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      On London Stages, Maverick Responses to Mortality

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      Creative adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” and Ionesco’s “The Chairs” grapple with death and feature inclusions of the coronavirus and performance artists.LONDON — The opportunity to see Kathryn Hunter in peak form is a rare treat, and one that is currently available by booking a seat for the Almeida Theater’s revival of “The Chairs.” This hugely gifted actress plays a character, billed as the Old Woman in Ionesco’s 1952 classic, with enough boundless wit and energy to make a mockery of age.Recently, Hunter has been acclaimed onscreen for playing all three witches in Joel Coen’s adaptation of “Macbeth,” starring Denzel Washington, for which she won a New York Film Critics Circle award. But this American-born mainstay of the London theater also gleams onstage with an unbridled delight in performance that is a pleasure to behold.The result lends a welcome immediacy to Ionesco’s potentially inaccessible exercise in absurdism, which hasn’t been staged here since 1997. That version, directed by Simon McBurney, Hunter’s longtime colleague at the Complicité theater company, transferred against expectation to Broadway, garnering six Tony nominations. This new iteration, adapted by its director, Omar Elerian, runs until March 5, leaving time for Hunter to limber up for her next stage assignment: playing Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer.The Old Woman, in fact, is in her 90s, so older than Lear but blessed in Hunter’s interpretation with a wide-eyed sense of wonder. Having been coupled for 75 years with the Old Man (played by Hunter’s own husband, Marcello Magni, another Complicité veteran), she joins her elegantly dressed spouse in awaiting the arrival of any number of guests to attend some sort of conference that may save the world. Or, more likely, not.Among them is a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick), who is this play’s equivalent of Beckett’s elusive Godot. The difference is that the Speaker actually does show up, allowing the duo to bow out of lives that haven’t been easy: “We shall decompose in marine solitude,” announces the Old Man. “Let’s not complain too much though.”Premiered in French by the Romanian-born Ionesco, “The Chairs” preceded “Waiting for Godot” by one year and represents a landmark text more often than not confined to the classroom. Committed to dusting away the cobwebs, Elerian’s English-language version insists upon the contemporary whenever possible. Before he is even seen, the Old Man is heard fretting about the performance: “Tell [the audience] I have Covid,” he says to his wife in an offstage argument about whether or not to do the show. Afterward, we learn that the Old Woman has had 21 booster shots.Once they emerge before us, the pair call to mind two aging vaudevillians having one last hurrah. She totters about in a red wig and dark petticoat, curtsying with endearing politesse and suggesting in her singularly throaty voice that “we cut the next bit; it’s terribly long.” (The production runs nearly two hours, no intermission.) He proffers a handkerchief to a nearby audience member and readies himself for the chairs of the title, several of which Magni manages to catch in midair: no mean feat for someone of any age. Ionesco’s original text calls for 40 chairs minimum, but I lost count of the quantity at the Almeida.Those chairs, of course, sit empty as comic business gives way to the stuff of tragedy. We hear of the children the couple wanted but never had and the “pain, regrets, remorse” that have been their shared fate instead, the Old Man chastising himself for allowing his mother to die, untended, in a ditch. Abandonment, he says, is an inescapable fact of life.The emotional pull of the material remains sufficiently strong that I wish Elerian’s adaptation wasn’t quite so fussy. The opening shenanigans are awfully forced, as are the closing remarks from the Speaker, who usually utters scarcely a word in this play. A discourse on “alternate truths,” this orator’s rambling observations are attuned to the concerns of the world today but nonetheless feel like padding. Its farcical elements notwithstanding, the play is sufficiently powerful as is, Ionesco’s overriding bleakness as topical now as ever, which speaks volumes to how little has changed in 70 years.From left, Sam Archer, Ash Hunter and Lucy McCormick in “Wuthering Heights,” adapted and directed by Emma Rice at the National Theater.Steve TannerEven more so than Elerian, Emma Rice is a prominent director-adapter who doesn’t take familiar texts at face value. A former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Rice made her name running the touring company Kneehigh, which deconstructed such time-honored titles as “Brief Encounter” and “Tristan & Yseult.” Since then, Rice has started a theatrical entity called Wise Children, whose irreverent take on the Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights” can be found on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theater through March 19.The eclectic impulses behind this production are evident from its cast, which brings together dancers, performance artists and a “Hamilton” alum to tell the corpse-strewn story of the foundling, Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, the veteran of the aforementioned musical), and the ill-starred Catherine (Lucy McCormick, a