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      For Angélica Liddell, Each Performance is About Survival

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      Angélica Liddell says she doesn’t care about looking good onstage. Instead, her visceral works give her catharsis that she says keeps her alive.GHENT, Belgium — There is nothing in contemporary theater quite like an Angélica Liddell monologue. The Spanish director and performer, who has crafted her share of monumental productions over the past three decades, pushes herself to grating, visceral extremes onstage.Take her new production, “Liebestod” (subtitle: “The Smell of Blood Doesn’t Leave My Eyes, Juan Belmonte”), which will have its world premiere next week at France’s prestigious Avignon Festival. In a recent rehearsal in Ghent, she railed against Western societies “engorged with rights and eco-anxieties,” against France — “a country obsessed with fame and the elite” — and, above all, against herself.“Not a single word about happiness will pass my lips,” Liddell, 54, warned near the beginning.In other hands, nearly everything she does could come across as self-indulgent. Love or hate them, however, Liddell’s scorching speeches, which can last up to an hour, have earned a cult following in places like Avignon, not least because she throws herself into them as if her life depended on it.And according to her, it does. “I need the stage to survive myself,” she said through an interpreter after her rehearsal, looking spent. “Onstage, I’m allowed to kill myself over and over again. That possibility allows me to avoid real suicide, real madness.”“Liebestod” was commissioned by Belgium’s NTGent as part of a series, “History/ies of Theater,” launched in 2018 by the playhouse’s director, Milo Rau. The series has been less a history lesson than a space for contrasting voices to explore their relationship with the art form.The first installment was Rau’s own “La Reprise.” And after extending an invitation to the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula in 2019, Rau turned to Liddell.“I was sure she had to be a part of it from the beginning. I admire her as a total artist and performer,” Rau said in Ghent, adding that her monologues “go to the heart of theater.”Liddell’s interests lie in the sinister corners of the human psyche. She has written about terrorist attacks and cannibalism.Colin Delfosse for The New York Times“Liebestod” was inspired by the Spanish tradition of bullfighting, and especially by Juan Belmonte, an innovative bullfighter who died in 1962. Liddell sees a connection between his art form and her own: “Belmonte said that what frees us from death is actually longing for it,” she said, comparing it to a poet’s “death wish.”Liddell’s take on theater history is certainly idiosyncratic. In “Liebestod,” she describes the tradition as populated with “bureaucrats, bit-part players and technicians with rights.” She finds most contemporary theater productions, she said afterward, “naïve and a bit childish, because they’re always focused on the good.”Very nicely — she can be as gentle in real life as she is abrasive in her work — Liddell said that she had no interest in playing nice. “I find these times to be repugnant, because everything is about likes,” she said. “I don’t want to show the best of myself during a performance. I want to show my ugly sides, that I can be a monster as well.”Her interests lie in the sinister corners of the human psyche. She has written about terrorist attacks, cannibalism and her sexual desire for criminals. Her productions are laced with references to art history and religion, and have a ritualistic quality. In “St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians,” a doctor collected her blood onstage, and Liddell’s fluids also make an appearance when she scrapes her hands and legs in “Liebestod.”“It has been a long time since I cut myself in my work, but I needed to create that state of irrationality. Blood is love, beauty and death — like a holy trinity,” she said, before tempering: “I must add that I only do these cuts in front of an audience, never by myself.”Still, Liddell says she doesn’t consider herself an actress. “There is no distance between me and the stage,” she said. “It’s a different level: It’s not a performance, it’s a transfiguration.”Liddell is a rare artist who is wholly uninterested in the current political or social discourse. In 2018, she even produced an anti-#MeToo manifesto, “The Scarlet Letter,” in which she extolled men’s superiority. “People were so pure, so correct, so moralizing,” she said of #MeToo.But surely, I suggested, the feminist movement created the conditions for uncompromising women like her to create freely. Liddell dismissed the idea: “What I needed for my work to happen is to be who I am, to have illiterate parents when I was growing up, poor grandparents, a mother who was intellectually impaired.”Liddell was born in Figueres, Catalonia, to a military family. She attended Madrid’s Conservatory for the performing arts, only to quit when she found the teaching there disappointing. Although she has worked steadily since the early 1990s, producing her work hasn’t always been easy. She has long experienced what she called “friction” with mainstream Spanish theater, to the point that she refused to perform some of her productions in her home country because of a lack of support for her controversial experiments.The situation has improved in the past couple of years, she said, but there have been other disappointments, like in 2016 when no Paris playhouse would stage “What Will I Do With This Sword?”, a five-hour show featuring a scene in which naked women masturbate with dead octopuses.