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      Pat Carroll, TV Mainstay Turned Stage Star, Dies at 95

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      Tired of sitcoms and game shows, she reinvented herself in a one-woman show about Gertrude Stein — and, later, in a gender-bending Shakespeare role.Pat Carroll, who after many years on television as the self-described “dowager queen of game shows” went on to earn critical acclaim for her work on the stage, died on Saturday at her home on Cape Cod, Mass. She was 95. Her daughter Kerry Karsian, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. She did not specify the cause.Ms. Carroll broke into television as a sketch comedian in the 1950s and later became a fixture on “Password,” “I’ve Got a Secret” and other game shows. She was also seen frequently on sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and dramas like “Police Woman.” But a part she took in 1977, when she was 50, inspired her to change direction.In a 1979 interview with The New York Times, she recalled being cast as Pearl Markowitz, an overly protective mother, on the short-lived comedy “Busting Loose,” and asking herself, “Is this all there is left — playing mothers on TV?”Rather than sinking comfortably into that stereotype, Ms. Carroll provided a bold answer to her own question by commissioning Marty Martin, a young Texas playwright, to write a one-woman play for her about the poet Gertrude Stein.“Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” opened Off Broadway in 1979 and received glowing reviews. Ms. Carroll won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards in 1980 for the performance, and in 1981 her recording of the play won a Grammy Award in the “best spoken word” category.“It was the jewel in my crown,” Ms. Carroll said in an interview for this obituary in 2011, recalling how the play came about. “I was recently divorced, I had gained a lot of weight, and the phone was not ringing. It was not the agents’ or directors’ or producers’ fault that the phone was not ringing. I thought, ‘I am responsible for creating some kind of work.’ And I began thinking of people to do.”Ms. Carroll in 1979 in the title role in the Marty Martin play “Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” at the Circle Repertory Theater. “It was the jewel in my crown,” she said of the play.Gerry GoodsteinA decade later, Ms. Carroll, still looking for challenging work, sought out the role of the conniving, overweight — and, obviously, male — Falstaff in a production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in Washington.“When Ms. Carroll makes her first entrance,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times, “a nervous silence falls over the audience at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger here, as hundreds of eyes search for some trace of the woman they’ve seen in a thousand television reruns. What they find instead is a Falstaff who could have stepped out of a formal painted portrait: a balding, aged knight with scattered tufts of silver hair and whiskers, an enormous belly, pink cheeks and squinting, froggy eyes that peer out through boozy mists. The sight is so eerie you grab onto your seat.”“One realizes,” Mr. Rich continued, “that it is Shakespeare’s character, and not a camp parody, that is being served.”Patricia Ann Carroll was born on May 5, 1927, in Shreveport, La., and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; her mother, Kathryn (Meagher) Carroll, worked in real estate and office management.Ms. Carroll attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles on an English scholarship but left before graduating. “I realized that what I was learning was not going to advance what I wished to do,” she said in 2011. “I always thought experience was the best preparation.”In 1947, Ms. Carroll left Los Angeles for Plymouth, Mass., where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater and, she said, ate, drank and breathed the theater. She made her professional stage debut there that year in “A Goose for the Gander,” starring Gloria Swanson. Soon after, she made it to New York, where, among other odd jobs, she shined shoes.She initially made her mark in the early 1950s as a comedian — first at Le Ruban Bleu, the Village Vanguard and other nightclubs, then on television, on “The Red Buttons Show” and other variety series.She was a regular on the Sid Caesar sketch show “Caesar’s Hour,” for which she won an Emmy in 1957, and, in the early 1960s, on “The Danny Thomas Show,” on which she played the wife of the Thomas character’s manager.Ms. Carroll made the first of her four Broadway appearances in 1955 in “Catch a Star!,” a revue written by Neil and Danny Simon. Her performance did not win the kind of notices that foreshadow stage success: Brooks Atkinson of The Times, for example, wrote that she did not have “a bold enough technique to come alive in the theater.”The response was different in 1959 when she played Hildy, the flirtatious cabdriver who tries to persuade a shy sailor on 24-hour shore leave to come to her apartment with the song “I Can Cook, Too,” in a revival of the Leonard Bernstein-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical “On the Town” at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. “If the evening has a star,” Arthur Gelb of The Times wrote, “it is Pat Carroll, a blue-eyed blonde with a genius for the deadpan and double take.”Ms. Carroll’s work at the Folger Theater garnered her three Helen Hayes Awards: outstanding lead actress for her roles in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” and outstanding supporting actress for her role as the nurse in “Romeo and Juliet.”Ms. Carroll married Lee Karsian, a William Morris agent, in 1955. The couple, who divorced in 1975, had three children: a son, Sean, who died in 2009, and two daughters, Kerry Karsian and Tara Karsian, who