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      Kenneth H. Brown, Playwright Best Known for ‘The Brig,’ Dies at 85

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      He drew on his own experiences in the Marines to depict brutality within the corps, drawing acclaim Off Off Broadway.Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed dehumanization inside a military prison during the Korean War, died on Feb. 5 at a hospice in Queens. He was 85. A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.After growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s as something of a street tough, Mr. Brown, eager to serve his country, enlisted in the Marines at 18. But stationed in Japan, he found himself rattled by military life and was thrown into the brig for insubordination.There, by his account, he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “maggot”; he was punched in the gut for even minor infractions. Mornings started with garbage-can lids being banged on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog around their claustrophobic quarters for hours until they were breathless.“I was always in trouble in the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I went to the brig twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I got out, I was a complete pacifist.”Back in New York, Mr. Brown worked as a bartender and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. In his spare time he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play depicting a grueling day in the life of 10 imprisoned Marines and the guards who brutalize them.Mr. Brown, left, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Manhattan avant-garde troupe the Living Theater, in 1964. The company had given “The Brig” its premiere.Mr. Brown didn’t have any theater connections. But through a friend his manuscript made its way to the Living Theater, the revered avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were captivated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.“I was a guy from the neighborhood,” Mr. Brown said. “I never met people like Julian and Judith.”“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of conditions in the brig, the president or his secretary of defense ought to order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script does not spare a detail of the devastating indictment.”The play won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but it also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic last performance there. During the play’s run, the authorities shut down the playhouse for delinquent taxes, but the cast and an audience broke into the padlocked theater for one final show.“The play accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” Mr. Brown said. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly not through commenting on it, but doing it. Actually performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”A scene from the film version of “The Brig,” directed by Jonas Mekas, in 1964Harvard Film ArchiveKenneth Howard Brown was born in Brooklyn on March, 9, 1936, to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank officer, his father a police officer.Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to brawl with youths in the neighborhood. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.After the success of “The Brig,” Mr. Brown enjoyed the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was off and running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and jaunts to faraway places,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could make a go of it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”He went back to tending bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for the downtown theater crowd. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he wryly addressed the realities of a writer’s life in the city:“That’s right, I’m the guy who wrote ‘The Brig.’ What am I doing here running this restaurant? Well, I’ve got to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get any fellowships and grants. I’ve had them all, and nobody will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh, yes, you have to do it again and again.”But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high schoolers growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a bleak city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000.Mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, living in a rent-controlled apartment passed down to him by his parents, and for years he headed into Manhattan to tend bar. He kept busy writing a sequel to “The Great Gatsby” titled “Carraway,” based on the character who narrates the Fitzgerald novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)In 2007, long after the Living Theater’s playhouse was closed and years after the company began moving from place to place, it settled into a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Ms. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the inaugural production.The play’s revival was widely publicized, and Mr. Brown savored the triumph. But as Americans were still reckoning with reports of torture at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival was starkly timely. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Mr. Brown.“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in an interview in 2010. “I guess as long as there’s war and as long as there’s a military and especially as long as one questions the ethical right to wage war.”“It’s going to stay relevant,” he added, “until there’s peace throughout the world.” More

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      Interview: Getting into a Pickle with Deli and Tanya

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      Deli Segal and Tanya Truman on new play Pickle

      Pickle is a play about being a young Jewish woman, balancing the two sides of your life; that of being from a Jewish family and the other of just being a young woman. We struggled to think of many other examples of theatre exploring the young female Jewish experience, so we thought we’d like to find out more from the show’s writer/ actor and producer. It was a lot of fun chatting to Deli and Tanya, as well as a wonderful chance to learn a little more.

      The show itself was scheduled to play at Vault Festival, so became yet another casualty when the festival was cancelled. This interview was recorded at the end of 2021, prior to cancellation and so there are a couple of Vault mentions.

      However we’ve been assured the show will see life on stage soon in 2022, so we thought it still more than worthwhile to share this interview with you.