maverick talent who moves between self-devised work and plays such as this one). Juggling several roles is the charismatic Sam Archer, an actor-dancer whose nimble movement very explicitly keeps Rice’s take on this 1847 novel from seeming earthbound: It’s always helpful to have a performer on hand capable of soaring at any moment.Rice’s freewheeling approach to the material won’t suit the purists. It’s surprising to find the Yorkshire moors — a setting crucial to the novel — brought to three-dimensional life by an assemblage led by the arresting Nandi Bhebhe, who seems to be wearing a crown of sticks and twigs and has a retinue of similarly attired human plants. Elsewhere, the convolutions of the plot are confronted head-on. “How is anybody expected to follow this?” asks the resident narrator, Lockwood (one of Archer’s several roles), only for Bhebhe to chip in with an awareness that “no one said this is going to be easy.”Rice’s goal is to ease a path through a labyrinthine novel by bringing her total-theater aesthetic to a music-heavy production that announces the characters’ fates on a chalkboard, a choice that taps directly into the association many will have with this novel from their student days. A trim or two wouldn’t go amiss, and there are times when the reinvention seems reckless, not revelatory.But I won’t soon forget a fierce-eyed McCormick haunting the action from beyond the grave like an ongoing premonition of doom, and Katy Owen’s chirpy Isabella Linton all but steals the show: a figure of audience-friendly fun amid the landscape of mortality that, as with “The Chairs,” we come to realize is our shared lot.The Chairs. Directed by Omar Elerian. Almeida Theater, through March 5.Wuthering Heights. Directed by Emma Rice. National Theater, through March 19. More

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      New Haven's Long Wharf Theater to Become Itinerant

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      Long Wharf Theater, a regional nonprofit on New Haven’s waterfront, is ending a long, bumpy chapter there, hoping to expand access and reduce costs.New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater will move out of its longtime headquarters and embrace itinerancy as the company seeks a fresh start after a period of extraordinary upheaval.The leadership of the nonprofit theater is framing the move as an opportunity to reach new audiences and reimagine its operations, and the city is supporting the change, which it says will help the organization better serve the community.The move is the latest chapter in a time of extensive change at the theater, which in 2018 fired its executive director, Gordon Edelstein, a day after The New York Times reported sexual misconduct allegations against him. As the company remade itself, it faced a real estate quandary: whether to renew its expiring lease at the New Haven Food Terminal, just off Interstate 95, where it has been performing for 57 years.The theater, which has been among the nation’s leading regional nonprofits, also faces the same challenges as its peers: demonstrating to patrons, artists and donors that it can move forward following the lengthy pandemic shutdown, and that it is committed to shifting priorities in response to industrywide calls for more diversity, equity and inclusion.“Long Wharf Theater has an incredible legacy, and it’s had some complicated challenges,” said Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director. “The next several years will be about discovery.”The theater’s leaders said they could have chosen to renew its lease when it expires in June, but that they opted not to, both because the theater was spending too much money on rent and upkeep, and because its location, once treasured for free parking and easy highway access that appealed to suburbanites, was inconvenient for some New Haven residents and difficult to access via public transit.The theater, which had thought of the industrial waterfront location as temporary when it opened there in 1965, has contemplated relocating before. In 2004, it announced plans to move to downtown New Haven, but in 2011, citing a worsening economy, it abandoned those plans, opting to renovate the Food Terminal location instead.Padrón said he views the decision to relocate to a variety of yet-to-be-determined spaces around New Haven as a way of rethinking “how a regional theater makes its art,” and a way to “expand our imagination of how a theater can show up for its community.”“It’s exciting to think about what’s the project, and what’s then the right container for that project,” he said.Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director, said that “the next several years will be about discovery.”Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe theater’s leadership, including not only Padrón but also the managing director, Kit Ingui, and the board chairwoman, Nancy Alexander, all said that they believe the institution is financially stable, and that it would benefit from the flexibility of its next phase. They said that the new arrangement should not only reduce its costs but also expand its reach to audiences who, because of geography, transportation or economics, have not found their way to the waterfront district from which the theater takes its name.