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      New Soho Rep Season Spotlights Emerging Artists

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      A Bengali-English play and a meditation on the work of Whitney Houston are among the offerings.Soho Rep, a 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan, has always been a home for experimental, formally inventive work. But a play in its new season is beyond anything one of the company’s three directors, Meropi Peponides, ever thought it would be able to support: A Bengali-English play.“I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams when I started working at Soho Rep that that would be something we would ever be able to produce,” Peponides said. “It’s so exciting to be able to represent the experiences of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.”The play, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is part of the theater’s 2022-23 season, which is set to run from October to July 2023. There will be three world premieres, two of which were written by artists who were members of the first class of the theater’s pandemic-era job creation initiative, Project Number One.The premieres “are emblematic of what Soho Rep does,” said Peponides, who directs the theater alongside Sarah Benson and Cynthia Flowers. “We commit to an idea when it’s still an idea and develop it all the way through to production.”First up is Kate Tarker’s “Montag” (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), a play about female friendship set in a basement apartment in a small German town near an American military base. The production, which is set to be directed by Dustin Wills (“Wolf Play”), is described as a “domestic thriller, a sleep-deprivation comedy and a rebellion celebration under threat of annihilation.”It will be followed by Chowdhury’s bilingual “Public Obscenities” (Feb. 15-March 26, 2023), which originated during his time as a member of Project Number One. The production is a co-commission and coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company’s National Partnership Project. It tells the story of a queer studies doctoral student who returns to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black American boyfriend and makes an unexpected discovery. Chowdhury will also direct.Closing out the season is “The Whitney Album” (May 24-July 2, 2023). The play, by Jillian Walker (who also participated in Project Number One), explores Walker’s relationship to the life and death of Whitney Houston, as well as perceptions of her in the American imagination. Jenny Koons directs.And Project Number One returns, with its third class, this time with the stylist and costume designer Hahnji Jang and the lighting designer Kate McGee. The initiative brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members ($1,250 per week) with benefits, including a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work. More

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      Libyans Try to Move On From Conflict With Comedy and Burgers

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      MISURATA, Libya — When Taha al-Baskini won a part in a new play about soldiers who reunite after dying in combat, his costume was already in his closet. His onstage camouflage pants were the same ones he had worn as a militia fighter during Libya’s most recent civil war a few years ago, when an airstrike injured Mr. al-Baskini and killed several of his comrades as they defended their city.“People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies,” Mr. al-Baskini, 24, whose brother died in the same conflict, said after a recent rehearsal for the play, “When We Were Alive,” at the National Theater in Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city. “You never forget when they were smiling and talking just moments before.”As an actor, “I try to show reality to the people,” he went on. “The message of the play is: ‘No more war.’ We’ve had enough war. We want to taste life, not death.”Friends playing in Tripoli. Many Libyans embraced militia culture as teenagers, but the trend is waning.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesTo the audience, that message is hardly a tough sell.After more than a decade of violent chaos — years that saw their country overrun by foreign mercenaries and subjugated by militias whose power made them a law unto themselves — Libyans are clamoring for peace. The question is whether the country can maintain a brittle truce even as two rival governments and their foreign backers jockey for power, raising fears that Libya is, once again, sliding toward conflict.To achieve lasting peace, Libya needs not only to find its way out of the current political crisis, but also to demobilize a generation of young men who have grown up knowing little but war.Misurata, whose powerful militias were key to overthrowing Libya’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt, is full of such men. More than 40 of them — mostly veterans of Libya’s conflicts — now act at the National Theater, a former meeting hall for Colonel el-Qaddafi’s political party. They hope to bring Misurata entertainment, they say, and some semblance of normalcy.But there is no avoiding the city’s damage, physical and psychic alike, onstage.A damaged building in Misurata. “The theater is impacted by Libya’s reality,” said an actor, adding: “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“I’d rather do something funny to lighten people’s moods, instead of reminding them of the friends and brothers they lost,” said Anwar al-Teer, 49, an actor and former fighter who raised money and put his own earnings toward converting the venue, which city officials were renting out as a wedding hall, into the National’s 330-seat theater.“But the theater is impacted by Libya’s reality, even when you don’t want it to be,” he said. “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”Libya’s 2011 revolution made rebels into heroes. In the years that came after, as the country splintered into rival political factions and warring regions, many former rebels and new fighters joined armed militias, hoping to defend their hometowns or simply to make a decent living. Militias could pay three times as much as the average salary or more. It was not only the money that appealed. At a time when weapons spoke loudest and wearing a militia uniform inspired deference, young men took to imitating the fighters’ style, even if they had never fired a shot: driving pickup. trucks with blacked-out windows, wearing their beards long, dressing in fatigues.Taha al-Baskini, left, Mohammed Ben Nasser, bottom, and others rehearsing for “When We Were Alive.” Many of the actors say they hope to bring a sense of normalcy to the city.