“Producers don’t always understand what the essence of a piece is,” Liddell said. “I find myself continuously explaining what I’m trying to do.”“There is no distance between me and the stage,” Liddell said. “It’s a different level: It’s not a performance, it’s a transfiguration.”Colin Delfosse for The New York TimesIn 2017, for the first time, Liddell directed one of her productions without appearing onstage herself, when “Dead Dog at Dry Cleaners: the Strong” joined the repertoire of Berlin’s Schaubühne theater. “It was a very strange experience to see people do what I do,” she said. “The acting was excellent, but it was very difficult to explain my process.”Would she do it again? “I don’t think so,” she said with a laugh.Her own team is small but close-knit. Some, like her assistant director and frequent actor Borja López, have been with her since her earliest performances. “I need people who understand my obsessions,” she said. “What we are representing isn’t the rational world. They need to defend that, and also understand that sometimes I have no patience.”And performing is an all-consuming business for Liddell. “After the performance, she disappears,” said López, who sat near her during the interview.She is no more sociable during the day. “I don’t do anything,” Liddell said. “I take care of my voice and myself — I don’t even read. I’m very afraid of catching a cold, of not being in the right physical state for the performance.”“I prepare, like a bullfighter,” she said, returning to the inspiration behind “Liebestod.” “The stage is my bull.” More

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      ‘The God Committee’ Review: At a Hospital, Judgment Day

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      In this drama starring Kelsey Grammer and Julia Stiles as cardiovascular surgeons, doctors have one hour to choose a heart transplant recipient.“The God Committee” ostensibly ponders the ethical compromises involved in choosing organ transplant recipients, but it mostly illustrates the dangers of facile twists.A teenage cyclist is killed in a hit-and-run that the screenwriter-director, Austin Stark, gratuitously plays for shock. The cyclist’s heart is helicoptered to New York, but the woman in line to receive it through normal channels dies during prep. That leaves the hospital’s heart transplant committee with an hour to decide who gets it.Should it go to a patient whose husband died on Sept. 11, 2001, but who is mean to the nurses? Should it go to an overweight doorman who has bipolar disorder, but who is trying to put three daughters through college? Or should it go to a much younger cocaine user and possible batterer whose father (Dan Hedaya) is dangling a $25 million grant?As agonizing as this emergency decision would be, the setup plays like a false trichotomy, compounded by ancillary ironies contrived for dramatic purposes. An eminent cardiovascular surgeon (Kelsey Grammer) on the committee has been having an affair with the group’s newest member (Julia Stiles). A lawyer-turned-priest (Colman Domingo) essentially acts as both.And in a device that has been added since “The God Committee” played in a stage version, written by Mark St. Germain, the movie crosscuts between these events, set in 2014, and the future, December 2021, when Grammer’s ailing character, nearing a scientific breakthrough, is himself a bad candidate for a transplant. A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.The God CommitteeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Generational Divides Emerge Onstage in Germany

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      At newly reopened playhouses, once-legendary and younger directors take very different approaches to their mammoth productions.BERLIN — Theatergoers know what to expect from a Frank Castorf production. The director, who helped shape the last 30 years of German theater, favors a deconstructive approach to the classics, reams of dialogue barked like manifestoes and manic performances over a marathon running time.All these Castorf hallmarks — and others — are on display in “Fabian, or Going to the Dogs” at the Berliner Ensemble, but they can’t help but feel old hat, especially when viewed alongside premieres from some of Germany’s most distinctive young theater artists.Scheduled to premiere in spring 2020, but delayed by the pandemic, “Fabian,” at five hours, is roughly two hours shorter than initially expected. I’m glad that the director, who is 69, used the extra rehearsal time to trim some fat. Perhaps the former enfant terrible has mellowed with age.Castorf ran the Berlin Volksbühne for 25 years before being fired in 2017, and this is his third production at the Berliner Ensemble since. It was loosely inspired by Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel about Berlin’s infernally decadent tailspin in the years before the Nazi takeover, but aside from some period details in Aleksandar Denic’s intricate set, there is little Weimar flavor to the production.Instead, Castorf treats the audience to a grim parade of high-octane acting and complicated, often messy, stagecraft that doesn’t seem to refer to anything outside itself.In typical Castorf style, there’s an off-kilter stage that rotates nonstop and actors performing out of sight and captured live via video. The show also