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      Interview: From France. With Love

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      Charis Ainslie and Sibylla Archdale Kalid on This Last Piece of Sky

      This Last Piece of Sky is set across two cities, following two young people. The first is Louis, who finds himself in hospital as his family cannot cope with his behaviour, and it’s here he dreams of a girl called Sarah. The second person just so happens to be called Sarah, and she also is causing her family anguish due to her behaviour at school. But what is it that connects the two?

      The play is from French writer Kevin Keiss. But don’t panic, Charis Ainslie has translated it into English for us, and along with director Sibylla Archdale Kalid, is now bringing it to The Space next week. We catch up with both of them in this interview to find out why they think audiences are going to love this play.

      Our knowledge of French theatre is, to be honest, lacking, so we thought we’d ask Charis and Sibylla to give us a little education.

      Bonjour, mesdames… ok, that’s the limit of our French*, but we guess you speak it?

      Charis: Yes, I’ve been visiting France since my early teens and lived there for two years. As a translator, I’m working with it in written form pretty much all the time, and I’m currently working with three French writers so am getting to speak it a lot more.

      So what first attracted you both to this French play?

      Charis: I loved the mysterious feel of it. It’s quite poetic, but it also has a real sense of urgency to it. When I first read it I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen. The characters are brilliant – right from the start I could hear what the characters would sound like in English, and that’s really exciting. I particularly loved the character of Granpy. He initially comes across as a cantankerous old man, always finding fault with his grandchildren. But as soon as the family is threatened, it becomes clear that he’s fiercely loyal and will do anything to defend them.

      Sibylla: The first time I read it I was left with a lot of questions and a lot of images in my head of the key moments in the play; a TV that won’t tune in, a young person’s scribblings on a wall, a family walking to a bus stop. The text is fairly sparse and doesn’t explain itself, so it was a tantalising creative challenge to get under its skin and fill in the gaps.

      How easy is it to translate a play such as this? Do you have to alter much to keep the lyrical flow of the original?

      Charis: The writer, Kevin Keiss, uses language creatively to create the ‘other-wordliness’ of the play and in particular to convey the mental state of the main character, Louis. Louis believes he has discovered the secret of the universe, and his language expresses both his wonder – in flowing, lyrical passages – and his sense of frustration and despair – when his speech becomes clipped and truncated, marked by abrupt hiatuses. The biggest challenge was to recreate that without worrying that it sounded ‘off’ or awkward. Once I gave myself permission to recreate the strangeness of the language, I really enjoyed playing around with the poetry of it and recreating its rhythms.

      The play explores mental fragility in young people, is this a theme that is the same whether it’s France on England?

      Charis: I think it is, yes. Although Louis is depicted as a mathematical genius, there’s a truth beneath that romanticised version of neurodiversity. The isolation. The medical world’s preoccupation with diagnosis. The sense that no-one is actually listening to you and what you have to say – if you could even put it into words. There’s also something hugely relatable in the way Louis’s family responds to him – their concern, and their sense of powerlessness as they try to support him. And after the last two years there’s something universal in the feelings of isolation depicted on stage. But there’s also a sense of solace created by the unlikely friendship of these two young people, without the play ever descending to offer solutions or trite answers.

      Sibylla: I think what’s so compelling about the play is that it’s not clear that it is about mental fragility; is Louis mentally unwell, or is he on to something that the rest of us are too close-minded to entertain? Either way, as Charis says, the resulting experience of isolation is close to the bone at the moment, whichever side of the channel you live on.

      The play is set across two locations, one of which has experienced a military coup, is this based on real events or pure fiction?

      To answer this, it’s helpful to start with Louis’s experience. Louis is discovering – or at least suspects – that the universe does not operate along our accepted notions of space and time. It’s significant that, while nobody believes him, the world of the play confirms his suspicions. We’re invited to believe in a world that could be tomorrow or yesterday, that has echoes of real events but could also be presaging the future. The clues in the play don’t necessarily point to a real place or a given reality but invite us to believe in something we can’t explain. In that sense, we inhabit Louis’s world.

      Have you thought how you plan to portray two separate locations when you are at The Space?

      Sibylla: One of the challenges of staging the play has been depicting two distinct locations whilst also allowing for the increasingly fluid boundaries between them as the story goes on. Technology – a TV, phones – have been a useful way of delineating different time periods, and our design consultant, David Medina Aguila, has carefully designed the costumes to use colour and period details to indicate different times and places. The script itself also helps in this sense, as the tone and energy of the scenes set in the two places are notably distinct from each other.