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“They were seen as heroes,” said Mohammed Ben Nasser, 27, a rising star in Libya’s small-but-growing television industry who also acts in “When We Were Alive.” “It was how you got money, power, cars.”Mr. al-Teer, the theater’s owner, has used social cachet to steer young men toward acting instead. Put them onstage, he says, and their social media likes will pile up. (Women are in the audience, and a few act, but in a country that remains deeply conservative, most of his actors are men.)“It’s like with TikTok,” he said. “Everyone wants to get famous.”For the four decades of Colonel el-Qaddafi’s rule, no one was allowed to be more famous than the dictator. Soccer players’ jerseys carried no names, only numbers, lest they gain a following. Paranoid about what it saw as the contamination of foreign ideas, the regime banned foreign films. If Libyans saw anything else during that period, it was thanks to smuggled-in videotapes and, eventually, illicit internet downloads.A building pockmarked by bullets in Misurata. “People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies,” said Taha al-Baskini, an actor, recalling his time in Libya’s civil war.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesSo Mr. al-Teer is teaching many Misuratans how to be a theater audience, down to when to clap. He stages comedies, tragedies and histories from Libya and abroad. He plans to add movie screenings, which will make his venue Misurata’s first cinema since the few allowed under Colonel el-Qaddafi closed down during the revolution. One Misuratan father recently told him that when it opens, it will be the first cinema his children have ever visited. Many of the plays carry an antiwar message. “When We Were Alive” is a black comedy in which dead soldiers return to confront their general, who survived and went on to glory. One character had joined up for money, another for fame, a third because he wanted to fight. They all ended up the same: dead.Weaponry used in the 2011 conflict, in Misurata. Its powerful militias were key to overthrowing Colonel el-Qaddafi during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“I feel like the audience knows what we we’re talking about,” Mr. al-Baskini said. “The generals are doing political deals with the enemy, while we’re fighting and giving our lives.”Mr. al-Baskini still bears scars on his left palm and left knee from Libya’s most recent civil war, from April 2019 to June 2020, in which forces from the country’s east marched on Tripoli, the capital.Three hours’ drive along the coast west of Misurata, Tripoli, too, has violence etched all over it: Half-destroyed houses still litter Tripoli’s outskirts, and families still occasionally scramble to get children home from school when rival militias clash.A business that made light of such violence might seem unwelcome. Yet right downtown is a burger joint called Guns & Buns, where most of the items on the menu are named after weapons. The Kalashnikov burger comes with mayo; the grenade with onion rings; the PK machine gun with tomatoes.Soccer practice in Misurata in May. During Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule, soccer players were not allowed to have names on their jerseys, a measure meant to prevent them from gaining fame.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“DON’T CALL 911, WE JUST MAKE BURGERS,” reads a sign on the back wall — though the “N’T” has been rubbed out.The owner, Ali Mohamed Elrmeh, 40, opened Guns & Buns in 2016, when Libyans were battling to expel the Islamic State. He said the concept was controversial, but it helped his business stand out. It has become so successful, he’s about to open another branch.“Now we have kids, teens, even girls — when they hear the sounds of weapons, they can say whether it’s a Kalashnikov or a 9-mm gun or a grenade,” he said. “This is the Libyan reality. But my idea was that when you say ‘Kalashnikov’ or ‘PK,’ these things don’t have to frighten people. Now you just laugh.”In Tripoli, half-destroyed houses from the civil war still litter the capital’s outskirts, and families still occasionally scramble to get children home from school when rival militias clash.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesLibyans hardly needed burger names or plays to remind them of the violence that has infused every part of life. After more than a decade, Libyans say, they are fed up with the lawlessness, the impunity and the violence that the militias have come to stand for. These days, dressing like a rebel is more likely to draw sneers and headshakes than imitators.Mr. Ben Nasser, the television actor, said he had many friends who had embraced militia culture as teenagers, including some who dropped out of school to join. Now, the trend is waning, and most have gone back to university or into business. A few, seeing his success, have joined him in show business.“They realized, ‘We’re fighters, but we have nothing,’” he said. “They started feeling ashamed of being fighters, because now it’s a shame on your family to be a fighter. When they looked at others, they saw you can succeed without being a fighter.”Ali Mohamed Elrmeh, 40, the owner of the Guns & Buns burger joint, in Tripoli, Libya. “My idea was that when you say ‘Kalashnikov’ or ‘PK,’” he said, “these things don’t have to frighten people. Now you just laugh.”Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesThe financial incentive to fight is also fading: Libya has been largely stable for the past two years, though politicians continue to pay militias for their own protection. One such politician, Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, the prime minister of Libya’s Tripoli-based and internationally recognized government, has blunted demand for militia jobs (and netted popularity) by handing out subsidies to families and newlyweds.But recent clashes between militias loyal to Mr. Dbeiba and others aligned with the Sirte-based rival prime minister, Fathi Bashagha, are a reminder that violence is never far away.“People are too used to these things,” said Alaa Abugassa, 32, a dentist ordering a Guns & Buns burger on a recent afternoon. “It’s become part of their reality. It’s the new normal.”A day at the beach in Tripoli. A generation of young men have grown up knowing little but war.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times More

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      ‘Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies’ Review: A Tragic Pageantry

