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      Citing Pandemic, This Year’s Obie Awards Will Include Streaming Theater

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      The Obie Awards, an annual ceremony honoring theater work performed Off and Off Off Broadway, this year for the first time will consider digital, audio and other virtual productions.The awards administrators decided to expand their scope in recognition of the adaptations made by many theater companies during the coronavirus pandemic, which prevented most New York theaters from staging in-person performances for at least a year, and in many cases considerably longer. Numerous theaters pivoted to streaming, and some experimented with audio.“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” said Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, which presents the awards. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”This year’s Obie Awards are expected to take place in November, which would be 28 months after the last ceremony, reflecting the extraordinarily disruptive role the pandemic has played in theatermaking. The ceremony will consider productions presented by Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theaters between July 1, 2020 and Aug. 31, 2022.The exact date for the ceremony has not been chosen, but Hitchens said she expects it to be in-person (the last one was streamed) and she expects it to have a host (or hosts).This year’s Obie Awards will be the first presented solely by the Wing, which also founded and copresents the Tony Awards. The Obies were created by The Village Voice and first presented in 1956; in 2014, as The Voice struggled, it entered a partnership with the Wing to preserve the ceremony, and now The Voice has granted the Obies trademark to the Wing, Hitchens said.The Obies, always a mixture of prestige and quirkiness, have long been distinguished by their lack of defined categories — each year, the judges decide what works to recognize, and for what reason. This year’s awards will be chaired by David Mendizábal, who is one of the leaders of the Movement Theater Company, and Melissa Rose Bernardo, a freelance theater critic. The judges will include David Anzuelo, an actor and fight choreographer; Becca Blackwell, an actor and writer; Wilson Chin, a set designer; Haruna Lee, a playwright; Soraya Nadia McDonald, the culture critic for The Undefeated; Lisa Peterson, a director and writer; Heather Alicia Simms, an actor; and Kaye Voyce, a costume designer. More

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      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

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      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      At the Exponential Festival, Case Studies in Category Busting

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      Two years into the pandemic, this festival, which has gone virtual for now, abjures traditional theatricality and performance.You know a show was hatched during the pandemic when it incorporates QR codes.At the start of Christina Tang’s streaming “Traffic,” part of this year’s Exponential Festival, that code took me from a YouTube page to one where I could pick a screen name and a number. A model of a car with my number was then placed among others on a board-game-like grid filmed from above. Participants could choose from a series of prompts (“pull forward,” “honk,” etc.) and disembodied hands would move the cars, or not, on the grid.At the same time, a series of messages in another window was going on and on about someone named Angela, who was dead, or not — or maybe a ghost. Since I was simultaneously trying to watch the cars and follow the comments in the chat box, I quickly lost track of the Angela side of things. (It’s best to experience “Traffic” with two screens; I spent the 45-minute running time toggling between my laptop and phone.)The overall effect was like a puckish re-enactment (with a soupçon of Battleship visuals) of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” in which a monstrous, paralyzing traffic jam devolves into violent chaos. Except that 55 years after its release, Godard’s movie remains more trenchant, formally and politically, than “Traffic” — though it ends on a suggestion of existential dread — or any of the other six shows I caught at Exponential.Unlike its higher-profile January siblings, the Under the Radar and Prototype festivals, which canceled their 2022 editions, the smaller, nimbler Exponential — which focuses on emerging experimental artists — managed to go ahead by pivoting to a free digital format. (It runs until Monday, and most of the programming will remain available on its YouTube channel for the foreseeable future.)“Traffic” was not the only project to borrow from gaming. In “Still Goes (The Game),” much of the screen is taken up by the explorations of two dogs, Spot and Lysol, who become humanoids and set off to wander in a digital world. The creators, Nola Latty and Thomas Wagner, play the game in a smaller window and comment on the proceedings. “Still Goes” evades deeper issues relating to the differences between species and unfurls like a lo-fi sandbox adventure.But it did leave me with questions: How is this theater, or even performance? Why do I feel like I could be watching Ryan Trecartin videos instead?From left, Arjun Dhawan, Nancy Nogood and Anna Dresdale in “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report.”Walter WlodarczykI mention Trecartin because throughout Exponential, I felt as if theater was trying to play catch-up with the art world. The performing arts have been undergoing an identity crisis during the last two years, and my lack of engagement with much of what I was watching this past week might have been because I had mismanaged my expectations.Even after two years of