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      Julianna Margulies on ‘Left on Tenth’: ‘This Is the Play I’ve Been Waiting For’

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      It was a meet-cute right out of a New York City rom-com.The actress Julianna Margulies was walking her dog near Fifth Avenue and 10th Street when a woman with her own dog stopped to ask if she was who she thought she was.“I love your book,” she said of Margulies’s 2021 memoir, “Sunshine Girl,” which follows her rather strange childhood and beyond, up through her time on “ER” and “The Good Wife.”The woman pulled down her face mask: “I’m Delia Ephron.” She, too, had written a memoir, “Left on Tenth,” about life, death and taking a chance on love for a second time, and it was coming out soon. Could she drop off an advance copy?“I plotzed because I’ve just always loved her writing,” Margulies said.While taking refuge from the heat last month, Margulies recounted this scene with Ephron, which happened a few years ago, over an iced cappuccino in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village.Then in January, Margulies went on, she received an email out of the blue from Ephron, saying she had turned “Left on Tenth” into a play — and she wanted Margulies for the lead.“So she emailed it,” Margulies said, “and I sat down, read it cover-to-cover within an hour, just raced through it, sobbed, laughed, emailed her right back, and I said, ‘This is the play I’ve been waiting for.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Working on a Sri Lankan-Australian Epic, He Learned His Family’s Past

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      As the acclaimed “Counting and Cracking” makes its North American debut, the playwright describes the work as “my soul on a plate.”The playwright S. Shakthidharan has lived in Australia since he was a toddler, but when he speaks of his homeland, he means Sri Lanka.That’s where he was born, where he spent his first birthday, where his ancestors were rooted. Then in 1983, the South Asian nation descended into what would become a 26-year civil war. His family, part of the country’s Tamil minority, had the means to flee to safety. So they did, going to India, Singapore and finally Australia, in 1984.“I do think of Sri Lanka as my homeland, but I think of Australia as my home,” he said the other day, his accent redolent of Sydney, where he grew up. “I think I carry the two simultaneously. Sri Lanka lives somewhere in my chest. Always. Wherever I am.”He was saying this in New York, after a rehearsal of his epic play, “Counting and Cracking,” in which the personal and political are inextricably entwined. Jet lag had a hold of him, but he was game to talk about the show, which has a largely South Asian cast of 19 and a running time of three and a half hours (intermissions included).Shiv Palekar, center, and other performers at N.Y.U. Skirball. Multiple trips to Sri Lanka and India were involved in assembling the cast.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAn autobiographically infused hit in Australia, where it had its premiere in 2019, it is now in previews at N.Y.U. Skirball in Greenwich Village. Produced by Belvoir St Theater and Kurinji, and presented by the Public Theater and N.Y.U. Skirball, it’s a multigenerational saga about a Sri Lankan-Australian family and the dangerous fragmenting of a society that can drive people to leave their beloved country and risk trying to forge a new life elsewhere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kara Young Is Charming in Rom-Com ‘Table 17’ Following Her Tony Win

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      The Tony winner leads a top-notch cast in Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production of Douglas Lyons’s hopeful new play.There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      15 Shows to See on Stages Around the U.S. This Fall

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      Matthew Broderick stars in “Babbitt” in Washington, D.C., and five companies nationwide will stage Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning play “Primary Trust.”For theater companies across the United States, the start of the new season finds them still in a time of uncertainty, with audiences not yet returned to prepandemic levels. It makes sense, then, that a lot of fall programming favors the cozily familiar: revivals of known quantities and fresh takes on classic tales. This list skews more toward the adventure of wholly new work — but it’s peppered with tempting adaptations, too.‘COLD CASE’ An Inupiaq woman from a Native village in Alaska battles to retrieve her aunt’s body from an Anchorage morgue in this new play by Cathy Tagnak Rexford (HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country”). The script won the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, whose previous winners include Sanaz Toossi’s “Wish You Were Here.” DeLanna Studi directs. (Sept. 6-22 in Juneau, Alaska, and Oct. 11-20 in Anchorage; Perseverance Theater)‘PRELUDE TO A KISS A MUSICAL’ Rita and Peter are young, beautiful and headlong in love when an old stranger supernaturally swaps bodies with her: his soul in Rita’s, hers in his. Craig Lucas’s 1988 fable of a play, which became a 1992 rom-com movie, now morphs into a musical, with a score by Daniel Messé (Lucas’s collaborator on “Amélie,” the musical) and Sean Hartley. Kenneth Ferrone directs. (Sept. 10-Oct. 19; Milwaukee Repertory Theater)Jonathan Gillard Daly, left, and Chris McCarrell in “Prelude to a Kiss a Musical,” which premieres in September at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.Don Rebar‘PRIMARY TRUST’ Eboni Booth’s graceful, aching, gently funny play about a lonely man quietly slipping through the cracks of a small American town won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama. This fall, productions are cropping up across the country, including at Signature Theater in Arlington, Va. (Sept. 10-Oct. 20); Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass. (Sept. 18-Oct. 13); La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, Calif., where Knud Adams, who staged the premiere Off Broadway, directs (Sept. 24-Oct. 20); the Goodman Theater in Chicago (Oct. 5-Nov. 3); and Seattle Repertory Theater (Oct. 24-Nov. 24).‘OH HAPPY DAY!’ The playwright Jordan E. Cooper joins forces again with the director Stevie Walker-Webb, who staged Cooper’s wild sketch satire “Ain’t No Mo’” on Broadway. This new comedy, a reimagining of the story of Noah’s Ark, has original music by the gospel songwriter Donald Lawrence and stars Cooper as an estranged son arriving unexpectedly at a family barbecue in Mississippi. (Sept. 19-Oct. 13; Baltimore Center Stage)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