survive her. Ms. Carroll played an Appalachian grandmother in the film “Songcatcher.” The role earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.James Bridges/Lions Gate FilmsAlthough she spent most of her career on television (where her later work included appearances on “ER” and “Designing Women”) and the stage, Ms. Carroll also had some memorable roles on the big screen. In 1968 she played Doris Day’s sister in “With Six You Get Eggroll.” In 2000 she played an Appalachian grandmother in “Songcatcher,” a role that earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination and a jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.For many of her film and TV performances, Ms. Carroll went unseen: She provided voices for numerous cartoon characters, most notably Ursula, the menacing sea witch, in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” in 1989. That role, she once said, was “the one thing in my life that I’m probably most proud of.”“I don’t even care if, after I’m gone, the only thing that I’m associated with is Ursula,” she added. “That’s OK with me, because that’s a pretty wonderful character and a pretty marvelous film to be remembered by.” More

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      Review: ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ Knows Its Good Angles

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      The Ruth Stage’s production understands the violence and identity crisis at the core of Brick’s character, but other elements fail to cohere.We know from his personal writing (and context clues) that Tennessee Williams was into trade: hypermasculine men who are just as likely to have sex with men as they are to break their necks. These seductive brutes are strewn throughout his work, just as essential and memorable as his fading belles. There is no Blanche without Stanley.Williams would probably love Matt de Rogatis’s Brick in Ruth Stage’s production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which recently opened at Theater at St. Clement’s. The former football hero is still a depressive alcoholic whose drunken escapades earn him a cast, crutches and the growing contempt of his wife, Maggie. But de Rogatis, tatted up and ab-tastic from his backlit shower entrance, compellingly finds the violence and identity crisis at Brick’s core in this contemporary staging.With the character mostly a punching bag for his bellicose Big Daddy Pollitt (Christian Jules LeBlanc) and the talkative Maggie (Sonoya Mizuno) to explode onto, he is often somewhat of a handsome blank slate. De Rogatis, who also produces, convincingly hints at a torrid inner life, congealed into an imposing physique but betrayed by the anguish he voices at the mention of his ambiguously close relationship with a male friend who died by suicide.The performance matches the play, which like many of Williams’ works, is concerned with surfaces as much as its characters’ deeper worlds. A fine-tuned melodrama about a wealthy Mississippi family undone by its patriarch’s cancer diagnosis, the play melts down the characters’ kept-up appearances and oft-mentioned “mendacity” as they scramble for his inheritance.This production, the play’s first Off Broadway staging licensed by the Williams estate, has several excellent surfaces, though not all the elements rise to the occasion. Joe Rosario’s direction, for example, handles the soap opera-style histrionics well but doesn’t land much of Williams’s wicked humor. His characters can often seem aimless and airless, when they should be pointedly animated.The character of Maggie buckles most under this misfire, especially in the first act’s hourlong near-monologue, in which she breathlessly complains about the children of her snooty sister-in-law, Mae (Tiffan Borelli), then laments her own childlessness and the speculation it brings on. Mizuno, though game, lacks a clear focus in this key scene. Hers is not the determined, seductively self-assured feline immortalized onscreen by Elizabeth Taylor — a high bar, to be sure — but a frenzied kitten rattling against a cage. This does, intriguingly, transform her legendary voluptuousness into a believable portrait of an Ole Miss grad whose hard-won financial safety has started to crumble.Similarly, this production manages to make the bourbon-soaked setting feel like the actual South rather than a gauzy memory of the South. Matthew Imhoff’s set is the exact kind of faux luxury gilded Wayfair a contemporary Pollitt family would seize upon, and Xandra Smith’s costumes are exceptionally observed. Mae’s modern good-Christian-girl uniform — sleeveless top, colorful pants, sensible heel — is particularly inspired.Borelli leans into the fun of her recognizable outfit (and hair in a tight bun), tastily spewing Williams’s barbs to crank up his melodramatic flair. She is matched in this by Alison Fraser as Big Mama, marvelously attuned to the work’s tonal balances. Her big, vulnerable eyes, painted smile and full blond hair perfectly convey everything there is to love about the playwright and his addictive fixation on deceiving appearances.This “Cat” evokes most of that allure, give or take a few fizzles. For those looking to cool off on these scorching summer days with a Tennessee Williams classic, it’s a solid trade.Cat on a Hot Tin RoofThrough Aug. 14 at the Theater at St. Clements, Manhattan; ruthstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Mary Alice, Tony Winner for Her Role in ‘Fences,’ Dies at 85

