so much.Marc BrennerSo when my editor, wanting a profile of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the West End, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.I would need to see that “Cyrano” again — twist my arm — because it had been more than two years since I’d caught it in early previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog across the Atlantic, I would stay a while and see a slew of other shows — starting, just hours after passing through customs at Heathrow, with a matinee chosen to go easy on my jet-lagged brain.That was “& Juliet,” a pop-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than century-old West End theater that couldn’t be described as airy, to see whole groups of people walk in and take their seats barefaced.Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a show, to encourage safer behavior. One briefly held up a chalkboard with a hand-lettered message: “Hello,” it said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: “Thank you,” which got some applause.But the wordless chalkboard in between those two — bearing a friendly pastel drawing of a mask — got only silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted as a response.“& Juliet” turned out not to be my cup of tea. Still, I’d have stayed if I’d been able to stop thinking about the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth it.I decided it wasn’t and fled at intermission, back onto the street, back into the open air.Heather Forster and Samuel Creasey in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”Manuel Harlan“THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage,” that night at the Bridge Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adapted by Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman’s fantasy prequel to “His Dark Materials,” and staged by Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it’s the character Lyra Belacqua’s origin story.The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery world, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I’d ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from within.The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn’t snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not like some old West End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn’t been to any theater since the pandemic began. (You can see “The Book of Dust,” whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)It makes me happy when I’m in London at the same time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life as if it had taken as its cue something Charlotte Brontë once wrote about the novel: that it “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, “Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!,” his jagged grief rips through us, straight to the soul.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in the Old Vic production of Caryl Churchill’s two-hander “A Number.”Manuel HarlanIn Caryl Churchill’s brisk two-hander “A Number,” given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu’s beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the center of us. Opposite Lennie James as a father who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays three disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops against Es Devlin’s stylized tomato-red set.OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me there is the one that left me absolutely stunned. The first time I saw “Cyrano de Bergerac,” on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was still a work in progress.This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a sensation through my limbs like an electrical charge. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this “Cyrano” on a cellular level.I saw other shows, too: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller’s weary new psychological drama, “The Forest,” about a man whose seemingly perfect life is blown up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian’s overlong take on Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, “Henry V,” starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors’ butts blocking my view) the day a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.Kit Harington, center, in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Henry V.” The theater was one of the few that explicitly requested that attendees wear masks.Helen MurrayI’d canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial flood of anxiety, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in “Dr. Semmelweis” — a play about a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a free box of seven rapid tests, from the N.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would announce the end of for most people days later, along with other precautions including contact tracing.Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the result was negative — and each time I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to “wear a face covering in crowded settings.”It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting side by side for hours, don’t bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, then for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated yet or in close contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a simple kindness. It is also an act of inclusion.The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such request was timid, and certainly not face to face. When major West End theater operators said recently that they would no longer require mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if it had gone unenforced.One night I went to the Duke of York’s Theater to see “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The show hadn’t started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn’t wearing a mask. Then a barefaced guy sat down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get up immediately. So I left.HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet not worry about things like that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn’t about quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that we learn of new variants only after they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in effect, that they can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, have decided to keep their money and keep safe.I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for “Cyrano.” A good single seat had opened up, and I grabbed it. I didn’t want to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.The audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with their health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn’t go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal. More

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      ‘Out of Time’ Review: Once Sidelined, Now Taking Center Stage

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      Five Asian American actors, all over 60, deliver monologues that touch on grief and heritage, on adult children and cultural cancellation.She is absolutely elegant, and completely isolated — a documentarian, microphone clipped to her chest, talking to an unseen camera about the last time she hugged someone.This will be the final film in the long career of this quietly charismatic woman, and the first in which she steps into the frame to center the narrative on herself. Although her real subject, she says, is someone near to her, now lost.“My Documentary,” written by Anna Ouyang Moench and performed by Page Leong, is the captivating opener to “Out of Time,” a collaboration between the National Asian American Theater Company and the Public Theater that gathers five new solo shorts by Asian American playwrights into a single program.The five performers are Asian American actors, all over 60, deep into careers in which their odds of working have been far tougher than for their white contemporaries. In “Out of Time,” they step into the frame — figuratively speaking, mostly — to tell wide-ranging stories that touch on grief and heritage and the pandemic, on adult children and cultural cancellation, on making art and pulling off an optical illusion.Not all of the art-making succeeds in Les Waters’s uneven production at the Public, but every actor is one you’ll want to see again, and that is a large part of the point. So is the potent sense of worldviews and experiences that the American stage has generally ignored.“My Documentary” is a beautiful piece of writing. A life story that’s a love story, too, it has a bruised awareness that “misunderstanding something very important as you’re living it” is a human tendency. In Leong’s hands, the nameless documentarian is compelling in a lean-forward way: Funny, sharp and warm, she has a whole cogent argument against hugging at work, and remembers her own sons in their earliest years as “agents of chaos” in her life. Connection and solace are what she’s seeking with her film. They’re also what the monologue brings.A series of long, sheer fabric curtains (by the design collective Dots) form most of the set for “Out of Time,” and when we first glimpse Mia Katigbak in Mia Chung’s play “Ball in the Air,” it is through them as she crosses upstage, intently playing with a paddle ball. You know the kind: wooden paddle, rubber ball attached by a string.It’s an intriguing start, and Katigbak — a founder of the National Asian American Theater Company and a dependably excellent mainstay of downtown theater — is a fine paddle ball player, it turns out. But the monologue is all confusion, written in short chunks that seem to come from three different strands of narrative that aren’t so much braided together as stacked on top of one another: one about an election, one about a friendship gone wrong, another about a car ride, if I’ve parsed them right. They might make perfect sense intercut in a film. Here they blend together muddily.Rita Wolf, behind a curtain and onscreen, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s monologue, “Black Market Caviar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe sole moments of clarity concern the optical illusion: a ball that Katigbak seems to make disappear in midair. (Steve Cuiffo, New York theater’s go-to magic guy, is listed in the program as a consultant.) Later, speaking directly to the audience, she tells us how it works. You’ll come away with that knowledge, anyway.The program’s rough patch continues with the next play, Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Black Market Caviar,” a gorgeously layered monologue foiled by Waters’s staging. Performed by Rita Wolf, it is a message of love and comfort spoken by a woman named Carla, 30 years in the future, to her younger self. In the script, Backhaus says that Carla appears in “a portal from somewhere that opens before you on December 31st, 2019.”Maybe it was the urge to mix things up that enticed Waters to place Wolf at such a chilly distance from the audience, veiled behind a curtain, seated in profile and talking to a video camera. We see her in close-up on a screen downstage, her image frustratingly out of sync with the sound of her voice, which travels faster. But is watching someone on video what we’ve come to the theater for?The screen prevents the vital communion between actor and audience, making it harder to hear Backhaus’s play — about a genetic predisposition toward cancer passed down from one generation of women to the next in Carla’s family, and about undoing the trauma that came from keeping that scary fact a secret.