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      ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: ‘Who Here Hates Their Father?’

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      Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play is a belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own.“Who here has a father who has died?”As show-of-hands questions for an audience go, that one is pretty personal. But when an actor asked it from the stage the other evening during “The Nosebleed,” Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play, many hands went up.Other questions for the crowd come later: “Who here loves their father?”And, at least as relevant in this emotionally complex, autobiographical show: “Who here hates their father?”At that, all four actors sharing the role of Aya — the playwright — raise their hands, in character.Directed by Ogawa at Japan Society, which presents it with the Chocolate Factory Theater, “The Nosebleed” is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.If that all sounds grim and — what with the four Ayas — hard to follow, it is not. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease familiar from Ogawa’s many English translations of the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada (“Zero Cost House”), who is known for his colloquial immediacy.“The Nosebleed” also has some wackily funny, psychologically insightful scenes reenacted from the reality TV show “The Bachelorette.”“Why haven’t you talked to your dad in two years?” the bachelorette asks her date.“Is it my responsibility to reach out to him and make sure that there’s a relationship there?” her date says. “I don’t know.”In a news release about the play, Ogawa says that it “chronicles what I believe is one of the biggest failures of my life, which is that when my father died almost 15 years ago, I failed to do anything to honor him or his life because of the nature of our relationship.”“The Nosebleed,” in which she plays both her father and her bloody-nosed 5-year-old son, goes some distance toward atoning for that without sentimentalizing the past. The father she shows us is a stolid, taciturn executive who immigrated from Japan to Northern California with young Aya and her mother, and considers his financial support of them proof enough of his love.The gap between Aya and her father, then, is partly cultural. Having spent a good chunk of her childhood in the United States, she fits into it more comfortably than he did — even if entrenched idiots like the character called White Guy (Peter Lettre) can hardly believe that she doesn’t speak English with an accent.With set and costumes by Jian Jung, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, “The Nosebleed” is a visually uncomplicated show: a vessel for holding ghosts and regrets, and for deciding what to do with what a parent leaves behind.With the four Ayas — Drae Campbell, Haruna Lee, Saori Tsukada and Kaili Y. Turner, terrific all — and some audience participation from volunteers, the performance becomes a moving communal rite that accommodates both love and hate and locates the filial kindness for a loopily generous send-off.But what it mourns most deeply are the questions for a dead father that went unasked, and the understanding that might have been.The NosebleedThrough Oct. 10 at Japan Society, Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      George Ferencz, Innovative Theater Director, Dies at 74

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      He directed works by Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and others at La MaMa and similar theaters known for experimentation.George Ferencz, a director who was a fixture at theaters known for experimental work like La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan, died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His family said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Ferencz (pronounced FAIR-ents) directed pieces by unknowns as well as name writers like Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and Mac Wellman. One specialty was giving startling new interpretations to previously staged works, both classic and contemporary. Another was infusing productions with music in unusual ways; he collaborated a number of times with the jazz drummer Max Roach.Mr. Ferencz first drew attention in the New York theater world as a founder and co-artistic director of the Impossible Ragtime Theater, known as I.R.T., which presented a wide range of productions in small spaces beginning in the mid-1970s. His 1976 staging of “The Hairy Ape,” a 1922 Eugene O’Neill play, gave that work a visceral immediacy.“The main reason one attends off-off-Broadway shows is in the one chance in a thousand of finding a production as good as the Impossible Ragtime Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’” Glenne Currie of United Press International wrote.Mr. Ferencz scored another success soon after with a more obscure O’Neill play, “Dynamo.”“If lesser plays by great playwrights are to be seen,” Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “then Mr. Ferencz’s productions could serve as models.”Mr. Ferencz left the I.R.T. in 1977 but continued to direct Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, including a mini-festival of Shepard plays at Columbia University in 1979, shortly after Mr. Shepard had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child.”Two years later Mr. Ferencz mounted a full production of one of those pieces under the title “Cowboy Mouth (in Concert).” Here he revisited “Cowboy Mouth,” which Mr. Shepard and Patti Smith had written and first performed in 1971. Mr. Ferencz’s production, with Brooks McKay and Annette Kurek in the roles originated by Mr. Shepard and Ms. Smith, imagined their back-and-forth exchanges as a rock concert.