features many of the director’s signature props, including gallons of stage blood (for bathing) and potato salad (for dancing in).Probably many of the graying spectators seated in the theater saw Castorf’s revolutionary productions in their youth. But by this point, he’s gone from legend to relic. I found myself wondering (and not for the first time) if his once radical brand of deconstructive theater is now an aesthetic dead end.As often with his work, one detects a strong misogynistic undercurrent, with female characters brutalized or presented as sexually available objects of gratification. So it was refreshing to see the cast’s five actresses transcend their limited roles by giving self-assured performances, especially the Russian-born Margarita Breitkreiz, who projected a feverish intensity, and the young French actress Clara De Pin, who recited Baudelaire and crawled into the audience as part of her physically adroit, courageous performance.Castorf’s quarter-century tenure at the Volksbühne was without parallel in modern Berlin theater history, but Thomas Ostermeier’s 21-year reign as the head of the Schaubühne comes close. “Vernon Subutex 1” is this 52-year-old director’s 41st show at the theater, and it suggests that Ostermeier’s verve-filled productions, which place a more traditional emphasis on the author’s text and on acting, may also be losing their bite.Joachim Meyerhoff in Thomas Ostermeier’s “Vernon Subutex 1.”Thomas Aurin“Vernon” is drawn from the French author Virginie Despentes’s kaleidoscopic trilogy of novels about contemporary French society. Published between 2015 and 2017, the books quickly became a pop cultural phenomenon and earned the author comparisons to Balzac. They have inspired numerous stage adaptations and deserve to be better known in the United States, where the final volume was recently published.The cycle’s title character is a down-on-his-luck former record store owner who embarks on an odyssey through Paris after he is evicted from his apartment. The Schaubühne production is largely faithful to the structure of the novels, where a large cast of highly opinionated characters narrate the chapters in a dazzling merry-go-round of storytelling. But what’s so alive and fresh on the page falls flat here, especially given Ostermeier’s dutiful expository approach and the show’s four-hour length.Despite some inspired performances — particularly from Joachim Meyerhoff as Vernon and Stephanie Eidt as the ex-groupie Sylvie and the reputation-destroying Hyena — the hours drag by. An onstage band, fronted by Taylor Savvy, performs at the earsplitting volume typical of Broadway musicals and is unable to ignite the dramatic spark missing from the production.Like “Fabian’s,” “Vernon’s” premiere was repeatedly delayed by the pandemic. Finally onstage this summer, they arrived around the same time as plays by young German directors who have been reared on a steady diet of Castorf and Ostermeier.The first thing you notice about productions by Ersan Mondtag, one of this group, is their visual flair. He designs his own sets (and sometimes the costumes), which frequently recall German Expressionism or Pee-wee’s Playhouse, while his actors perform with the mannered rigor favored by Robert Wilson.Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood),” also at the Berliner Ensemble, is an irreverent reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, written by Thomas Köck with music by Max Andrzejewski.From left, Philine Schmölzer, Peter Luppa and Emma Lotta Wegner in Ersan Mondtag’s “wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).”Birgit HupfeldSurprisingly, the music is one of the less exciting parts of the show, in which Wagner’s gods, dwarves and hapless humans cavort in an oversize kitchen. Or perhaps the set is a collective delusion created by Wotan, the head god, who keeps everyone confined to an asylum.Following the general contours of Wagner’s tetralogy, Köck’s version seems inspired by “Rein Gold,” the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist deconstruction of the “Ring.” Köck also puts an environmental gloss on the epic, while interrogating the nature of myth and history.Like “Fabian” and “Vernon Subutex,” this production lasts more than four hours. And though it does drag here and there, it never did when Stefanie Reinsperger’s Brünnhilde or Corinna Kirchhoff’s Wotan was onstage.In late June, Mondtag had three new shows running in Berlin, including his first dance piece, “Joy of Life.” Next season, he is scheduled to make his debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin with a staging of Rued Langgaard’s “Antikrist.”Like Mondtag, Pinar Karabulut, 34, is one of today’s most pointedly idiosyncratic young German theater directors.“The Leap From the Ivory Tower,” at the Münchner Kammerspiele in Munich, feels more mature than some of the director’s other recent productions. At two-and-a-half hours without intermission, it’s a fascinating deep dive into the life and wide-ranging work of the German writer Gisela Elsner, who committed suicide in 1992.Gro Swantje Kohlhof, left, in Pinar Karabulut’s “The Leap From the Ivory Tower.”Emma SzabóIn one striking scene, German children in a bombed-out city play at being concentration camp guards and prisoners. In another, former Nazis set out for a hunt in the Bavarian forest. Later, the writer finds herself attacked by a clueless West German TV anchor during a cringe-worthy interview.The show blends grotesque and unsettling humor with energetic performances and surreal touches. One of the few missteps is a film screened as part of the production about sad bourgeois couples engaging in orgies, the subject of Elsner’s novel “The Touch Ban.” Overlong and meandering, it recalls the sordid exuberance of the copious live video in “Fabian.”Nevertheless, there is something liberating about Karabulut and Mondtag that audiences here respond to. I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing more of their stylish aesthetic as the once avant-garde provocations of the past become nostalgia-laden chestnuts.Fabian, or Going to the Dogs. Directed by Frank Castorf. Berliner Ensemble.Vernon Subutex 1. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Berlin Schaubühne.“wagner — der ring des nibelungen (a piece like fresh chopped eschenwood).” Directed by Ersan Montag. Berliner Ensemble.The Leap From the Ivory Tower. Directed by Pınar Karabulut. Münchner Kammerspiele.All shows will return next season. More

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      Yale Drama Goes Tuition-Free With $150 Million Gift From David Geffen

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      Starting in August, the drama school plans to eliminate tuition for returning and future students, removing a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about debt.The billionaire David Geffen is giving $150 million to Yale School of Drama, allowing one of the nation’s most prestigious programs to stop charging tuition.The graduate school, which enrolls about 200 students in programs that include acting, design, directing and playwriting, announced the gift on Wednesday, and said it would rename itself the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.Yale said it believes the gift is the largest in the history of American theater.The school said that, starting in August, it would eliminate tuition for all returning and future students in its masters, doctoral and certificate programs. Tuition at the school had been $32,800 per year.The move should remove a barrier to entry for low-income students and those worried about incurring high student debt before entering an often low-paying field.“We know, because people have told us, that there are potential applicants out there who think they could never afford graduate theater training at an Ivy League school,” said James Bundy, the drama school dean. He said he hoped that by going tuition-free, that obstacle would diminish.He also said that he hoped that the move would lessen the impact of student debt on the career choices graduates make.“By reducing the debt burden of the average student, we create more resilient artists and managers who are able to make braver artistic choices — they’re able to take that downtown play and they don’t have to have a career selling real estate on the side,” he said. “Not every artist is going to break through at the age of 25 or 26 or 27. Certain kinds of careers take time to build, and entering the professions with less debt is going to make for more interesting and more resounding choices in the long run.”The drama school is home to the Yale Repertory Theater, and its graduates include Meryl Streep, Lynn Nottage and Lupita Nyong’o.It will become the second program at Yale to eliminate tuition; in 2005 the Yale School of Music did so. There are a handful of other tuition-free graduate programs around the country, including N.Y.U.’s medical school.The university’s president, Peter Salovey, said he hoped more schools would follow, particularly in the areas of nursing and public health, where students tend to graduate with high debt and pursue careers that are not highly lucrative.“In general, what should be happening in higher education is an attempt to reduce the financial burden on individuals and families associated with undergraduate education and graduate and professional education,” Salovey said. “I’d love to do this for other programs as well, but it will take the generosity of donors to make it happen.”Geffen, 78, made his fortune in the music and film businesses, and is currently worth about $10 billion, according to Forbes. He has become a major philanthropist with an interest in the arts, previously giving $150 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, $100 million to Lincoln Center for the renovation of the concert hall where the New York Philharmonic performs and $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art.Geffen, through a Yale spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed, but Salovey said the Yale gift came about after years of conversations between the university and Geffen’s foundation. Geffen once taught a seminar at Yale, in the late 1970s, about the music industry, and Salovey said that experience had been positive for Geffen; Salovey also said the university had been aware of Geffen’s interest in supporting higher education and the arts, and had looked for projects that might appeal to those interests.Geffen has maintained a variety of connections to theater throughout his career: In the 1980s, he was among the producers of the original Off Broadway production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and in the 1990s, he gave the founding gift for the Geffen Playhouse, a major theater in Los Angeles. Over the years he has been credited as a producer of nine Broadway shows, from “Dreamgirls” to the upcoming revival of “The Music Man.”Salovey said he hopes in the future that Yale will be able to build a new theater that will also house the drama school; that project would have to be financed through a separate fund-raising effort, he said. More

