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      Review: In ‘I Agree to the Terms,’ It’s Raining Pennies From Amazon

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      The Builders Association explores the world of turkers, workers performing thousands of weird, low-paying tasks for an online giant.A place where “information is free” and “money isn’t everything”: That’s how Stewart Brand, the longtime editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, foresaw the future of the internet in 1985.That same year, the management guru Art Kleiner said that his “key impression” of the developing medium was “one of civilization.”And in 1996, John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” wrote that the online world was a place “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”So how’s that going?Cheap are the ironies of hindsight. Yet not as cheap as what happened to a new class of low-wage workers brought about by the internet age — in particular, a group of freelancers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform known as turkers. They are the subject of “I Agree to the Terms,” an online presentation from NYU Skirball that is less a play than an affable, informative lecture-demonstration on last-ditch labor — and an implicit criticism of it.Because this is the brainchild of the Builders Association — written by James Gibbs, one of its “core collaborators,” and directed by Marianne Weems, its founder — the genre bleed is not unexpected. Previous Builders works, including “Alladeen” (a multimedia piece about Bangalore call centers) and “Elements of Oz” (a riff on the MGM movie musical involving smartphone filters you point at the stage), have often mined delight from novel combinations of technology and storytelling.Even so, when I saw “I Agree to the Terms,” on Saturday, the novelty was causing problems. The 45-minute piece was delayed for 35 minutes by what were described vaguely as “back-end problems.”Once the difficulties were resolved, “I Agree to the Terms” went smoothly if not quite compellingly. In the first part, set during the internet’s early days, recitations from those optimistic manifestoes are interspersed with brief recreations of bulletin board testimony about sexism and addiction. The third part, a glimpse at an online future that includes metaverse avatars, virtual reality and a cyberspace bazaar selling human hearts for NFTs, seems merely glib.Only in between do we learn anything new, as our guides, Moe Angelos and David Pence, introduce the so-called MTurk world. Several hundred thousand workers, we learn, operate on that platform, performing menial online tasks for pennies, sometimes as a side hustle and sometimes as their sole source of income.Semi-scripted interviews with four actual turkers personalize the information. Adah from Florida walks us through the MTurk dashboard, which lists HITs (human intelligence tasks) and how much they pay. Michelle, an actor living in the Bronx, performs HITs on the subway, monetizing time that would otherwise be wasted. Noel, who is quadriplegic, can now work from home in New Mexico — as can Sibyl, from Alabama, who tells us she became a turker when her husband’s death left her with $35 and no source of income.“It was this or murdering chickens at the chicken plant,” Sibyl says, adding that the transportation costs for that minimum-wage work would have wiped out her earnings. At least by turking she can make, on a good day, $100, without leaving what appears to be her basement.It is perhaps for that reason she will not brook any criticism of Amazon. “I know you aren’t all sitting there and judging my pimp,” she says, warningly.That’s it for real-life drama, but there is at least some virtual excitement to come. A QR code leads you to an MTurk dashboard created especially for this production. You have 12 minutes to process as many tasks as possible, accumulating “Builders Coin” and approval ratings as you go. Some of the tasks I faced resembled Captcha challenges; others were short surveys, and a few were simply inscrutable. One, I felt sure, was an SAT reject: an analogous relations question with no satisfactory answer.In any case, I completed 14 tasks, earning $7.17, a 93 percent approval rating and a headache.If the Builders were hoping to expose another Amazonian hellhole of capitalism, I’m not sure they succeeded; the experience, being pleasant enough, was at odds with the message. While turking, I felt no more exploited than while solving the daily Wordle.A more telling exercise might have been drawn from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century scam for which the enterprise is named. That was a chess-playing “machine” operated secretly by a person pretzled into its cabinetry. Talk about back-end problems!I Agree to the TermsThrough April 3; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 45 minutes. More

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      A Playwright Makes the Scene in New York’s Living Rooms