“The result,” Mr. Gussow wrote in The Times, “is a sizzling, surrealistic 70 minutes that in its own stark way comes closer to the anarchic spirit of Shepard than some elaborate productions of more complete plays.”Mr. Ferencz’s collaborations Mr. Baraka included directing his “Boy and Tarzan Appear in Clearing” at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater in 1981.The next year Mr. Ferencz began a long association with Ellen Stewart and her influential experimental theater, La MaMa, in Lower Manhattan, directing a portion of “Money, a Jazz Opera,” composed by George Gruntz with a book by Mr. Baraka. He founded La MaMa’s Experiments reading series for experimental works in 1998 and ran it for 16 years.Mr. Ferencz in 1982 with Ellen Stewart, the founder of the experimental theater La MaMa in Lower Manhattan. They had a long artistic association. Courtesy of La MaMa ArchiveMr. Ferencz directed well beyond New York’s downtown scene, staging productions at Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theater and numerous other venues.“I look at the theater as a hammer,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 1979, when he was guest director for a production of Donald Freed’s “Inquest” at the University of Maine, “aggressive and highly theatrical, something you can’t get by flicking on the television switch. It has got to have spectacle and shock value.”George Michael Ferencz was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in a Hungarian Catholic neighborhood of Cleveland. His father, George John Ferencz, owned an auto-parts store, and his mother, Anne (Haydu) Ferencz, was a homemaker and a former beauty queen.He studied journalism at the University of Detroit but transferred to Kent State University in Ohio, where he pursued theater, directing plays by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and others. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and settled in New York soon after.In 1969 he married Pam Mitchell, who became a founder of I.R.T. along with him, Ted Story and Cynthia Crane. The couple divorced in 1978, and in 1986 he married Sally Lesser, a noted costume designer he had worked with for years; they collaborated on some 65 productions.She survives him, as does their son, Jack.In addition to his La MaMa work, Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field, the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.“He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity for socially relevant theater,” she said in a statement. “He was a Brechtian director whose mission was not only to engage you emotionally, but also to make you think and think hard about the world in which the story lives.”Among Mr. Ferencz’s frequent collaborators was Mr. Roach, whom he met at a party at Mr. Baraka’s house; they joined forces in 1984 for a staging of three Shepard plays performed in repertory, with Mr. Roach providing original music. Among their later efforts was a jazz-infused version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged at San Diego Rep in 1987.“George loves jazz and directs like that,” Mr. Roach, who died in 2007, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “He kind of lets things unfold the way folks like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington would do. He knows where he wants to go, but he gives everybody a chance to make a contribution.” More

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      Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’

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      Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’Maya Phillips��Reporting from the Theater DistrictJane Seymour (Abby Mueller): Known as the only wife Henry truly loved, Jane is imagined as a wholesome mother and hopeless romantic, robbed of domestic bliss. (She died shortly after giving birth.) Simple Pleasures: Sundays on the couch, brunch, tea. More

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      He Speaks Theater’s Language (and Many Others, Too)

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      Tiago Rodrigues, the newly appointed director of the Avignon Festival, will make his American debut, in English, with a work he has also performed in French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.LISBON — Theater knows no language barriers for the Portuguese actor and director Tiago Rodrigues. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where he will make his American debut on Oct. 12, he will perform “By Heart,” a solo show with audience participation, in English.Since it was created in 2013, he has also staged it around Europe in the three other languages he speaks: French, Portuguese and Spanish. And because the premise of “By Heart” is that Rodrigues, 44, brings 10 audience members onstage to teach them a Shakespeare sonnet, he has also learned the poem in Greek and Russian, for shows in Thessaloniki, Greece; Moscow; and St. Petersburg, Russia.Midway through a recent interview at the Lisbon playhouse he has directed since 2015, the grand-looking Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, he recalled the first four lines of the sonnet — No. 30, which begins, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” — in Russian, with obvious delight.