      If you want to keep an eye out for when this show will be on stage, we recommend you follow both Deli Segal and Tanya Truman on Twitter. More

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      Review: ‘The Tap Dance Kid,’ Still Out of Step With the Times

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      The Encores! series returns with a 1983 musical that, despite its pleasures, wasn’t quite right then and isn’t quite right now.When 8:30 p.m. was a typical curtain time for Broadway musicals, the main character’s biggest number, crystallizing the crisis and ensuring an ovation — think “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” — often came at 11.The curtain for Wednesday night’s opening of the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” went up at 7:30, so the so-called 11 o’clock number came closer to 10, but it was still recognizably the main event. That’s when Joshua Henry, playing William Sheridan, the conservative father of a Black family thrown into chaos by a son who wants to be a dancer, let loose with a tirade that ripped the fabric of the rest of the show to pieces, expressing with fury and unbridled terror the character’s disdain for what he sees as the performative Blackness of tap.“I keep on smilin’ through the worst of times,” he snarls while shucking and jiving monstrously. “Lettin’ the white man toss me his nickels and dimes.”It’s an astonishing performance, in the best way hard to watch. If only William were the main character it might even make sense at the end of a mostly lighter-hearted story. But he’s not, and it doesn’t, and the biggest number, whenever it comes, should not be his.That “The Tap Dance Kid” is never sure which of the members of the Sheridan family it’s about — the focus seems to change every 10 minutes — is just one of the oddities afflicting this tonally bewildering but intermittently appealing 1983 musical, which Encores!, in its return to live production after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is offering through Sunday at New York City Center.Is the main character, as the title leads you to expect, William’s 10-year-old son, Willie (Alexander Bello), the one who wants to dance despite his father’s prohibitions? Or is it Emma (Shahadi Wright Joseph), William’s 14-year-old daughter, who wants to be a lawyer like him but can barely get his attention because she’s a girl?Bello, left, with Adrienne Walker, who plays his mother, Ginnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat about William’s wife, Ginnie (Adrienne Walker), who must “tap dance” around her husband’s temper while trying to make things right for her children? Or Ginnie’s brother, Uncle Dipsey (Trevor Jackson), a dancer and choreographer? Dipsey, depending on your point of view, is either leading Willie astray by teaching him the “shim-sham-shimmy” or upholding the joyful traditions of an art form mastered by men like his late father, Daddy Bates (DeWitt Fleming Jr.).Yes, even a ghost gets two big numbers.The musical was always something of a hodgepodge. The original book, by Charles Blackwell, based on the bracingly dour young adult novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh of “Harriet the Spy” fame, never resolved the problem of making peppy entertainment out of such downbeat material.The score — by Henry Krieger and Robert Lorick — fully absorbed that confusion of tone, offering songs that are either purely high-spirited (“Fabulous Feet”) or baldly prosaic (“Four Strikes Against Me”) with little in between. There are times when you don’t know why someone is singing or dancing and other times when you do but wish you didn’t.The Encores! production, directed by Kenny Leon, does not solve those problems. Lydia Diamond’s “concert adaptation” (though the production is amply staged) does make some improvements, moving the story, which in the 1983 production was said to take place in “the present,” to 1956, where it in some ways makes more sense. The family’s interpersonal and often gender-based conflicts — Emma wants to wear pants, Ginnie chafes under her husband’s authority — feel more apt in the earlier period, as does Krieger’s swingy music, which is oddly retro for the composer of “Dreamgirls.” Still, it’s beautifully performed by the 24-piece Encores! orchestra under the direction of Joseph Joubert.But in further revising the jumbled tunestack used for the original production’s national tour, Diamond’s adaptation exacerbates the show’s scattershot approach. (At the start, we get three establishing numbers in a row, for Willie, Dipsey and Emma, thus establishing little.) And the heavy cutting of spoken scenes that is part of the Encores! brief is especially detrimental to such a busy yet unfocused story. In one scene, I realized that Willie was on a bus only after checking the program to find that the number was called “Crosstown.” I’d thought he was in a dream sequence.Foreground from left: Kurt Csolak, Jodeci Milhouse and Justin Prescott. The show’s ensemble numbers, choreographed by Jared Grimes, are suitably spectacular, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography by Jared Grimes is suitably spectacular in the ensemble numbers, and the demonstration of the changing styles of tap as they pass from Daddy Bates to his children and then, via Dipsey, to more familiar Broadway versions, is fascinating to watch. Jackson (along with Tracee Beazer as his girlfriend, Carole) is an especially exciting dancer, and an appealing crooner as well. And Bello, in a tradition of Willies that includes Alfonso Ribeiro, Dulé Hill and Savion Glover, makes a charming show of learning and then quickly personalizing the steps that are part of his heritage.I wish that were the focus of the story — or that there were a focus at all. If the musical numbers are sometimes hard to grasp visually, the staging of the book scenes is too often undifferentiated. And at least on opening night, after just 11 days of rehearsal, the technical elements were not yet cohering. For a show about the excitement of dance, the pace is strangely languid.That’s partly built into the haziness of the original material. And though one of the things Encores! is designed to show us is what musicals, for better or worse, felt like when they first opened, I’m not sure this production, the first under Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director, succeeds.Perhaps it shouldn’t. That “The Tap Dance Kid” tells the story of an upper-middle-class Black family (“Don’t you buy all of your clothes on the Upper East Side?” William asks his wife rhetorically) made it somewhat ahead of its time in 1983. That it was mostly the work of a white creative team makes it somewhat behind the time now. Letting Black artists take a new look is the only sensible thing to do — except for leaving it be. Not every historical relic needs to be on display.The Tap Dance KidThrough Feb. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Artistically in Sync, and Reunited for ‘The Merchant of Venice’