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      A former Chicago schoolteacher, she appeared on TV in ‘A Different World’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ winning an Emmy in 1993.Mary Alice, an Emmy- and Tony-award winning actress who brought a delicate grace and a quiet dignity to her roles in Hollywood blockbusters (“The Matrix Revolutions”), television sitcoms (“A Different World”) and Broadway plays (“Fences”), died on Wednesday in her home in Manhattan. She was 85, according to the New York City Police Department.The death was confirmed by Detective Anthony Passaro, a police spokesman, who said officers responded to a 911 call and found Ms. Alice unresponsive.A former Chicago schoolteacher, Ms. Alice appeared in nearly 60 television shows and films. In 2000, she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.She first gained widespread attention in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Fences” in 1987. She earned a Tony Award for best featured actress for playing Rose Maxson, a housewife in 1950s Pittsburgh forced to balance duty with anger toward a philandering husband (played by James Earl Jones, who also won a Tony), who is filled with rage after a promising career as a baseball player devolved into a grueling life as a garbage hauler.“Ms. Alice’s performance emphasizes strength over self-pity, open anger over festering bitterness,” Frank Rich wrote in a review for The New York Times. “The actress finds the spiritual quotient in the acceptance that accompanies Rose’s love for a scarred, profoundly complicated man.”The role had deep resonance for Ms. Alice, who based her performance on memories of her mother, her aunts and her grandmother, women “who were not educated, living in a time before women’s liberation, and their identities were tied up in their husbands,” she said in an interview with The Times that same year.“I decided very early that I did not want — well, not so much that I did not want to get married, but that I did want to find out about the world,” she added. “I did that through college, through learning, through books and travel.”Ms. Alice, left, with Ray Aranha, center, and James Earl Jones in “Fences.” Ron ScherlMary Alice Smith was born on Dec. 3, 1936, in Indianola, Miss., one of three children of Sam Smith and Ozelar (Jurnakin) Smith. When she was a small child, the family moved to Chicago, where they lived in a house on the Near North Side that was later demolished to make way for the Cabrini-Green housing project.No immediate family members survive.Viewing teaching as a path to a stable, middle-class life, she graduated from Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University) in 1965 and took a job teaching at a public elementary school.Even so, she aspired to be an actress. “It was escapism,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1986, adding: “We never lacked for anything. But my parents got up before the sun rose and worked all day. My father was tired. My mother had to cook. When I went to the movies, those people on the screen didn’t have to work.”Dropping the surname “Smith” and moving to New York City in 1967, Ms. Alice trained at the Negro Ensemble Company, landing in an advanced acting class taught by Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater who went on to direct “Fences.” Ms. Alice, left, and Beatrice Winde in “Sparkle,” a 1976 film loosely based on the singing group the Supremes.Everett CollectionThroughout the 1970s and the early ’80s, she made numerous appearances in sitcoms like “Good Times” and “Sanford and Son,” while carving out a film presence in “Sparkle,” a 1976 musical loosely based on The Supremes, and “Beat Street,” the 1984 break-dancing film that helped nudge hip-hop culture into the mainstream.She earned praise onstage in a 1980 Off Broadway production of “Zooman and the Sign,” featuring Frances Foster and Giancarlo Esposito, as well as a 1983 Yale Rep production of “Raisin in the Sun,” featuring Delroy Lindo.After her success with “Fences,” she played Lettie Bostic, a resident director at a historically Black college who has an intriguing past, in “A Different World,” a spinoff of “The Cosby Show.” A year after that, she drew praise as the mother of Oprah Winfrey’s matriarch character in “The Women of Brewster Place,” a television mini-series based on the Gloria Naylor novel about a group of women living in a run-down housing project.By the 1990s, she had become a familiar face in film. She had roles in Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger” featuring Danny Glover, and in Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” featuring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in 1990; and in Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” with Denzel Washington in the title role, two years later.She also appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” as the mother of a teenager struck by a car in a hit-and-run accident.Ms. Alice, right, and Jasmine Guy in a 1988 episode of the NBC sitcom “A Different World.” NBCU Photo Bank/GettyIn 1992, she was nominated for an Emmy award for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series for her role in “I’ll Fly Away,” a series starring Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor and set in a fictional Southern town in the 1950s; she won the award for the same role the following year.Ms. Alice nearly took home another Tony in 1995. She was nominated for best actress for her performance as the fiery Bessie, one of two centenarian sisters looking back on a century of life, in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Broadway adaptation of the best-selling 1994 memoir by Sarah (Sadie) L. Delany and her sister Annie Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany, written with Amy Hill Hearth.Ms. Alice replaced Gloria Foster as the Oracle in the third installment of the Matrix film series in 2003, and continued acting until 2005, when she appeared in a television reboot of the 1970s detective show “Kojak.”“Acting has been a big sacrifice,” she told The Tribune in 1986. “I sometimes think that if I had continued to be a teacher, I would be retired already. The income would have been constant. But I didn’t feel about teaching the way I do about acting. It’s my service in life. I’m supposed to use it.” More