      Charis: We’re also going to be exploring the connections and porosity between the two worlds through sound, music and lighting. We’re working with a brilliant Sound Designer, Raffaela Pancucci, and a brilliant Lighting Designer, Catja Hamilton, and we’re very excited to see what they come up with! There’s already a strong musical motif in the play: Louis speaks of the genius of Glenn Gould – a Canadian pianist who made a famous recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the 50s – and there’s a strong parallel between them: Gould was a musical genius, and a very eccentric individual. Music is also an inherent part of Sarah’s family – her grandfather was a classical violinist. One of the most poignant scenes in the play is when the family are forced to destroy their record collection because music has been banned by the regime.

      You’re taking the play to a local school after your run at the Space, what is the reason you wanted to do this?

      Charis: We want to make theatre for young people, and we want to make it accessible to everyone. The Space has strong connections to its local community, and we wanted young people there to be able to enjoy a theatre experience they might not otherwise have – to imagine other worlds and dream a little after what they’ve been through these last couple of years. It fits with our view of what theatre is about more generally. I mean, just this week people are talking about a show that’s charging £400 for a ticket! That’s the polar opposite of what we want to do. So many small theatres are putting on great work – and the Space has an incredible programme: great theatre, great acting and shows that will echo in you long after.

      Any plans for what is next for you, or this play, after this run?

      Charis: We’d love this play to have another lease of life – not least because it’s the first part of a trilogy! And I also have another play by the same writer for younger children that I need to find a home for. It’s about a boy whose father has died, and his quest to remember his father’s voice – aided and abetted by a huge whale, two beautiful golden birds and a family of guinea pigs. What’s not to love?!

      Sibylla: Working with the cast on this play has only whet my appetite to explore this play further; it’s opened up so many possibilities and strengthened my conviction that this is a furiously timely piece of work, so we hope to bring it back to audiences soon. To continue Charis’ children’s theatre theme, I’m also in development with a BSL-integrated devised piece about a female astronaut for 7-11 year olds, which I am co-directing.

      Photos from rehearsals

      Merci beaucoup pour votre temps to Charis and Sibylla. This Last Piece of Sky plays at The Space between 17 – 21 May. The play will also be livestreamed on 17 May, and available for a further two weeks on-demand following the end of the live run. Further information and bookings can be found here.

      You can follow the play’s Twitter account here to keep up to date with any further announcements.

      * We would also like to apologise to our reviewer Jane Gian for suggesting we cannot speak French. Jane is fluent and will be even be reviewing Dom Juan at The Vaults during one of its French performances this weekend. More

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      Leaked Video of Jesse Williams’s Staged Nude Scene Denounced by Union

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      Despite an attempt to ban smartphones in the theater, a video of the actor’s nude scene in the Broadway production of “Take Me Out” circulated widely online.The first time “Take Me Out,” a baseball play with nude shower scenes, arrived on Broadway, there were no iPhones in the theater, because they hadn’t been invented yet.This year, when the acclaimed play returned for its first revival, the nonprofit presenting the show instituted a no-phones policy, requiring patrons to put their phones in locked pouches before entering the theater, in an effort to prevent the photographing of naked actors.The effort failed.This week, someone posted to social media video of a naked Jesse Williams, a star of the play, in a shower scene. The video circulated widely.The incident prompted outrage both from Second Stage Theater, the nonprofit producing the play, and Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents stage performers.“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the creation and distribution of photographs and videos of our members during a nude scene,” Kate Shindle, the union president, said in a statement. “As actors, we regularly agree to be vulnerable onstage in order to tell difficult and challenging stories. This does not mean that we agree to have those vulnerable moments widely shared by anyone who feels like sneaking a recording device into the theater.”Second Stage, which distributes Playbills with an insert reminding patrons that “photos and videos are strictly prohibited,” issued its own statement, saying “we are appalled that this policy has been violated” and that “taking naked pictures of anyone without their consent is highly objectionable and can have severe legal consequences.”The theater said it was seeking to have the online videos removed, and was adding security at the theater to enforce its phone ban.Second Stage has been using Yondr pouches to restrict phone use — when patrons arrive, they are asked to turn off their phones and put them into the locked pouches, which the patrons hold through the show, and then hand back to be unlocked after it is over. The system, used at some comedy shows, pop music concerts and other live events, is imperfect — some people have figured out how to open such pouches, while others smuggle in phones despite the rules.“Take Me Out,” written by Richard Greenberg, is about homophobia in baseball; Williams plays a team star who comes out as gay and confronts discomfort among some of his teammates. In 2003, the drama won the Tony Award for best play; this week the current revival picked up four nominations, including one for best revival, and three for actors, including Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Michael Oberholtzer. Oberholtzer can also be seen, naked, in some of the online video.In the run-up to the show, Williams, best known for “Grey’s Anatomy,” discussed the nudity. “It’s terrifying in all the right ways,” he said on “The Ellen Show” last year. In an interview this year with The New York Times, he was more sanguine. “I’m here to do things I’ve never done before,” he said. “I have got one life, as far as I know. It’ll be fine.” More