pandemic-related disruptions have forced us to start rethinking paradigms and reconsidering assumptions, it’s still hard to shake habits that were formed when a few Greeks started hanging out in amphitheaters. I had been expecting what Exponential participants might consider calcified (to them) ideas of performances, but the festival appears unconcerned with antiquated borders separating installations, video, live performance, theater, music, movement. Or at least this virtual edition accelerated Exponential’s evolution toward not caring about those borders.Fine, but if only there had been more wit, style, imagination.While one of the festival’s most anticipated selections, Leonie Bell with Local Grandma’s “We Live to Die: The Grieving Widows Club” does not open until Monday, the pieces I caught mostly fell short of their proclaimed ambitions. Many show descriptions nowadays, especially on the outer limits where Exponential dwells, tend to read like grant applications promising the excavation of Big Subjects. The reality usually turns out to be merely ho-hum — call it the “all bark and no bite” syndrome.We were informed, for example, that Joe Hendel’s “Artificial (Man) Intelligence” is about “a menagerie of cyborg males living in the uncanny valley, exposing their cut up, hybrid psychologies to the world in order to gain a sense of control over their cybernetically deterritorialized destinies.” What we got was a shapeless digital montage of anxieties, with many lines pulled from subreddits like r/MensRights and r/CircumcisionGrief. The original posters’ toxic brew of insecurity, resentment and hostility was confounding, but it’s unclear what the show was trying to tell us about it.Self-indulgence also hampered Braulio Cruz and John-Philip Faienza’s “Flow My Tears,” in which Cruz mused out loud for nearly an hour. Relief occasionally came in the form of electronic-music breaks. The more beat-oriented ones successfully evoked the pulsing atmosphere of a dank Berlin club — the kind of experience in which you can lose yourself, until a guy sidles up next to you to share his important thoughts. “Flow My Tears” went on to display some doom-scrolling and concluded by breezily taking Philip K. Dick’s name in vain.Justin Halle’s “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report,” directed by Dmitri Barcomi, took a more playful approach under the glamorous guidance of the drag queen Nancy Nogood — the closest the festival came to an old-school theatrical creation. Like “Traffic,” “Case Studies” incorporates a QR code, but no technology could make up for a rambling script that lacked rigor (a problem that plagued almost every project). Still, it’s hard to be entirely let down by a show that features a dance to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Emotion.”In addition to “Traffic,” another work got close to fulfilling its ambition: River Donaghey’s inventive “RecursiveCast,” in which Tad and Tammy (Spencer Fox and the Exponential artistic director Theresa Buchheister) host a podcast dedicated to a science-fiction series titled “Recursive.” The show is structured like a series of podcast episodes, with the visuals duplicating a Spotify page. Donaghey nails the sci-fi lingo, with casual references to a dodecasphere, for instance, adopting as fans’ tendency to assign great importance to details.“RecursiveCast” shares with “Traffic” a structural descent into uncontrollable disarray, with the world falling apart despite our best attempts at finding some sort of order, whether by trying to escape from a commuting disaster or by scrutinizing triviality. If there’s a lesson to be drawn, it’s that technology may have allowed the Exponential Festival to happen against daunting odds, but hey, we’re all doomed! More

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      Martyrs, Converts and Pious Frauds: Religion Takes Center Stage

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      Three Paris productions — including Ivo van Hove’s take on “Tartuffe” at the Comédie-Française — explore questions of the divine.PARIS — When Molière first presented “Tartuffe,” in 1664, Louis XIV is said to have laughed his head off at the play’s satire of religious zealots. The zealots in question were less amused: “Tartuffe” was swiftly censored and only re-emerged five years later, in an expanded and softened version.The 1669 “Tartuffe,” in five acts, is the classic play everyone in France knows, about a pious fraud who weasels his way into a bourgeois family’s home and attempts to steal both wife and fortune. Yet this month, 400 years after the birth of Molière, the original — or a reconstruction, at least — returned to the stage in a sleek and moody production directed by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française.“Tartuffe” opened France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial, an event that is no small matter for the Comédie-Française: The house’s permanent ensemble was born in 1680 from the fusion of Molière’s own acting troupe and the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The Comédie-Française considers Molière its founding father, and ensemble members know their way around his wittiest lines like no one else.Van Hove at least gave them something new. The 1664 version of “Tartuffe” was recreated a few years ago by two researchers, Georges Forestier and Isabelle Grellet, using Molière’s own sources. To understand what the play might have been like in three acts, they went back to commedia dell’arte and other 17th-century stories, which the plot of “Tartuffe” partly mimics.The result is a genuinely intriguing alternative to a familiar narrative, but it will take further stagings to reveal its potential, because van Hove’s directing choices are idiosyncratic. His “Tartuffe” has the familiar look of many van Hove productions: dark and minimalistic, here