“I really love to see what happens to a play when you did it in one language, and then you do it in another,” he said. “I always ask someone from the country to help out. I’ve visited a lot of embassies in Portugal.”Rodrigues, center, performing “By Heart” in 2013 at O Espaço do Tempo performing arts center, in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.Magda BizarroOne embassy has recently been less amenable. In September, the United States Embassy in Lisbon denied Rodrigues a visa to perform at BAM, advising instead that he “travel to a country outside Europe to apply for a visa to enter the U.S.,” Rodrigues said in an email on Wednesday. So he will go to Canada before traveling to New York, pushing the “By Heart” premiere back by a week: The show will now run from Oct. 12 through Oct. 17.At least American theatergoers will still get a glimpse of the work that has made Rodrigues a widely appreciated figure on Europe’s stages — and led to his appointment as the next director of the Avignon Festival, one of the continent’s biggest theater events, starting with the 2023 edition.Over the past two decades, Rodrigues’s output has spanned multiple genres, including classic dramas like Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” and Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and less formal and more personal works like “By Heart,” which is a loving tribute to his grandmother Candida. A voracious reader, she tried to learn a favorite book in its entirety when she found herself going blind at the end of her life.“The moment I say her name onstage, it’s a way of perpetuating her presence, somehow, and to share this invisible connection that literature creates,” Rodrigues said.What Rodrigues’s productions have in common is a Pan-European, multilingual outlook and a loose, collaborative directing style. His wife, Magda Bizarro, has been a frequent collaborator from the start of his career, and will oversee international programming in Avignon.Artists who have worked with Rodrigues describe him as gentle to a fault. Océane Cairaty, who played the role of Varya in “The Cherry Orchard” at Avignon in July, said that he “completely trusts the actors — he believes we also have our vision of the play and the role, and he welcomes it.” (In an interview in Lisbon, Bizarro explained with a laugh that it doesn’t mean Rodrigues doesn’t have an end point in mind: “Tiago hears everyone, but if he has an idea about a text, he keeps it until the end.”)Rodrigues’s approach stems in part from political principles, he said. A child of the young Portuguese democracy, he was born in Lisbon three years after the “Carnation Revolution” in 1974 that abolished the country’s military dictatorship. His father was an antifascist activist who spent several years in exile in France in the late 1960s, and later worked as a journalist.“I never want to work with someone and, when we disagree, play the authority card because it’s my job,” Rodrigues said.Ana Brigida for The New York Times“Democracy for me is a big thing. I try to work the way I try to live,” Rodrigues said. “I never want to work with someone and, when we disagree, play the authority card because it’s my job. If I ever do it, I hope I’m brave enough to say sorry.”“Knowing him has been one of the privileges of my theater life,” Jean-Marie Hordé, the director of the Théâtre de la Bastille in Paris, where Rodrigues has presented many of his works, said in a phone interview. “His talents are manifold, and he is an extremely honest man.”Rodrigues himself took an unusual path to the stage. When he applied to the Lisbon Theater and Film School as a teenager, he was rejected — “I was the first of the non-admitted, the best of the refused,” he recalled — yet ultimately, he got in after someone dropped out. “I did one year, and by the end, they were sorry they had called me,” he said. “They said I was just not talented. I’m not sure they were wrong. I probably grew much, much better, just to prove them wrong.”The school advised him to focus his talents elsewhere. Instead, Rodrigues enrolled in every workshop he could find after the school year, including one with the Belgian company tg STAN. By the end of the summer, tg STAN, a director-less collective that Rodrigues described as “my school of theater,” offered him a role in an upcoming production.“It was really love at first sight with them,” he said, adding that when he turned to directing, he was heavily influenced by the collective’s philosophy. “The idea of a creation is shared by all, collectively, and is based upon the freedom of the actor onstage.”To keep working with tg STAN, Rodrigues pretended he could speak French to land a role in “Les Antigones,” a production that premiered in Toulouse, France, in 2001. “I said in English that my French was great, and they never doubted me,” he said.His now excellent French will no doubt improve further when he moves to Avignon, in southern France, full time this winter. In Lisbon, Rodrigues leaves behind a rejuvenated Teatro Nacional — Portugal’s “symbolic temple of theater,” as he puts it.“When I came in 2015, it was perceived as a bit old-fashioned,” Rodrigues said. “Sometimes it didn’t allow for the great work being done here to be perceived as great work.”A production of “By Heart” at the Teatro in June 2020, shortly after the theater reopened following a coronavirus lockdown.Filipe FerreiraUnder his leadership, the theater introduced outreach programs aimed at residents of central Lisbon who had never been to the Teatro Nacional. The resident ensemble, at that point downsized to only a handful of actors because of funding cuts, was supplemented by young performers on fixed contracts.While bringing in new blood, Rodrigues also honored the theater’s long-serving staff members. “Sopro,” a work he created in 2017, is based around four decades of backstage anecdotes from the theater’s prompter, Cristina Vidal. She whispers her stories to actors onstage, who relay them to the audience.