“There’s no sense that we’re hanging on by a thread or that we have to live on a shoestring,” Alexander said. “We have been blessed with some longtime givers who have created a strong endowment for us, and we are projecting budgets that will work.”Long Wharf plans to stage at least two more shows at its current location — a new play called “Dream Hou$e,” by Eliana Pipes, which the theater describes as being about “the cultural cost of progress in America,” and “Queen,” by Madhuri Shekar, about “brilliant women confronting inconvenient truths.” The theater is still talking with its landlord about whether it might continue producing in the building later this year, but by the fall of 2023 the leadership expects to present full productions at other locations in and around New Haven — possibly in rented theaters, and possibly in spaces not traditionally used for theater.“We believe you can produce theater anywhere,” Ingui said.Long Wharf, which in 1978 won the Tony Award for regional theater, survived the pandemic with significant support from the federal and state governments. Its staff is less than half the size it was — about 30, down from 65 before the pandemic; the annual budget, which had been about $6.5 million before the pandemic, is now a little over $5 million.The theater’s leaders said they have not yet decided whether they will remain itinerant long-term, or whether this will be a short-term phase. But they all said the crises faced by the theater were catalysts, not causes, for the move.“We’re going into this with excitement,” Alexander said. She said that the theater’s pandemic performances in city parks demonstrated that new locations could attract new audiences, and that by moving around New Haven, Long Wharf is seeking to become “a theater that is much more widely in our community, and, we hope, valued by our community.”“We really are being mindful that this is a period of exploration and experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ultimately decided to have something like an anchor space and then continue producing in some other creative spaces as well, in some kind of hybrid model,” she said.Adriane Jefferson, New Haven’s director of cultural affairs, said Long Wharf was one of the most important nonprofits in the city, and that its move would strengthen both the organization and the city. She said she believed the shift would help Long Wharf become more anti-racist, in keeping with the city’s new cultural equity plan, which called attention to “inequities that prevent people from participating in arts and culture in every corner of our city.”“Long Wharf’s idea of being more mobile, moving throughout the city and coming to communities who are not making it down to where Long Wharf is now, is very responsive to our plan,” Jefferson said. “I would have concerns if they weren’t thinking along these lines.” More

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      Amber Gray on Leaving 'Hadestown' for 'Macbeth'

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      The actress, who has played Persephone in “Hadestown” in three countries and four productions, is leaving to join a new “Macbeth” on Broadway.Amber Gray spent eight years as a Greek goddess.She joined “Hadestown” in 2014, back when the songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and the director Rachel Chavkin were still trying to figure out how to turn Mitchell’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice concept album into a stage show.Gray had read lots of mythology as a classics-obsessed kid, and felt an immediate connection to Persephone, the split-level queen who spends half of each year in the underworld as Hades’s wife and half on earth as a harbinger of spring.“I kind of knew, ‘Oh, this is my job,’ which is not a feeling I have often,” she said. “I felt possessive of it — that it belongs to me, and it was my baby to help raise.”Her Persephone, clad in green aboveground and black below, is an ageless merrymaker with a taste for drink, toughened by time but still soft of heart. She created the role Off Broadway in 2016, refined it through a Canadian production in 2017 and a London production in 2018, and then was nominated for a Tony Award after originating the role on Broadway, where the show opened in 2019 (winning the Tony for best musical). Along with the rest of the principals, she stuck with the show through an 18-month pandemic shutdown; “Hadestown” returned in September to the Walter Kerr Theater.Her performance won praise from Jesse Green, The New York Times’s theater critic, who wrote, “Ms. Gray, never better, makes something quite brilliant out of Persephone: a free spirit, a loose cannon, a first lady co-opted by wealth yet emotionally subversive.” He declared of her closing number, “you at last wish the show would slow down so you could live in the glowy moment forever.”But on Saturday night, Gray, 40, sang that song for the final time. She is leaving the show to join Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in a production of “Macbeth” that begins performances in March at the Longacre Theater, directly across 48th Street from the Walter Kerr. She will play Macbeth’s friend Banquo; her “Hadestown” alternate, Lana Gordon, will assume the role of Persephone full time.For the last several months, Gray has been sharing the role of Persephone with another actress, so she could spend more time with her two children.