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      Arin Arbus and John Douglas Thompson are collaborating on their fifth play, a Theater for a New Audience production that begins previews Saturday.More than 25 years later, John Douglas Thompson still remembers the summer heat that made him sweat beneath his costume. He remembers lines, too, that have been stored in his brain ever since — like the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, in which his character, the moneylender Shylock, asserts his own humanity.And then there was the spit. Each performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” on an outdoor stage at Shakespeare & Company, in western Massachusetts, started with Thompson walking past his fellow cast members while they spat at him, in character: Christians displaying their contempt for a Jew. It felt horrible — he remembers that as well — but it did lock him into the experience of the man he was playing.“I’d, you know, wipe it off,” Thompson said. “And I just had to keep going. I had to suffer that.”He was still training as an actor then, in 1994; his Shylock was part of a student production by the company. But he has long since established himself as “one of the most commanding classical actors around,” as the critic Ben Brantley once called him. And Shylock, it turns out, is a role that Thompson wanted to revisit.His performance — in a Theater for a New Audience production, starting previews on Saturday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn — appears to be, according to the theater’s research, the first time a Black actor has played the role on a professional stage in New York City. It is also Thompson’s fifth play with the director Arin Arbus, a collaboration that started with her acclaimed “Othello” in 2009.Thompson with Nate Miller, center left, and Maurice Jones (center with hat) during a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThat show was her professional debut, and she’d had to persuade him to play the title role. He risked it partly because, in his experience, white men directing that tragedy “tend to zero in on Iago and really leave the Black actor playing Othello to fend for themselves,” he said, whereas “the female director being a minority, as the Black actor playing Othello is also a minority, there’s just a connection there.”By now — after also starring in Arbus’s productions of “Macbeth,” Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Strindberg’s “The Father,” all for Theater for a New Audience — he says that hers are precisely the “careful hands” he needs to help him shape a role as complex as Shylock in a play as controversial as “The Merchant of Venice.”In a joint interview on a January afternoon at a rehearsal space in downtown Manhattan, Thompson, 58, and Arbus, 43, were easy together behind their face masks. Filling in the blanks in each other’s sentences, they seemed artistically in sync in a way that felt organic, not rehearsed. Arbus observed that they argue well — an underrated skill.“I hope to one day be her muse,” Thompson said, and she laughed delightedly.“The Merchant of Venice” is one of those Shakespeare plays that defy easy classification. Technically it’s a comedy, ending sans blood bath and with couples reunited. Yet there is heartbreak in it, not least because Shylock’s beloved daughter, Jessica, betrays and deserts him. And Shylock, like Othello, is an outsider in his own society.Enduringly divisive, the play bristles with bigotry: the antisemitism that is aimed at Shylock, who over the centuries has often been portrayed in ugly caricature; and the anti-Blackness that Portia, the principal character and Shylock’s courtroom nemesis, spouts repeatedly.Arbus working with Alfredo Narciso, seated, and Sanjit De Silva, right. (In the background are Varín Ayala, left, and  Nate Miller.)Amir Hamja for The New York Times“People have issues with this play just on the page,” said Arbus, who, like Thompson, views Shakespeare as depicting bigotry, not endorsing it. She was on staff at Theater for a New Audience when it staged its last production of the play, starring F. Murray Abraham and directed by Darko Tresnjak. It was the only time Arbus has known the theater to get hate mail.The idea for a new production of “Merchant” came from Thompson, whom she described as an actor with “an enormous intellectual appetite and an enormous emotional appetite.”He also has some shiny recent credits in high-profile prestige TV series. Last year, he played Chief Carter, the boss of Kate Winslet’s title character, in the HBO hit “Mare of Easttown”; currently, he can be seen as Arthur Scott, the father of Denée Benton’s character and the husband of Audra McDonald’s, in Julian Fellowes’s HBO glam-o-drama, “The Gilded Age.”Plans for this “Merchant” were already afoot when the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 sparked a racial reckoning. Ask Thompson whether his exploration of the character has changed since then, and he mentions the wider lens on hatred that his depiction — of a Jewish Shylock who is also a Black Shylock — will open up at a time of ever more belligerent public expression of antisemitism and anti-Blackness.He speaks, too, about the buildup of daily indignities and humiliations that Shylock endures before he gets a chance to exact revenge — when Antonio, the contemptuous merchant of the title, fails to repay a loan on time, and Shylock demands as penalty the pound of flesh that their contract stipulates.“What is it that drives someone to say, ‘No more’?” Thompson asked. “How does one who has been discriminated against horribly and treated horribly, how does that person get agency for themselves in a world that refuses, wants to keep them as a second-class or no-class citizen?”Thompson wants to examine why Shylock abandons rationality, insists on a moral wrong and then — this is the sticking point — refuses to relent.What’s fascinating about Shakespeare’s poetry, Douglas said, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“What Shylock is up against is so much bigger than him,” he said. “And I think that’s where the irrationality comes in: ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”Thompson is, of course, not the first Black American to play Shylock in a professional production. That distinction probably goes to the 19th-century Shakespearean Ira Aldridge, though he had to leave New York for Europe to do it.In contemporary times, Paul Butler played the role for the director Peter Sellars in Chicago in 1994, and Johnny Lee Davenport at Milwaukee Shakespeare in 2005.Arbus’s staging — a coproduction with Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., where it will run in the spring — surrounds Thompson with a racially diverse cast. In consultation with the scholar Ayanna Thompson, a specialist in issues of race in Shakespeare, Arbus said she asked the actors “to bring their backgrounds into the characters that they’re playing.”And in contrast with much American theater in recent decades, which in using colorblind casting has sought to teach playgoers to look past race, Arbus says she intends her audiences to see it, and to think about it.To John Douglas Thompson, their “full-bodied, color-conscious, diverse production is a clarion call,” a way of debunking even unconscious biases on the part of audience members and asserting that Shakespeare’s words belong to more than just a narrow slice of the populace.“The most fascinating thing about this poetry,” he said, meaning all of Shakespeare, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful. And I think it’s educational. Then you can learn about people, you know, you really can.”A Shakespeare evangelist through and through, Thompson considers the plays “a birthright,” and likens them to “mother’s milk.”At home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, he has five to 10 copies of each of Shakespeare’s plays, he said — and 15 separate editions of “The Merchant of Venice,” lately placed strategically around his prewar apartment, so that one is never more than an arm’s length away.Arbus says that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“It’s a one-bedroom kind of loft,” he said, “but everywhere there’s a chair or a table, I just want to have it, because I don’t want to go searching for the script, you know what I mean?”It helps to immerse himself that way, and he likes that each version has different scholars’ notes, with possibly slightly varied text. He has even more copies of “Othello” — 16 or 17, he thinks.Arbus, applauding the wisdom of keeping multiple editions, cited a version of “Othello” whose editor had reassigned one of Desdemona’s lines to Emilia, and in the process done away with a key to Desdemona’s character.“You see?” Thompson marveled. “That is fascinating. From a line.”Later, by phone, Arbus would say that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “his nerves are closer to his skin than many people’s are, in that he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”“It’s these big stories that I feel satisfy his soul in a way that maybe nothing else does,” she said.But that afternoon in the rehearsal space, Thompson was talking about trust — about how he would probably say yes to doing another Shakespeare play with Arbus even before she told him which one she had in mind.“I mean, she may say, ‘OK, it’s going to be a comedy,’” he said. “And I hate comedies. I would still do it.”Rising ever so slightly to his bait, Arbus didn’t mention a title, just a potential role, as distant from Shylock and “The Merchant of Venice” as Shakespeare could be — the weaver-turned-ass in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”“Bottom, Bottom, Bottom,” she said.“I’d say OK,” Thompson said. “I’ll do it with Arin.” More