“Don’t succumb to the fear,” Carla counsels, surely knowing that the mere fact of her being alive so far in the future is heartening.“Be afraid,” she says, “and live your life.”The program bounces back with Naomi Iizuka’s “Japanese Folk Song,” starring Glenn Kubota as a silver-haired retired banker named Taki, speaking to his grown daughter about his life — and his loathing of jazz, including the Thelonious Monk song that gives Iizuka’s monologue its name.The script carries a poignant dedication, “to Takehisa Iizuka (1934-2020),” and the playwright has said that Taki is strongly influenced by her father. The character tells the audience, in a quick prologue to the play, that he is not the real Taki but rather a stand-in who looks like him. This, then, is theater as a tender, comic, aching act of remembrance.Leonie, the famous septuagenarian novelist in Sam Chanse’s “Disturbance Specialist,” the final monologue, is very much not retired, though a younger generation who deems her tweets problematic is trying to make her go away. In response, Leonie has shown up defiantly at her alma mater to give a speech.Performed by Natsuko Ohama, it’s a thoughtful play, discursive and entertaining, with sympathy for a lifelong artist-activist who worked hard to earn a place at a table where white men were so much more freely welcomed, and who abruptly finds that place threatened. Yet Leonie, for all her indignation, recognizes that her detractors may have a point.She was young and furious once, too. And she knows that, even at her age, she must adapt to thrive.Out of TimeThrough March 13 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      The Past Pushes Back in 2 Shows With Contemporary Blackness in Mind

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      New productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More” aim to reflect our current racial politics. The results are uneven.On a recent weekend, I eagerly set out to see two new productions that prominently center Blackness: the director Arin Arbus’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More,” a new musical with a starry creative team that was inspired by a satirical 1931 novel about race in America.“The Merchant of Venice,” a Theater for a New Audience production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, came first. Here, Arbus strong-arms contemporary politics into the work, which she places in a modern-day setting. The tension between Arbus’s direction and the text is most apparent in a scene in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in arguing he should be repaid after a merchant defaults on a loan, cites laws about the enslaved:You have among you many a purchased slaveWhich, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to you‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.Why sweat they under burdens?’In this race-conscious production, the speech takes on a different meaning. Since the actor playing Shylock is John Douglas Thompson, Shylock’s Jewish identity is subordinated to another one: a Black identity.While “Merchant” reflects our current racial politics and sensibilities through the director’s vision, “Black No More,” the New Group’s musical, relies on the major ways in which its script deviates from the original novel. Both shows function almost as reactionary works of criticism, “Merchant” critiquing Shakespeare’s text and “Black No More” critiquing the bleak satire of the novel. And though each production brings art from the past to the present, sometimes in brilliant ways, the antiquated plots, themes and characters aren’t always easy to recontextualize. The past pushes back.In this “Merchant,” Antonio, the title character, and Bassanio, the best friend to whom he offers his fortune and very nearly his life, are lovers. The women — the heiress Portia, her maid Nerissa and Shylock’s daughter, Jessica — are married in the end, as is typically the rule in Shakespeare’s comedies, but are unhappy and wise to their husbands’ misogyny and other faults. And then Shylock and his daughter (and Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal) are all Black, which brings in the history of racial discrimination, slavery and prejudice.Arbus shifts the focus of the text so Shylock — performed by Thompson with devastating pathos — isn’t the antagonist who stands in the way of the central characters’ happiness, but the tragic heart of the play. Though there’s still the matter of the dual Black and Jewish identities; of course Black Jews exist, but the conflation addles the themes of the production and bends the original text in directions it can’t actually go.While the text specifically speaks of anti-Semitism, the pivot to include anti-Black racism overwhelms it. Arbus does try to balance the two identities, especially in the final scene, in which Shylock and his daughter (beautifully portrayed by Danaya Esperanza) recite a Hebrew prayer; the exceptional performances almost make up for the fact that the scene feels out of place, like a last-ditch effort to assert that this is still also a