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      Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm’s ambitious and sometimes metaphysical comedy playfully tries to tackle thorny issues at 59E59 Theaters.What defines Blackness? The idea that there might be a clear answer is absurd. But skin color is all it takes to land two diametrically opposed teenagers in the same jail cell. In the eyes of the law, at least, the connotations of race are obvious.The laughable and at times deadly assumptions that attend Black men in America are the subject of “Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies,” an imaginative and occasionally metaphysical comedy of identity by the playwright Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm. The production at 59E59 Theaters has the playful mood and aesthetic of an insightful and ambitious school project, traversing thorny terrain with deceptive simplicity.Marquis (Lambert Tamin) is splayed out on the ground playing dead, a pose he calls “Trayvonning,” after Trayvon Martin. “It’s a meme,” he explains, like planking or owling. Though his cellmate, Tru (Tarrence J. Taylor), doesn’t see the point of it, he’s not surprised to hear that Marquis was caught doing such nonsense with some white friends (in a cemetery, no less) and that only Marquis was arrested.“Typical,” says Tru, who embodies certain conventions associated with Blackness — fly kicks, street smarts, bravado — that Marquis utterly lacks. Adopted by a white mother (Tjasa Ferme), an arrogant lawyer who easily springs both boys from the town slammer, Marquis lives in Achievement Heights, where he attends an all-white academy. His mom thinks Tru would be a good (that is, Black) influence on her son and invites him to live with them (assuming that Tru comes from poverty and lacks sufficient parental care).Marquis’s classmates are caricatures of whiteness, affluence and ignorance — the girls are all blond and selfie happy, and his best friends, Hunter (Zachary Desmond) and Fielder (Henry James Eden), are troublemakers who make him the scapegoat. Marquis fits right in with his peers, with their retro-preppy uniforms and lofty life goals (costume design is by Latia Stokes). But if racial identity is a performance, Tru considers that Marquis doesn’t have the right script. So Tru writes one, called “Being Black for Dummies,” that winds up in the wrong hands.“Hooded” demonstrates a voraciousness for forms and ideas. Chisholm deploys an array of devices — scenes that reset and repeat, a light-up laugh sign — that disrupt the narrative rhythm and provoke indirect associations. Greek theater looms large (the set design, of deconstructed cardboard columns, is by Tara Higgins), and Chisholm engages with Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy to illustrate the duality inherent to his young Black characters. “There’s a little bit of Apollo and Dionysus in all of us,” Marquis tells Tru. (In case you couldn’t tell, Marquis is the kind of teenager who reads Nietzsche in bed.)It’s a lot to pack into two hours, just as a dummy’s guide to being Black could hardly be contained between binder clips. “Hooded,” presented by Undiscovered Works, is evidence of a provocative and spirited writer whose inkwell overflows onto the page. The play’s exploration of race as a kind of tragic pageantry suits its current form, but there’s more style and substance here than ultimately coheres into a convincing theatrical argument.The director, George Anthony Richardson, gives the production a freewheeling assurance. It is pleasantly lo-fi, but for projections, designed by Hao Bai, that draw wry inspiration from European art, like the schoolyard that resembles Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting. The adult actors play their teenage characters with a touch of exaggeration, suggesting both the volatile eagerness of youth and that Chisholm is interested in the origins and politics of self-presentation.“I am Black, and so whatever I do is acting Black,” Marquis tells Tru. “Or not. Or whatever!” he says, growing flustered. As with any signifier, meaning is determined by the beholder as much as by the object itself. The question isn’t what defines Blackness, but who.Hooded; or Being Black for DummiesThrough July 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

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      In ‘Downtown Stories,’ Theater That Uses New York as Its Stage

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      “Mic check 1, 2, 1, 2. Welcome to the official unofficial unauthorized ‘Hamilton!’ walking tour,” the actress Michelle J. Rodriguez called out into her portable voice amplifier, a headset with a microphone and speaker, worn like a fanny pack. “Just kidding, it’s authorized. I just like to say that.”So begins “Uncovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams,” one of two walking tours in “Downtown Stories,” a series of interactive theater being staged through June 25 in downtown Manhattan. Presented by Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit organization that manages Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district, and En Garde Arts, an experimental theater company, the three productions — two guided tours and one “docu-theater” play — weave New York City’s landmarks into the storytelling.The actress Michelle J. Rodriguez leads a fictional walking tour about Alexander Hamilton. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“Who wore it better, Lin-Manuel or Alexander?” Rodriguez continued with the enthusiasm of a college tour guide, drawing from her days as an actual campus tour guide at Williams College. Fun facts are delivered like a history lesson until you remember that you’re on a fictional walking tour. Were Hamilton’s gold epaulets really sold at auction for $1.15 million? (They were.)The play takes its audience members through crowds of rushed New Yorkers and unhurried tourists, perhaps some on their own “Hamilton & Washington” history tours, meandering from Bowling Green Park to the back alley of Marketfield Street — stopping for a moment north of Bowling Green Park to observe tourists gawking at the bronze “Charging Bull” sculpture. (“Boy, do people really like to take pictures with an ass,” Rodriguez says.)Anne Hamburger, the artistic director of En Garde Arts, said the inspiration for the work came from “theater being ingrained with the city at large.”Rodriguez is enthusiastic, drawing from her days as a college tour guide. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesShe added, “That’s what I’m excited by, coming together with a group of artists and saying, ‘How would you use this city as a stage?’”All three productions tell the tales of what the company calls “dreams from New York’s oldest streets.” In “Uncovering Downtown,” directed by Jessica Holt and co-written by Holt and Mona Mansour (“The Vagrant Trilogy”), audiences follow an out-of-work Puerto Rican performance artist who takes a job leading a “Hamilton!” walking tour. “We the People (Not the Bots),” written by Eric Lockley and directed by Morgan Green, introduces a man visiting from the future. He’s here to teach lessons about the past in hopes of stopping the world from becoming a robot-controlled society. The time traveler, played by Lockley, takes his audience to the Soldiers’ Monument at Trinity Church, where he embodies a prisoner of war in 1777, and to the Department of Motor Vehicles at 11 Greenwich Street, where he tells the story of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat tagging Lower Manhattan with graffiti art.In an afrofuturistic guided tour written by Lockley, he plays a time traveler who teaches lessons about the past to protect against a possible robot-controlled society.