with no wings on the sides of the stage and a metallic platform along its length for entrances and exits.The transitions are especially awkward, with asinine titles projected onto a screen (samples: “Is Madam right?”; “Love, or submission?”) and bombastic sound effects marking the beginning of new episodes. Most of the cast wear suits; at times, when they stiffly convene for family conversations, it feels as if Molière’s characters have landed in the middle of the HBO series “Succession.”From left, Claude Mathieu, Denis Podalydès, Loïc Corbery, Julien Frison and Dominique Blanc in “Tartuffe.”Jan VersweyveldIt’s a shame, because there is much of value in seeing some of the play’s characters through a new lens. Tartuffe, for instance, is more clearly a destitute figure than usual. Christophe Montenez — who was also a highlight in “The Damned,” another van Hove production for the Comédie-Française — is fascinatingly strange in the role, at once lonely and creepy.Yet the actors wrestle with Molière’s text, in part because of van Hove’s deadly serious approach. Throughout the performance I attended, “Tartuffe,” which was written as a comedy, elicited little laughter from the audience; when it came, it felt like an automatic reaction to familiar lines, rather than a reflection of what was happening onstage.Van Hove also sees a love story where there isn’t one. In his production, Tartuffe doesn’t just try to deceive Orgon, the man of the house, and seduce Elmire, his wife; Elmire actually falls for Tartuffe, an absurd development since she is the one to uncover his hypocrisy at the end of the play. This forces Marina Hands, as Elmire, into an acrobatic performance in which she by turns refuses Tartuffe, gives in, and silently apologizes for betraying him. Tartuffe verbally abuses Elmire on two occasions (to the point that she cowers in a corner) before she snuggles up to him. Is it Stockholm syndrome? In any case, this diminishes what is typically a powerful, and very funny, female character.At least this “Tartuffe” is a reminder of just how mordant and modern Molière’s take on religious piety was. As the church’s anger over the play showed, this was a controversial position in the 17th century. On the other hand, Racine and Corneille, who make up French theater’s trinity of classic playwrights with Molière, both wrote religious plays dramatizing their faith in line with church dogma.Those plays are rarely seen today, but “Polyeucte,” a 1641 work by Corneille inspired by the life of a Christian martyr, is back onstage at the Espace Bernanos, a Roman Catholic cultural center. It depicts the religious conversion of Polyeucte, a nobleman, and the initial despair of his wife, Pauline, and his father-in-law, whom the Roman Empire has tasked with persecuting Christians. Directed by a veteran actress, Rafaële Minnaert, the production, a straightforward delivery of Corneille’s text in Roman-inspired costumes, contrasts sharply with “Tartuffe.”Aloysia Delahaut, left, and Romain Duquaire in “Polyeucte,” directed by Rafaële Minnaert.Matthieu Maxime ColinWhile the cast is often overemphatic, Aloysia Delahaut carries the day as a dignified Pauline. For nearly the entire play, Corneille’s rhymed alexandrines are skillful enough to make you think “Polyeucte” warrants more performances. Then, at the end, both Pauline and her father abruptly convert to Christianity, their strong stance against it forgotten. This makes “Polyeucte” feel preachy — a cardinal sin by contemporary standards — which helps explain why it, and other religious works, are so little performed.Still, contemporary theatermakers are finding ways to weave religion into topical dramas. The playwright and director Hakim Djaziri tackles the subject especially openly as a way of understanding major political debates in France. After “Unbalanced,” a play about his own youthful religious radicalization in an underprivileged Paris suburb, he has turned to the real-life story of a white woman who converts to Islam in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” currently at La Scène Libre theater.In a series of smartly constructed vignettes, we see Audrey grow up with an alcoholic mother and a violent stepfather, seeking meaning in the religion of a friend whose happy family she admires. Yet soon enough, she is roped into a violent take on Islamism by characters she meets online. She ends up in Syria, as the wife of a Frenchman who has vowed to fight for the Islamic State.Karina Testa, left, and Arthur Gomez in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” written and directed by Hakim Djaziri.JMD ProductionIt is a lot to get through in 90 minutes, and the Syrian scenes especially feel overly expository, but Djaziri delivers a lot of emotion with the performances of his small yet brilliant cast. Karina Testa captures Audrey’s childlike need for love and meaning, while Arthur Gomez shines in a range of characters, from friends of Audrey’s to extremists.As they do every night, Djaziri and his actors stayed onstage after the performance I caught for a discussion with the audience. He spoke candidly of his own experience of radicalization, and said he felt compelled to respond, through theater, to Islamophobia in France’s public sphere. With “Audrey,” he does this subtly, by depicting the peaceful facets of Islam as well as the hypocrisy of its radicals. After all, the Tartuffes of today need their own plays, too.Tartuffe or the Hypocrite. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Comédie-Française, through April 24.Polyeucte. Directed by Rafaële Minnaert. Espace Bernanos, through Feb. 13.Audrey, the Diary of a Convert. Directed by Hakim Djaziri. La Scène Libre, through March 26. More

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      Review: In ‘Skeleton Crew,’ Making Quick Work of Hard Labor