play about anti-Semitism.Blackness is already in the play, in the form of racist throwaway comments about “Moors” that Arbus’s direction highlights to the degree she can. So Portia’s matter-of-fact dismissal of any dark-skinned suitors as she speaks to Nerissa (played by the Black actress Shirine Babb) is challenged by Nerissa’s disapproving glare. And when Jessica’s suitor, Lorenzo, disdainfully jokes about Shylock’s servant impregnating a Moor, Jessica silently steps away in disgust.Racism against Black people was assumed in Shakespeare’s time, so in a contemporary race-aware production that stays loyal to the text, the characters’ reactions to it must be limited to pauses and glances.Perhaps a contemporized version of this problematic play must be edited beginning with the language, mixing in modern-day parlance, as James Ijames did in his “Fat Ham,” or revised by artful omission, as in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Because there’s a limit to Arbus’s approach even within these textual constraints; Nerissa and Jessica can silently respond to a comment about Moors, but no one speaks about or refers to Shylock’s Black identity, just his Jewish one. It’s odd to showcase Blackness without having a Shylock who can explicitly speak about his Blackness. It then feels as if his two identities are at war. To which should we direct our attention, because the text can’t hold both?These thoughts lingered as I headed to the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan to see “Black No More,” whose short run ended this weekend.Unlike “Merchant,” “Black No More” isn’t loyal to the original text, George S. Schuyler’s novel of the same name. But it does take the book’s basic plot and characters. (“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” Tariq Trotter, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said in a recent interview. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”)In Schuyler’s novel, a Harlem man named Max Disher undergoes a scientific procedure that turns Black people white. The process, invented by a Black scientist named Dr. Crookman, becomes so popular that it affects Black businesses and institutions, labor politics and more. The newly Caucasian Max changes his name and moves down South to find and marry the racist white woman named Helen who had previously rejected him. He eventually becomes the leader of a white supremacist group and profits off racist rhetoric.Brandon Victor Dixon as Max Fisher in the musical “Black No More.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Black No More” the musical, directed by Scott Elliott and with a book by John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”), softens — and in some cases eliminates — Schuyler’s biting critique. The novelist didn’t just target racist whites but also Black identity, and Black leaders and institutions that claim to support the Black community while actually damaging and profiting off it.In the novel, characters mostly act in their self-interest, especially when it comes to money; in many ways the villain is capitalism. (Schuyler was a vocal socialist at the time he published the book.) In the musical, things are simplified: Dr. Crookman (played by Trotter) is a devil figure offering a Faustian bargain.There aren’t many sympathetic characters in the text, which the musical changes. Helen, now a liberal at heart, falls in love with Max when he’s still Black and reveals she’s only pretending to be racist around her conservative family.In the book, Max’s best friend, Bunny, follows his lead, also turning white and serving white supremacists for profit. In the musical, Bunny (now Buni) is a Black woman who acts as Max’s moral compass; she defends Blackness and calls out Max for betraying his race. Schuyler’s book disregards women, and the intersection of race and gender, altogether. In the musical, Buni gets a song about the burdens Black women bear for their families and communities, but her character is thinly written, just bolstering Max’s story.The influential Black artists who worked on the show appeared eager to transform the original work into a piece that celebrates Blackness. Trotter’s lyrics, Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters were lovingly appreciative of Black movement and sound, with R&B, soul, hip-hop, spoken word, step and lindy hop forming an extravagant collage. And some numbers — like the oddly triumphant final song of Black solidarity — and a new Black activist character named Agamemnon, seem incorporated to counter the cynicism of Schuyler’s work.It’s understandable, especially given the way Black Lives Matter has shaped the cultural conversation about inequality faced by Black people; it would be outré to produce a true adaptation of a work like Schuyler’s, which has no redeemable Black characters and berates pillars of the Black community as vehemently as it does white institutions.And so Max, our Black-turned-white protagonist, is given a guilty conscience; he’s made sympathetic just long enough so he can be the martyr, shot down in the middle of a fourth-wall-breaking monologue that’s meant to be a bridge between the 1931 story and 2022 audiences.In art, context is key. But depending on the work and what new context the director or playwright wants to bring to it, some changes can feel too forced, too transparent. “Expectation from you all is … what? For me to give a moving soliloquy on race in America?” Max says in his final monologue. He’s no longer speaking from the world of the musical but from today. “Still we can’t put all our nonsense behind us,” he says. And the bullet that takes him down? It doesn’t come from Schuyler’s time; it’s shot from 2022. It just goes to show that when past and present collide, it may not be pretty. More