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      Interview: Keeping our heads above water with Swell

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      Tom Foreman on new play Swell

      It doesn’t feel that long ago we sat down with Tom Foreman to chat about his play Big Boys. So we were rather surpsied to realise that he was now heading to Lion and Unicorn next week with new show show Swell. Set in the fictional town of Swell, the play takes its inspiration from the real town of Fairbourne which, in 2014, was announced would be depopulated by 2054 due to being unsustainable to defend from the effects of global warning and rising tides.

      So befor we all go under with the rising tides, it seemed a good time to catch up with Tom to find out how he has been since we last spoke.

      What was it that first attracted you to write a show around Fairbourne?

      I came across the story of Fairbourne during the first lockdown, and despite all the chaos of current affairs in that period, it still had this incredibly powerful reach on me. Like most people, combating climate change is a cause I’m deeply committed to, but living in the UK where we’re nowhere near the worst of the impacts, it’s all too easy sometimes to feel that it’s something abstract, in the future.

      And then Fairbourne: a town in Wales that has ‘decommissioned’ due to inadequate defences against rising sea levels, with the whole population set to be removed and infrastructure deconstructed by 2054. I don’t think I ever find it less shocking, really. It’s climate change being felt right here, right now on our shores, and those residents are unfortunately the nation’s first climate refugees. What I think cut through to me the most however was the human stories. These people who have found out overnight that the place they called home was just being abandoned. Hearing stories of how that’s affected the community and individuals within it… That’s where Swell was born. Swell is not a play about climate change: it’s a play about community and grief, about how we come together and fall apart in times of crisis.

      Did you visit the area for the play at all, or did you do what the rest of us do, and get onto Google Earth?

      I wrote the play during the first lockdown, so unfortunately I never did. I’ve always meant to visit, but it’s one of those things that always evaded me being so far away. On the other hand however because it was that first lockdown, I had so much time on my hands, and I spent it learning every little detail I could about Fairbourne. My paternal family are also from Whitstable in Kent, so I also really got my teeth into researching there, and suddenly I was an encyclopedia for small British coastal towns! That was invaluable in constructing the town of Swell when developing the show. I actually have a complete and detailed map of the town, which hasn’t made it into the show yet, but we’re hoping to transfer to Edinburgh for the Fringe after, so maybe people will get to see it one day!

      You focus on two siblings to tell your story, how much is Swell about family told against a backdrop of climate change?

      It’s absolutely that. In my press releases I use the phrase “backdrop of environmental crisis” because that’s really where the climate change comes in. The decommissioning of the town is what triggers the plot, but the plot is certainly not focused on the climate change itself. It’s absolutely a play about family and community, about grief and perseverance. I think that siblinghood is one of the most complex relationships in our lives. We all have such different experiences of it, but the one common theme for all of us with siblings is that they are never ever simple. I wanted to explore that dynamic and push it to its limits. 

      Did you always want to write a climate change story, or were you inspired from hearing about Fairbourne.

      The one thing I never try to do when writing is go looking for a story or issue to write about. I think that if you try to force it, you’ll end up in so many dead ends trying to make it work that the whole experience will just be unenjoyable, and if it’s unenjoyable writing you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll be unenjoyable viewing.

      I also try to steer clear of ‘problem plays.’ That may sound weird given that my most recent two shows have focused on male mental health and climate change, but what I mean by that is a story should never come out of a problem: a problem should always come out of a story. So, in this case, the story of Swell is triggered by climate change, but it doesn’t come out of climate change – it comes out of two siblings finding themselves in a community being torn apart. I couldn’t stop thinking about Fairbourne after I came across it in the news, and it really was the draw of the story, rather than the fact it was related to climate change, that spurred me to write about it.

      You are playing at Lion and Unicorn; last year they had Lately, about youngsters growing up in a dead seaside resort. Did you see this and do you think that there is a lot of ground to be explored in this theme of “dying” seaside towns?

      I know! I actually was lucky enough to see this, what an excellent production. I didn’t know a lot about it going in and I remember when it started thinking “Oh! Coastal community!” Yeah, I’m not sure to be honest! It’s certainly a strange coincidence. I do think that as an island nation, we all have some innate connection to the coast, whether consciously or not. And particularly in the wake of things like Brexit and climate change, those communities on the coast do seem to be struggling the most, when really they should be some of our most valuable towns and cities.

      I mentioned that my paternal side were from Whitstable – we looked into it and found that for hundreds of years, the Foreman’s had been oyster fisherman, passing down the trade from father to son, right up until my grandfather, who broke the chain because he got seasick. It’s a story that makes me chuckle, but I also can’t tell it without considering how different my life would have been growing up there and not around London. It’s a connection with seaside towns that has developed in the making of Swell, and I do think others find their connections in similar ways.

      Your last show, Big Boys, was well received, what did you learn from making that show that you have brought to Swell?