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      ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ Review: Palestinians in Exile, Yearning for Home

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      Mona Mansour’s rich trilogy, now at the Public Theater, follows a displaced Palestinian family.The matinee audience was filing out of the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall the other afternoon when stagehands started dismantling the set — a rickety home in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where Mona Mansour’s border-crossing, alternate-realities epic “The Vagrant Trilogy” winds up.The scenery coming down before we’d left the room was a jolt: I’d wanted to stay in the show’s world for just a little longer. Which is saying something when a production stretches to three and a half hours, including two intermissions. And when, courtesy of the Covid pandemic, both lead roles are being performed by understudies.But Mansour’s rich trilogy about a displaced Palestinian family is captivating, and for all the protean theatricality of Mark Wing-Davey’s gorgeous production, watching it feels somehow like being engrossed in a novel, with that same luxuriant sense of immersion and transport. Woven of poetry and politics, threaded with comedy, it’s Stoppardian in its intellectualism and doesn’t shy from poignancy.Is it poor form to invoke a British dramatist when discussing a play that’s in no small part about the ravages of British colonialism? Quite possibly. But Mansour’s Palestinian characters are smitten in their own ways with touchstones of British culture. And Stoppard is, after all, a Czech-born immigrant.Nadine Malouf, left, and Rudy Roushdi, who play multiple roles in the trilogy of plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Hour of Feeling,” the trilogy’s first play, starts with a meet-cute on a hilltop near Ramallah in April 1967. Adham, a young scholar just back from Cairo and cultivating an expertise in the poetry of Wordsworth, is busy avoiding a party. Abir, a rebellious young woman raised on a nearby farm and modeling her personal style on the film star Julie Christie, has come up for a smoke. (There is much atmospheric smoking in these plays, which are spoken mainly in English and occasionally in Arabic, with English supertitles.)Abir and Adham’s attraction is instant. By June, when they fly to London for a lecture that he is giving, they are newlyweds. And when the Six-Day War breaks out during their trip, they face a choice: to remain abroad, in cosseted academia, or return home to upheaval.The rest of the trilogy explores each of those possibilities, proffering two different, incompatible realities that stem from 1967. The second play, “The Vagrant,” finds Abir and Adham in London in 1982, having decided to stay in a country that will always view them as other. In the third play, “Urge for Going,” set in the Lebanese refugee camp in 2003, home and family lured them back all those years ago, only to mire them in a different exile.“Palestine?” Abir’s brother says dryly to his niece, in the camp. “Your father’s homeland, thirty minutes away, depending on traffic.”Mansour has calibrated the narrative tension so expertly that in each reality we are deeply invested in the fates of her characters, among them Adham’s mother, Beder, embodied by Nadine Malouf as a funny, formidable, thoroughly unsentimental woman who has fought to give her brilliant boy the best possible chance in a hostile world. Her other son, Hamzi (Osh Ashruf), is a gentle, kindly man whom she left behind as a child, with his father, in that refugee camp, where he spends decades of his life.Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, as Abir, and Bassam Abdelfattah, as Adham, acquit themselves honorably. Yet maybe because they are understudies, they draw their characters in broader strokes than they might if they had more time to settle into such large roles. (Tala Ashe and Hadi Tabbal, both wonderful Off Broadway in “English” this spring, ordinarily play Abir and Adham.) They are surrounded by a solid company, even if some accents get slippery in the London scenes.Those scenes are often fun, though, especially the visuals; Allen Moyer’s sets, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes and Tom Watson’s wigs evoke the ’60s and ’80s to delightful effect. (Lighting by Reza Behjat; sound by Tye Hunt Fitzgerald and Sinan Refik Zafar; and video by Greg Emetaz are also excellent.) Malouf has comic magnetism as a flirtatious ’60s Londoner in fabulous orange slingbacks who can’t keep her hand off Adham’s thigh, while Ramsey Faragallah is eccentrically funny as a floppy-haired — and, it turns out, bigoted — ’80s professor who stirs his tea with the eraser end of his pencil.With Wordsworth’s poetry a motif throughout the trilogy, Mansour examines the sustaining psychic power of a beloved landscape — a home that one may leave but must be able to revisit. And through the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali’s “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” a chunk of which makes an affecting monologue by Hamzi in the third play, Mansour suggests the quiet tragedy of the geopolitical bystander: “His God-given rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea.”It’s in this final part of the trilogy that we meet the two tightly bonded characters most likely to smash our hearts: Abir and Adham’s teenage daughter, the ebulliently ambitious Jamila (Malouf, at her most splendid), and her vulnerable brother, Jul (Rudy Roushdi, tenderly lovely). As bookish as Adham, Jamila is studying to get into college and join the wider world.For now, though, she still sometimes pretends with Jul that he is a talk-show host and she a marvelously successful guest with a string of doctorates.“How did you get out of the refugee camp?” he asks.“Well, it’s a long story,” she says.The Vagrant TrilogyThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Which Way to the Stage’ Review: Theater Buddies, With Claws Out