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      Dominique Morisseau’s 2016 play, now on Broadway, is a swift, well-crafted look at factory workers trapped in an economic “dumpster fire.”The construction of the joke is perfect: A 60-ish woman in the grungy break room of a metal stamping factory lights a cigarette beneath a sign that says “No Smoking Faye” — the “Faye” part added by hand in big, angry letters.Naturally, as we soon learn, she is Faye.So begins “Skeleton Crew,” a play by Dominique Morisseau that in considering the ways we must sometimes break rules, breaks none itself. It’s so adroitly built and written — and, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday, so beautifully staged and acted — that you hardly have time to decide, until its brisk two hours have passed, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.Start with Faye, who has worked at the factory for 29 years; she plans to hang on until, at year 30, her pension bumps up significantly. As played by Phylicia Rashad in a wonderfully ungrand performance, wearing flannel shirts, big jeans, work boots and a look of sour contentment, she would appear to have her life under firm control — and, as union rep and auntie of the break room, her co-workers’ lives as well. Dispensing wisdom and correcting their foolishness, she models candor and self-reliance, even when, as “Skeleton Crew” in good time reveals, the two come into conflict.You might call Faye’s specialty, like the play’s, clarity about moral ambiguity. And in Detroit in 2008, with the national economy a “dumpster fire” (as a TV news snippet tells us) and the auto industry in particular collapsing, there’s plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.For Reggie, the unit foreman and author of the no smoking sign, the pressure is almost too much to bear. Burdened with advance knowledge that the factory will shut down within the year, it falls to him to keep efficiency high as workers are let go. But despite his tie and white collar, his is a blue-collar soul, and the terrific Brandon J. Dirden shows just how close the contradictory pull of job and community comes to strangling him as he tries to protect the skeleton crew that remains.Boone and Adams in Dominique Morisseau’s play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAside from Faye, that crew includes Shanita (Chanté Adams) and Dez (Joshua Boone), both under 30 and thus with more (or is it less?) to lose than Faye. Theirs is a classic “B plot,” but the comic and romantic contrast their story provides is more complex than its bald structural purpose suggests.Yes, Dez has a longtime crush on Shanita, who is pregnant by a different man. Sweetly, he walks her to her car every day; tartly, she even lets him. But both have existential worries that interlock with and deepen the play’s larger issues. How can Shanita raise a child alone if the bedrock of her self-confidence — her job — crumbles beneath her? How will Dez survive in a world that sees his labor no less than his existence as expendable? (Though all four characters are Black, racism is more of a given than a theme.)These questions do not seem likely to be answered satisfactorily when, with perfect timing, a gun comes into the picture.In truth, some of the plot devices, the neat parallels and red herrings, are, like Faye, a bit creaky with use. But that doesn’t stop them from working; indeed, it’s a pleasure to surrender to classic craftsmanship. Though you can certainly sense Morisseau’s debt to August Wilson in her dramaturgy — “Skeleton Crew” is part of a trilogy of works set in Detroit, as Wilson had his Pittsburgh Cycle — you also sense the brute efficiency of problem plays by Ibsen and the best television procedurals.Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, improving in many ways on the one he directed for the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016, makes the most of the larger space and the excellent new cast. Michael Carnahan’s set, expanding in grunginess on his earlier version, turns grime into a kind of pulp poetry, from the peeling linoleum to the succulents striving to survive in a barely translucent window. The costumes, by Emilio Sosa, provide both psychology and sociology even in a limited range of sartorial gestures: a “Juicy” sweatshirt for Shanita, a fleece sweater-vest for Reggie.I was less convinced, as was also the case downtown, by the interludes of robotlike popping and waving (choreographed and performed by Adesola Osakalumi) that, along with Nicholas Hussong’s projections, suggest the harsh and repetitive labor taking place beyond the break room. Instead of enhancing our understanding of the characters, these dance moments, however astonishing, seem unrelated and unspecific, detracting from the play’s insistence on valuing workers, not just work.Dirden and Rashad use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt its considerable best, “Skeleton Crew” practices that preachment; its characters are not just building blocks in a moral tale but a pleasure for actors to perform and thus for audiences to experience. Especially in the scenes between Faye and Reggie, when Rashad and Dirden get to use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal, you can’t look away from the many things they’re doing at once. Collegiality, scorn, fear, affection — and a shared history saved for a late reveal — all come into it. What comes out of it is the richness of great performance.If the play itself is sometimes over-rich, it is not underfed. Real things are at stake for characters who expect a respectable reward for labor and loyalty. That their expectations are so rudely disappointed makes it harder to do the right thing in a world that doesn’t, and tragedy could easily ensue.Perhaps what ultimately tips “Skeleton Crew” in the other direction is the way it abjures cynicism in favor of connection. Though Faye at one point says “I don’t abide by no rules but necessity,” it turns out — in a perfectly turned final surprise — that necessity is sometimes a synonym for love.Skeleton CrewThrough Feb. 20 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Broadway Grosses Fall, but Average Attendance Rises, as Shows Close