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      Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

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      Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More

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      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More

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      In a New Memoir, Harvey Fierstein Shares Gossip and Regrets

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      “As much as it hurts, tell the truth,” says the Tony-winning performer and playwright, tracing his path from Brooklyn to Broadway.Harvey Fierstein contains multitudes. The playwright, screenwriter, actor and drag performer has inhabited at least as many personalities as Walt Whitman. With trademark wit and empathy, he has written about himself in “Torch Song Trilogy”; a father with a drag queen partner and a straight son in “La Cage Aux Folles”; the bootlegging song and dance man Legs Diamond; English factory workers and an unlikely firebrand in “Kinky Boots”; heterosexual cross dressers in “Casa Valentina”; striking newspaper boys in his Broadway adaptation of “Newsies”; and a sissy duckling for an HBO animated special.And he has revised the script for the musical “Funny Girl,” a show about Fanny Brice, an unlikely star like himself, which opens on Broadway this spring.Now, at 69, the multitalented Tony Award winner has added memoirist to his kaleidoscopic résumé. “I Was Better Last Night,” published by Knopf and described as “warm and enveloping” and full of “righteous rage” in a New York Times review, just released.The title refers to what Fierstein would often say to friends after a performance. But it’s also about regret. “What’s the harm in looking back?” he writes. “If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to dig.” This video interview has been edited and condensed.Can we get this out of the way at the top? What’s with your voice?My father had the same voice. It’s enlarged secondary vocal cords. It’s the most boring answer. You end up with a voice kind of like Harry Belafonte, except not so pretty because I abused it early in my acting career. I had no training and I listened to no one because children listen to no one.Like all your writing, your memoir is full of humor. Do you think it’s a form of defense?I think of humor as perspective. Perspective plus time. When I started writing, I realized that when you’re looking to talk to an audience, you have to find that line between the tragedy and the comedy and the humanity. The man slipping on the banana peel. What makes that funny is how human it is, how it could be you.In the book, your adolescence sounds pretty great.I arrived at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, this total innocent from Brooklyn into this world of kids that wanted to be artists. And all the teachers were professional artists and everyone was gay. I used to tease them that they bused in heterosexuals because it was the law. All of a sudden, I had a community.It almost coincided with Stonewall.I was too young to go to the bar. But I was already hanging out in the Village.As a teen you also did community theater with the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, and there was this gay male couple involved there that made a big impression on you.They had been together for 30 years, and they were the very first gay couple I knew. They had dinner parties. They had fights. And so, as a kid I was introduced into the world of gay couples as something I recognized. When I started reading and seeing gay theater, I was shocked by how negative it was. It wasn’t the gay people I knew.You were in drag in a Warhol play at La MaMa and Ellen Stewart, the legendary producer there, had her eye on you. Why?The closest I could tell was when she called me up to her office one day and said, “Mama’s baby don’t wear bloomers no more.”Meaning drag?Right. “These other people, Mr. Fierstein, I love them,” she said. “They’re all talented and wonderful and they run around in their bloomers, and I let them do it here because it’s a safe place, but that’s all they will do. Mr. Fierstein, you are made for something else. I don’t know what that is, but we’re going to find out.”So, after some wild plays that imitated others, you wrote an honest and personal monologue after an anonymous sexual encounter.It was already 5 o’clock in the morning and I had a meeting at La MaMa, so it made no sense to go home to Brooklyn. I sat down on a bench and I wrote this monologue. Then I read it to a friend on the steps of La MaMa and she laughed and thought it was absolutely fabulous. But here’s the thing — she saw the character I wrote as a woman, not a gay man. She felt exactly the same way about her sexual encounters. She saw the humanity, and it wasn’t gay or straight. It was about being used as a sexual object. It was an eye-opening moment that taught me that as much as it hurts, tell the truth. And in that truth, you will find an audience, you will find other people feeling exactly the way you feel. And you will even find humor.Fierstein as Arnold Beckoff in his career-making 1982 Broadway play, “Torch Song Trilogy.”Gerry GoodsteinWhen your mother came to see the first part of “Torch Song” at La MaMa in 