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn her single day off between finishing “Hadestown” and beginning rehearsals for “Macbeth,” she talked about her long run; an ovation-filled final night that included special attention from her co-star André De Shields; and her next chapter. These are edited excerpts from the interview.How are you doing?I don’t know how I’m doing. You have to help me process.At your final performance there were tears on your face at the start, at the end, in the middle. What was going through your head?I’m having great waves of grief, and I’m heartbroken, but I also feel very excited about a new chapter. It feels like commencement.What happened after the audience went home?My partner was there, and we went across the street to Hurley’s, where we go often, the cast and the band, and we just chatted for another hour. I sort of stood around and loved on everyone, and let them love on me. Lots of crying, and there was some sneaky footage of André kissing me, which we watched and laughed and laughed and laughed. It felt very celebratory.What’s it like to spend so long with a single character?It’s kind of like a deep, meditative trance state while I’m doing it. Every 50 shows or so, you go deeper, which is so rad. And in those last few weeks of performing, my peripheral vision opened up. I saw things I’d never seen before that have been happening for years.How has your approach to Persephone changed over time?A huge shift came after two full productions, when the alcohol was introduced. In London, Chavkin came up to me and was like, “I think you’re trashed for a while, and it’s like ‘Ab Fab’ — you’ve got to be like ‘Ab Fab’ trashed.” I was like, “Really, are you sure?” I didn’t get it. And then it became great fun.What does Persephone think of Hades?She loves him. You know, they’ve been married for hundreds of years. They’re like an old couple that knows how to fight well and make up well. That’s important in a long-running relationship.Gray, flanked by Patrick Page, left, and André De Shields, right, toasts the audience in the musical’s final song.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow did you stay in shape physically and vocally for this role?Physically, I don’t do anything but the show — that’s plenty of exercise. Vocally, I learned in school to stay away from certain foods, like dairy. I rolled my eyes, but I have really found if you stay away from stuff like that it’s so much easier to sing and scream and growl night after night. I see an ENT [an ear, nose and throat doctor] once a week, and get an IV of a bunch of shots to make sure you never get sick. And I haven’t had alcohol in a couple of years — that’s another way that my physical, spiritual, vocal self is just healthier.Did you have Covid?I got Covid in December with the rest of the cast — I got Omicron after being vaxxed and boosted. It was like a really bad cold for about 36 hours. That was it.How did playing for a masked audience affect your performance?I thought the masks were going to feel weird, but it doesn’t. You can still feel the audience. They did start serving alcohol, though, a couple of weeks ago, and that difference I very much noticed. I was like, “Oh, they love me these last couple of weeks,” and then I was like, “Oh, they’re serving alcohol again.”Why are you an actor?Well, I’m an Army brat that had to move every two or three years, and I was deeply shy. And actors are really nice — they accept the freaks and geeks, no questions asked. I also grew up skiing, but the jocks were not nice. So if I were to make friends in the new town every two or three years, I had to do the play. By the time college rolled around, it was the only thing I loved.During your time in “Hadestown,” you had two children, and when the show reopened you started sharing the role with an alternate. Tell me about that.Before the pandemic hit, I asked for an alternate to do the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could have three days off, away from that building, one of those days being Sunday, when my children are not in school. I wasn’t seeing my kids, and that was deeply painful. I didn’t have kids to not raise them. All I wanted was a little family time, and they gave it to me.There were job-sharing experiments both at “Hadestown” and “Jagged Little Pill” that turned out to be short-lived, for different reasons.I’m a big believer in job-sharing. Several productions have done it in London, and that’s what gave me the idea. And in Korea they job share. It’s a wild puzzle to put together, but they’ve figured it out.What’s it like watching other actresses play Persephone?It’s wild. I always offer survival tips. And any Persephone I have watched I always steal one thing from, as a gesture of honor.“It’s time to try new things,” said Gray, sitting on the stage before her final performance at the Walter Kerr Theater. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is your first commercial hit. How does that feel?I’m not always aware of what a hit it is, because I don’t use social media and I don’t go through the stage door. But you know, I was totally that kid in high school — I would go to the library and get a CD of “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Who’s Tommy” and listen over and over again. So I know what it is to be a teenager who really latches on to a story and an album. Lots of people wrote me over the pandemic about how much “Hadestown” helped them, and it’s beautiful to know that the art is functioning in that way.Why did you decide to leave?I was too comfortable. It’s just time to grow. It’s time to try new things. I come from a short-run world. It’s what I love about theater: it’s ephemeral, it goes away, it evaporates, right? I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t keep any fan mail or fan art