“He took a sleeping beauty, and woke it up,” said Hordé of Rodrigues’s tenure in Lisbon.The Avignon Festival — in another country, and language — will present new challenges, but Rodrigues said he would apply the same convictions there. It might also mean “doing less” than the current, sprawling event, he added.The vast scale of the job might mean he has to do less, too: Avignon will most likely keep Rodrigues too busy for many stage appearances of his own. “When I started directing and writing more and more, I understood that acting is the hardest job for me,” Rodrigues said. “I’m exhausted by it.”Yet eight years after the “By Heart” premiere, he said he hadn’t tired of sharing Shakespeare’s sonnet around the world. “Every performance, 10 new people come onstage,” Rodrigues added. “And it’s a totally new adventure.” More

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      Revisiting a Post-Apocalyptic Play in the Pandemic

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      Anne Washburn’s phantasmagoric “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is getting a timely new run at Theater Wit in Chicago.CHICAGO — One of the most unbearable things about the pandemic is the uncertainty: about what we can and cannot do, and the way our understanding of what is going on gets tangled in conflicting stories or collapses altogether. And then there is the dread about what will happen next.Or at least that is what I was thinking as I watched this pandemic-era production of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” Anne Washburn’s 2012 apocalyptic phantasmagoria about hope, storytelling and “The Simpsons.” At Theater Wit in Chicago, Jeremy Wechsler, its longtime artistic director, is offering an expressive new staging that leans on the horror of the last 18 months to draw out the work’s fresh urgency. But he has also found new comfort in its meaning.I saw “Mr. Burns” twice in the Before Times — in 2013, at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and, in 2015, which was Wechsler’s previous Theater Wit production. Like many critics, I was won over by Washburn’s agile, boisterous storytelling and her tangled, semi-redemptive vision of how humans would respond to the end of the world as we know it.The plot is ingenious: In Act I, a group of people try to keep it together after a series of nuclear meltdowns by retelling the story of a single “Simpsons” episode: “Cape Feare,” a sendup of the movie “Cape Fear.” Seven years later, in Act II, those same characters, now an itinerant theater troupe, are recreating episodes of “The Simpsons,” commercials and hit songs. But they lose whatever unity they had and, in the closing scene, are gunned down by rivals. The sung-through third act begins 75 years later, with a ritual homage to the meltdown and a fantastical, grisly and surprisingly comedic version of “Cape Feare.”Washburn and the composer Michael Friedman, who died of complications from AIDS in 2017, were trying to examine how pop culture and storytelling might survive after a disaster. To take a line from the play: “What will endure when the cataclysm arrives — when the grid fails, society crumbles and we’re faced with the task of rebuilding?”Wechsler’s new production lands differently. And the pandemic isn’t the only threat it evokes. Take, for instance, climate change and all that comes with it: fire, heavy rain, droughts, people buying blocks of ice in a city with no electricity, gas stations running out of gas, power grid failure. “We have a larger sense of ourselves as being on precarious ground,” Washburn said in an interview.An emblematic moment arrives at the end of Act I, when one character, Maria, crouched around the fire, shares an anecdote about someone she met at Walmart who courageously tried to shut down the plant. But as she goes on telling the story, it begins to seem as if he never made it to the plant at all: “It’s not knowing,” Maria recounts the unnamed character saying. From the safety of a nearby gas station, he dreams himself fleeing the generator, nuked, and dying. But he actually walks in the other direction, away from the plant.Moments like this — as full of vivid, free-floating theories and fears as our current lives — make it fitting that “Mr. Burns,” which opened Sept. 8, was until recently the only Actors’ Equity Association production in Chicago.Theater Wit requires proof of vaccination and masks; the actors, who are unmasked, perform 10 feet away from the audience of the 99-seat house. But the attendees I saw didn’t seem fazed by the restrictions. And one of them, comparing Wechsler’s 2015 “Mr. Burns” with this one, said during a post-show discussion, “What was speculative became realistic.”In an interview, Wechsler agreed. “Back then,” he said, “the play had a funnier, sci-fi spin and a hallucinatory, giddy feeling.”He did not start the pandemic plotting to restage “Mr. Burns.” In March 2020, Theater Wit was presenting “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Wechsler took the show online, but then he sank into a depression. “What surprised me was how quickly the profession could vanish,” he said.Once the theater reopened to in-person audiences, Wechsler thought, it would need “something real, big, complicated and recklessly extravagant.” And he wanted that show