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesIn writing a sci-fi production heavy on rendering historical moments, Lockley said he wanted to think about how Black people might “use ancestry in the future to arm ourselves.”“I want to remind people that we are more than what we see,” he said. “There’s a spiritual element to it.”In the documentary-theater piece “Sidewalk Echoes,” performed at the John Street United Methodist Church, the playwright Rogelio Martinez and the director Johanna McKeon tell the stories of working immigrants. An Irish immigrant lands a job at an Italian restaurant but can’t pronounce orecchiette. A Catholic man from India begins working as a gas station attendant but quits after three days when the owner asks him if he wears a diaper on his head. An Uzbeki immigrant by way of Israel earns his barber’s license by demonstrating a haircut on a homeless man.The production “Sidewalk Echoes” blends fact, fiction and history. The story draws from real interviews with local business owners in New York City. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“When you see someone sleeping on the subway it’s not because they don’t want to work,” the barber says. “Maybe they just work too hard.”These are the stories of the people working in downtown Manhattan’s businesses. To write the script, Martinez listened to hours of interviews that Hamburger had conducted with local business owners. He then created narratives about immigrants building their lives in New York City. Some of the lines in the play were taken verbatim from their conversations, others are composites of multiple characters, blending together history, fact and fiction.“As an immigrant myself, I’m always interested in reinventing yourself and changing the pattern of one’s stories,” said Martinez, who is from Cuba. “This is my chance to listen to a community reflect. And from there, I could craft my story.”In the show, a banker turned food and wellness advocate tells a friend back in her native Australia that here, “people are really restless.”“We reinvent ourselves,” she tells the audience, sitting in the church pews. “Body cells replace themselves every seven years or so. And that’s in our DNA. And it just so happens it’s in New York’s DNA, too.”Each 45-minute walking tour concludes at neighborhood restaurants where audience members can use their $20 ticket as a meal voucher to support a local eatery. “Sidewalk Echoes” is free. More

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      She Won a Tony. But Deirdre O’Connell ‘Can’t Think About That.’

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      When Deirdre O’Connell returned to work two days after winning this year’s Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, the production staff of her current show, “Corsicana” at Playwrights Horizons, greeted her with a balloon arch and cake. O’Connell, 68, enjoyed it. For a little while, anyway. But “Corsicana,” a lonesome, oblique quartet by Will Arbery, is in previews. It begins press performances soon. O’Connell needed to rehearse. So she put the celebration aside.“I just went, ‘Well can’t think about that anymore,’” she said, later that same day. “I have to work.”Perhaps you saw last fall’s “Dana H.,” the show that won her the Tony, in which she spent a harrowing hour and change lip-syncing a woman’s recollections of her abduction by a white supremacist. Or maybe you have already caught “Corsicana,” in which she seems to unseal her character’s soul as casually as you or I uncap a beer. Or, at some point in the last four decades, you might have witnessed the performances that earned her Obies, Lucille Lortels, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize.O’Connell in “Dana H.,” lip-syncing and “brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor,” Jesse Green wrote in his review.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut possibly you have never seen O’Connell onstage, so here is what I can tell you: She is an actress of rigor and possibility. She will abandon herself to a character without apology or vanity or self-preservation. Some actors are simply better at the business of being alive, at seeming to present life onstage, and she is one of them.Her absolute focus, Lucas Hnath, the “Dana H” playwright, told me, “creates an opening for something — call it life, call it the spirit. Something ineffable and wild rushes in to fill the space.”Or here is how Les Waters, the director of “Dana H.,” put it: “She is available to life.”O’Connell — Didi, to her intimates — is petite and nimble, with a queenly nimbus of red hair and a default expression, offstage anyway, of intent curiosity. She grew up in western Massachusetts, the granddaughter of a Ziegfeld girl and the daughter of Anne Ludlum, an actress and playwright. As a child, she was, as she put it, “a classic theater nerd,” shy and uncomfortable offstage. “And then strangely comfortable and excited” when performing, she said.Jamie Brewer, left, and O’Connell in the Will Arbery play “Corsicana,” now in previews at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter two years of college, she made her way to Boston, apprenticing with an experimental theater company there, and then joining others — in San Francisco, in Baltimore. That scene took a lot out of her. “I felt a little too vulnerable just having my life swallowed up by it,” she said, so in her mid 20s she moved to New York, determined to become what she called “a regular actress.” (Has anyone ever thought of O’Connell as “regular?”) Yet she carried experiment with her. Even in her most controlled performances — “Dana H.” among them — there is something feral, ungovernable at the heart.She spent the next five years pouring drinks, pouring coffee, learning how to audition, learning how to act. In her late 20s, right around the time she found the rent-stabilized East Village apartment (with a bathtub in the kitchen) where she still lives, she booked the national tour of John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God.” Except for the five years she spent in Hollywood, amassing just enough jobs for a nest egg and a Screen Actors Guild pension, she has rarely been offstage since. Screen acting, it turns out, never gave her what she wanted, a feeling of un-self-consciousness, of surrendering to a role in a way that sounds a little like religion, a little like ego death.