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      In the fall of 2020, a young playwright named Matthew Gasda decided to entertain some friends by staging a one-act drama on a grassy hilltop of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The masked audience quickly realized that what they were watching was conspicuously relatable: Performed on a picnic blanket by seven actors, “Circles” presented a group of pandemic-weary friends who gather over wine one night in a city park to catch up on their lives.After the applause, Mr. Gasda, 33, passed around a hat for donations. Then he began plotting his next play.A few months later he unveiled “Winter Journey,” a drama loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came “Quartet,” a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged his next play, “Ardor,” about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. He was a long way from Broadway, or even Off Broadway, but he was grateful for the attention.“I’d long been staging plays in New York in anonymity,” he said, “but during the pandemic I became like the rat that survived the nukes. Suddenly, there was no competition.”In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.From left, Bob Laine, Bijan Stephen, Ms. Grady, Mr. Lorentzen and Eunji Lim rehearse a scene from “Dimes Square,” a new play about a downtown scene.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe reflected face of the critic Christian Lorentzen during a rehearsal of Matthew Gasda’s “Dimes Square.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe actor Cassidy Grady, under a flag blanket at the same rehearsal.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSet in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Adding a touch of realism, Mr. Gasda cast friends in key roles: Bijan Stephen, a journalist and podcast host, portrays a frustrated magazine editor; Christian Lorentzen, a literary critic, plays a haggard Gen X novelist; and Fernanda Amis, whose father is the author Martin Amis, plays the daughter of a famous writer.Since the play opened in February at a loft in Greenpoint, “Dimes Square” has become an underground hit that consistently sells out performances. The people who see the show include insiders eager to see their scene committed to the stage, as well as those who have kept track of it at a distance via Instagram. The writers Gary Indiana, Joshua Cohen, Sloane Crosley and Mr. Amis have all attended.The play, which is scheduled to start a Manhattan run at an apartment in SoHo on Friday, also won Mr. Gasda his first big write-up, a review by Helen Shaw in New York Magazine’s Vulture, that compared him to Chekhov and declared: “Gasda has appointed himself dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”After the appraisal ran online, Mr. Gasda received a text from a friend on his battered flip phone congratulating him on the fact that he had been “dubbed our chekhov.” But even as Mr. Gasda is getting his shot at success in literary New York, something about the noise surrounding his play has been troubling him.The playwright in his Brooklyn apartment.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I’m thankful for the attention, but the people coming to see the show seem to think the play is complicit with the scene, and that’s getting totally warped by them,” he said. “The play is pessimistic about the scene.”Moments before actors took the stage at a recent performance, audience members sipped cheap red wine and made small talk about the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. As the lights dimmed, Mr. Gasda, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and his usual scarf, reminded his guests to pay for their drinks on Venmo.After the performance, as the loft cleared out, one audience member, Joseph Hogan, a 29-year-old filmmaker, offered a critique: “The likability of these characters is irrelevant to me,” he said. “What’s important to me is if their insecurities are relatable. And as a person who moved to this city from somewhere else and is trying to make it here in New York like they are, I feel I can identify with them.”“If they’re not considered likable,” he continued, “then neither am I. And that’s fine with me.”The play’s cast made its way to its usual bar, Oak & Iron. There, Mr. Gasda nursed a Fernet as Mr. Lorentzen passed along an evaluation of the show.“A journalist came up to me and told me she thought you’d be just another Cassavetes rehash,” Mr. Lorentzen said, referring to John Cassavetes, the noted indie filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. “But afterward she told me, ‘No, he gets it. He’s doing his own thing.’”“I’ve gotten Cassavetes references before,” Mr. Gasda said. “But it’s not my job to be interested in what people think. My job is to keep secreting and writing.”He took a sip.“It’s great we’re getting attention,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m making money out of this. I still have my day job.”“It reminds me of this story I heard about a guy seeing ‘Einstein on the Beach,’” he continued, referring to Philip Glass’s 1976 opera. “Then the guy needed to get his toilet fixed, so he called a plumber. The plumber shows up, and the guy asks him, ‘Aren’t you Philip Glass?’ Glass tells him, ‘Yeah, but I’m not making money on the show yet.’”Mr. Gasda watches from below as George Olesky and Cassidy Grady act out a scene from his play “Minotaur.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMr. Gasda’s quest to become a New York playwright began during his teenage years in Bethlehem, where his father was a high school history teacher and his mother was a paralegal. He grew up watching Eagles games on TV with his dad and hearing stories about a grandfather’s days as a steelworker. He became bookish, compulsively reading “Ulysses” and devouring the works of the poet John Ashbery and the novelist William Gaddis.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, Mr. Gasda hopped a bus to Port Authority. He spent his first day walking aimlessly until he stumbled on Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village institution that was once a gathering spot for bohemians and Beat Generation poets. And there, even among the New York University students doing their homework, he felt at home. He soon moved into an apartment in Bushwick and started his reinvention.He wrote on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. He rocked the scarf and turtleneck to literary parties. He hung out in the stacks of the Strand and made Caffe Reggio his office, writing parts of over a dozen plays there. To make the rent, he taught English at a charter school in Red Hook and worked as a debate coach at Spence, the Upper East Side private school. He is now a college prep tutor and lives in a book-cluttered apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.But even after a decade in the city, he could get few people aside from friends and family members to see his work — until his luck changed during the pandemic, when young New Yorkers, weary of Netflix, seemed up for some live theater.Now, in addition to the second run of “Dimes Square,” another one of Mr. Gasda’s plays, “Minotaur,” is scheduled to open soon at a small venue in Dumbo. An early and intimate staging of the production included the actress Dasha Nekrasova, who has a recurring role on “Succession” and co-hosts the provocative politics and culture podcast “Red Scare.”Mr. Gasda at home.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAfter a recent “Minotaur” rehearsal in Midtown, Ms. Nekrasova and another cast member, Cassidy Grady, huddled for a smoke on the street while Mr. Gasda chatted with them. They discussed the debut novel of the moment, Sean Thor Conroe’s “Fuccboi,” as well as the new play that was rounding into shape.“‘Minotaur’ is a kind of Ibsenian drama,” Ms. Nekrasova said. “I’m enthusiastic about Gasda because he represents a burgeoning interest in theater, post-Covid, in the city.”Mr. Gasda slipped into a nearby sports bar. He ordered a glass of Fernet, and as he considered the impending run of “Dimes Square,” he suggested that audiences think about his play differently.“Ultimately, ‘Dimes Square’ is a comedy,” he said. “I’m not trying to send people to the therapist. And I’m not saying I’m better than the people in my play.”“The other side of the play is about striving in New York,” he added. “So it’s about something that’s universal, too.” More