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      ‘Happy Life’ Review: Ghosts in the Studio

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      The playwright Kathy Ng imagines a world where mortality, eroticism and Hello Kitty collide in a spirited, if sometimes muddled, contemplation of loneliness and loss.Urban real estate is flush with ghosts. How many people have lived and died alone, in apartments stacked toward the clouds? Cities thrive on fantasies of possibility, but the specter of suffering looms behind every door. Just ask the broker peddling a cleaned-up murder scene on the allure of its fresh lemon scent.The soon-to-be tenant of that cramped studio in “Happy Life,” which opened at Walkerspace in New York on Tuesday night, says she’s used to ghosts clinging to her shoulders. It’s a convenient match, because the two that haunt her new digs are not the type to go bump in the night and call it a day. They bicker like spoiled children, recollect the circumstances of their awful deaths and make impossible demands of the living.The playwright Kathy Ng imagines a world where the boundary between this one and the next is porous but sticky, and where everyone on either side wants a second chance. It’s a reasonable motivation to propel characters forward, but “Happy Life” does not chart a conventional path. Ng’s influences include gruesome true crime and manga pornography, such that mortality, eroticism and Hello Kitty collide into a spirited, if sometimes muddled, contemplation of loneliness and loss.The head ghost in charge (or H.G.I.C., as Ng’s characters, prone to coining acronyms, might say) was the victim of a brutal homicide. Ng borrows details from the killing in 1999 of Fan Man-yee, a Hong Kong woman who was abducted and tortured by three men, in a case that came to be known as the “Hello Kitty” murder. Billed as Cat Mermaid, and played with unbridled intensity by Priyanka Arya Krishnan, the H.G.I.C. has an iridescent tail that drapes off one leg and furry cat ears protruding from her tangle of hair (costumes are by Alicia J. Austin). Her claim to the site of her fatal ordeal is obvious, and she has every reason to be in a constant state of fury.The other lingering soul (Sagan Chen) hanged himself from the bathroom doorknob. His chest is bandaged from post-mortem top surgery, performed by his phantom co-tenant — the wounds of a self-actualization that came only in death. His hope lies in potential reincarnation options (or ROs), which are not looking great, and in the unlikely support of their new mortal roommate (Amy Chang), who is recently divorced and learning to live on her own.There’s a playful quality to Ng’s storytelling that encourages lighthearted engagement and the suspension of rationality. Can a ghost operate a phone sex line? Can everyone see dead people if they really try? The rules that govern Ng’s theatrical plane are expansive and unencumbered, allowing for freer association of impulses and ideas. A queer sensibility in both form and content is evident throughout. But “Happy Life” forgoes maintaining even its own internal logic, like when and why characters can communicate, whether they’re alive or dead.The production, directed by Kat Yen for the Hearth theater company, dials up rather than tempers Ng’s inclination toward maximal expression. The performances are each calibrated to a static frequency — the forceful and pitiless apparition, the relentlessly placid new occupant — curtailing the potential for more dynamic shifts in character. The shades-of-gray apartment, lined with plastic sheeting in place of drywall and designed by Lily Guerin, is aptly neutral but still hopelessly drab, as much a suitable crime scene as it is a blank slate for a new beginning.“Happy Life” seizes with an almost maniacal delight on the particulars of the “Hello Kitty” murder, more than once recounting the grizzly details of the case. It could make for arresting commentary on the ways in which women are infantilized, dehumanized and ultimately consumed by a culture obsessed with sex and death. But there’s an insular quality to the play that resists broader resonance beyond its prescribed confines. The call is coming from inside the studio, but who is on the other end?Happy LifeThrough Aug. 6 at Walkerspace, Manhattan; thehearththeater.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Bottom of the Ocean,’ a Deep Dive Into the Soul

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      Themes of change, death and rebirth abound in this peculiar production, a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity.A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacled rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semifinished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now, in a town that doesn’t lack for weird. How odd is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, OK, fake baby octopuses) in its communal bathroom.“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, following “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a newish company, called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater. I had missed the two earlier shows, but over the last month or so, a couple of friends had recommended “Bottom of the Ocean” and I had heard it mentioned in conversation. Booking a ticket began to feel a little like destiny. And there are worse Tuesday-night fates than being delivered to the basement door of a 19th-century church across the street from a smoke and vape shop. Knock at the appointed time and a small window will open. Speak the password and a man in elaborate robes will play a xylophone, welcoming you into new worlds.Undersea motif: An installation of baby octopuses in a bathroom at “Bottom of the Ocean.