or show paraphernalia. I very neurotically photograph it all. I write back to anybody. But then anything that’s paper I burn in the backyard. And then it’s on to the next one.Why “Macbeth?”Because it was the job I got. I was banging out all these auditions, and that one came through. I auditioned for Lady Macduff and Witch One, and then the next day they were like, “Actually, do you want to play Banquo?”Banquo was written as a man. Any thoughts on what you’re going to do?I am a woman and I will play it as a woman. I’m also excited to play a parent onstage, to a sweet 10-year-old that I haven’t met yet. It’s my first time playing a parent in a play after being a parent, and I really look forward to that.A lot of actors have superstitions about “Macbeth.” Do you?It’s been a joke in the cast for a while. Patrick [Page, who plays Hades] has a copy of the folio in his pocket onstage, and every now and then he’ll throw it down on top of our dominoes game to try to scare me.So much of your career has been downtown. I wonder how you viewed Broadway before you worked there, and how your assessment of it has changed.I’ve been on Broadway only twice, but both times were pieces that I helped nurture from little Off Broadway gems. Then you get there, and the realities of producing a show on Broadway are very different, and, to be totally honest, I find the maintenance of the machine quite heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking to see things become moneymaking machines, and the money doesn’t necessarily always go to the artists. But I will say “Hadestown” is doing a ton of work to try to have these conversations about how things could and can change.You have one day off between “Hadestown” and “Macbeth.” Are you planning to rest?No, I’m going to go see Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” for some artistic healing, and then my partner and I are going to go do a shamanic ceremony with a medicine from a frog for spiritual and emotional and energetic cleansing. I’m like, “Bring it on! Let’s clean the slate!” More

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      ‘The Same’ Review: Do You See What I See?

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      Enda Walsh’s play, which had its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center, stars two sisters who play different versions of the same character.Imagine that on one otherwise normal day, while going about your normal activities, you encounter someone who looks uncannily familiar — it’s you. Does the discovery cause you discomfort or give you relief? Are you met with assurance or fear?It’s the situation a woman named Lisa — well, two women named Lisa — face in “The Same,” by Enda Walsh, that opened on Sunday for its U.S. premiere, at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.The Corcadorca Theater Company production stars Catherine Walsh and Eileen Walsh, who are sisters in real life (with no relation to Enda Walsh), as two expressions of Lisa. The younger Lisa recounts her recent arrival to a new city and what is presumably a mental health facility. She occasionally leaves her “small blue room,” as she calls it, for errands or groceries or, on one particular day, to take a job helping prepare for a repast after a funeral. There she meets the woman who shares her face and her memories: her future self.The two Lisas sit, stand and pace, reminiscing about their childhood. They speak in a steady back-and-forth, trading lines and swapping roles in what feels less like a conversation than a team recitation of a story they both know by heart. Their dialogue reflects a constantly changing perspective; sometimes they speak in the first person, sometimes the second, sometimes the third, as though each Lisa is, even individually, too fragmented to maintain a consistent point of view.The production, directed by Pat Kiernan, runs a trim 50 minutes, less than the time it takes to get from some corners of Brooklyn to the Irish Arts Center’s swanky new Midtown location on 11th Avenue.The set design, by Owen Boss, is immersive. It feels like a waiting room; the audience sits in upholstered chairs and love seats arranged in a loose square on a patch of carpet, giving a sense of the contours of a room. There’s a bookcase, a potted plant, and around and alongside the seats are signs of interrupted progress: tables cluttered with half-empty mugs of coffee and half-eaten cookies and an unfinished game of solitaire. The seating faces the center of the space, where the two actors spend most of the play. It’s novel to sit among the action, with one Lisa or another shuffling past your seat, though ultimately the effect doesn’t support its execution.Kiernan’s direction, however, imbues the production with an unsettling feeling: The actresses mirror each other in ways that aren’t always exact replications but rather variations on themes. And so there’s an interplay among their postures, movements and energies — younger Lisa gets worked up and older Lisa is calm, until she, too, gets worked up and younger Lisa becomes subdued. Michael Hurley’s lighting design and Peter Power’s sound design also seem triggered by the volatility of the Lisas’ minds. Kiernan has some of the set’s effects suddenly spring to life — two TV sets suspended in the corners of the room awaken to show clips from a game show or an episode of “Judge Judy,” a bingo machine whirs to life and then chaotically spews its contents on the floor.The success of the play’s Gemini effect is in large part