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      Interview: Down In The Tube Station At Midnight

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      Actor and writer Will Charlton on two plays, Jumper and The Boys

      Our guest on our Runn Radio show this week was Will Charlton. Will is both an actor and writer, so there was plenty to chat about. He is currently preparing to play in Joshua King‘s Jumper at Lion and Unicorn Theatre, and straight after that, he is then gearing up for his own play, The Boys, to make its debut at New Wimbledon Theatre’s Studio space.

      Jumper is set across two time frames five years apart, both on the night’s of elections. And in the first, he is stuck on the underground with a host of other passengers. Whilst The Boys is about struggling to pay the rent and considering the option of becoming a male escort. Both gave us plenty to talk about.

      Jumper plays at Lion and Unicorn between 5 and 9 April. More information and bookings here. More

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      A Director Returns (Uncomfortably) to His Working-Class Roots

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      Christophe Honoré’s latest work, for the Paris stage, is part of a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility.PARIS — The French director Christophe Honoré, best known for films including “Love Songs” and “Sorry Angel,” has been making exceptional work in recent years — and international audiences have been missing out on it. The reason? It’s happening on theater stages in his home country.From “The Idols,” a play dedicated to a series of French artists who died at the height of the AIDS crisis, to “The Guermantes Way,” his Proust adaptation for the Comédie-Française, Honoré’s storytelling onstage has a kind of tragicomic immediacy that is instantly recognizable. His latest production, “The Sky of Nantes” (“Le Ciel de Nantes”), applies this sensibility to Honoré’s own family. The resulting journey, back to his working-class roots in the Brittany region of northern France, is fraught, yet poignantly astute.The starting point of the play, running through April 3 at the Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, is an aborted film. Honoré had long wanted to tell the story of his grandmother Odette and her 10 children — eight of them fathered by an abusive Spaniard, Puig. Honoré went so far as to cast actors and do screen tests; at one point, some videos of these tests are projected on a scrim in “The Sky of Nantes.” Yet the project never came to fruition. Instead, it became a play about the sticky nature of autobiography.Honoré has a stand-in in “The Sky of Nantes”: a young actor, Youssouf Abi-Ayad, who introduces himself as the director in the first line. The play is set in a timeworn movie theater, faithfully recreated on the Odéon stage, its red seats facing the audience. Around Abi-Ayad, six of Honoré’s relatives — Odette and Puig; his mother, Marie-Dominique; and three of her many siblings — have gathered to hear him talk about their family history and the film he is (supposedly) making about it.Honoré’s staging style is playful enough that this meta self-reflection doesn’t weigh the show down. He makes no attempt to recreate things as they might have happened: Instead, “The Sky of Nantes,” like “The Idols,” brings its characters back from the dead and invents new, casual conversations between them. (They are fully aware of their demise but seem unfazed by it.) Regularly, the actors use microphones on stands to deliver pensive monologues, or a song, to the audience, only for others to interject and draw them into spontaneous-seeming banter.And Abi-Ayad, as Honoré, gets interrupted more than anyone else. Fascinatingly, the play makes space for the other characters to disagree with the polished, screen-ready version of their lives he attempts to recount at the beginning. His boorish uncle Roger objects to a poetic description of him contemplating ladybugs on his father’s tombstone, saying indignantly: “I’m not gay!” Soon after, Odette — whose age is superbly conveyed by the much younger Marlène Saldana — offers her take on her marriage to Puig. When Abi-Ayad corrects a word she uses, she berates him for suggesting she doesn’t speak “well