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      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ to Slim Down Before Broadway Return

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      Reducio! The play, which had been performed in two parts, will be condensed and restaged in one part when it returns this fall.“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the sprawling stage play that imagines Harry and his friends as grown-ups and their children as wizards-in-training, will be substantially restructured before returning to Broadway this fall.The play, which had been staged in two parts before the pandemic, will return as a single show on Nov. 16.The show was widely acclaimed, winning the Olivier Award for best new play when it opened in London, and the Tony Award for best new play when it opened in New York. But it was costly to develop, costly to run, and costly for theatergoers, who had to buy tickets to two shows to experience it fully.The play’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, in a joint statement attributed their decision to “the challenges of remounting and running a two-part show in the U.S. on the scale of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,’ and the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”The show will continue to run in two parts in London; Melbourne, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany, but will be a single part in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. It was not immediately clear how long that single part would be; the two parts have a total running time of about 5 hours and 15 minutes.Structured essentially as a stage sequel to J.K. Rowling’s seven wildly popular “Harry Potter” novels, the show was the most expensive nonmusical play ever to land on Broadway, costing $35.5 million to mount, and another estimated $33 million to redo Broadway’s Lyric Theater. Before the pandemic, the play was routinely grossing around $1 million a week on Broadway — an enviable number for most plays, but not enough for this one, with its large company and the expensive technical elements that undergird its stage magic.The play, a high-stakes magical adventure story with thematic through lines about growing up and raising children, was written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, based on a story credited to Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany. Thorne and Tiffany said they had been working on a new version of the show during the pandemic, which, they said, “has given us a unique opportunity to look at the play with fresh eyes.”The writers did not say what kind of changes they would make, but the production promised that the new version would still deliver “all the amazing magic, illusions, stagecraft and storytelling set around the same powerful narrative.”“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” began its stage life in London, opening in the summer of 2016, and winning nine Olivier awards — the most of any play — in 2017. It arrived on Broadway in 2018, picked up six Tony Awards, and initially sold very strongly, grossing about $2 million a week. But the sales softened over time, as average ticket prices fell, apparently because of a combination of the lengthy time commitment and the need to buy two tickets to see the whole story, which made it particularly expensive for families.The show has been expanding globally — adding productions in San Francisco and Australia, and planning its first production in a language other than English for Hamburg — making restructuring complicated. But the producers have apparently decided to go to a one-part structure in North America, while maintaining the two-part structure elsewhere in the world, as they try to find the formula for long-term global success. According to the production, the play has already been seen by 4.5 million people.Tickets for the Broadway production will go on sale July 12; ticket prices have not yet been announced. The San Francisco production is scheduled to resume performances at the Curran theater next Jan. 11, and the Toronto production is to begin performances next May at the Ed Mirvish Theater.The two-part play is already running in Melbourne and is scheduled to reopen in London on Oct. 14 and to resume previews in Hamburg on Dec. 1. More

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      ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ Review: Pride and Pole Dancing Behind Glass

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      This array of short plays has viewers in headphones wandering the meatpacking district for stylish, but shallow, theatrical thrills.Sex and spectacle are on the menu in “Seven Deadly Sins,” a sumptuously staged, deliciously outfitted exploration of vice performed in the meatpacking district, once home to slaughterhouses and sex clubs, though now more about trendy dining and swanky shopping.Yet this feast for the eyes — bringing to life seven short plays performed in storefronts to audiences who mostly watch through glass but listen on headphones — turns out to be more about appearances than anything else.Originally conceived by Michel Hausmann for a theater in Miami Beach and directed by Moisés Kaufman, this iteration of “Seven Deadly Sins” features work by its director (covering greed) as well as by the notable playwrights Ngozi Anyanwu (gluttony), Thomas Bradshaw (sloth), MJ Kaufman (pride), Jeffrey LaHoste (envy), Ming Peiffer (wrath) and Bess Wohl (lust).But we begin in Purgatory (a blue neon sign makes that clear) greeted by Shuga Cain from Season 11 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who arrives like a beautiful, lip-syncing hurricane of gloss and glitter in the first of Dede Ayite’s many stunning costumes.