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      New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Review: Putting Putin’s Rise Onstage

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      The best-selling, much discussed French novel is now a play. It gives a similarly humanizing view of the Russian leader and his inner circle.Perhaps it was just a matter of time before Vladislav Y. Surkov became a stage character. Surkov, an influential ideologist who spent two decades in the orbit of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, once trained as a theater director; in 2011, the novelist Eduard Limonov described Surkov as having refashioned Russia “into a wonderful postmodernist theater,” according to the London Review of Books.“The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a new French production directed by Roland Auzet, makes a pointed case for Surkov’s pivotal role in Russian, and international, politics. Staged through Nov. 3 at La Scala Paris, a fairly new Right Bank playhouse, it is an adaptation of a French novel that sold over half a million copies after Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2022.The book, a fictionalized account of Surkov’s life and career, was the work of a former political adviser to Italy’s government, Giuliano da Empoli. (An English translation was released by Other Press in 2023.) In France, the book was so popular that some worried it could shift national policy toward Russia.Onstage, it’s easy to see why. Philippe Girard plays the lead role as an expressive, eccentric figure, often sympathetic. Vadim Baranov, as Surkov’s fictional alter ego is called, loves rap music, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock, we learn, and speaks in dark quips. (“What’s a Soviet duo? A quartet who went abroad.”)Yet throughout, Baranov also sheds light on the ruthless rise of Putin’s party and the roots of the president’s power. “The destiny of Russians is to be governed by descendants of Ivan the Terrible,” Baranov says near the beginning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Roommate’ Pairs Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow on Broadway

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      “Sweet and sour?” Patti LuPone suggested, as if considering options on a menu. She looked questioningly at Mia Farrow, who was sitting next to her in a small atelier in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. We were in the heat-soaked throes of early August, and the women had just arrived, depleted, from what they described as an “airless” rehearsal room nearby.“I don’t know,” LuPone said. “It’s kind of negative, the sour …” She hesitated. “SALTY!,” she then exclaimed, in the clarion voice that has resonated from so many stages over the past five decades. “Sweet and salty.”LuPone was trying to define the yin and yang of the most unexpected double act of the new Broadway season. Farrow (she would be the sweet) and LuPone (salty) are the stars and entire cast of Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” which is in previews and opens on Sept. 12 at the Booth Theater, under the direction of Jack O’Brien.They portray women of radically dissimilar backgrounds and temperaments, who come into intimate and potentially combustible contact. These are roles for which Farrow and LuPone, longtime friends who have homes in the same Connecticut county, would seem to be naturals. “We complement each other, because we are so different,” LuPone said.Farrow, whose habitual manner melds openness with wariness, said: “I don’t know if at the core we’re so different. We may superficially appear to exhibit certain things that are ours in different ways. But going deeper than that. …” Her voice trailed into an ellipsis.Within that ellipsis, you have the essence of both Silverman’s play and the tantalizing pairing of its performers. A story of what happens when a meek Iowan homebody (Farrow) takes in a disruptive stranger from the Bronx (LuPone, natch) as a lodger, “The Roommate” ponders the Gordian knot of identity for two women at the crossroads of late middle age and the questions, as Silverman puts it, “of who gets seen and who doesn’t.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Dae Kim Isn’t Afraid to Fail

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      It’s tough to see the resemblance.In the Broadway production of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face,” starting previews at the Todd Haimes Theater on Sept. 13, Daniel Dae Kim will star as DHH, a fictionalized, none-too-sympathetic character based very loosely on the Tony-winning playwright.“Who wouldn’t want to have their doppelgänger be Daniel Dae Kim?,” said Hwang, whose play premiered Off Broadway in 2007 and who helped cast Kim in this Roundabout Theater Company revival.Who indeed? Since Kim first broke through in 2004 as the brooding, morally conflicted former enforcer on the hit ABC series “Lost,” and later as a tough, shotgun-blasting detective on the CBS reboot of “Hawaii Five-0,” he has become known for a certain type of character. Earnest. Serious. Enigmatic. Dignified.As the King of Siam, “Daniel stood in the middle of this enormous space and just held the entire audience in the palm of his hands,” said Maria Friedman, who performed alongside him in a 2009 staging of “The King and I” at London’s cavernous Royal Albert Hall. “There’s nothing slight about him.”Kim revisited the role in 2016, making his Broadway debut in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “The King and I,” where he was praised by Ben Brantley, a former chief critic of The New York Times, for his “astute comic timing” and his character’s “restive, self-delighted intelligence.”In “Yellow Face,” Daniel Dae Kim is lampooning a playwright who became an advocate for the Asian American community. “He’s trying to do all the right things,” Kim said, “but parts of his personality get in the way of making the right decisions.”Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More