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      In her new comedy, Ana Nogueira spins zippy fun out of a fairly conventional story about a friendship strained by resentment.If you have ever fantasized about casting your favorite musical or ranked the actresses who have played Mrs. Lovett, chances are you will be familiar with Jeff and Judy. You might even be them.We first meet the two besties by the stage door of the Richard Rodgers Theater. They are waiting, Playbills at the ready, for Idina Menzel — this is 2015, when Menzel was still headlining “If/Then” and stars occasionally met with fans after a performance (an activity now curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic).Judy (Sas Goldberg) and Jeff (Max Jenkins) are arguing over the respective merits of Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone in “Gypsy,” and Ana Nogueira’s “Which Way to the Stage,” at MCC Theater, is off, its needle already close to the red zone. At least Jeff and Judy agree on one thing: either of those two stars is better than the one they refer to simply as “Imelda” (Staunton, unless Marcos also appeared in “Gypsy”). “Like a caricature of a caricature of a performance by my mother in the Temple Beth Israel talent show,” Judy says.You might have sussed out by now that Judy is straight and Jeff is gay, and both have a way with quips.Admittedly this is a fairly conventional setup, but Nogueira spins zippy fun out of it, the theater references are on point, and the director, Mike Donahue, imparts a nice screwball-comedy pace. Then come the variations on the theme.Michelle Veintimilla, from far left, Evan Todd and Sas Goldberg at a drag performance by Max Jenkins’s character, Jeff.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe first is that, somewhat predictably, Judy and Jeff are actors themselves — though she makes a living as a real estate agent while he is a Crunch instructor with a drag gig on the side.We also gradually realize that their friendship is heavy with barely contained resentment. Jeff lectures Judy when she uses a slur for gay men, only to casually drop demeaning words for women. After she takes off during his drag tribute to Menzel, a wounded Jeff demands to know what she thought of his act. It is obvious the last thing he wants is an honest opinion, but he pressures Judy anyway.“Which Way to the Stage” is about the performances people put on for themselves, their friends, family and potential loved ones, as well as the identities they hide behind. (Nogueira has experience both as a writer and an actor, with acting credits on such shows as “The Vampire Diaries” and the Starz series “Hightown.”)This tension between who we are, who we think we are and the personas we project is especially fraught for actors, and it weighs heavily on Jeff and Judy. (Goldberg, a standout in “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” and “Significant Other,” excels at suggesting hurt underneath sarcasm.) The veiled animosity between the two is brought to a head when they meet the handsome Mark (Evan Todd), who has the easygoing, insouciant charm of a born star — or at least someone who can live off his acting.Under its avalanche of knowing jokes, “Which Way to the Stage” has serious matters on its mind, including the undercurrent of homophobia and misogyny that can suffuse the relationship between straight women and gay men. Nogueira’s writing is at its best when she lets anger bubble to the surface, but like Jeff and Judy with theater, it seems as if she can’t quite decide whether her play is, at heart, about love or cynicism.“Which Way to the Stage” builds up to a conflagration that is the equivalent of an 11 o’clock number. But like many musicals, the show doesn’t know what to do with itself afterward, so it ends big with a move that feels like a Hail Mary pass. The attempt is fun to watch, but it also comes up short.Which Way to the StageThrough May 22 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      In a Chaotic Tonys Season, It Was an Honor Just to Open