because of the actresses’ talents. Eileen’s performance is jittery, her version of Lisa so full of neuroses that she seems like a shaken can of soda, fizzing just beneath the surface. Catherine gives off a similar, though more muted, anxiety; her Lisa embodies a different type of pressure, one of a dam carefully constructed over the years, pushing back against the waves crashing against its walls.Walsh’s script, however, doesn’t leave as lasting an impression. The play, which was originally commissioned by Corcadorca in celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary, has the usual signatures of the playwright, whose most recent New York production was the arresting “Medicine,” starring Domhnall Gleeson, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. There’s an intentional obliqueness, the traces of a narrative that are blurred and contorted by the characters. It all comes back to the slippery nature of the playwright’s language, which is full of repetition and half-formed ideas; sentences have some unspoken antecedent or trail off, spiraling inward to form an ouroboros of thoughts.But Walsh typically uses those linguistic maneuvers to add more shades to his text; rarely is he interested in a singular theme or mode of storytelling. Here, the short run time prevents him from getting too complicated, but the result is a script that, though still unconventional, is limited.How does a person grow from trauma? What happens when she resolves to leave part of herself behind, only to re-encounter that part unexpectedly? “The Same” circles these questions but never reaches a sharp point. It’s almost as though the play gets trapped simply gazing in the mirror.The SameThrough March 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 50 minutes. More

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      Review: Learning ‘English,’ When Your Accent Is a ‘War Crime’

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      In a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi, four Iranians and their language teacher find second selves in a second tongue.If you’ve ever tried, as an adult, to learn a new language, you know how painful it can be; it’s bad enough to hear yourself mangling Italian, but worse to hear it mangling you. For those of us accustomed to sounding sharp with our words, it can come as quite a blow to discover the shabby figure we cut in the ill-fitting suit of someone else’s.How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.The play, a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, is after all set in Iran in 2008, against a backdrop of travel restrictions and family separations. Each of the four students prepping for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, at a storefront school in Karaj, a city of two million not far from Tehran, has a different reason for enrolling.For the cheerful 18-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the promise and pleasure of new opportunity is reason enough. “English is the rice,” she explains in the inadvertent poetry of the partially fluent. “You take some rice, and you make the rice whatever you want.”But the others are more ambivalent. Dignified Roya (Pooya Mohseni) is there only because her son, who lives in “the Canada” with his wife and daughter, has insisted she speak English if she wants to live with them. He will not have his daughter’s assimilation threatened, he has warned, by a grandmother cooing in Farsi.If Roya is angry about this situation, she mostly suppresses the feeling, leaving her son hilariously passive-aggressive voice mail messages in which she offers evidence of her growing fluency. “I know all the numbers now,” she tells him. “Forty-three. Five hundred and thirty-eight. And seven.”But for Elham (Tala Ashe), anxiety is upfront: Having failed the Toefl five times, she must pass it if she wants her provisional acceptance at an Australian medical school to become official. When the Toefl teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), tells her that “English isn’t your enemy,” she answers, “It is feeling like yes.” Her accent, she adds, is “a war crime.”Marjan learned English during nine years spent living in Manchester, England, gradually experiencing the way the fog of alienation can give way, through language, to the thrill of connection. Now that she is back in Iran, though, her English is eroding at the edges, at least in comparison to that of the fourth student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose accent is minimal and vocabulary exceptional. Playing a game in which everyone must name items of clothing as quickly as possible while tossing a ball, he wins handily, wowing the others with “windbreaker.”Tabbal, left, plays the standout student in the English class taught by Neshat’s character. We understand her fluency (nine years in Britain), but there’s a mystery behind his (where did he learn the word “windbreaker”?).