1978, she noticed that you were wearing earrings she’d been missing.When I was doing drag early on, I would snatch a lot of her jewelry. When I took my jewelry course at Pratt, where I went to college, I gave her everything I made.You felt supported by your parents, didn’t you?My father was raised in an orphanage. He instilled in me and my brother that all you have is your family, and he would always be behind us. I’m sure he and my mother had many sleepless nights talking about what I was up to, wearing dresses, whatever. My brother once told Lesley Stahl in an interview that never aired, “Harvey was just always Harvey, we always accepted him as Harvey.”So how did your mom respond to those early plays that were tender, but also brutal?First of all, she loved the theater and took me as a kid every chance she got. And she knew my boyfriends and stuff. She wasn’t an innocent.It’s a different world now. When you wrote your trilogy, gay couples didn’t have kids so often.But at that time, there were all of these gay kids thrown out of their homes and getting beaten up in group homes. And so there was this need for us to go beyond our own needs as individuals and start becoming this community and take care of our children. My mother was a New York City schoolteacher, and we had a fight over the Harvey Milk school for gay kids. She told me that if you don’t mainstream these kids now, they will never have lives. Then she had a gay student and all of a sudden, she changed her mind.You refer to L.G.B.T.Q.L.M.N.O.P. in your book. Could you get canceled for being glib?No, because everybody knows we’re an ever-growing group. When I was a kid, I thought there were gay people and straight people, and everybody else was in the closet. As I grew up, I started realizing there are many colors in our crayon box. The men in my play “Casa Valentina” were based on real-life straight cross-dressing men in the 1950s, and not one of them agreed on anything. The great lie is that we’re all the same. Not one of us is like the other. We are all so magnificently individual.In 2003, the makeup artist Justen M. Brosnan doing Fierstein’s makeup for the role of Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray.”Richard Perry/ The New York TimesWell said for a man who, in one year, went from playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” to Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”I was so happy onstage as Edna in that wig and persona. And I was happy offstage when people called me Mama. Then I go into playing Tevye, and I am surrounded by five daughters and I’ve grown my own beard and I’m talking to God and I’ve never been happier. I was completely and utterly in ecstasy when anyone called me Papa.You were playing Bella Abzug before the pandemic in a solo play you wrote and had a Gloria Steinem incident.At the end of the play Bella is saying, if only women would vote the way they should and not the way their husbands tell them to. And Gloria stood up and said, “No, no! White women!” She was telling me that white women vote in the interest of the men who are supporting them. Gloria will always be about encouraging independent women who take care of themselves.Do today’s changes around sexuality and gender surprise you? Nonbinary pronouns, kids considering hormone replacement therapy? And what about polyamory and open relationships?I’m going to be 70 in June, so I still have to make adjustments. But this is where the world is, and the conversation now was not my conversation then. But I love it. I love young people telling us where to go. I love young people defining the world and saying, “This is the world I want to live in.” Although I don’t know how my friends who are raising teenagers do it.You’ve lived in Connecticut for years. What’s the appeal?I never breathe freely in the city. It’s always there, calling you or frightening you. Here I live on top of a hill. I come home from work, walk straight through the house pulling my clothes off, and I fall into the swimming pool.You write about lovers and heartbreaks in the memoir. Now you’re happily single. Are you on dating apps?Not right now, but I once met a really nice guy on one who I’m still close with.“When you’re looking to talk to an audience,” Fierstein says, “you have to find that line between the tragedy and the comedy and the humanity.”Michael George for The New York TimesWouldn’t people recognize you on a dating app?That’s why I don’t go on them much, but when I did, I was totally open. I once put up a picture with my beard, and I think I labeled myself “Tevye is in town.” I was not trying to hide. And I did meet a few people interested in meeting Harvey Fierstein. That was fine.Not Harvey Weinstein, as happens on occasion?I was in a diner in Connecticut and this guy’s saying, “Oh my god, it’s Harvey Weinstein.” And I said, “No, I’m not Harvey Weinstein.” And he says, “Yes, you are,” and he wouldn’t stop accusing me of doing terrible things. I told him that that Harvey was in prison somewhere and that I was Harvey Fierstein.Did that end it?I paid for his dinner on my way out and that shut him up.Your memoir has some dicey celebrity anecdotes. You got in a hot tub with James Taylor at Canyon Ranch?I didn’t get all crazy and ask for his autograph or anything.Did you ask for a selfie?I didn’t do any of that. That’s fangirling.But you managed to compliment him on his private parts.Is that such a terrible thing? More

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      Review: In ‘sandblasted,’ Seizing the Day. Also the Nose.