      ‘Big Boys’ was such an amazing piece to be at the helm of. It was delayed for years due to Covid, and when it finally premiered after countless redrafts and rip-ups, it was such an incredible release. I think what it really taught me was my style of writing and how I translate it to the stage. I have come out of the spotlight and focused more on the directing alongside my very talented co-director Connor Rowlett for this one, and that’s helped me really refine the type of show I want to present and how I want it to be delivered. It’s also encouraged me to draw out certain aspects even more. I love Fringe theatre because it allows for such an intimacy with the audience, and we’ve pushed that even further in Swell (although not quite to audience interaction yet!) Looking ahead to the Fringe etc, there’s more lessons still that I’ve learnt from this production that I want to take and push Swell with even further, and I can’t wait to do that. But first, I’m absolutely ecstatic to be back at the Lion & Unicorn, and working with the wonderful team there.

      Swell and Big Boys seem miles apart in their themes, was it deliberate to do something so far removed from your last one?

      As I mentioned, I never go looking for a script to write, so it definitely wasn’t a conscious choice. In fact, there are a lot of themes in Swell that resonate strongly with themes from Big Boys, although I don’t want to give too much away! They’re certainly two entirely different beasts however, and I’ve been conscious of treating them accordingly.

      And after Swell, what have you got lined up next then?

      Well the next step is hopefully taking Swell to the Edinburgh Fringe, where I’m hoping 2022 will be a triumphant return to near-normality. I did visit in 2021 and it was great to be back watching the shows that were on, but it was certainly at a hugely reduced scale. Other than Swell, I don’t actually have anything written at the moment, but I’ve always got projects on the go. I’m trying to write a musical currently with an old friend of mine who is a very talented composer, and longer term I really want to sink my teeth into TV writing. For now though, I’m firmly fixed on seeing how far we can take Swell, and share the desperately important story of Fairbourne to as many people as will listen.

      As always, our thanks to Tom for taking time out from getting the show ready for opening soon. You can catch Swell at Lion and Unicorn Theatre from 8 – 12 February. Further information and bookings via the below link. More

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      ‘Dr. Semmelweis’ and ‘The Glow’ Reviews: Tales From the Asylum