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      The percentage of seats filled on Broadway was up last week, but overall box office grosses fell, as some of the industry’s softest shows closed and the survivors reduced prices.According to figures released Wednesday by the Broadway League, 75 percent of all seats on Broadway were occupied during the week that ended Jan. 23. That’s up from 66 percent the week ending Jan. 16, and 62 percent the week ending Jan. 9, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on the industry and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant makes this winter especially challenging.Average attendance is still far below what it was in January 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic, when between 93 percent and 95 percent of seats were occupied.The overall number of people who saw a Broadway show last week (152,135) was down from the previous week (162,566), as shows continue to close — there were 21 shows open last week, down from 25 the previous week. Two more shows closed on Sunday (“Girl From the North Country,” which says it plans to return in the spring, and “Slave Play,” which is transferring to Los Angeles), leaving just 19 shows now running in the 41 Broadway houses.The rising capacity percentage is good news for an industry rattled by empty seats. But it’s coming at a cost, with fewer shows running and the average ticket price falling.Last week, the average ticket price on Broadway was $108, down from $114 the week ending Jan. 16 and $116 the week ending Jan. 9. (In 2020, average January ticket prices were as high as $123.)The falling average ticket price reflects both a lowering of premium prices (that’s the price for the best seats on the most popular nights), and a heavy use of discounts.At “Hamilton,” for example, the top price in January 2020 was $847; now it’s $299. (The priciest premium seat at the moment appears to be at “The Music Man,” which is asking $699 for some center orchestra seats on a Saturday night in February; “Six” is selling some tickets for $499.)But there are also multiple discounts available. The city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company, is now holding its annual Broadway Week (which, despite its name, will last 27 days this year), a popular program that offers two-for-one tickets to all but a handful of shows.And, although the Broadway League is no longer disclosing grosses for individual shows, there are indications that more are turning to discounting as a strategy to get through this winter, when the ordinary seasonal dip has been exacerbated by the pandemic. The TKTS ticket booth in Times Square, which sells tickets at 20 percent to 50 percent off, now periodically features “The Lion King,” which was almost never sold at the booth before the pandemic, as well as other big shows including “Moulin Rouge!,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Hadestown” and “MJ,” the new Michael Jackson musical. More

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      After 16 Years in ‘Hadestown,’ Anaïs Mitchell Emerges With a New Album

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      The singer-songwriter fully plunged into her acclaimed theater project. Since then, her life changed wildly — and she recaptured the desire to record her own music.BRISTOL, Vt. — Eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child, the musician Anaïs Mitchell was instructed in a hypnobirthing class to envision her “happy place,” and was flooded with a sense memory from her rural Vermont childhood.She was in her grandparents’ house, which her father helped build, “laying on the carpeted floor in a sunbeam coming through the sliding glass door,” she recalled. Something fragrant was cooking on the stove. Her grandmother quilted while young Anaïs stenciled, crafted, or, later, scribbled lines that would become the basis of her earliest songs.In early January, a now 40-year-old Mitchell stood in that same living room, taking in the house’s rich history. Her wide blue eyes smudged with dark liner, she wore a flannel button-down and a Brooklyn Nets beanie, not an expression of fandom so much as a sartorial homage to the city she used to call home.In the decades since that childhood memory, she’s become an accomplished singer-songwriter and a force behind one of the most successful and celebrated Broadway musicals of the past few years, the eight-time Tony-winning hit “Hadestown.” By this time next year, Mitchell hopes to be living in this house with her husband and children, bringing up her two daughters on the very same family farm on which she was raised.“It’s intense to go home,” she said. “I know everyone; it’s a small town.” When she runs into people she has known her whole life, she admitted, it can be easy to revert to her childhood self. “I was a little scared to move back for that reason,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not the thing you should do.”In some sense, leaving Brooklyn for Vermont was a practical choice: Mitchell was nine months pregnant with her second child when Covid-19 hit New York. “One day I pulled our older kid out of school and the next day we bought a car,” she said. “And then the next day Broadway closed and I was like, we’re leaving. We drove to Vermont and the baby was born a week later at my parents’ farm.”It’s in many ways an ordinary story — how many city-dwellers fled to the country? — but her telling has the narrative beats of an epic myth. In that way, it feels like an Anaïs Mitchell song.Foreground