to ask: What would theater need to provide in a post-lockdown landscape?Tina Muñoz Pandya and Ana Silva in the play, whose Act III costumes are made from materials including Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets.Charles OsgoodHe thought of Washburn’s layered storytelling and how it might hit more closely now. “I became obsessed with it,” he said.Although Wechsler has directed over 50 shows, restaging “Mr. Burns” felt different. He had never done a remounting in which the lives of artists, and culture at large, had changed so much, he said. This run is different from 2015 in many ways: It is the largest production in the theater’s history (with help from a $140,000 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant); and although a few actors reprised their roles, most of the cast was new, including Will Wilhelm, the first nonbinary actor to play Jenny.The design team is mostly intact from the 2015 production, though the set and costumes in Act III are more of, as Wechsler put it, a “fever dream” this time. The clothes worn by “Simpsons” characters are made of comparatively wackier found materials like Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets. Humorous frescoes of Marge Simpson as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” and Homer crossing the Potomac River have been moved closer to the audience.But the most marked changes are in the staging. In 2015, Wechsler set Act I in a forest; now, it opens on the characters huddled around a pile of burning chairs in a backyard. It is also set later in the year, with how people passed time during the pandemic in mind. “Act I is really, ‘How We Spent the Winter,’” he said.Earlier productions I saw dragged at times in Act II, but Wechsler’s new staging of it is ragged and brisk. “There is a shared sense of a new normal and managing dreams, the things the characters talk about, like the fires and the grid going down, have already happened,” he said. “I wanted that ‘Let’s put on a show’ spirit in desperate circumstances.” He was inspired in part, he said, by things that he had previously taken for granted, such as friendly visits and birthday parties, becoming difficult during the pandemic.Wechsler also updated the poignant and hilarious “Chart hits” medley, in which the actors perform (and flub) lines from pop songs. He added snippets from Billie Eilish, Lorde and Taylor Swift. Act III, too, has transformed: Its ceremonial theater piece seemed sharper, or maybe I understood better that we need the grandeur of a chanting masked chorus to communicate apocalyptic horror.In that scene, the actors also used details from their lives during the pandemic. Leslie Ann Sheppard, who plays Bart Simpson, said in an interview: “We incorporated a little bit more of the coughing and ‘Stay away from me. We need to cover our faces.’”During one striking moment of Act III, Jenny reads the names of people who have died. “When we first did the show in 2015, we would sing audience members’ names that were there that evening,” Wechsler said. “This was arresting in its way, but too anxiety-producing and flip after the last 18 months.”Now the names include those in the script, as well as theater luminaries who have died — not just from Covid-19 — including the Chicago actor Johnny Lee Davenport and the Organic Theater founder Stuart Gordon.Later in Act III, Mr. Burns brutally murders Homer, Marge and Lisa, and then Bart seems to kill the villain. But when the lights come on, Mr. Burns is not dead. The last moment reveals him pedaling more and more slowly on a stationary bike hooked up to a generator. It’s an image that “is uncertain,” Washburn said. “It can toggle more difficult or more heartening.”In his production, Wechsler wanted to emphasize the positive. “Life is hard, and none of us is going to emerge unscarred,” he said. “How do we heal? The answer is just keep living.”That moment, in 2015, ended with a blackout after a spotlight shone on Mr. Burns pedaling for a long time. Not now: Rather than close with that image, several colorful electric fixtures slowly descend from the ceiling as the house lights come on.“We wanted to bring the audience in,” Wechsler said, “to show them we are in this together.” More

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      Positive Coronavirus Cases Halt ‘Aladdin’ a Day After It Reopened

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      The Broadway show had just returned to the stage on Tuesday with several understudies.On Tuesday, “Aladdin” held its first performance since Broadway closed for the pandemic. On Wednesday, the show was canceled because of several positive coronavirus tests.Disney Theatrical Productions announced the cancellation just a half-hour before curtain, saying “through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of ‘Aladdin’ at the New Amsterdam Theater.”Disney said it was refunding purchased tickets, and did not yet know whether or how future performances might be affected.“We will continue to provide support to the affected ‘Aladdin’ company members as they recover,” the company said in a statement.The cancellation is the first missed performance of a Broadway show for Covid-related reasons since theaters started reopening in late June.But there have been missed shows Off Broadway — Second Stage canceled several performances of Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh,” citing “an exposure of COVID-19,” and then postponed that play’s opening after resuming performances with an understudy. And in Atlanta, a touring production of “Hamilton” had to cancel a performance because of positive coronavirus tests.All Broadway companies — cast and crew — are required to be fully vaccinated, as are all Broadway audiences. When breakthrough cases occur, some productions have been able to keep going with a combination of backstage testing and understudies. For example, “Waitress” had a positive test in its cast before its first performance, but was able to use testing to determine that the rest of the cast was OK, and then to keep going with an understudy.