“I’m into the numinous experience,” O’Connell explained. “I’m into the thrills.”She hadn’t expected to win the Tony on Sunday night. With good reason. “Dana H.,” which required O’Connell to mouth along to prerecorded interviews with the playwright’s mother, demanding complete submission to the text and its rhythms, is more challenging than most Broadway fare. And it had closed in November, meaning that some Tony voters might already have forgotten it. Besides, three of the four women in her category (LaChanze, Ruth Negga and Mary-Louise Parker) are far better known.O’Connell had watched the Tonys for decades, once in person, but much more often at home, in that same rent-stabilized apartment that she shares with her partner, Alan Metzger, an educator. She knew that at the moment an award is announced, everyone stares at the losers. So as the Tonys entered its final hour, she prepared herself.“I was ready to be so awesome and classy,” O’Connell recalled.But she didn’t lose. And so O’Connell, who had appeared on Broadway only twice before, found herself walking up the aisle of the Radio City Music Hall, in a black jumpsuit from Rent the Runway. On that jumpsuit: “I thought it was going to be a little more Cinderella, but then I was like, I guess not, I guess I’m old,” she said. (None of the designers her producers contacted offered to dress her. Their loss.)O’Connell in her dressing room at Playwrights Horizons. “There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “You really don’t know how to behave.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesA person could argue that this award was the culminating moment of a nearly five-decade career. And yet, O’Connell — who looked awesome, classy and indisputably shocked — used her 90 seconds of speech time to look forward, manifesting the theatrical future she hopes to see.Holding her statuette, she said, “Please let me standing here be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”After receiving the award, a golf cart shunted her to one press room, then another. The ceremony had ended by then. She had left her purse at her seat when she walked onstage. “What New Yorker walks away from their keys and their phone?” she said. Still, she managed to reunite with Metzger, and they attended an after-party at the Plaza and a second one at the Omni and then it was after 3 a.m. and she was in a car, heading back to that bathtub in the kitchen.The next day, Monday, she slept late and then read through congratulatory texts and emails, too many to ever answer. Washing dishes, she suddenly felt devastated that she hadn’t thanked Metzger in her speech; she had felt too reluctant to reveal any of her private life. Which is to say, there were a lot of feelings, most of them good.“There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “Because you’re so suddenly shot out of a cannon, and you really don’t know how to behave.”On Tuesday, after cake, she spent some hours rehearsing the role of Justice, a librarian, an anarchist, a would-be lover, a friend. Sam Gold, the director of “Corsicana,” who in an email noted both her “free and open energy” and her extreme technical precision, gave her notes. She catnapped. Then she performed — baring her character’s soul, without showiness or fuss.“I like the excavating of finding another person inside me,” she said of her process.After bows, she changed her clothes and tidied up. Just past 10 p.m., she emerged into the fetid air of Hell’s Kitchen, greeted a few friends and fans, and went to find a restaurant that was still open.Even offstage, over a mediocre dinner at a sidewalk table on a block that smelled of sewage, it was something fine and rare to be held in her attention, to be, for a moment, her collaborator.This, anyway, has been Arbery’s experience. “It almost feels a little unfair to get to work with someone so good,” he told me.She marveled that she had been able to keep going for typically long hours, at typically low pay, for all of these years. That cheap apartment helped, she said. As did the fact that she has no children, though she is close to Metzger’s. The Tony could have come to her earlier. “I could have taken it at 48. I could have used it,” she said. But she has never felt that she missed out on much. The numinous experience, the thrills, they have always been near at hand. And she is happy to have received the prize now.“I certainly didn’t think that it was going happen this way,” she said. “It wasn’t a plan. But it’s pretty sweet.” More

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      Review: In High-Tech ‘Orchard,’ It’s Hard to See the Forest for the Trees

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      Jessica Hecht, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Chekhov himself too often get overwhelmed by this ambitious Arlekin Players Theater adaptation.A black-clad figure shuffles a curving path through the cherry blossom petals carpeting the ground. Ancient, dignified, slightly stooped, he is searching for his cane in this strange and beautiful landscape where almost everything, including the cherry blossoms, is a shade of swimming-pool blue.The opening moments of “The Orchard,” Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” belong to Firs, the serf turned servant who has been attached for generations to the same house in the countryside, and devoted to the same frivolous family now in peril of losing their beloved home. It is Firs who reliably pierces our hearts at the end of “The Cherry Orchard,” so to start with him here is fitting — all the more so because he is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov with the ineffable magnetism and captivating grace that have always made him a riveting performer, and that now make him the quietly scene-stealing anchor of this ambitious and cluttered production.We don’t know it yet, but that brief interlude — with a single line of dialogue about the weather, and the pleasure of watching Baryshnikov whirl when a wind whips up — is the last we will have before this show starts obstructing our view of the actors with video frequently projected on its transparent downstage scrim.It is extraordinarily frustrating, like trying to watch a play through a black-and-white film: a film that is often showing a close-up of what is happening on one part of the stage while blocking something else — such as Baryshnikov making a choreographed movement that we can’t see clearly even though he’s right there in the room with us. And this theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center is a fairly intimate space; we are not in need of a zoom lens.Baryshnikov, as the servant Firs, and Hecht as Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house.Maria BaranovaA clue to the root of the chaos is the giant robotic arm sitting center stage in Golyak’s production for the Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theater, where he is artistic director, and its Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab. “The Orchard” is a hybrid, meant to provide