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      When their body parts start falling off, two women go on a spiritual journey with an Oprah-esque guru in Charly Evon Simpson’s new play.As the lights go up, we discover two women half-buried in sand — which is one more woman than stingy Samuel Beckett offered in “Happy Days.” But Beckett’s semi-subterranean Winnie faced only the terrors of eternity. For Angela and Odessa, the main characters in Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which had its world premiere Off Broadway on Sunday, the problem is closer to home.A lot closer: not even arm’s length, you might say. Because less than a minute into the action, it is that appendage that falls off Odessa’s body like an overripe fruit from a tree.Kudos to the prosthetic designer, Matthew Frew, for the lifelike limb, and to Simpson for the bolt of surreal humor at the start of a play that wants to be a Beckettian comedy about Black women in extremis. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not for lack of trying.For me, it tries too hard. The central metaphor — that Black women are literally falling apart — is assiduously explored, but the issues that might give it heft are left, like Angela and Odessa, buried in the sand. Random racist violence and the increased rate of infant mortality are name-checked only.Which is not to say that every play about Black women must be a tragic news bulletin. In some ways it’s a relief that when Angela and Odessa do rise from the sand, there’s some enjoyable interplay between them. There’s not much development, though, unless you count the further shedding of body parts. Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) loses her nose and a toe; Odessa (Marinda Anderson) reglues her arm but drops the occasional finger.The women are, at first, strangers, having come to the same beach seeking the sand and fresh air they have heard might “slow the process” of their apparently epidemic condition. They both fit the at-risk demographic: stressed-out Black women, especially those living in big cities. Though joined by common disaster, they are meet-cute opposites: Odessa blingy, fatalistic and cool; Angela nerdy, anxious and eager to please. She calls herself a “safety cat” as opposed to a “scaredy cat.”Marinda Anderson, left, as Odessa, and Brittany Bellizeare, right, as Angela, join Rolonda Watts, as a guru named Adah, on a spiritual quest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut with the beach treatment more or less a bust, they nevertheless set out together on a mad mission to seek the advice and care of an Oprah-like wellness guru named Adah. Adah, who says she is “somewhere below 100” in age, has not been afflicted by the disease, and has thus become a popular source of inspiration about it, writing books, giving lectures (“Girl, Stop Falling Apart!”) and preaching the murky gospel of self-help.Yet “sandblasted” is not a satire of Oprah or Oprah-ism; especially as played by the former newscaster and talk show host Rolonda Watts, Adah is at least as warm as she is sententious. You can’t help but like her even though she’s oblivious to the way her privilege provides insulation and her prescriptions turn out to be riddling and fickle. As she joins Angela and Odessa on a journey that seems more spiritual than medical, she suggests they travel east. Oh wait, no, west. Well, somewhere.The play is similarly wayward: its path sometimes random, its chronology scrambled for no reason. Angela and Odessa seem scrambled, too; they exchange positions in their arguments, perhaps to maintain the semblance of conflict where little exists. Lively disagreement comes into the picture only when Angela’s playboy brother does; Jamal (Andy Lucien) attends an Adah lecture so he’ll “seem more understanding when I go on dates” and tries to pick up the not-having-it Odessa, whom he meets too coincidentally at the bar where he works.The actors, under the direction of Summer L. Williams, are all enjoyable, making the most of characterful writing when it’s provided, and doing what they can with the big gulps of self-conscious poetry Simpson has otherwise asked them to deliver.And “sandblasted” — a coproduction of the Vineyard and WP theaters — looks handsome, too, its surreal landscape represented in Matt Saunders’s set by heaps of sand, a cotton-ball sky and doors and windows cut into the cycloramic horizon. The witty costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and alfresco lighting (by Stacey Derosier) help counter the vagueness of time and locale. Despite those felicities, the play, with 18 scenes totaling an hour and 40 minutes, is too long for its own good, a problem not ameliorated by stodgy pacing and shaggy transitions.Not everyone