“Aladdin” had been dealing with coronavirus complications in the run-up to its reopening performance. The raucous first night performance, with an audience that included Kristin Chenoweth and the show’s composer, Alan Menken, and librettist, Chad Beguelin, featured three understudies. The crowd didn’t seem to mind — “Friend Like Me,” the Genie’s big production number, brought the audience to its feet. Michael James Scott, the actor playing the Genie, stood to the side of the stage, breathless, before shouting to the audience, by way of explanation, “18 months, people! 18 months!” More

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      Young Women Set the Tone for a Paris Theater Season

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      The directors staging the most ambitious premieres are all female millennials.PARIS — In March last year, Pauline Bayle’s “Lost Illusions” closed after just two performances, the day before France’s first coronavirus lockdown came into force. Eighteen months later, the Théâtre de la Bastille was chock-full once more for the production’s return to the stage — and the mood in Paris appeared to have finally lifted.Sure, proof of full vaccination or a recent negative test is required at the door, and masks remain mandatory in theaters. But the fear of shutdowns has receded along with the infection rate in the country, now that 75 percent of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine. Nearly all the country’s playhouses have reopened, with hopes now high for a “normal” season.And the directors setting the tone with ambitious premieres this September have all been millennial women. Like Bayle, Pauline Bureau, currently at the Théâtre de la Colline with “Surrogate” (“Pour Autrui”), and Maëlle Poésy, who just made her debut at the Comédie-Française, were on the cusp of national prominence when the pandemic hit.It is a relief to see them back. For emerging artists, the risk of running down funding or losing key opportunities has been especially acute over the past 18 months. The odds for women are arguably even tougher: Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum report suggested that the pandemic would delay gender equality by a generation. In France, an open letter published in the newspaper Libération last March pointed out the continued dearth of female leaders in the country’s arts world.The talent is there to change the narrative, and these millennial directors are maturing. While Bayle, Bureau and Poésy are far from alike, they all shun the highly conceptual approach that is often confused in France for a strong directorial voice. Instead, “Lost Illusions,” “Surrogate” and Poésy’s “7 Minutes” are all examples of confident, clear storytelling, complete with a few twists.“Lost Illusions” is in many ways a follow-up to Bayle’s Homer-inspired “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” two shows that toured widely in France from 2017 to 2020. Once again, Bayle has adapted an epic, character-heavy tale — Honoré de Balzac’s novel of the same name, published in installments between 1837 and 1843 — with just five actors on a bare stage. Four of them play multiple characters, men and women; the fifth, Jenna Thiam, takes the gender-swapped role of Lucien, an ambitious young writer from Angoulême who strives to make it in Parisian society.Significant cuts have been required to keep “Lost Illusions” under the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Still, Bayle and her cast manage to clearly delineate no fewer than 17 characters, sometimes with seconds to change costumes and transition from one to the next.Marie Nicolle and Nicolas Chupin in Pauline Bureau’s “Surrogate” at the Théâtre de la Colline.Christophe Raynaud de LageWhile Bayle relies on the audience’s imagination to fill in some gaps, Bureau’s instincts are closer to documentary theater. In 2019, she tackled the legalization of abortion in France in the 1970s for the Comédie-Française, in a play that drew on real-life events; “Surrogate,” at La Colline, returns to the theme of women’s reproductive rights through fiction.While legal in many countries and in some U.S. states, surrogacy remains forbidden by French law, regardless of the parents’ circumstances. “Surrogate,” which Bureau wrote and directed, openly acts as an advocate for change by telling the story of a heterosexual couple who can’t conceive after the prospective mother was treated for cancer.It’s a tricky proposition for a play, because creating characters in service of a clear cause can leave them feeling one-dimensional. When we meet Liz (Marie Nicolle), a construction manager, and Alexandre (Nicolas Chupin), a puppeteer, it soon becomes obvious — if only because of the play’s title — that they will fall in love and struggle to have a child. Yet in a neat, fast-paced series of vignettes, Bureau manages to introduce them both and stage a believable meet-cute at an airport. Their budding love story is told through intimate text messages flashed over the elaborate two-tier set.Some shortcuts are more frustrating. After Liz undergoes a hysterectomy, the play nudges them