enough.”From left, Stéphane Roger, Marlène Saldana, Chiara Mastroianni, Jean-Charles Clichet, Harrison Arévalo and Julien Honoré in “The Sky of Nantes.”Jean-Louis FernandezThe effect is one of dynamic contrast: As in his other plays, it allows Honoré to reconcile impulses — his penchant for literary self-indulgence on the one hand; his love of fantasy and surprise on the other — that film critics have occasionally found contradictory. But the back-and-forth between the director and his unruly characters serves another purpose in “The Sky of Nantes”: It highlights how difficult it can be to narrate the stories of a world one has left behind.Trauma runs deep throughout the play, from violence against women to suicide, and memories of France’s war in Algeria. The life of Honoré’s aunt Claudie is especially tragic and sensitively portrayed by Chiara Mastroianni (a longtime collaborator of Honoré’s, making her stage debut here). Honoré doesn’t shy away from the casual racism and homophobia of some characters, yet he also shows what gave them joy, too, like their fierce, relatable attachment to Nantes’ soccer team.“The Sky of Nantes” adds to a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility, led by writers like Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon. In the role of Honoré — the gay, upwardly mobile grandson who moved to Paris — Abi-Ayad cuts a pained, melancholy figure. He is often seen smoking on the sidelines while the family quarrels, at once detached yet intermittently drawn back to the fold. “I’m mad at myself for changing,” he tells the others when he admits that he couldn’t complete his film. His focus on bourgeois characters throughout his screen career is no coincidence, Honoré says through Abi-Ayad: “I can only betray you.” Without anger, his uncle Jacques replies: “You’re ashamed of us. We’re not chic enough to put into your films.”Honoré allows his mother, Marie-Dominique, the only member of the family who is still alive, to have the last word. Her role is gender-swapped in “The Sky of Nantes,” and affectionately played by Honoré’s own brother, Julien Honoré.At the very end, however, the real Marie-Dominique appears in a short video clip, and reveals her discomfort with the retelling of family stories. “They’re a pain,” she says of her two sons, with a laugh. Here, and elsewhere, “The Sky of Nantes” captures the thorny reality of autobiography — and its heartbreak, too.Bboy Junior, left, and Djamil Mohamed in Julie Berès’s “Tenderness.”Axelle de RusséSo does another new Paris production, Julie Berès’s “Tenderness,” at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in the suburb of Saint-Denis. With a cast of eight young people, Berès explores masculinity in the #MeToo era, through a mix of real stories and fiction. Onstage, the diverse cast members appear to be drawing from their lives, yet “Tenderness” (“La Tendresse”) was based mostly on research: Together with her co-writers, Kevin Keiss and Lisa Guez, with additional help from Alice Zeniter, Berès surveyed around 50 young men about their relationship to masculine norms.The result illuminates the reality of men’s experiences without requiring the actors to share their own intimate stories, as other theater projects sometimes do. With the help of the choreographer Jessica Noita, Berès also matches movement to the text, and many in the cast are accomplished dancers. Bboy Junior (Junior Bosila Banya), an astonishing slow-motion break dancer, holds impossible-looking handstands as he speaks, while the ballet-trained Natan Bouzy recounts a youthful addiction to online pornography while on pointe.There are scenery-chewing group dances, too, which unleash extraordinary energy, but like “The Sky of Nantes,” “Tenderness” is strongest when it acknowledges the contradictions and complexity of its characters. Both productions speak to larger realities of French society, and just like Honoré’s best films, they deserve to be seen widely.Le Ciel de Nantes. Directed by Christophe Honoré. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, through April 3.La Tendresse. Directed by Julie Berès. Théâtre Gérard Philipe, through April 1. More

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      ‘Told It Like It Was’: Ntozake Shange’s Tales of Black Womanhood