from left, Eva Noblezada, Andre De Shields and Amber Gray in “Hadestown,” which opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There’s something in the way her ideas connect and always come back around,” said Josh Kaufman, the musician and producer who plays with Mitchell in the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. “She has a very lived-in knowledge of traditional music and folk songs. But as a human she’s also incredibly in-the-moment, which allows her to anchor everything in the present.”Once a prolific solo artist, it’s been nearly a decade since Mitchell released music under her own name. But on Jan. 28, she’s returning with a self-titled album, produced by Kaufman — a collection of the most personal songs she has ever released. She sometimes attempted to write her own music during those long, busy years of working on “Hadestown,” but she ultimately “felt like I was cheating on it if I did anything else.”“I’m so proud of what we made and there was so much joy in the making of it,” she added, “but it was also an unsustainable way of living, that level of stress.”Adapted from a humble, low-budget community theater project she debuted in Montpelier in 2006, “Hadestown” brought the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into conversation with such modern phenomena as capitalism, climate change and New Orleans-style jazz.In 2010, Mitchell released a concept album called “Hadestown,” featuring songs from the initial Vermont theater production sung by some of her folk peers: Justin Vernon of Bon Iver voiced Orpheus, Ani DiFranco was Persephone. But Mitchell still dreamed of adapting a more ambitious stage production.“Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin said in a phone interview. “So often the process of creating can seem really abstract,” she added. “What is very beautiful about Anaïs is that she lives very openly in the process of turning over words and images, feeling them around in her mouth and on her guitar.”When “Hadestown” opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in April 2019 (taking over for “Springsteen on Broadway”), Mitchell became just the fourth woman to compose the music, lyrics and book of a Broadway musical. The moment was a turning point in her journey with a project she’d been living with for 13 long years. But there comes a time in a show’s life when even the most involved writer must find a new space.“There was a funny moment that happened as soon as the show opened on Broadway, where suddenly I didn’t have a home in the theater anymore,” Mitchell said when we first met up in Manhattan in the courtyard of the Standard Hotel last November. “Literally: It used to be, this is my seat, this is where I go play guitar in the stairwell. And then suddenly the audience is there and there’s nowhere for me.”But this necessary step back from “Hadestown” finally gave her the opportunity to reconnect with the music world from which she’d long been absent, and return to her own, more intimate form of songwriting.“Hadestown” and her stirring 2012 album “Young Man in America” involved a lot of “dressing up in costumes, getting access to some kind of larger-than-life feelings and language, like, ‘I’m the king of the Underworld,’” she said, laughing for a moment as she did her best Hades impression. “I do really enjoy that. But these songs are all me, the stories are my stories. That feels very different.”“A songwriter is kind of a songwright,” Mitchell said. “It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTHOUGH SHE IS not quite at the level of Ben, Jerry or Bernie, Mitchell is certifiably Vermont Famous — the sort of New Englander who gets recognized in hushed tones at folk festivals and farmers’ markets. Her hair is shaggy and dyed darker than the blonde of her “Hadestown” days, and she speaks in a chiming voice that often sounds innocently wonder-struck, before a joke or a playful bit of profanity suddenly brings it back down to earth.Behind the wheel of her salt-kissed Chrysler Pacifica in January, she pointed out local landmarks on the 15-minute drive between the house she is renting in Bristol and her parents’ farm: her high school; a sign for a local “radical puppetry” company; a humorously and undeniably phallic-shaped headstone that has always made her laugh (“Who chose that?”).Mitchell describes her parents as “hippies, back-to-the-landers.” In the late 1960s, her father, Don, scored a book deal when he was still a Swarthmore undergraduate, for a semi-autobiographical hitchhiking novel he’d written called “Thumb Tripping.” He sold the movie rights, moved to Los Angeles with his young wife, Cheryl, and wrote the screenplay to a pulpy, “Easy Rider”-era film adaptation of his book. He cashed out in the early 1970s and used his Hollywood earnings to buy a 130-acre farm in Vermont’s Champlain Valley.For most of Anaïs’s childhood, her entire family lived on the property, including her grandparents in that wooden house her father helped build for them. Cheryl opposed television, so young Anaïs would sneak over to her grandparents’ place whenever she wanted to watch; she has fond and uncommonly subversive memories of the nightly news with Dan Rather. She rode horses, roamed the woods with her older brother and, like her namesake Anaïs Nin, journaled prolifically.She found those old diaries recently in a box in her grandparents’ house, and the experience inspired “Revenant,” a heartfelt, acoustic-guitar-driven song on the new album that finds her extending a mature grace to her younger self: “Suddenly I saw you there, runny-eyed in a wooden chair/Ran outside to hide your face in the wild Queen Anne’s lace,” she sings. “Come and let me hold you in my arms/Come and get my shoulder wet and warm.”Mitchell went to Middlebury College, and supported herself as a figure model for art classes. “I was always very