quickly toward surrogacy. Liz’s sister just happens to work at an American maternity hospital, and to have a colleague who dreams of becoming a surrogate. The staggering cost — over $100,000 — is mentioned only in passing, along with the vague prospect of a loan.Yet Bureau is brilliantly imaginative when it comes to revealing character in small, concise touches. As the American surrogate Rose, who seems too perfect on paper, she cast Maria Mc Clurg, a trained dancer who luxuriates in languid, expansive steps while heavily pregnant, as Liz watches, still — an eloquent metaphor for the relish Rose says she experiences when carrying a child, as well as Liz’s frustration with her own body.As Liz’s mother, Martine Chevallier is another highlight, insensitively deadpan, even as her daughter struggles. The only major mishap in “Surrogate” is the final scene, which sees Liz and Alexandre’s daughter appear as a teenager. Her studied weirdness, as well as repeated allusions to her high intellectual potential, undermine the rest of the play: Wouldn’t an average child be a gift, too, after infertility?The cast of “7 Minutes,” directed by Maëlle Poésy.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseNotably, both Bayle and Bureau benefited from commissions from the venerable Comédie-Française in 2019. Under its current director, Éric Ruf, the storied company has implemented a roughly equal split between female and male directors every season. This year, the two productions that opened the season were staged by women.After directing a Chekhov double bill for the troupe in 2016, Poésy returned with “7 Minutes,” a play by the Italian author Stefano Massini. It is set in a French textile factory, whose workers fear for their jobs after a change of ownership. Instead, the new management makes them a surprising offer: Eleven women elected to represent their peers are asked to voluntarily give up seven minutes out of the workforce’s daily 15-minute breaks.“7 Minutes” works like a courtroom drama. The characters have 80 minutes to decide whether or not to accept the proposal, and never leave the stage. While it initially seems like a no-brainer — seven minutes, they reason, is nothing compared with layoffs in a declining sector — one dissenting voice, that of Véronique Vella, raises the possibility that it is the first step in a rollback of hard-earned rights. As blue-collar jobs disappear, she asks with understated defiance, should those who remain accept worse working conditions just to remain employed?The play makes a superb addition to the Comédie-Française repertoire, which isn’t exactly replete with working-class stories, and brings every generation of the company together, from the company’s doyenne, Claude Mathieu, to Ruf’s latest hire, Séphora Pondi, 29.From left, Gaël Kamilindi, Sylvia Bergé, Gilles David, Claïna Clavaron and Birane Ba in Rose Martine’s “Hansel and Gretel” at the Comédie-Française.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseAnd there are already new names in the wings. “Hansel and Gretel,” a family-friendly production on the Comédie-Française’s smallest stage, the Studio-Théâtre, introduces Rose Martine, a 27-year-old director born in Haiti and raised in the overseas department of French Guiana.“Hansel and Gretel” lacks a little finesse in the acting choices, yet it’s a joy to see Martine bring elements of Black culture to the Comédie-Française stage, including call-and-response interactions with the audience borrowed from Haitian folk tales. Hansel, Gretel and the narrator are all played by young Black members of the company, with Birane Ba especially convincing as Hansel. Postpandemic, the future looks bright.Lost Illusions. Directed by Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 16.Surrogate. Directed by Pauline Bureau. Théâtre de la Colline, through Oct. 17.7 Minutes. Directed by Maëlle Poésy. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 17.Hansel & Gretel. Directed by Rose Martine. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 24. More

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      Review: Tracy Letts Brings Out the Long Knives in Short Plays

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      It takes 15 minutes or less in each segment of “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts” for the bard of male moral decrepitude to skewer his subjects.Tracy Letts, though always funny, has never been jolly.You wouldn’t, after all, expect bonhomie from a writer whose earliest plays were called “Killer Joe” and “Bug.” Even now, in dark memory, those Off Broadway hits feel somehow infested, buzzing with sociopathy.Nor did “August: Osage County,” his 2007 Broadway breakthrough, do much to advertise the charms of humanity, featuring as it did a hellish family that by the final curtain made the opening suicide seem inevitable.Since then, despite the increased restraint of middle age, he has periodically released his swarms of psychic cicadas; “Linda Vista,” his 2019 Broadway outing, basically pinned American maleness to a museum wall, letting it writhe there, and us with it.Now welcome to Letts 2021, the streaming edition, as Steppenwolf Theater Company, his longtime Chicago home, unveils a virtual Letts sampler. In three heartbreaking, brutally short plays — an anthology if not of horror then of angst — the fury may be fully internalized, but it is nevertheless poisonous, and seeps.I at first thought the pandemic might be a factor in the tone of the triptych, which carries the omnibus title “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts,” but as it happens all