will feel that way. Some people in the audience on the night I attended were signifying with murmurs and finger snaps their appreciation for the well turned phrases and tender encomiums about caring for one another and seizing the day. And though I found the pileup of metaphors oppressive, I have to admit they were eye-opening. An especially elaborate one introduced me to the phenomenon of fulgurites: tubes of glass formed underground when lightning hits sand.In the context of “sandblasted,” they are clearly meant to symbolize Black women themselves, the lightning strike of disaster having fused with their own nature to make something beautiful and precious — and, all too often, buried.sandblastedThrough March 13 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Daughter-in-Law’ Review: Sons and Wives

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      In this D.H. Lawrence play, a production by the Mint Theater, men are trouble, “pure and simple.”In the darkness before dawn, a sleepless woman and her daughter-in-law keep each other company.There is no love lost between these two — Mrs. Gascoyne, a miner’s widow who keeps her miner sons close in their small English town; and Minnie, a former governess who, just weeks earlier, had the gall to marry one of them. But late in D.H. Lawrence’s play “The Daughter-in-Law,” the women are gentle enough with each other to have a heart-to-heart.“A child is a troublesome pleasure to a woman,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie, “but a man’s a trouble, pure and simple.”If that’s unfair as a generalization, it certainly applies to Mrs. Gascoyne’s Luther, who has passed 30 without exhibiting the slightest twinge of ambition.An enduring mystery of the play is why Minnie, a go-getter with some money of her own, elected to marry him. As a spousal choice, he seems a distant second even to his aimless brother Joe, who still lives with their mother and, in the play’s opening minutes, sits down to a supper that she cuts up for him.In Martin Platt’s diverting revival for the Mint Theater Company, at New York City Center Stage II, the men are not what’s captivating about this play. Rather, it’s Lawrence’s women, drawn with a capacious, conflicted sympathy that recognizes how frustrating it is for a keen-minded person to try to carve satisfaction from a stifling domestic world.Portrayed with a fine ferocity by Sandra Shipley, Mrs. Gascoyne nurtures a bitterness about Luther’s “hoity-toity” new wife — a resentment that’s about class and clannishness, but also about loss of control, because what if her boy doesn’t need her anymore? When an acquaintance, Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie), breaks the news that her daughter is four months pregnant with Luther’s child, Mrs. Gascoyne’s desiccated heart swells in anticipation of the humiliation this will bring to Minnie.The gentle-mannered Minnie, in a beautifully nuanced performance by Amy Blackman, has trouble enough already. Her new marriage has descended into bickering, and Luther (Tom Coiner) is a self-pitying grump. Still, when she says in the heat of anger that she would have preferred “a drunken husband that knocked me about” to a mama’s boy, it seems a stretch.Written in a thick, distinctive dialect of the East Midlands, where Lawrence grew up, the text leaves room for Luther to have some appealing qualities, but here he is all roughness and no complexity. There’s not even a sexual spark that would make sense of Minnie’s choice to be with him — which is a problem, because we are meant to have a stake in their relationship’s success.His brother Joe (Ciaran Bowling) is at least kind to her, mostly; when he isn’t, the change of tenor is more confusing than anything.As with many Mint productions, the play’s back story is part of the allure. Lawrence’s father was a miner; his mother, to whom he was exceptionally close, came from a slightly higher class. He wrote the script in the years after her death in 1910, around the time he wrote his novel “Sons and Lovers,” which has similar themes.Not staged in Lawrence’s lifetime (and previously directed by Platt for the Mint in 2003), “The Daughter-in-Law” feels at times like a purgation — a 20-something playwright rebelling at last against the beloved mother who demanded too much of him emotionally. When Minnie blames Mrs. Gascoyne for hobbling Luther, as if he had no agency, she can sound like she is channeling the playwright’s own wounded outrage. Rebellion, though, is not the same as revenge.“The world is made of men for me, lass,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie.But in the world of Lawrence’s play, the women are the stars.The Daughter-in-LawThrough March 20 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More