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      Two new plays offer very different experiences of the sanitarium, one starring Mark Rylance and the other spotlighting a fast-rising actress.LONDON — “Wash your hands! Wash your hands!” That plea has sounded the world over in recent years, and it lends a topical potency to “Dr. Semmelweis,” running through Feb. 19 at the Bristol Old Vic, a beautiful 18th-century playhouse in southwest England.Its urgent speaker is the titular medic, a Hungarian-born doctor in 19th-century Vienna who pioneered antisepsis only to die in 1865, at age 47. It was left to subsequent physicians like Joseph Lister to pick up his work.The play tells the time-honored tale of a man against the system, in this case a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment. Worthy of Ibsen and chronicled before in a Howard Sackler play that circled Broadway but never got there, Semmelweis’s story here emerges as a star vehicle for Mark Rylance. The much-laureled actor (three Tonys and an Oscar) co-wrote the play with Stephen Brown.The director, Tom Morris, runs the venerable Bristol venue and has given Semmelweis’s too-short life a busy, bustling production that includes actors spilling from Ti Green’s turntable set into the auditorium on occasion, with musicians and dancers on hand to amplify the discordant emotions of the piece. The dancers, choreographed by Antonia Franceschi, give swirling physical expression to Semmelweis’s increasingly disordered mind and to the mothers who lost their lives to hygienic neglect. The Salomé string quartet weaves among the events, playing snatches of Schubert and lending a high-art sheen to some grave subject matter.If all this sounds like a lot of embellishment, it’s fair to say that the first act in particular feels as if stage business is being used to disguise some fairly boilerplate writing. The play begins at the end, with Semmelweis in Hungary recalling, alongside his calm-seeming wife, Maria (Thalissa Teixeira), a climate of contamination in Vienna that did irreparable damage to the doctor’s psyche.How can a vaunted “city of new ideas” not be more responsive to the investigations of a young maverick who comes upon the disinfectant potential of chlorine? This grocer’s son has determined that death rates at the world’s largest hospital — as Vienna General then was — are three times higher at the doctors’ clinic than at that of the midwives. “Cadaveric particles” are posited as the culprit, passed on by unclean hands from the autopsy room to the delivery ward and turning the hospital into a de facto slaughterhouse.Rylance’s character in “Dr. Semmelweis” is, in time-honored fashion, a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment.Geraint LewisThe locals aren’t having it. “Nuts by name, nuts by nature,” one of Semmelweis’s colleagues remarks dismissively, referring to this upstart’s first name, Ignaz. Never mind that the insult doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that these people were probably not speaking English.After the intermission, the baldfaced, expository nature of the writing continues. If Semmelweis is right, we’re told, “the entire future of medicine will be changed.” There’s a line, too, about the possible efficacy of bleach that draws thumping parallels to one of the more, um, peculiar proposals to defeat the current pandemic.Through it all, Rylance is a springy physical presence. He brings a stammering restlessness to the role of a radical thinker whose thoughts at times outpace his words. You have to smile when this protean actor — acclaimed across TV and film, but devoted first and foremost to the stage — speaks in passing about “not wanting to waste time in the theater either,” and it’s nice to find among the supporting cast such fellow theater stalwarts as Alan Williams, in stern form as the obstetrician Johann Klein, Semmelweis’s nemesis.More than anything, “Dr. Semmelweis” whets the appetite for Rylance’s return to the London stage in April, reprising his seismic performance in the Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem,” first seen at the Royal Court in 2009. That same London address, an important one for new writing, is currently hosting an Alistair McDowall play, “The Glow,” that really is nuts, albeit intriguingly so.The title character of “Dr. Semmelweiss” died unappreciated in an asylum, and McDowall’s time-traveling drama begins in one two years earlier, with a dimly lit figure fearfully inhabiting a windowless cell. That figure, a woman (Ria Zmitrowicz), is then glimpsed in any number of settings and centuries, ranging from the 1300s, in the company of a warriorlike personage (Tadhg Murphy) who might have wandered in from “Game of Thrones,” to 343 A.D. and forward to the 1970s and beyond.From left, Ria Zmitrowicz and Rakie Ayola in “The Glow” at the Royal Court Theater in London.Manuel HarlanWhat in heaven’s name is going on? You might ask McDowall the same of his 2016 play for the Royal Court, “X,” which was set on Pluto.Shouty and apocalyptic only to turn rapturously poetic in its closing monologue, “The Glow” is best viewed as a sensory experience in which lighting and sound conjoin with the writer’s freewheeling imagination to summon up a lonely and difficult world that nonetheless allows for the warmth of the title. The intermission, only 40 minutes or so in, gives