one experience to in-person audiences and another, more interactive experience to online audiences. One of the show’s multiple cameras, none particularly well deployed, is on that robotic arm. There is also a robotic dog, who is surprisingly charming. (Robotics design is by Tom Sepe.)Experimenting with virtual theater is how Arlekin made a bigger name for itself during the industry shutdown; Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, the other star in this cast, first worked with the company online.But the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly, which hampers both incarnations. Seeing it in person is better, or certainly it was on Wednesday, when I caught the matinee at the theater and watched the virtual version — which is also live, and supplemented with activities like touring virtual rooms inhabited by Baryshnikov as Chekhov — from home at night. As intended, online viewers miss the beginning of the stage performance; why this would seem like a good idea I cannot fathom.It turns out that those close-ups on the scrim can be helpful if you’re watching the show on a laptop. On the other hand, the online video jerked and stopped so often on my screen, and for so long, that there were whole chunks of action I heard but didn’t see; the video feed cut out before the curtain call; and the scripted online ending mysteriously failed to appear. The ending I watched in person, though, didn’t entirely come off, either, because the final, vital projection never happened.A robotic arm gathers some of the video that is projected live onstage and shown online. In person, the images often prove distracting to a viewer captivated by the performers.Maria BaranovaWhat about the play, though? Well, that’s exactly the problem: You have to hack your way through an enormous amount of distraction merely to get to it, and even then the production doesn’t have the storytelling clarity the play needs to land. On the sidewalk after the matinee, I overheard some audience members who had never seen “The Cherry Orchard” and were left none the wiser, in terms of plot, after “The Orchard.”This disjointed production gives the impression of not being especially interested in comprehensibility. For all its projections (designed by Alex Basco Koch), significant passages of dialogue in American Sign Language, Russian and French go untranslated.Still, it is pretty to look at, with Anna Fedorova’s set ravishingly lit by Yuki Nakase Link, and the actors clad in Oana Botez’s elegantly contemporary take on period costumes. And Hecht is a gorgeously frothy Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house: sentimental and self-absorbed, with a decorative layer of ever-pleasant femininity and a spritz of teasing sexiness.During Wednesday night’s performance, when Hecht broke off to take a few live-chat questions from the virtual audience, she remained in character as a viewer reported a long-frozen computer screen.“I am so sorry,” she said, noting that a solution would require someone versed in such things. “I can only speak of matters of the heart.”One would think that this production might speak eloquently of matters of the heart — not only because Chekhov’s play does, but also because the Kyiv-born Golyak and his Arlekin, with its immigrant origins, are no strangers to the reality of having to leave a beloved home and build a life elsewhere.Aside from Madame Ranevskaya’s less-favored daughter Varya, played by Elise Kibler with a touching hopefulness, there’s not much in this production beyond sweet, funny, delicate Firs to suggest a heart at all.But, ah, Firs — so certain all his life that if he looked after this family, they would do the same for him. When the truth dawns at last, with the shock of disillusion, he collapses into human wreckage. Even in utter stillness, he is fascinating.The OrchardThrough July 3 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan, and online; theorchardoffbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘The Big Mix’: Little Island’s 3-Week Party

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      The director Tina Landau knows firsthand how much the New York City waterfront has changed over the decades. In 1996, she did a production of Charles Mee’s “The Trojan Women: A Love Story” at the East River Park Amphitheater. “I remember going there, and we cleaned up syringes and condoms,” Landau said.She was speaking backstage at another riverside amphitheater, albeit in much improved conditions: at the public park Little Island in Manhattan, which opened last year at Pier 55 on the Hudson and where Landau is directing “The Big Mix,” a new performing arts festival through July 3. The roster features prominent names like Idina Menzel, Tonya Pinkins and Peppermint alongside poets and fire artists, neighborhood dance troupes and choirs, tap dancers and marching bands.“I wanted to focus on representation of as many kinds and types and ethnicities and abilities and genders,” Landau said.One of Little Island’s four artists in residence, Landau has come a long way since her days picking up trash before a show; she’s a member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, and was a Tony nominee for “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.” But the inspiration behind “The Big Mix” came not so much from a high concept as from simply looking at the calendar.“I saw that Pride weekend was a week after Juneteenth and a week before July 4th,” Landau said. “I started thinking about what these holidays are: What do they mean to different people, and why do we celebrate them? So each show is in honor of, and an interrogation of, the holiday that falls on that weekend.”While she takes seriously the meaning of these commemorations, Landau also wants to entertain. “Let’s get a ton of different people in here and mash them up, and let it be sloppy and crazy and big and powerful and fun,” she said.From left, Zach McNally, Ianne Fields Stewart, Allan K. Washington and Marla Louissaint rehearsing at Little Island for a Pride Week performance. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJoshua Henry (“Carousel,” “Waitress” and the upcoming Broadway run of “Into the Woods”) is the M.C. of the Juneteenth celebration, running through Sunday, with a lineup that includes Pinkins, the singer Mykal Kilgore, the Sing Harlem Choir and the dancer Brinae Ali. Henry is fully on board with Landau’s big-tent approach.