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      As ‘For Colored Girls’ returns to the New York stage, we look at how the show found its way from a Bay Area bar to Broadway in 1976.Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” defied Broadway conventions when it opened at the Booth Theater on Sept. 15, 1976. An experimental “choreopoem” focusing on the lives of seven women of color, who are each named after colors of the rainbow, was revelatory and not something you might expect to find on a mainstream Broadway stage.“At the time, Black actresses were still coming out of the stereotype framework of people looking at us and judging us,” Trezana Beverley, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Lady in Red, said during a recent Zoom interview. “Zake broke all those rules and we broke them with her. We were indeed the colors of the rainbow — that was what was so exciting about it.”Monologues detailing loss, betrayal, violence and love are told poetically and combined with movement and music. Through a gentle touch, a soft embrace or an impromptu dance, the women comfort one another as a supportive collective.“Ntozake had an extraordinary way of blending prose with poetry — the rhythms of her words and, of course, the incredible imagination, that she had in her storytelling,” Beverley said.The show ran on Broadway for nearly two years, closing in July 1978 after a total of 742 performances (“Godspell,” which had opened in June 1976, only made it to 527). It became an instant classic and continues to inspire new generations of playwrights, including Aleshea Harris and Dominique Morisseau.To fully appreciate Shange’s work, and what it means to have it return to Broadway this spring (in a production directed by the dancer and choreographer Camille A. Brown), it helps to explore the historical and cultural contexts that led to its original Broadway production in 1976.From Poems to a PlayShange began developing “For Colored Girls” in 1974 while living in the Bay Area, and performed it with the dancer Paula Moss at a bar called the Bacchanal.“Whenever she read her poems, like at the Nuyorican Cafe years ago, she always had musical accompaniment,” Beverley recalled. “She always had a saxophonist, a flutist or a cellist, and she moved with her poems. She has a line in her poem, she says ‘music was like smack to me,’ and you knew it.”She had found inspiration in the Black Women Writers’ Renaissance, which began to unfold around the time she graduated from Barnard College. In works like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Alice Walker’s “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” both published in 1970, the writers explored the specific ways Black women contend with racial and gendered violence.And Shange had her own inner struggles. Her college journals reveal that she “tried to commit suicide,” said Kim F. Hall, the Lucyle Hook professor of English and a professor of Africana Studies at Barnard. “Go back to some of the early interviews. She talks about it very forthrightly,” she said, adding that the title of the play is not “an abstraction.”All of this fed her poetry, and after spending several years on the West Coast for graduate school, she returned to New York and began to turn her poems into a play. And that’s when Ifa Bayeza, Shange’s sister, introduced her to the director Oz Scott.“I directed right from the beginning,” Scott, 72, said. “We did it at DeMonte’s, the bar on the Lower East Side where we started it, and then we went to Henry Street [home of the New Federal Theater], then we went to the Public, and then we went to Broadway.”Opening at the New Federal TheaterBefore the show could move to Midtown from downtown, producers had to invest in an experimental new work. It’s not like there were many plays by Black women, with an all-Black female ensemble, having sustained runs on Broadway.Ntozake Shange in 1977 in a production of “Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon,” a play that she wrote with Jessica Hagedorn and Thulani Nkabinde.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesThat’s when Woodie King Jr., founder of the New Federal Theater, came to see “For Colored Girls” at a bar. He was immediately drawn to the work. And he was especially drawn to the poem “Sorry,” Scott recalled. (“Sorry” details myriad excuses that women have heard from lovers to justify mistreatment.)“I gave it to Laurie Carlos [one of the show’s original cast members] the night before,” Scott explained. “I said, ‘I need this poem in this place. Here’s the poem, memorize it for tomorrow.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Oz, are you crazy? I can’t.’”“I said, ‘Laurie, don’t worry. Just memorize it,’” Scott recalled. “And so, we got to that spot, and she just went into it, and Woodie King was sitting there, and she just looked at Woodie, and she gave the whole poem to Woodie, and she was letter perfect.”It was as if King were the “sorry” lover, sitting there and absorbing the women’s stories. “What propelled me to bring it to the New Federal Theater,” King, now 84, recalled, was that the “women in it were very beautiful and very Afrocentric.”The cast continued to rehearse and eventually performed for Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater.“I’d been working for Joe Papp,” Scott said. “I was stage managing ‘The Sun Always Shines for the Cool,’ Miguel Piñero’s play, and around seven o’clock when we’d finished rehearsal, I just scooted everybody out and would sneak the colored girls into the Public Theater and we would rehearse there. Somebody told me that Joe knew. And I said, ‘Joe doesn’t know.’ Joe knew.”They showed Papp the work in a little space that Papp had turned into a movie theater, Scott said. Gail, Papp’s wife, was there and she cried. “She said, ‘You got to do this, Joe,’” Scott said. “And so, Joe said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it in this little 40 to 50 seat theater.’”“I said, ‘You give me a theater, I’ll fill the space.’ So, Joe teamed up with Woodie, and we did it at Henry Street,” Scott said.In the introduction to the 2010 published version of “For Colored Girls,” Shange described opening night at Henry Street as being “divine” with “supplicants flocking from everywhere.”Beverley noted that “At the New Federal Theater, it was like we were at church. Sisters were falling out in the aisle, they were so energized and charged.”After the shows, Beverley said: “We would see a sister in the shadows, and she would follow us down the street, and then she would say, ‘Can I say, can I say something to you?’ And they would say thank you. Thank you for telling my story.”“You see,” she continued, “that’s one of the great impacts that the show had because it told the Black woman’s story. She told it like it was.”Opening Night at the PublicWith the move from Henry Street to the Public, the audience shifted from predominately Black to predominately white, and that continued to be the case when the production moved to the Booth Theater. Even with the growing size of the theaters, the work maintained its intimacy through its poetry, dance and music.On June 2, 1976, opening night at the Public’s Anspacher Theater, the show was sold out. “Joe Papp said, ‘I want you to invite all your friends,’” Scott recalled. “And I said, ‘Joe, the play is sold out.’”“He said, ‘Oz, tell your cast to invite all their friends,’” Scott said. “So, all our friends were out in the lobby of the Anspacher. And when the place was full. Joe said, ‘OK, bring all your friends, have them sit on the stairs.’” King was one of many to fill the stairs.“They sat in the front on the stage. There was no room. And I said, ‘Joe, what about the fire marshal.’ He said, ‘Oz, the play is an hour and 15 minutes. By the time the fire marshal gets here, the play will be over.’”“It was an absolute brilliant move,” Scott added, “because the energy in that room — you had the critics, they were all locked into that room, everybody was locked into that room. It was a magnetic night.”In its move to Broadway, the cast was expanded to include understudies. “I was brought in to audition to replace Zake,” Seret Scott, 72, an original member of the Broadway cast, said in a telephone interview. (Shange also performed in the play, as the Lady in Orange.)From the opening night on Broadway, the cast knew they had a hit. “You could hear ‘Oh!’ or ‘Mmm’ or somebody who would suddenly weep because it was too close,” Seret Scott said. “You could hear the comments. So that is how we knew we were embraced.”The Show’s LegacyPhysical movement drives “the choreopoem.” Instead of completing the play, Shange’s work is meant to unfold through dance and changes to the poems. Donald Sutton, the Shange estate’s literary trustee, said, “Ntozake saw herself as a dancer who supported herself as a professional writer.”He continued, “The chorepoem is driven by the poetry, but the poetry is danced and the poetry is accompanied in sound and the music. Putting all three of those elements together is very difficult.”For the Broadway revival, he added, “Camille’s background as a choreographer and her experience in stage directing gives her the opportunity to realize the choreopoem.”For the 2022 production, which begins previews April 1 and opens April 20, Brown will make her Broadway directorial debut; she is also choreographing the show. (Brown previously choreographed the Public’s 2019 revival of “For Colored Girls,” which was directed by Leah C. Gardiner.)The show “provides me the space to really dive into what I do which is choreography, but also storytelling of the body,” Brown said in a telephone interview. In executing her dual role, Brown will be drawing from her own work, specifically “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” and “Ink,” to find a physical language for Black girls and women to express their stories. “One of the lines in the work says, ‘sing a Black girl’s song,’ and that’s what it’s about,” Brown said. “What is the song for each of us — that anthem, that macro anthem that we all respond to but individually that speaks to us personally?”Although Brown said she is committed to providing a healing space for women of color, she said she plans to build on that legacy as well. “I think it is easy for you to get trapped into a certain way that this show needs to be done,” Brown said. “We need to hit these markers. They need to say it this way, we need to make sure this happens. I had to get out of that. I was talking to a friend and she said, ‘This is an offering.’ It’s going to be my offering.” More