audiences ample time to ponder what they have seen.The more literal theatergoer will be driven to distraction by the play’s apparently willful opacity, but that in itself tracks with the experimental bent of a theater defined in part by the playwright Caryl Churchill, whose own inquisitiveness and disregard for convention may have offered a beacon for McDowall.For myself, I have to commend the full-throttle production of Vicky Featherstone, the Court’s artistic director, in tandem with a design team in which Jessica Hung Han Yun’s mercurial lighting reigns supreme. Fisayo Akinade and Rakie Ayola offer sterling support as more recognizable participants in a world to which Zmitrowicz’s initially mute woman has a hesitant relationship. Seen first as a spiritualist medium — yes, you read that right — Ayola also gets to display a lovely singing voice.With the mysterious spectral figure at the play’s center, McDowall has offered a gift to Zmitrowicz, a fast-rising actress who has come to attention of late largely at the Almeida. Alternately sullen and feverish, indrawn yet eloquent, this performer rivets our attention throughout, even when the play she inhabits is ricocheting every which way around her.Dr. Semmelweis. Directed by Tom Morris. Bristol Old Vic, through Feb. 19.The Glow. Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Royal Court Theater, through March 5. More

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      Review: In ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ Echoes of the Past

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      Joshua Harmon’s ambitious new play toggles between a contemporary Jewish family facing growing antisemitism and their relatives during World War II.The well of naïve young Americans being schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French people is in no danger of running dry. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who has just met her distant cousins in Paris.Thankfully it is they, not sweet, passive Molly, who are the subjects of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play, directed by David Cromer at Manhattan Theater Club.At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the young woman’s benefit, and of course the audience’s as well. Even then, it takes much of the play’s three-hour running time and some toggling between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their consequences to sink in.Harmon (“Significant Other,” “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge because Molly has arrived at a critical juncture for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-something children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloodied face after an antisemitic aggression. It is just another example of what Charles feels is an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a last straw that makes him want to move to Israel.Betsy Aidem, left, and Richard Topol as siblings in Joshua Harmon’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s the suitcase, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he may be about to emulate it. (One of the play’s most fascinating aspects, though an underexplored one, is how these characters represent two strands of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors have been rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa for generations before relocating from Algeria in the 1960s.)The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: Should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The play’s title refers to a prayer that has been said in French synagogues since the early 19th century.)Some of the show’s concerns, including the temptation of appeasement via assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — echo those Harmon explored, in a much more comic vein, in his blistering debut, “Bad Jews,” from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a marginally milder-mannered relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, tirades and put-downs that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-type cardboard box rather than the paper bags used in French boulangeries.)From left: Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in one of the scenes from the end of World War II.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of this would be enough to pack any story, but Harmon also transports us to the end of World War II for several scenes with Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heart-wrenching), have somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and held on to their piano store.The two narratives progressively start bleeding into each other, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the link, both literal and metaphorical, between past and present.Cromer, a technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, handles the back and forth as well as you might expect — he puts a stage turntable to evocative, if perhaps a little clichéd, use, for example. Still, it’s not hard to feel the show’s tension slacken when we leave the Benhamous. The play’s finale aims for the lofty and falls terribly short, but it does represent the family’s tragedy: they want to be part of a country that may never fully accept them.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Danai Gurira Will Star as Richard III at Shakespeare in the Park