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the course of 22 scenes representing lessons, office hours and smoke breaks during the six-week course, we get to know all five characters well, and yet they also remain as stubbornly enigmatic as people do in real life. Their progress, too, is unpredictable, their skills sometimes stalling, then bounding forward, with new words and seemingly new ideas emerging.Not that we are told this; we just see it happen, thanks to Toossi’s clever theatricalization of the process. (When the characters speak English, they do so haltingly and with an accent; when they speak Farsi, which we hear in English, it’s swift and unaccented.) Even Elham, her W’s no longer sounding like V’s, and her tempo improved from largo to allegretto, is eventually able to pose a challenge to Omid’s fluency.The mystery of that fluency (why does he know “windbreaker”?) is one of the more obvious tensioning devices in a play that, despite its pleasures — but also at the root of them — has a somewhat schematic structure. Like a lifeboat movie, it features the immediate and broad differentiation of characters, their shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.Nor are its themes entirely novel; the drama of superimposing one language on another is at the heart of works as widely varied as Brian Friel’s “Translations” (in which a 19th-century cartographer is charged with rendering Irish place names in English) and the hyper-asterisked Leo Rosten novel “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,” set among immigrants in a night school English class and turned into a musical in 1968.But the delicacy of Toossi’s development handily makes up for both problems, especially the hysteria of lifeboat melodrama; in a recent interview in The New York Times, she told my colleague Alexis Soloski that “writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave.”So in dealing with characters who could easily be exoticized in their chadors, Toossi has chosen instead to focus on their familiarity; like most of us, they deal less with the disaster of geopolitics than with an atmosphere of mild if daily discomfort. As such, the insights here are deep but never shattering, as when Roya perceives the crucial distinction between the verbs “visit” and “live” in one of her son’s messages. If the world’s happiness does not depend on it, a grandmother’s does.The director Knud Adams gently underlines the calm, almost classical rhythms of Toossi’s writing. Chopinesque piano solos play between scenes. As the play contemplates the question of language from several angles, the cube-like set, by Marsha Ginsberg, slowly rotates, offering in turn a street view of the building, the classroom interior and an entry portico. The cast is uniformly excellent, in a suitably unshowy but fully lived-in way.Too much delicacy has a way of wearing thin, though; with its refusal of trauma and even climax — the romance, if there is one, is buried — “English” begins to feel a bit overlong despite its moderate running time of an hour and 45 minutes.Still, the longueurs are worth it, forcing the audience into a useful position of slight non-fluency. We don’t always know what is going on in the play, as we don’t in the world either. And as each character struggles to decide whether to become another person by mastering another language, we are asked to consider whether we in the English-speaking West are not just cultural imperialists but linguistic ones as well. And whether, perhaps, those are really the same thing.EnglishThrough March 13 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

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      The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More

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      ‘Barococo’ Review: Fop Till You Drop

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      Happenstance Theater traps five pretentious aristocrats in a comedy of bad manners that could use more luster and more bite.Playing parlor games, dancing the minuet, making snide comments — aristocrats sure do know how to party. But there’s always a chance that by the end of the night someone will lose their head …The dandies and dauphins of the 1 percent prance to 59E59 Theaters for Happenstance Theater’s “Barococo,” A satire of upper-class privilege zhuzhed up into an often absurd comedy of manners, “Barococo” has fun and laughs, but doesn’t always have the glamour you’d expect from this exaggerated snapshot of genteel life.The play’s title is a portmanteau of “Baroque” and “Rococo,” the 17th- and 18th-century periods of ornate European art, fashion, architecture and music. “Barococo” takes place during a soiree hosted by the noble Dauphine Marionette (Sarah Olmsted Thomas). In attendance are the self-important actor Astorio Cavalieri (Mark Jaster), the pretentious Duc Leslie Pamplemousse de Citron-Pressé (Alex Vernon), the petty elder Countess Olympia Stroganovskaya (Sabrina Selma Mandell) and the vacuous outsider Baroness Constance Blandford Plainview (Gwen Grastorf).Luccio Patatino von Dusselkopf (Caleb Jaster) serves as the entertainment, accompanying the party games with the sounds of Handel and Bach on harpsichord and cello.Happenstance, a Washington-based physical theater troupe, devises productions with its cast, and there’s no plot to speak of in this brief 65-minute show, directed by the company members Jaster and Mandell.We simply watch these daft noblemen and women play charades, dance and trade riddles in a desperate attempt to stave off ennui. Leisure is a trap — literally. It soon becomes clear that these aristocrats are unable to leave the party.So the surprise of “Barococo” is how it actually resembles Sartre’s “No Exit,” or, more fittingly, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film “The Exterminating Angel,” which was recently adapted into an opera. There’s the same idiocy and, sometimes, cruelty beneath the fawning and posturing. Somewhere outside this room is the real world, where finery and foppishness won’t save these characters from