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI can’t really tell you what “Bottom of the Ocean” — which you can experience singly, doubly or in a group of five — is about. Probably I shouldn’t. Immersion depends on surprise, on not knowing what you will encounter around the next corner. More abstract than immersive hits like “Sleep No More” or “Then She Fell,” “Bottom of the Ocean” dilates, broadly, on themes of change, death and rebirth. There is often an undersea motif, though that evaporates in certain rooms.The show borrows, ecumenically, from ancient rites (the Eleusinian Mysteries seem to be a particular point of inspiration) and New Age practices. It invents some rituals outright. At one point I may have worshiped a jellyfish.Throughout, the performance insists on radical intimacy. During the preshow, you will be given a safe word that you can utter if touch is not your thing, though the touch provided is gentle and respectful and never delivered without consent. But not all intimacy is physical. The three actors (Hoepfner, Chia Kwa and Naja Newell on the night I attended) play characters, but you play only yourself. And in the course of the performance you will be asked to offer up your own regrets, desires and prayers.I am unaccustomed to making disclosures like these to strangers. I barely make them to my therapist. So if you pride yourself on privacy and personal boundaries, the show may induce some very squirmy feelings. (Maybe that squirminess is appropriate for a show with so many cephalopods.) Those, like me, with lousy night vision, should proceed with caution. The stairs are steep. And those, again like me, who don’t love to sing in public — well, do your warm-ups.Chia Kwa appears in a show that “privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace,” our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI have sometimes thought about the politics of immersive theater, what it means to prefer individual experience over communal joining. And I thought of it again a few times during “Bottom of the Ocean,” at least when I wasn’t thinking of the jellyfish or whether the fire burning on the salver was maybe a little high or how to locate the emergency exit in the dark. But the aims of “Bottom of the Ocean” are strictly apolitical. The show instead privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace.Personally, the depths of my soul aren’t my favorite destination, but there is so much to enjoy along the way. Only two designers are credited — Laura Borys, who created the hallucinatory costumes, and the technical designer Howard Rigberg — but “Bottom of the Ocean” is a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity, achieved through the simplest means: balloons, beans, wax, water. In the fewest square feet, it provides a sensory deluge. Each new room reveals a strange and distinctive environment.If I sometimes found the closeness uncomfortable (the closeness and the singing), discomfort is the trade-off for two hours spent in what can feel like a lucid dream. At the end I emerged, from one sort of warm, wet dark into another. My aura, if I had one, was definitively cleansed.Bottom of the OceanAt Gymnopedie, Brooklyn; boto.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Closes on Broadway as Creators Spar With Rudin

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      The hit play, closed since January, was expected to reopen on Broadway this fall.“To Kill a Mockingbird,” a stage adaptation of the classic novel that in January announced a temporary shutdown after Jeff Daniels left the cast and the Omicron variant slammed into New York, will not reopen on Broadway.The play’s writer, Aaron Sorkin, and director, Bartlett Sher, emailed the play’s cast and crew late Thursday to inform them of the decision, and they blamed the original lead producer, Scott Rudin, who had stepped away from an active role in the show after being accused of mistreating collaborators. According to Sorkin and Sher, “At the last moment, Scott reinserted himself as producer and for reasons which are, frankly, incomprehensible to us both, he stopped the play from reopening.”Rudin, who continued to control the rights to the stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel, sent his own email to Sorkin and Sher on Friday, attributing the decision to the economic situation on Broadway, where overall ticket sales have lagged behind prepandemic levels. Both emails were obtained by The Times.“The reason I opted not to bring back TKAM has to do with my lack of confidence in the climate for plays next winter,” Rudin wrote, using an acronym for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He added, “I do not believe that a remount of Mockingbird would have been competitive in the marketplace.”The show continues to have a healthy life outside New York. A production in London’s West End opened in March, and a national tour in the United States opened in Boston in April. Those productions are unaffected by the Broadway closing.The play opened on Broadway in late 2018, and was a hit before the pandemic, regularly selling around $2 million worth of tickets a week, which is quite high for a play, and recouping its $7.5 million investment costs 19 weeks after opening.Broadway closed in March 2020 because of the pandemic, and “To Kill a Mockingbird” resumed performances last October, with Daniels returning to star as Atticus Finch, as he had done during the play’s first year. The play sold well until early January, with the exception of a week when breakthrough Covid cases forced performance cancellations; Daniels left the cast on Jan. 2, at a time when Broadway grosses were already plunging because of the resurgent pandemic, and the show’s grosses cratered.The play stopped performances at the Shubert Theater on Jan. 16, and Barry Diller, then functioning as lead producer, said it would resume performances on June 1 at the Belasco Theater. That did not happen, and according to the email from Sher and Sorkin the most recent plan had been for the play to restart performances on Nov. 2 at the Music Box Theater.Sher and Sorkin described themselves in the email as “heartbroken” and said they “mourn the loss of all the jobs — onstage, backstage, and front of house — that just disappeared.” Rudin, in his email to them, said, “It’s too risky and the downside is too great. I’m sorry you’re disappointed. It’s the right decision for the long life of the show.”Sher, Sorkin and Rudin all declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the play. The decision to not reopen the play was previously reported by the website Showbiz411. More