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      The actress, known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” will headline a return to semi-normal for the annual festival, which will also present “As You Like It.”The Public Theater, anticipating a semi-normal summer this year, is planning two full-scale productions for Free Shakespeare in the Park, including a run of “Richard III” starring Danai Gurira in the title role.The annual festival, ordinarily a highlight of summer in New York, took place via radio in 2020 (the play was “Richard II”), and then last year featured a single, small-cast show before a reduced-capacity audience (it was called “Merry Wives” — even the title was abbreviated) as the theater tried to adapt to shifting safety protocols necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.Both pivots won praise, but this summer the Public is ready to go big again, with a two-show season and full-capacity audiences. “Richard III” will feature a cast of about two dozen, and it will be followed by a reprise of the Public’s 2017 production of “As You Like It,” which, by featuring New Yorkers from all five boroughs alongside professional actors, will have a cast of several hundred.“Last summer was a lifesaver, and this summer is going to be a huge shot of energy,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s ebullient artistic director, pledged in an interview. “We are planning to have a full summer and to produce in as large and vibrant a scale as we ever have.”Of course, the pandemic’s not over, and there will be rules. At the moment, the Public is still planning to require patrons to show proof of vaccination, including a booster shot for those who are eligible, and to require mask wearing by patrons. Also, Eustis said the goal will be to keep both productions short enough that they can be performed without an intermission, which means some serious trimming for “Richard III,” originally one of Shakespeare’s longest plays.The production of “Richard III” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), who is no stranger to trimming — his halved production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is now running at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater downtown.Eustis said that he and O’Hara chose “Richard III” because it has not been seen at Shakespeare in the Park for many years, and because it felt relevant.“Let’s just say that ‘Richard III’ is the artistic work that for the first time really examined a political figure who utterly committed to the big lie — whose entire career is based on telling blatant falsehoods and somehow getting away with it,” Eustis said. “The idea that showmanship, devoid of content, has become a powerful political force makes it very germane for this moment.”Gurira, Eustis said, was an obvious choice to star: Best known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” she is also an accomplished playwright (“Eclipsed”), a member of the Public’s board and a Shakespeare in the Park alumna (“Measure for Measure”).“She is a great actress who has become super-famous without people necessarily seeing the work she’s greatest at,” Eustis said. “Richard III is a spectacularly theatrical and rich character to play, and somebody with her ferocity and intelligence is going to make a spectacular Richard.”Darius de Haas, center, as a banished duke with a welcoming message in the 2017 Public Works production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what will it mean to have a woman play Richard? “We are not going to re-gender the role, but what that means exactly we won’t know until we’re doing run-throughs,” Eustis said. “I know where we’re starting, but that doesn’t mean we know where we’re ending.”“Richard III” has been staged at Shakespeare in the Park four times previously, most recently in 1990, starring Denzel Washington.This summer’s production of “As You Like It” is a remounting of a production that had a short run in 2017, staged as part of the theater’s Public Works program, which integrates amateur performers from throughout New York City into musical adaptations of Shakespeare plays. In the years since it was created at the Public, this adaptation has been staged 35 times in school, community and professional theaters, including at the Dallas Theater Center, Seattle Repertory Theater, and the National Theater in London. The Public had hoped to give it a full run in 2020, but the pandemic prevented that.This “As You Like It” was adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery; Taub wrote the music and lyrics, and Woolery is the director, with choreography by Sonya Tayeh (“Moulin Rouge!”). As with the earlier version, this summer’s production will feature Darius de Haas, Joel Perez and Taub.The dates for the two productions, as well as the full casts, will be announced later.Shakespeare in the Park has since 1962 been staged at the 1,830-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and last week the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a $77 million renovation of the theater. Construction is expected to begin this fall, after the summer season ends; Eustis said that he is hopeful that construction can be phased and contained to off-season periods, so that Shakespeare in the Park can continue without further interruptions. More