comfortable nude because no one can see us here, so everyone would skinny-dip,” she said on the secluded farm. When she was 19, one of those gigs led to the sort of meet-cute that might appear in an R-rated comedy: Noah Hahn, a student in one of the classes, turned out to be the man she would marry.They were apart quite a bit in the early years of their relationship, as Mitchell was paying her dues on the road as an aspiring singer-songwriter. But — as she proposes on the new album’s ode to an artist’s muse, “Bright Star” — sometimes longing and distance can bear unexpected fruit. She was driving home alone from a show one night, hoping Noah was waiting up for her, when the melody and a few lyrics of what would become the first “Hadestown” song came to her out of the blue:“Wait for me, I’m coming, in my garters and pearls/With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?”Mitchell and the “Hadestown” director Rachel Chavkin. “Anaïs is the most specific writer I’ve ever encountered,” Chavkin said.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesLIKE THE LONG gestating “Hadestown” (Chavkin compares the pace at which Mitchell works to “watching a tree grow, because it’s so deep, so imperceptible”), one of the most affecting songs on Mitchell’s new album took years to finish writing.“Little Big Girl” is partially about the tension she experienced returning to her hometown, appearing to the outside world as a grown and accomplished woman while, internally, still feeling like that same scrappy little Anaïs she was years ago. But the song is roomy enough to tap into a more universal sentiment — how strange it is that we all “keep on getting older” while still feeling “just like a kid.” Or, more specifically, that the world treats you as an ever-aging woman when you sometimes feel as defenseless as a little girl.“There’s so much art made by people in their 20s about the ups and downs of your love life,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been there and I love that music. It’s very deep and real. But there’s also all these other elements of being the age I am now, and being a mom, and relocating myself in the world and in my family. I want to be able to write about that stuff, too.”Mitchell knows this kind of work can be too easily dismissed as “culturally irrelevant mom art,” as she put it. But the remarkable specificity of her songcraft and the expansive, almost mythic scope she brings to her human experience as a wife, mother and 40-something woman demand to be taken seriously.“On her other records, it’s someone else’s epic poem that she’s running through her own beautiful sense of language and harmony,” Kaufman said. “On this one, she’s looking back like, ‘I have my own epic poem here. There’s these people, these relatives, my kids, my long relationship with my husband, my long relationship with my songwriting.’ It’s a self-portrait, but like any compelling self-portrait it’s vulnerable enough that you almost feel like you’re looking in a mirror. It resonates deeply because it’s so honest.”Ideally, Mitchell said, “the song could live on without you.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesFOR ONE NIGHT in November 2021, Mitchell once again had a designated seat in the theater when she attended the reopening of “Hadestown” following its pandemic closure. “It just made me miss the process of working on that show so much,” she said later. “I spent the first act of the show spinning wheels in my head like, ‘What musical could I write next? I need another story!’” She is content for now to focus on her work as a solo artist and with Bonny Light Horseman, though the thought of never writing another stage show after “Hadestown” would be like if she “went to grad school and then didn’t use the degree.”Mitchell doesn’t see such a clear delineation between the two artistic worlds she straddles, though. “I do think there’s a common denominator with writing for the theater and writing songs,” she said. “Ideally, the song could live on without you. You don’t have to sing it, someone else could sing it. I love that. Someone singing it at their wedding, or at a funeral, or at a protest.”She reached for a bit of lingual antiquity and metaphor that tracks closely to her own move to Vermont. “You know how you spell playwright as playwright, like you’re building or constructing something?” she asked. “A songwriter is kind of a songwright. It’s like building a house that other people will inhabit.” More

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      Review: A Shorter ‘Long Day’s Journey,’ Now With N95s

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      The Eugene O’Neill classic, set in 1912, is just as powerful in Robert O’Hara’s revival, set in our own age of disease and lockdown.Eugene O’Neill, whose insanely detailed stage directions for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” specify even the titles of the books on the shelves, somehow forgot to mention the Purell. Also the N95s.Yet there they are, prominent props in Robert O’Hara’s warp-speed Covid-era revival, which opened on Tuesday at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Far from cheapening a classic work with random relevance, they help define (or at any rate don’t get in the way of) a beautifully acted and affecting interpretation for a new age of disease and lockdown.In the Tyrone family, closely based on O’Neill’s, disease and lockdown are already a way of life. For James (Bill Camp) the disease is spiritual; a could-have-been Shakespearean who (like the playwright’s father) got trapped in an immensely popular melodrama, he is embittered by success and a skinflint by nature. His older son, Jamie (Jason Bowen), has just the opposite problem: A failure at everything, he beggars himself by carousing as if he weren’t.For the other two members of the household, the disease