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      Hollywood Star Gives Broadway a Much-Needed Boost. Sound Familiar?

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      A Broadway comeback is a box-office triumph: Parallels abound between two starry shows, more than 80 years apart.It was as dark a time as Broadway had ever seen. Multiple stages were shuttered, uncertainty abounded, and a beleaguered theatrical season was limping along, desperate for a hit. But then a Hollywood movie star — who was also a uniquely magnetic performer on the musical stage — rode into town, bestriding a vehicle perfectly suited to his outsize talents. He had retreated to a film career for nearly a decade, and frequently hinted at a Broadway return, but then, in his 50s, he finally did so — and it didn’t hurt that a beloved musical comedy ingénue was at his side.Consumers tossed money over the box-office transom by the sackful, creating one of the biggest box-office advances in memory. It was a triumph that prompted one critic to conclude: “Broadway is beginning to look like Broadway again.”While this may sound an awful lot like Hugh Jackman’s highly anticipated return to Broadway in “The Music Man” (co-starring the captivating Sutton Foster), this précis also captures another Broadway comeback: Al Jolson’s star turn in “Hold On to Your Hats,” a long-forgotten show that took a forlorn town by storm 82 years ago. And, though “The Music Man” grossed $3.5 million the other week — the most of any show since theaters reopened after the long pandemic shutdown — Jolson, it should be noted, got better reviews.Sutton Foster as Marian Paroo and Hugh Jackman as Professor Harold Hill in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy the end of the 1930s, Jolson’s eight-cylinder performance persona had been idling over in Hollywood. Although he had dominated Broadway in the late teens and the 1920s, usually in rickety vehicles that accommodated his performances in blackface, the phenomenon of talking pictures — which he had exploded with “The Jazz Singer,” the first feature-length “talkie” with musical sequences, in 1927 — had changed over the following decade.“His kind of all-devouring star personality was no longer the kind that would thrive on film; Jolson was instrumental in creating the movie musical, but it had left him behind by then,” Richard Barrios, the musical film historian, recounted in a phone interview. His earlier films had been commercial blockbusters, showing off his ebullient and narcissistic way with a musical number, but Hollywood musicals were pivoting from such personality-pounding packages to more ensemble-driven stories and gentler stars such as Fred Astaire or Judy Garland. This transition made Jolson feel as if he was being put out to pasture on the West Coast — not to mention his fraying marriage to Warner Bros.’s tap-dancing ingénue Ruby Keeler. As the new decade began, Jolson’s primary passion was for playing the ponies out at Santa Anita Park.And it was a pony that would carry him back to the East Coast.The producer Alex Aarons had an idea for a stage show that would star Jack Haley, who had just starred as the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.” The show’s concept was pretty clever by the standards of the day: a Western action hero for the Nationwide Broadcasting Company, named the Lone Rider (and his faithful companion, Concho — get it?), is recruited by denizens at the Sunshine Valley Rancho to defend them against bandits; they don’t realize he’s a radio entertainer playing a fictional character. The scenario provided for plenty of high jinks and heroism for the performer playing the Lone Rider, who’s “so tough, he uses a rattlesnake for a whip.” Spoiler alert: in real-life, he’s not. (This is an original concept, though, “borrowed” subsequently for such films as “Three Amigos” and “Galaxy Quest.”)Aarons recruited the “Wizard of Oz” lyricist, Yip Harburg, and the composer Burton Lane, who was also working in Hollywood at the time, to collaborate with the “Anything Goes” writer Guy Bolton (abetted by a few errant gag men). When Haley bowed out, Jolson was immediately interested, piqued by the comic and musical potential offered by the Lone Rider character. (Jackman, of course, has his own resonance with an action hero, having played Wolverine in the “X-Men” movies.) He signed on for a fall 1940 Broadway opening of “Hold On to Your Hats” and agreed to front 80 percent of the show’s nearly $100,000 investment.Ruby Keeler, Jolson’s wife, took on the ingénue role in the show even though she had filed for divorce.Lucas & Monroe, via Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library
      for the Performing Arts
      That meant Jolson was calling most of the shots, and he cannily shaped the new musical around his strengths. Thankfully, he eschewed any of his blackface routines (though, typical of its time, the show’s script embraced the casual racist stereotypes of Mexicans, Native Americans and Jews). But Jolson — for whom the fourth wall was a mere inconvenience — managed to stop the show each night, usually at its climax, to sing a medley of his popular hits. Audiences were given a vague context for such digressions — the Lone Rider was a radio entertainer, after all — and his interpolations so offended Harburg and Lane that they refused to leave Hollywood to watch Jolson’s antics once the show hit Broadway. (They would return to New York in 1947 for “Finian’s Rainbow.”)Another of Jolson’s creative decisions was downright deranged: He offered the ingénue role to Keeler, who had just filed for divorce back in California. According to Lane, in an interview decades later, Jolson “expressed this: ‘She’s never been on the stage with me. I think that if she works with me on the stage, she’ll see how wonderful I am and she won’t want to divorce me.’” Somehow, Keeler agreed to sign on for the thankless role and off the show went to out-of-town tryouts in the summer of 1940.“Thankless” seemed to have been the key word in the Jolson-Keeler marriage; there was a 24-year age difference between the two, and Barrios recalled a comment made by Keeler to a commentator in the 1970s: “Al was the world’s greatest entertainer. He used to tell me so every day.” Jolson’s anxiety about the incipient rapprochement got the better of him during the Chicago leg of the tryout; during their duets, Jolson would make cracks about their marriage, Keeler’s talent, Keeler’s mother. That was it. Keeler stormed off the stage, quit the show and divorced Jolson within months.None of this mattered to the cheering throng that greeted Jolson when he sidled up to Broadway’s Shubert Theater on Sept. 14, 1940. (He had wanted his cherished Winter Garden Theater — where Jackman’s “The Music Man” is currently playing — but it was occupied by the manic comedy “Hellzapoppin.”)“Al Jolson is back on the home grounds,” wrote John Anderson of the New York Journal-American, “in celebration whereof I toss my own critical headgear over the moon and over the dictionary.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      ‘Camelot’ Is Returning to Broadway, Reimagined by Aaron Sorkin