“It’s my job to make sure everyone’s having a great time,” he said in a video chat. “As I become more active on social media, people are starting to see my personality more, and I guess I come across as a fun-loving guy, which is pretty accurate,” he added, chuckling.Henry also suggested potential guests to Landau, who was all ears. “I wanted to find a way to turn over the space to voices other than my own,” she said. “For Juneteenth, for instance, I’ve invited people, but I’ve also been very open to what they want to say and how they want to say it. We’re in a very charged and thankfully transformative time, culturally.”The L.G.B.T.Q. Pride program (June 23-25) provided Landau an opportunity for some course-correction, decades after her 1994 show “Stonewall, Night Variations,” which also happened to be on a New York pier. Looking back on that show, Landau believed it wasn’t as inclusive as it should have been — leaving out people of color, homeless youth and transgender women in particular, who were all “part of that moment in time.” This time around, she said, “I wanted to honor those that I, in some way, had left out.”That’s why Peppermint, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” runner-up, seemed like a great addition as M.C. But because she could host only a couple of the Pride shows, Landau turned to the costume designer and activist Qween Jean to handle the other two. “I had been following her, and I thought, ‘She’s the real deal, she’s out there doing the work,’” she said.Another participant in the Pride celebration is the choreographer James Alsop, who had been wanting to collaborate with Landau since meeting her in 2019. “She could have said, ‘I have a sneaker full of poop,’ and I’d be like, ‘I’ll choreograph it!’” Alsop said with a laugh.Fortunately, the director had a better offer — to choreograph a group number to Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” for the festival, despite being deep in rehearsal for “The Devil Wears Prada: The Musical,” which premieres next month in Chicago.Jose Llana, right, and Brandon Contreras rehearsing a duet in front of an unbeatable backdrop, the Hudson River.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne challenge was to concentrate on the dancing and not the spectacular vista right behind the stage. “Let the backdrop do what it does and just be beautiful, and let me not think too much about it, because then I won’t really focus on the movement and the dance and the joy that I want the audience to feel,” Alsop said. “I just want to exude nothing but radiance and light.”Rounding out the festival is the Independence Day show (June 30-July 3), hosted by Faith Prince — a beloved Broadway star who won a Tony for “Guys and Dolls” in 1992 and starred in Landau’s revival of “Bells Are Ringing” about a decade later.At first, though, the actress worried that she wouldn’t be a good pick for the diverse group of performers, which includes the samba-reggae marching band Fogo Azul NYC, the poet Denice Frohman and the Heidi Latsky Dance company.“Tina said, ‘Oh no, you’re quirky in your own way,’” Prince said on the phone. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I have age on me, which is another factor.’ Just when you think you’re in your prime, they want to put you out to pasture!”Prince is familiar with at least one of the performers in the Independence Day show, the Broadway regular Judy Kuhn, but she’s particularly excited by the mix of professional artists and community members, similar to the approach in a production of “The Tempest” she co-directed at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center in 2019.“We used a lot of different groups around the city, and it was thrilling,” Prince said. “It brought so many different communities together, and they were all cheering for each other. I’m really excited that’s what will happen here.”The Big MixThrough July 3 at Little Island, Pier 55, Manhattan; littleisland.org. More

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      To Preserve La MaMa’s Legacy, a Shift in Leadership Styles

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      Championing collaboration and digital projects, Mia Yoo is forging her own path at the experimental theater incubator.Artistic directors tend to be in the spotlight twice: When they are appointed and when they leave. But looking at what happens several years into a tenure — especially one that includes a global pandemic — can be a helpful exercise for anybody interested in arts management.After a decade as the artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, in the East Village, Mia Yoo has somehow established continuity with the aesthetics and priorities established by her predecessor, Ellen Stewart, while also forging her own path.With the theater’s 60th season nearing its end (it’s currently presenting “God’s Fool,” a new work about Saint Francis of Assisi by the dance-theater master Martha Clarke), Yoo sat down to chat about two things in constant conversation, or perhaps in a constant tug of war, at her institution: the past and the present.The first still looms over La MaMa, which for decades was closely identified with Stewart, its gung-ho, charismatic founder. Over 50 years, she nurtured La MaMa into a performing arts incubator of international repute. And then, in 2011, she died.“I always say Ellen could have burned this place down if she wanted to, because she built it,” said Yoo, who picked up the artistic-director baton when she was in her early 40s, about the same age Stewart was when she created LaMaMa in 1961. “I know she wouldn’t do that, but there’s a part of me that thought she could because she created it. Now it’s up to us as a community to make sure that it continues.”Ellen Stewart in 1965. She nurtured La MaMa into a performing-arts incubator of international repute. “Now it’s up to us as a community to make sure that it continues,” Yoo said.Sam Falk/The New York TimesOn a recent afternoon, she guided me through a hard-hat tour of La MaMa’s flagship four-story home at 74A East Fourth Street. The 19th-century building, which the company purchased in 1967, is in the middle of a $24 million gut renovation — financed by the city and state of New York, as well as various foundations and donors — that will finally bring it up to modern standards. The performance spaces are being upgraded, an elevator is finally being installed to ensure accessibility, and a data network will support the latest in video and audio technology.Throughout the seemingly never-ending construction — the reopening has been pushed several times and is now scheduled for this fall, or maybe spring 2023 — shows have continued to be made. That’s because Stewart had the forethought to invest in real estate: La MaMa owns 88,000 square feet spread over four buildings within walking distance of one another, as well as a property in Umbria, Italy, that is used for playwriting and directing workshops.Yoo and I had moved on to 66 East Fourth Street, which houses the company archive and the mainstage Ellen Stewart Theater. Sitting in the first row, Yoo warmly greeted children from the Brooklyn United Music and Arts Program, an after-school project that has been working with La MaMa since 2015. The children were preparing for a performance of their show “B.U. Live” later that day.Yoo herself has come of creative age at La MaMa. Starting in the early 2000s, she worked with Stewart — “there was something symbiotic and mutual in terms of what we were wanting to create,” she said — and eventually her mentor anointed her the new artistic director. No exploratory committee, no national search: Stewart decided that Yoo would be next, and that was that.In the ensuing decade, Yoo has steered the ship very differently from the way Stewart did — and, as it turned out, more in sync with the behavior expected from artistic directors these days.