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      If the roster of Tony Award nominees announced on Monday looks even odder and more random than usual, well, it’s been an odd and random season. For that matter, it wasn’t even really a season. The surfeit of nods — many categories that usually feature five nominations this year feature six or seven — pales in comparison to the scope of eligible productions, the first of which (“Girl From the North Country”) opened in March 2020, just before the pandemic blew an 18-month hole in Broadway. If my math is correct, that was 100 years ago.The pandemic that distorted the season also distorted the awards process. Of the 34 productions the 29 nominators were allowed to consider, 15 opened in April — six in the last week of that month alone. It couldn’t have been easy. I know that for critics it was a maddening game of Whac-a-Mole, trying to hit each show as it popped up before suddenly vanishing, riddled with shutdowns and star absences. In the end, I missed two: “Mr. Saturday Night,” which received five nominations, and “The Little Prince,” which was ineligible and by all accounts unintelligible.The nominators presumably missed none, and of those 34 eligible productions, they honored a whopping 29. No musical, not even the dreadful “Diana, the Musical” was skunked, even if some awfully good plays, including “Pass Over” and “Is This a Room,” found themselves forgotten. Was that because they were among the first to step up in the wishfully post-Covid Broadway reopening that began in August? Having opened perhaps too early they definitely closed too quickly.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in the revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” which received a nomination for costume design.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut those shows are also more cutting edge than commercial awards typically know how to handle, using downtown theatrical formats to present difficult dramatic material. (“Pass Over” is a surrealist look at violence against young Black men; “Is This a Room,” a spoken transcript of an interrogation about government secrecy.) The nominations suggest a willingness to accept only one of those challenges — just as, at the other end of the spectrum, they seemed ready to welcome plays that are hackneyed in form or content but not both. The revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, received one nomination, for Jane Greenwood’s costume design.Still, poring over my personal Tonys spreadsheet, which I keep in a special air-locked safe with my original cast vinyl recordings and Playbills printed on papyrus, I am impressed with the nominators’ determination to spread the wealth.There are plenty of familiar names, of course, including the previous Tony winners Mary-Louise Parker, LaChanze, Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Phylicia Rashad and Patti LuPone — the last two superlative in supporting rather than leading roles.But there are plenty of breakthrough names as well. The contest for best performance by a leading actor in a musical is likely to pit Broadway newbies Myles Frost (the star of “MJ”) against Jaquel Spivey (the star of “A Strange Loop”) — never mind Jackman or Billy Crystal in the same category. The nominees Sharon D Clarke (“Caroline, or Change”) and Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Square”) are likewise the pair to beat for best performance by a leading actress in a musical — never mind Foster.That those four leading contenders are Black underscores that the Tonys, like the season itself, are making some progress in their push toward greater diversity. By my count, more than a third of the 136 total nominations honored shows and people you might not formerly have seen much of on the Great White Way — which I think we can finally stop calling by that name.Not that you “see” all of that diversity even now. We are also benefiting from diversity backstage, including many of the directors and designers and choreographers behind “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” “Paradise Square” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Inclusion is insufficient if it’s merely public facing.A lot of that new-to-Broadway talent arrived not individually but en masse, thanks to Black authors, directors and producers who made diverse hiring a priority. One result is that this was a season of ensembles, including the six “thoughts” featured in “A Strange Loop,” the seven abstract nouns portrayed by the cast of “Thoughts of a Colored Man” and the seven colors of “For Colored Girls.”When the group is the star: The women of “POTUS” include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn some of those shows, as well as in “Six,” “The Minutes,” “Clyde’s,” “Skeleton Crew” and “POTUS,” there are no leading roles at all; the group is the star. When that’s the case, it can seem perverse to single out just one performer from a carefully balanced company, though the nominators did just that with their nods to Kenita R. Miller in “For Colored Girls,” Rachel Dratch and Julie White in “POTUS,” and John-Andrew Morrison and L Morgan Lee in “A Strange Loop.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      James Ijames on Winning a Pulitzer and Making ‘Hamlet’ a Comedy