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      The Lincoln Center Theater production, with a new book by Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher, will open in December.Lincoln Center Theater said Monday that it would stage a revival of the classic musical “Camelot” on Broadway this fall, with a new book by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.The revival is to be directed by Bartlett Sher, who in 2019 directed a one-night concert performance of “Camelot,” starring Lin-Manuel Miranda to benefit Lincoln Center Theater. The project will be a second joint Broadway venture between Sher and Sorkin, who previously collaborated on a stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” that opened in 2018. Sher has also directed several Golden Age musicals for the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater, including “South Pacific,” “The King and I” and “My Fair Lady.”“Camelot,” first staged on Broadway in 1960, is based on the novel “The Once and Future King,” which, in turn, was based on the British legend of King Arthur. Lincoln Center Theater described the show as “about the quest for democracy, striving for justice, and the tragic struggle between passion and aspiration, between lovers and kingdoms.”“Camelot” features music by Frederick Loewe and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; Lerner and Loewe also wrote “My Fair Lady.” Lincoln Center Theater said that Sorkin’s book would be “reimagined for the 21st century” but based on the original written by Lerner.The musical has been revived on Broadway several times, most recently in 1993, and was adapted as a film in 1967.The new production is scheduled to begin performances Nov. 3 and open Dec. 8 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, which is a 1,080-seat Broadway house. No casting has been announced. More

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      Review: In Stefano Massini’s ‘7 Minutes,’ It’s Make or Break

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      The author of “The Lehman Trilogy” sets his new work in a fictional textiles factory, where workers debate in real time the new owners’ demands.Though based on real events, “7 Minutes,” produced by Waterwell in association with Working Theater, is a piece of hopeful fantasy. It envisions a roomful of people in profound disagreement. Despite disparities of attitude and background, these people listen, respectfully, to one another’s arguments. In our increasingly partisan society, “7 Minutes” offers a portrait of representative democracy — functional, unmired — in action. Can you believe it?Written by the Italian playwright Stefano Massini (author of “The Lehman Trilogy”), and translated by Francesca Spedalieri, this American premiere, at HERE, is set at Penrose Mills, a fictional Connecticut textiles factory. New owners, backed by foreign investors, have taken it over. As the play opens, 10 members of the workers’ executive committee, all women and nonbinary employees, are huddled in the break room waiting for news of the new owners’ demands. (The break room — fluorescents and stained paneling above, linoleum below — is designed by You-Shin Chen and lit by Hao Bai, who also provides the ominous sound design.)After a few increasingly tense minutes, Linda (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), the committee’s spokeswoman — and its 11th member — arrives. The factory will not close, she tells her co-workers. Benefits and salaries will remain stable. But the owners have asked for one small concession: a seven-minute reduction in the employees’ break time. And they require a decision in just over an hour, which means that the debate in the 90-minute play unfolds in real time.From left, Danielle Davenport, Marshall-Oliver, Mahira Kakkar, Simone Immanuel and Layla Khoshnoudi in “7 Minutes.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“7 Minutes” is smart. It’s also chilly, as if someone has run the air conditioning at full. And while the documentary framing lends it currency, it can feel familiar. The play, which transposes conflict between management and workers onto conflict between worker and worker, has dramatic antecedents as far back as Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty” (a drama about unionized cabdrivers so galvanizing that on opening night the audience joined the actors in calls to strike) and as near as Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat” and Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.”At first Linda’s is the only no vote. But as the play progresses, generational rifts emerge as well as differences of ethnicity and pay rate, and several of the other workers shift to her side. (This makes a work like Reginald Rose’s teleplay “Twelve Angry Men” one more forerunner.) On an individual basis, the concession isn’t onerous. The seven lost minutes themselves don’t really matter, and certainly not when compared with the possibility of layoffs or a lockout. But almost immediately the minutes take on symbolic value: Why should the workers reward the new owners? What precedent would a yes vote set?Ultimately, the vote becomes a referendum on freedom, a mostly abstract concept, and the security of a steady paycheck.Linda’s fiercest opponent, Danielle (Danielle Davenport), needs to keep her medical insurance. She has no time for abstraction. “Do you want to start a fight because of your doubts?” Danielle asks.Linda replies, “And do you want to keep the peace, no matter the cost, because of your fears?”Massini has an obvious interest in capitalist systems and the ways in which they can deform individuals and societies. In this production, directed by Mei Ann Teo, ideas dominate, with character consistently subordinated to debate. This is partly a problem of translation. The real conflict on which the play is based took place in a French factory. Massini moved it to Italy. Waterwell’s version uproots it to Connecticut, but without any real feeling of place or circumstance. It could be anywhere.The language is oddly formal (“May they all die,” “If 10 think red, the 11th must blush”) and largely undifferentiated among the characters, who are given only the thinnest carapace of background. The stronger actors — Marshall-Oliver and Davenport among them — can fill in these blanks, but the weaker ones struggle to flesh out the women and nonbinary workers behind the words.This renders “7 Minutes” a play that makes you think. But in contrast to Nottage’s and Morisseau’s works, which consistently ground the political within the individual, it is never one that makes you feel. Democracy without emotion? That’s a fantasy, too.7 MinutesThrough April 10 at HERE, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More