an uprising of the plebs.The actors distinguish themselves through affectations: a raised eyebrow, a bow, a giggle, a swept leg, a daintily dropped handkerchief, a cleared throat. Pantomime and awkward silences are emphasized more than dialogue, and to great comedic effect — the show really takes off during an extended silent sequence in which the partygoers gorge on an unseen feast; outrageous feats of physical comedy soon devolve into violence and then total chaos.As the Dauphine and Cavalieri, Thomas and Jaster make starving for attention into a show of flamboyance — she tittering shamelessly and he performing a full actor’s warm-up for a simple game of charades. Grastorf is a worthy straight woman, her bearings painfully stiff and face twisted into an expression of constant bafflement.From left: Vernon as a pretentious duke, Mandell as a petty countess, Jaster as a pretentious actor and Thomas as the hostess of the soiree.Richard TermineAnd yet, for a show all about excess, the production is oddly spare. The set design is virtually nonexistent — unadorned floors and walls dotted with a harpsichord, some stringed instruments, a fencing sword mount and a table with quills and an inkwell. In a program note the directors write that they chose this minimalist approach “to focus on period restraint, manners and style,” but the empty space feels like too stark of a contrast; some embellishments would do the production good.The same can be said of Daniel Weissglass’s austere lighting and the costumes, designed by Mandell. The cuffs and collars and doublets, and curled and powdered wigs, are perfectly serviceable but could use more rococo ornamentation, with brighter colors, opulent fabrics and jewels.The script itself could use some trimmings, too. There is plenty of delicious humor to chew on at “Barococo.” But more context on the outside world, and the lives of these characters, might individualize the gossip and quibbles, and give the satire more bite. Right now the show is little more than rich people dawdling and preening on a stage.BarococoThrough March 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ Postpones Broadway Reopening Until April

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      The musical, which closed temporarily last month as the Omicron variant spread, had hoped to reopen in March.The Broadway musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which closed temporarily last month as Omicron battered New York, announced Friday that it would postpone its reopening until April 14, a month later than anticipated, to give the theater economy a bit more time to rebound.“The good news is that it looks like the virus is calming down, but there are still a lot of unknowns,” said the show’s lead producer, Kevin McCollum. “It was just clear that April was a better time to open, given the trends with tourism, and thinking about when families and groups will start to feel comfortable.”The hiatus left the show’s cast, crew and musicians without work (at least at “Doubtfire”), but McCollum said he thought it was the best way to attempt to preserve their jobs longer term. And on Friday, he said he had invited the entire cast to return, and was hopeful that they would do so.The musical, adapted from the popular 1993 film, has traveled a bumpy road: After an out-of-town run at 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle, it began previews on Broadway on March 9, 2020, just three days before the coronavirus pandemic forced all theaters to close. After a 19-month hiatus, the show resumed previews last October and opened Dec. 5, to mixed reviews, just as Omicron was causing cases to spike again.“If there was an award for worst timing for a producer, I will take that award,” McCollum said. “My timing was terrible.”But McCollum said he believes that the show will work if given a chance, and that he is committed to trying to preserve the jobs of his company, many of whom have been working on the show for several years.“The easiest path would have been to say, ‘OK, we’re done,’ but the show was telling us we’re not done,” he said. “We just never got our sea legs because of Omicron.”One additional advantage to reopening in April: Tony nominators and voters who did not catch the show before it began its hiatus on Jan. 10 will now have another chance to do so before casting their ballots. (This year’s Tony calendar has not yet been announced, but the season is expected to end in late April, followed by nominations, voting and an awards ceremony.)“Mrs. Doubtfire” was written by Karey Kirkpatrick, Wayne Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, and directed by Jerry Zaks. A second production of the show is scheduled to begin performances in Manchester, England, in September.“Mrs. Doubtfire” was the first of three Broadway shows to announce a temporary closing as the Omicron surge caused audiences to dwindle — “To Kill a Mockingbird” closed on Jan. 16 and said it would reopen at a different theater on June 1, while “Girl From the North Country” closed Jan. 23 and said it hoped to reopen in the spring. (Six other shows closed for good.)Unions representing actors and musicians did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the “Mrs. Doubtfire” plans. D. Joseph Hartnett, the stagecraft department director at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), said that his union, which represents stagehands, had not had yet heard from the show and “presumes the production has and still is officially closed.” More