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      A Rebound for a Summer Pairing of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Oresteia’ at the Armory

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      Two Robert Icke productions have endured illnesses and last-minute casting changes. Now they have finally settled into a repertory groove.Perhaps more than any other production of this post-shutdown season, the Park Avenue Armory’s summer stagings of “Hamlet” and “Oresteia” — with their last-minute replacements and cast illnesses — have faced the most hurdles on their way to opening night.The productions, already delayed from their intended 2020 U.S. premieres, were dealt another blow this spring when, two days into tech rehearsals, Lia Williams (“The Crown”) tore her Achilles’ tendon. She was double booked to play Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, and the husband-killing matriarch Klytemnestra in “Oresteia,” but recovery, though guaranteed, would not be quick. She was forced to drop out. Jennifer Ehle and Anastasia Hille quickly stepped in, with Ehle having only 10 days to settle into the role of Gertrude before the first “Hamlet” preview.“I had no idea what I was getting into, and I really didn’t care,” Ehle said during a recent video call. “It was one of those moments where you get a call on a Sunday morning, somebody asks if you want to take a challenge, and you have no choice but to take the leap and start planning in midair.”The plays, helmed by the English writer-director Robert Icke, are now being performed in repertory at the Armory, where they will run through mid-August. “Hamlet” opened in late June to mostly positive reviews. (Maya Phillips, in her review for The Times, wrote that Icke “brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension.”) “Oresteia” began previews July 10, and is set to open Tuesday. Once it does, this ambitious pairing of classics of the Western canon will conclude a nearly seven-year journey of starts and stops.“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible,” Ehle (with Lawther) said of joining the cast of “Hamlet” during tech rehearsals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow It All StartedThe plays had momentous premieres (“Oresteia” in 2015 and “Hamlet” in 2017) at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke had been associate director, and successful West End runs followed. Writing from London in 2015, Ben Brantley said Icke’s “theatrical chutzpah pays dividends” in his drastically reimagined “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ revenge-filled trilogy.That ancient Greek work and the surveillance-heavy “Hamlet,” with the actor Andrew Scott in the title role, cemented Icke’s status as an incisive editor and renovator of classics. Not that editing here means trimming down — each production clocks in at just under four hours — but Icke’s revisions bring the centuries-old plays’ essences to stark, ultramodern light.As planning began for the Shakespeare adaptation, he and Hildegard Bechtler, the set and costume designer, decided to reuse a frosted glass they had used in “Oresteia,” allowing them to achieve something like a cinematic jump cut. It’s what first led him to think of the two pieces as similar.“There was an acknowledgment that these two plays, though separated by many centuries, are in conversation with each other,” Icke explained during a recent video call, quarantining after testing positive for the coronavirus. “Those central questions about family and vengeance, and the obligations children have to their parents, and what it means if a family and a country are intertwined with each other, always felt like they were reflecting and refracting each other in really interesting ways.”Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director and founder of the Almeida, suggested bringing a repertory pairing of the two works to Manhattan back in 2018. Having met the Armory team while in town in 2017 for the Broadway premiere of his and Duncan Macmillan’s “1984” adaptation, Icke said it felt like it could be “a fruitful collaboration,” and the productions were announced for 2020.Williams, who had played Klytemnestra to great acclaim in “Oresteia,” would reprise that role, and play opposite Alex Lawther in “Hamlet,” who was cast after Scott was unable to commit to the transfer. But then the pandemic shut down live theater in 2020 and many planned productions were canceled, though everyone wanted to keep these two afloat. (In the meantime, Icke collaborated with the actress Ann Dowd on a socially distanced adaptation of “Enemy of the People” at the Armory last summer.)Angus Wright, seated at the table and projected onto the screen, in “Oresteia” at the Armory. In the foreground, from left, are Wesley Holloway, Anastasia Hille and Elyana Faith Randolph.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Pairing With ‘Poetic Logic’In April 2022, the company finally reunited and began rehearsals. Because of the plays’ length and density, the focus on each alternated on a weekly basis. Lawther said he enjoyed the repertory setting and “the luxury of watching this amazing company switch and suddenly do this Greek tragedy.”