three were written in the Before Times. They first appeared, live, at the Gift Theater, another Chicago institution, during annual evenings of original short works by various writers. I can only imagine that on those occasions, they came off like the creepy guy at the corner of a party.That’s a compliment, by the way, or at least a job description for Rainn Wilson. In “Night Safari,” first performed in January 2018, Wilson plays Gary, the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever. Certainly it’s the most unusual, containing only animals whose characteristics mirror those of their guide. Take, for instance, the Panamanian night monkey, monogamous in captivity but not, Gary emphasizes, in the wild.Rainn Wilson, as the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever, in “Night Safari.”Liberace Cruzuee“There’s a lesson there somewhere,” he says, “but you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”Between stops at the aardwolf (“physically unattractive, and what is with this attitude?”); the boreal owl (“unsociable”); and the reverse-growing paradoxical frog (“Imagine that, if you can … dwindling as you mature”), Gary can’t help but display his own problems, too. These mostly involve Rhonda, who works in the gift shop and has so far responded unfavorably to his khaki plumage.Wilson is terrific in the 12-minute monologue, managing (much as he did as Dwight Schrute on “The Office”) to make boorishness and hostility human if not sympathetic. In the director Patrick Zakem’s merciless close-ups, he looks as if he’s actively curdling. Even so, “Night Safari,” with its slightly over-clever conceit, is not much more than a lark — perhaps a foxy lark, characterized (I read) by its quick, high-pitched song.“The Old Country,” written in 2015, is no less foxy; what seems at first like a simple lunchtime conversation between two codgers embodied by papier-mâché puppets moves quickly but without comment into another realm as you realize the men are talking at cross-purposes. Ted (voiced by William Petersen) is the spryer of the pair, and basically compos mentis; he praises the diner’s sandwiches, recalls the Russian waitresses who used to work there and waxes sexist on the topic of past conquests.But Landy (the great Mike Nussbaum, who is 97) seems to have let go of his moorings, drifting on a sea of random and often inappropriate thoughts. When Ted says of a previous visit, “We sat in a booth right there,” Landy responds: “You sawed a lady in half.”As his non sequiturs (or at least I hope they’re non sequiturs) get ever more so, you realize that he is not in fact responding; rather, he is making pronouncements, as perhaps we all do, from a locked-down world of his own.That impression is deepened by the choice (the director, again, is Zakem) to stage the piece, written for humans, with the puppets, which as rendered by Grace Needlman seem to generalize human experience instead of specifying it the way live actors do. Their sad gorgeousness and apt materiality — Ted’s stringy white hair looks like Scotch tape, as if it alone were holding him together — give “The Old Country” the weight of universal tragedy, in just eight minutes.Or perhaps I mean the lightness of universal tragedy. There’s no shrieking or bellowing in these plays; the theatrical format does all the dramatic work, and only by implication. The gap between what’s being said and what’s being shown is where the pain lies.Letts in “The Stretch,” which at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers.Anna D. ShapiroIn that sense “Night Safari” and “The Old Country” are warm-ups for “The Stretch,” a 15-minute monologue, performed by Letts himself, that at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers. You barely have time to laugh as the names of the horses flying by get weirder: Architect, Daddys Lil Dumplin, My Enormous Ego, Scrod.Perhaps the most telling name is A Horse Called Man, which gives away the game. In the guise of “calling” the 108th running of the (fictional) El Dorado Stakes, “The Stretch” is actually calling the uncountable zillionth — and yet always roughly the same — running of a man’s life. I say “man” because it is from a man’s perspective that the story unfolds, at least as written; in the script, from 2015, the announcer’s monologue is “illustrated” onstage by human dioramas of a boy’s birth, then maturation, marriage, fatherhood, infidelity and decline.But the version now streaming — directed by Anna D. Shapiro, who stepped down as Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August — does away with the illustrations, which strike me in any case as banal. Instead, Shapiro trusts the words (abetted by Allen Cordell’s thundering hooves soundscape) to score the play’s points in passing, and in Letts’s imperturbably dense performance they do. You don’t need to see a man getting married stage right to feel the punch of a line like “My Enormous Ego has stumbled badly and taken a terrific fall!”Nor do you have to be a man, though Letts now seems to be our leading contender for bard of male moral decrepitude. He was always in the running, of course; check out the revival of “Bug” at Steppenwolf in November. For new Letts, there’s also “The Minutes,” scheduled to open on Broadway in April, two years after the pandemic shut it down in previews.But now, taking on smaller slices of humankind, and leaving the big bad themes to speak for themselves, his vision seems funnier, deeper, bigger. Call him the paradoxical frog of playwriting: He’s growing as he shrinks.Three Short Plays by Tracy LettsThrough Oct. 24; steppenwolf.org. More