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      The 41-year-old playwright’s show “Fat Ham,” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the pandemic.The play “Fat Ham,” a comedic riff on “Hamlet” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the coronavirus pandemic.But on Monday, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on its script and following a streaming production mounted last year by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And on Thursday, performances of the first production before live audiences are scheduled to begin Off Broadway at the Public Theater, in a coproduction with the National Black Theater.“Fat Ham” was written by James Ijames, 41, who grew up in Bessemer City, N.C., and was educated at Morehouse College and Temple University (he studied acting). He now lives in Philadelphia, where he is one of several co-artistic directors experimenting with a shared leadership model at the Wilma Theater; his other notable works include “Kill Move Paradise,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”About an hour after the Pulitzers were announced, I spoke to Ijames (his surname is pronounced “imes”) about the play and the award. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Brennen S. Malone and Lindsay Smiling in the Wilma Theater’s streaming production of “Fat Ham.”via The Wilma TheaterSo for those of our readers who have never heard of “Fat Ham,” what’s it about?“Fat Ham” is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that has been transported to the American South, and it takes place in the backyard of a family that owns a barbecue restaurant. At its core, the play is about how this Hamlet character, whose name is Juicy, is meeting and undermining his family’s cycles of trauma and violence. It’s really about how he brings the rest of his family with him to that realization that they don’t have to continue these cycles of abuse and violence, and that they can do something completely different with their lives. It’s a comedy in the end, so I take “Hamlet” and I essentially make it not tragic anymore.Where did the idea come from?I just have always loved “Hamlet.” When I was in college, I did a truncated production of it. And the scene when we first meet Hamlet, in the court, I did that scene, and it was just like, “This is such a great scene. I think the whole play could exist inside of this moment. All of the players are in the same room together, and what if everything just erupted in this court in this moment, so the whole sweep of Hamlet was in one scene?” And I wanted to take that and bring it a little closer to my experience by putting it in the mouths of people that look like me and sound like me, that have my rhythms and eat the kind of food that I grew up eating. And I think it illuminates something about the original.Obviously, we’ve been living through a pretty unusual period, and you have won this prize after a virtual production. Tell me about that.We basically got Airbnbs and put all of the cast and the crew in a bubble, and they filmed it over the course of a month. It turned out really beautifully, and we were all really proud of it. And I’m really thrilled for people to see an in-person performance of it.How do you think the in-person experience will be different from the streaming experience?The actors can feed off of the reactions from the audience that they hear. So I’m really excited about having that experience. I also did a few tweaks on the play because it’s moved from the digital format to the live format. So I’m curious to see how that meets audiences.Why are you a playwright?When I was about 13, my parents split up and I had a lot of anger and frustration, and one of the ways that my family tried to encourage me to work through that was to write. And so I started writing little skits and plays, and I just have been writing in dramatic form ever since. I think it’s a way for me to metabolize all the things that I’m thinking about or curious about.The 2022 Pulitzer PrizesCard 1 of 12The awards. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Star L Morgan Lee on Her Trailblazing Tony Nomination

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      L Morgan Lee made theater history on Monday, becoming what production officials described as the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a featured actress in “A Strange Loop.”Lee’s Tony nod was one of 11 for the musical, which opened April 26 and is a meta-work about a Black gay writer trying to make art while being distracted by his intrusive thoughts. Lee plays one of those thoughts — “Thought 1.”In a telephone interview on Monday hours after learning of her nomination, Lee, who made her Broadway debut in the musical, said she found her nomination “overwhelming.”“I know of many trans and nonbinary and gender-expansive people who are out here trying to be seen and trying to put stories out into the world,” she said. “Having this happen today helps more people know that it’s possible.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.This was your Broadway debut. Tell me about what it was like to see your name on the screen this morning with a Tony nomination.I’m still trying to wrap my head around the importance of a Black trans woman in a principal role on a Broadway stage, period. And the importance of that, especially in a time when so many of us are simply fighting for our basic well being. So to be able to be part of a story that is challenging the form in so many ways — challenging what people have known Broadway to be — it’s a gift.It is all bigger than me. I’m really excited about what will happen after these steps. I’m very excited about who is in the audience that will see this show or my performance or now this nomination and know that it is possible for them to pursue theater.What does it say to you that a show that describes itself as a “big, Black, and queer-ass Great American Musical” can be the big winner of this morning’s nominations?I would like to say that it means that there is hope. I’m careful with the word change, because in order for us to be in the type of world and space we want to be in, it’s not as much about change as much as it is about growth. You’re not going to suddenly get rid of all the people who don’t agree with you. But we do need to figure out how to make space so that all of our stories can actually be told.To that point, for anyone out there who says “Hey, this got 11 nominations — I’m interested — but I’m not sure this musical is for me,” what would you tell them?Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      Interview: Taking a Stroll Down Gutter Street