“They speak to one another in incredibly moving and mysterious ways,” Lawther said on a video call. “Although ‘Oresteia’ is much older, Rob’s adaptation is full of modern language, and feels like a contemporary family drama, whereas this ‘Hamlet’ uses the original text, and feels of a different time. There’s a poetic logic that exists in putting these two together.”While the productions share a set and much of the same acting troupe, Icke said he did not go out of his way to heighten the two works’ similarities.“The attempt is not to direct them to point back to each other,” he said, “but almost to hang the two paintings next to each other in a gallery, so that if audiences choose to, they can move back and forth and think about the ways in which the two might relate.”Written nearly 2,000 years apart, the works deal with chaos unfolding in the private homes of high-powered political families. Almost entirely stripped of period or royal specificity, the modern-dress productions allow Icke to focus on contemporary parallels. With “Hamlet,” it’s the British royal family.“This time, we talked about Prince Philip’s death and what it’s like for an old guard to die,” he said. “But I’ve always felt like Hamlet and Princess Diana have got something in common. You’re told again and again that he is adored by the people, and that one of the reasons [the king] does not have him packed off to prison immediately is because of how much the people love him. That sense of somebody struggling to make sense of themselves, and what’s happening to them, while under constant observation always took my mind to Diana.”For “Oresteia,” he said the story’s setup, with Agamemnon coming back from war with a new woman, would have meant for ancient Greek audiences what the Kennedy and Clinton families might signify to contemporary viewers.“Audiences then would’ve known their Homer back-to-front, so it was probably similar to telling audiences back then that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has just broken,” Icke continued. “Here’s Hillary, and Bill is about to walk through the front door. A modern American audience feels that. In another thousand years, to tell the Clinton story, you probably will have to go back and fill in the Lewinsky part of the story to get it across.”Luke Treadaway as Orestes, Klytemnestra and Agamemnon’s traumatized son, in “Oresteia.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Necessary PivotAfter Williams’s injury, “Hamlet” performances were pushed back, giving Ehle a little over a week to learn the part of Queen Gertrude for the first time. But Hille, who is British, needed to secure a work visa, and that forced “Oresteia” to be delayed nearly a month.When she got the call, Ehle said, “I thought, if the Armory has brought this man here, with these people, to tell this story, it couldn’t be anything but interesting.”Ehle, a two-time Tony winner for her work in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” described the process of situating herself within the production as “less rehearsing and more orienteering.”“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible, and jump on a moving train,” she recalled. “My seat was there waiting, but I had to figure out where to put my luggage.”Many hours of last-minute rehearsals were required — Lawther called it a “baptism by fire” — with Hille, who was preparing with Icke via Zoom while awaiting her visa, only arriving in New York on July 3, just days before the first previews of “Oresteia.” Around that time, Ehle tested positive for coronavirus, and had to briefly retreat from “Hamlet.”“It’s pretty much impossible to do anything without everyone in the room,” Icke said, referring to absences resulting from Covid. “But this has been much easier because the big-picture decisions and structures had already been in place. We were able to focus on the details of the performances, rather than our sound design or choice of music.”Luke Treadaway, the British actor who plays Laertes in “Hamlet” and Orestes, Klytemnestra’s son, in “Oresteia,” had been preparing for the roles since 2020 and noted the effects of the changes on the ensemble. “The cast changes had a huge emotional impact on us all, because rehearsals become a world that you create with the people you create it with,” he explained. “We’ve had many understudies come on, because of Covid. It made us realize that it’s not just 10 actors in a cast, or however many, but a squad of people getting these two massive stories onstage every night, in any form we can.”Icke also acknowledged the resiliency of actors. “Anyone who has done much theater is very aware that everything can change in a second, particularly in Covid times,” he said. “It’s remarkable how adaptable everybody is, saying, ‘Well, this isn’t what we thought it was going to be, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re really glad to be here and delighted to be presented with two productions.’ It all sort of just recalibrates itself.” More

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      ‘Oresteia’ Review: A Mother’s Grief, Underestimated

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      Anastasia Hille is riveting as Klytemnestra in Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory.Before the first domino of their tragedies falls, before murder begets murder begets murder, they are an enchanting family: the mother, Klytemnestra, warm and easy with her two little ones gathered close around her; the father, Agamemnon, suave in public but playful the instant he walks through the door at the end of the day.In their cozy contemporary sanctuary of a home, they seem so absolutely normal. These people love one another. The boy, Orestes, has never been a good sleeper, but when his bad dreams come, his parents are there to comfort him. And Iphigenia, his sister, is a darling in a citrus-orange dress. Though she is young enough that she totes her long-eared plush bunny everywhere, she is old enough, and smart enough, that she’s already a moral thinker. When the family has venison for dinner, she cannot bear the thought of eating a deer.