is literal. Partway through the play, the younger son, Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood), receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis from which he believes he will never recover. His mother, Mary (Elizabeth Marvel), having been improperly treated by a cheap doctor after Edmund’s difficult birth, is addicted to morphine. Her most recent rehabilitation miserably collapses over the course of the long day of the title.That day, according to O’Neill, is in August 1912; the setting is the family’s fog-infested waterfront home on the Connecticut coast. There, James estivates sourly between tours, talking big and doing little, watching helplessly (or unwilling to help) as Mary’s fear for Edmund undoes her.Her relapse is all the more painful because of the hypocrisy that informs it; it began, after all, as a result of James’s stinginess. And though the three men drink at least as insatiably as Mary drugs, only her addiction is seen as a character flaw: an elective humiliation that has turned them all into emotional — and nearly literal — hermits.From left, Jason Bowen, Bill Camp and Ato Blankson-Wood in the play, which is being performed at the Minetta Lane Theater and will be released later as an audio play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn O’Hara’s production, though, the Tyrone lockdown is only partly about shame; it is also about precaution. When Mary tells James that “this will soon be over,” and that his theater season — another tour of his tired old play — “will open again,” we hear it differently with our pandemic-primed expectations. How many productions have recently had to reassure us they will open again?And all it takes to turn Edmund’s tuberculosis into Covid is the discreet suppression of the word “consumption” from Jamie’s question after his brother visits the doctor: “He thinks it’s … doesn’t he, Papa?” We fill in the blank as we please; the coughing is the same either way.That’s successful if relatively minor surgery. But can a revision that cuts about half the text, reducing its running time from nearly four hours to slightly less than two, still be “Long Day’s Journey”? Certainly the O’Neill estate, which permitted the changes, thinks so, in part because O’Hara, as he writes in a program note, has not added “a single word” in the process of imagining “this glorious play into the future that we are all currently living through.” The contemporization is achieved entirely by suggestive or visual means.At first, the effect is humorous, as when James shows up in cargo shorts bearing Starbucks and Mary, demonstrating her improved health, does yoga. Soon, though, the jokes deepen, creating a feeling of double vision as we notice both our time and O’Neill’s at once. The density makes a four-person play feel crowded; Clint Ramos’s living room set, littered with discarded Amazon delivery boxes, nails the relentless clutter of a self-indulgent family trapped together for months with no maid. (She too was cut.)Nor do the house’s upper stories, as revealed through voids in the living room wall, offer relief from the creeping claustrophobia; in one of the openings we see Mary repeatedly shooting up. (To judge from the spoon and flame, she’s using heroin now instead of morphine.) If this, let alone her vomiting, feels too literal, the astonishing projections by Yee Eun Nam are almost phantasmagoric in their abstraction. They vividly suggest the solace that blossoms from the needle, a solace that is at least in part a dissociation from reality.Marvel in the upper level of Clint Ramos’s set, with abstract projections by Yee Eun Nam.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet we know that anyway; the play as typically performed demonstrates it over and over. Mary’s addiction is part of a closed system in which each of the Tyrones victimizes and is victimized by the rest, all the while explaining and apologizing and defending. (That’s part of what justifies its usual unusual length.) What O’Hara gets so right, regardless of the apparent setting, is the relentless rhythm of placation and perturbation. These are people who can’t help pulling one another’s scabs off, then trying to stick them back on.If you want to think about our own recent lockdown in those terms, this production, even in its relative brevity, certainly allows you to. And if you want to think about what O’Hara meant by casting white actors as the Tyrone parents and Black actors as the sons — he says he meant nothing — you are welcome to do that too, though you probably won’t get very far beyond merit.But if you aren’t interested in a contemporary medical or racial gloss, the great thing about this “Long Day’s Journey” is that you need only close your eyes. Indeed, because the revival has been produced by Audible, the Amazon company that creates spoken audio content, once the stage production closes on Feb. 20 that will be the only way you can experience it.What I think you will find with the visual information stripped away is a very accomplished, and surprisingly faithful, reading of the play. If it loses some of its cumulative power in the abridgment, its moment-by-moment power often increases in recompense. Bowen and Blankson-Wood get the alternating current of the brothers’ connection just right. Camp, unlike many Jameses, plays the real man, not his melodramatic stage incarnation. These are performances that are not only stageworthy but streamworthy.And certainly Marvel’s vocal characterization of the deteriorating Mary — lilting then wheedling then ratlike then hollow — is one you will not soon get out of your head. You may even feel infected by it. Do they make Purell for the ears?Long Day’s Journey Into NightThrough Feb. 20 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audible.com/ep/minettalane. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More