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      Gutter Street on bringing their Street Night to ChewFest

      We had our first walk down Gutter Street last year with Feathers. At the time we weren’t aware of the company, but the play certainly had us interested in future work. We also had no idea about their Gutter Street Nights. But Chewboy Productions were singing their praises during a recording of our podcast, and informed us that they would be taking over the Friday night of the upcoming ChewFest at Lion and Unicorn. So it seemed the perfect opportunity to delve into their world and find out just what it is that they have planned.

      It was our pleasure then to chat with co-founders, Leo Flanagan, Isobel Warner and Josh Barrow and ask, just where is Gutter Street?

      What do you have planned for ChewFest?

      We’re going to be bringing Gutter Street Nights to ChewFest. Our monthly new writing night for musicians, poets, actors, comedians and all manner of artists. We ask five featured performers to create or curate a piece of work centred around one central theme, this month’s theme is ‘Homeward’. We then do a little pub quiz and open the stage for the audience to jump up and share whatever they like on our open mic. We usually host these nights at our spiritual home of Green Note in Camden but we’re excited to travel up the northern line one stop to Kentish Town and bring Gutter Street Nights to the Lion and Unicorn Theatre!

      How have you gone about selecting the five creatives for the night?

      For this particular event we have asked five artists who have all performed with us at some point over the last few years. We usually programme creatives from those who have reached out to us or chatted to us on one of our nights. Our aim with the whole company is to build a community and develop real relationships with creatives. It’s great when someone has come down to one of our nights to support a friend and on a whim jumps up on the open mic, and then the next month they’re sharing their first bit of writing as a featured performer with us.

      Do you help with input and advice along the way?

      We don’t really involve ourselves with the writers pieces. We do strive to get at least one first time writer at every one of our nights, people who have flirted with the idea of writing something of their own but never got round to it. We’re always there for those creatives and if they would like a bit of support or guidance we’re more than happy to help and provide a bit of feedback but really the first time we’re seeing their pieces are when they’re on stage!

      Your own work is all based along your fictional “Gutter Street”, does this mean they are all based on the same dystopian world that existed in Feathers?

      All of our plays and stories do take place in our fictional ‘Gutter Street’ world, but we’ve given this world a very wide timeline of 10,000 years to fill! Feathers takes place somewhere along this timeline and we do have other plays and tales that take place around the same time, but our next story could be 1000 years before the events of Feathers. We didn’t want the plays to be direct continuations or sequels/prequals but anthologies. Individual fables that if you were to watch one on their own you’d enjoy the story presented to you, but if you had seen a few and connected with some of the moral questions, myths and background set up, you may walk away with a different experience to someone who hasn’t.  

      Is ChewFest a great opportunity to get your work seen by a new audience?

      Absolutely! We are all massive fans of the work that ChewBoy put on and when they asked us to produce one of our ‘Gutter Street Nights’ for the festival we had to jump at the chance. It’s also a great challenge to adapt from our regular venue (Green Note) which is so ingrained into the DNA of our nights to the beautiful black box space of The Lion and Unicorn. We hope that our regulars feel the vibe and personality of Green Note bleeding through at the Lion and Unicorn this month and that newcomers get a real flavour of our regular nights.

      And you promise an open mic slot at the end of your evening at ChewFest, is that something you normally do, do you get many takers then?

      We do an open mic at the end of every ‘Gutter Street Nights’ and it’s always such an energetic and exciting part of the evening, because it’s full of creatives who didn’t really expect to perform or share that little poem they’ve had written on their notes app for months, or that song they’ve had in the back of their minds. We’re never short of people who want to get up and perform, especially after watching the first five featured performers. They’ve seen the warm, enthusiastic and vocal response from the ‘Gutter Street Nights’ audience and think ‘I fancy a bit of that!’. We also film everyone’s performances so they can take it away and use it for whatever they like, which as performers ourselves, we know is really useful.  

      Gutter Street Night Audiences

      Our thanks to Leo, Isobel and Josh for their time to chat with us. Gutter Street will be taking over the Friday Night of ChewFest. Further information and bookings can be found here. More