“It’s a little dead body,” she says.Is this the deer whose killing so angered the goddess Artemis that she stilled the winds on which Agamemnon’s warships depend? Robert Icke’s fraught and gripping “Oresteia,” an emotionally harrowing retelling of Aeschylus’ trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t get bogged down in such background details of ancient mythology.What matters is the excruciating ransom that Agamemnon, a military commander and a great believer in prophecies, thinks he has to pay to get the winds blowing again so he can be victorious in war. He must murder Iphigenia, his curious, trusting, doted-on daughter who wants nothing to do with killing deer and has nothing to do with waging war.“By his hand alone,” the prophecy reads. “The child is the price. Fair winds.”Her innocent life, ended irrevocably, in exchange for maybe — if her father’s faith in the gods and the counsel of serious men is not misplaced — achieving his political objectives. Not, of course, that her mother has been consulted in this, let alone Iphigenia herself.“If she doesn’t feel pain,” Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says, arguing in favor of snuffing out his niece, “and it is a civilized procedure, and it is the clear and greater good, then who are the victims?”What is the value of the life of a girl? What is the value of her mother’s clawing grief and bottomless rage at her child’s murder? And how, exactly, has Klytemnestra come off so badly through the ages for her revenge killing of Agamemnon — as if she were singularly evil and crazed while he was simply a decent guy in a difficult position, who’d made the tough call that his own daughter was expendable?Hille and Angus Wright in Robert Icke’s production, which originated at the Almeida Theater in London in 2015.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTold in four acts over three and a half hours, this “Oresteia” is about grief so deep it settles into the soul and metastasizes into a need for bloody vengeance, whose result in turn becomes a cause of more fresh grief. If you’d wondered what unites “Oresteia” thematically with “Hamlet,” Icke’s other thrilling production running in repertory at the Armory this summer, there it is — two plays in which murders leave survivors bereft and homicidal, and in which one generation of a family suffers the treachery of another. But whereas “Hamlet” centers the title character, this re-centered “Oresteia” is concerned principally not with Orestes, the son, but rather with Klytemnestra, his haunted mother.“This whole thing,” she tells Iphigenia’s ghost as it flits through the house, “this whole thing is about you.”When this production by the Armory and the Almeida Theater was first announced, it was meant to star Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, reprising the role she had played in London, but an injury forced her to leave the show before previews began.Anastasia Hille is the Armory’s Klytemnestra, and she is magnificent in an incandescent, utterly sympathetic interpretation so riveting that you would do well to spend the entire first intermission watching Klytemnestra simply sit onstage, in a stupor of grief that ages her by the next act. Hille will win plenty of partisans over to Team Klytemnestra — even as the play would also like to draw its audience’s attention to the needless, cyclical horror of murder and revenge, and the self-righteous delusion that just one more death will even the score for good.In the terrifyingly real depiction of a loving marriage that’s destroyed before our eyes, Hille is matched every inch by Angus Wright as Agamemnon. After Klytemnestra realizes that he plans to murder Iphigenia (beautifully played at the performance I saw by Alexis Rae Forlenza, one of two young actors who share the role), the fight they have is so brutal and raw that you may recall its dynamics from the most damaging domestic argument you’ve ever had.“This is about a person who came from us, who would never have lived if we hadn’t loved each other,” Klytemnestra says, pleading her daughter’s case in the hope that her husband will hear reason. “What you are destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.”Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Hille.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy the end of their fight, the current of intimacy that ran between them for years is shut off. They are for all intents and purposes exes, effective immediately, with any further emotional access denied. Which, in the bruised and intricate psychic honesty of this play, does not mean the love has entirely vanished.On a set by Hildegard Bechtler so chic it looks like what you’d get if Norman Foster and Richard Serra retrofitted an ancient castle, “Oresteia” seeks to implicate us in its patterns of needless destruction: Whenever the lights come up on the auditorium, we’re reflected in the set’s long glass wall.The show is peppered with tiny oddities and puzzlements that become clear, mostly, at the end. Slight spoiler: The reason that the grown-up Orestes (Luke Treadaway) watches much of the action from outside the periphery of the house is that he is immersed in a court proceeding, to determine his guilt in the murder of his mother. His memory is often uncertain. The woman questioning him (Kirsty Rider) doesn’t really buy that his other sister Electra (Tia Bannon), who conspired with him to kill Klytemnestra, even existed. The text hints that maybe she didn’t. There is a whiff of mystery about it all.But the tragedy of it is paramount — one set in motion by superstitious men who took it on faith that the life of a little girl didn’t matter, and who never stopped to think that her mother would counterattack.OresteiaThrough Aug. 13 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More