“They have almost polar opposite leadership styles,” Lois Weaver, a member of the long-running performance company Split Britches, said in a video chat. “Ellen was very, very much in charge: It was her theater, she had the last word, she made all the decisions. She loved her family very, very much, but it was a very, very tough love. Mia’s leadership style is a collaborative style, and her love is an extended-care kind of style. She looks after the well-being and the welfare of each of the artists and also the staff: They make collective and collaborative decisions rather than slightly autocratic decisions.”The company archive is housed at 66 East Fourth Street, where the mainstage Ellen Stewart Theater is also located.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesThis has led to management that is less top-down than Stewart’s reign — not easy when it would sometimes be more expedient to just tell someone to do something.“I tried to create an environment where we get consensus from a lot of different people, and a lot of people then ultimately become invested in how we’re moving forward,” Yoo said. “We have a lot of different programs: a play-reading series, a puppet series, the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, the Coffeehouse Chronicles series, and each of them has its own person running it,” she continued. “I try to give them as much freedom as possible.”The programming director of the Club, one of the spaces at 74A, and the curator of La MaMa Moves!, Nicky Paraiso embodies both this collaborative approach and the institution’s constant negotiation between an awe-inspiring legacy — which nurtured the careers of Harvey Fierstein, Sam Shepard, Diane Lane, Al Pacino and even David and Amy Sedaris — and the future. He appeared in the Jeff Weiss show “Dark Twist” at La MaMa in 1979, but unlike others, he essentially never left. This has helped give him a bird’s-eye view of curating as he and Yoo try to figure out how to balance the needs and approaches of different generations.“I’ll say, ‘Do we keep presenting such and such an artist? Are they doing the same work that they were doing 20 years ago?’” Paraiso said in a video conversation. “And Mia would say, ‘Ellen created this space for people to nurture their art and then they become part of the family of La MaMa.’”As with every company, the programming can be uneven, though the ratio of hits to misses seems to have improved from where it was toward the end of Stewart’s tenure. And this has been accomplished by striking a delicate balance between older artists and newcomers.In the first category is Split Britches, which has been presenting shows at La MaMa for much of its 40-year existence and in October will present “Last Gasp: A Recalibration,” an in-person production of its acclaimed pandemic video project “Last Gasp WFH.” And then you have someone like the 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist John Maria Gutierrez, who in May performed the solo show “Rockefeller and I Part 1,” contrasting his experience as the son of Dominican immigrants with the life of John D. Rockefeller Jr., on the sidewalk outside 66 East Fourth Street.“We believe,” Yoo said, “that if we create an environment and a platform for artists to explore and experiment in ways that they themselves didn’t even think possible, that potentially groundbreaking work could happen.”Olivia Galli for The New York TimesWhen he was still in high school, Gutierrez was mentored by the composer, writer and director Elizabeth Swados, a pillar of La MaMa. He graduated from New York University and he, too, found his artistic home in the East Village, joining La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company. “It was after Ellen had passed and I was the newest member,” he said in a video chat. “It was Mia who brought me in and checked up on me. She kept inviting me into her office and asking, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’”Yoo also bet on the future when it came to exploring technology’s impact on the performing arts.In a 2011 article introducing her as the new head of La MaMa, The New York Times noted that “Ms. Yoo is championing a high-tech project called CultureHub that allows theatermakers in different countries to work together by video conference. She calls this system, which allows for life-size images, ‘Skype on steroids.’” (When he was president of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Yoo Duk-hyung — Yoo’s father, whom Stewart had adopted — spearheaded CultureHub as a joint project with La MaMa.)Fast forward to March 2020, when the city’s live-performance venues shut down amid the pandemic. LaMaMa did, too, but it immediately pivoted to online programming that included everything from children’s shows to new work and chats with legacy and emerging artists. Unlike the majority of its New York brethren, La MaMa not only knew what livestreaming was but also had the infrastructure to implement it.Just like Stewart had invested in physical assets, Yoo had staked a claim on the virtual world. “I believe that artists need to be a part of that conversation — it can’t be just technologists and corporations that are in that internet space,” she said. “It’s not going to just be about money or about power, but about how we explore our humanity.”As La MaMa remained virtually busy — it’s worth noting that Yoo did all this while being paid about $65,000 in 2020, while some high-profile artistic directors making many times that salary essentially hibernated — the company also reinforced its commitment to what it calls a Radical Access Plan. According to its “envisioning statement,” a declaration of intent, that plan includes physical and economic accessibility, opportunity, representation and relevance.The work itself has remained eclectic as ever, reflecting not so much on our world’s increasing fragmentation as the idea that art can still play a unifying role. “We want curation of art at this time to be about this multiplicity of perspectives and aesthetics and forms,” Yoo said. “We believe that if we create an environment and a platform for artists to explore and experiment in ways that they themselves didn’t even think possible, that potentially groundbreaking work could happen. And, potentially, new forms could be born.”Yes, she can sound terminally optimistic, but come on — isn’t that infinitely better than the alternative? More