“What better place to look at human nature than the stage,” she purrs, setting in motion how the show will work: Each of three groups will maneuver through the circuit of plays in a different order over a three-block radius, sitting to watch each roughly 10-minute performance before rising and walking to the next.My first sin of the night was gluttony, for which Anyanwu presents an alternative Garden of Eden story with “Tell Me Everything You Know”: Here it’s just Eve, here called “Naked” (a timid Morgan McGhee) and mostly covered in knee-length dreadlocks, and the snake, called “Clothed” (a sultry Shavanna Calder), in a sleek black bodysuit and a ponytail of hair styled into giant interconnected chain links. The snake’s temptation becomes queer in this context, and Anyanwu has linguistic fun with her Eve’s awakening, which comes in a verbal cascade.Sex, queerness and body positivity are central themes of most of the plays. In LaHoste’s envy play, “Naples,” set not in a storefront but in a shipping container on a cobblestone street, a manipulative 18th century French noblewoman (Caitlin O’Connell, stately yet cunning) has a less than friendly exchange with her husband’s not-so-secret boy toy (Andrew Keenan-Bolger).Bradshaw’s “Hard,” about a schlubby, unmotivated gamer (Brandon J. Ellis) whose wife (Shamika Cotton) tries to convince him to have sex, struggles to hit its comedic beats. The slovenly man-child paired with the attractive partner is old hat, and the sitcom dynamic between sad-sack husband and nagging wife feels unintentionally regressive.Cody Sloan in MJ Kaufman’s play “Wild Pride,” which looks at the commercialization of gay rights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMJ Kaufman’s “Wild Pride” is the most politically conscious play of the batch, a pointed critique of the commercialization of queer advocacy. In a storefront set full of TVs, rainbow streamers and balloons that read “Queer AF,” a trans social media star called the “Guru” (Cody Sloan) believes he’s providing affirmation for his fan base (Bianca “B” Norwood, voicing comments from followers and other influencers) but finds the tide turn against him and is confronted with the shallowness of his brand.It’s a bold and welcome pick for Pride month, sharply underlining the limits of performative advocacy, especially online.Moisés Kaufman’s purely comic greed play, which premiered as part of the original Miami Beach production of the show, reappears here. “Watch,” in which siblings (a comic Tricia Alexandro and Eric Ulloa) fight about their freshly deceased father’s pricey Rolex, feels like the odd man out of this otherwise pretty horny bunch, which include the two most explicitly sex-themed — and powerful — plays in the mix, Wohl’s “Lust” and Peiffer’s “Longhorn.”Donna Carnow pole dances while Cynthia Nixon voices her thoughts in Bess Wohl’s play “Lust.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn “Lust,” a pole dancer (Donna Carnow) does her usual routine as we hear, via voice-over, her internal monologue, performed by Cynthia Nixon in her best matter-of-fact Miranda Hobbes. The mix of mundane thoughts (“Refill prescription for eczema cream”), casually withering judgment (“Oh, sweetheart, do you think I don’t know a toupee when I see one?”) and hefty declarations (“There is no God.”) showcase Wohl’s talent for capturing the quirky ways people think and move through their everyday lives.Carnow’s dancing, however, is the production’s true showstopper. She does splits and body rolls, windmills herself around the pole and performs aerial contortions that look utterly unreal — all with perfect nonchalance. And did I mention the platform stripper heels? When she’s upset, her heels violently stomp down to the floor, and when she’s caught in an anxious spiral her body likewise spins around the pole.Her facial expressions, however, can veer into exaggeration, revealing how Wohl’s otherwise clever script becomes didactic when it comes to the topic of sexual assault. Similarly, Peiffer’s “Longhorn” — tracing the troubling and fascinating power dynamics between a white man (Brad Fleischer) and an Asian dominatrix (Kahyun Kim) — ends on a gratuitously violent note. It’s a painfully explicit political parable that, while valid, banks too much on shock value.It’s a problem throughout “Seven Deadly Sins,” a presentation of Tectonic Theater Project and Madison Wells Live. That’s not to say their money isn’t well spent, both in Ayite’s costumes and David Rockwell’s remarkable scenic and site design.Shavanna Calder, left, and Morgan McGhee in Ngozi Anyanwu’s gluttony-themed “Tell Me Everything You Know.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe gives Eden dimension with bright flowers and layered panels painted in lush greens in Anyanwu’s “Tell Me Everything You Know.” And the cascade of gilded roses and baroque accents in “Naples,” as well as the sex dungeon props in “Longhorn,” show extraordinary attention to detail.Yet perhaps my favorite of the sets was Christopher and Justin Swader’s clever scenic design for “Watch” — the contemporary, lifeless room of what appears to be a funeral home, bisected by a grave with a coffin in the center, which we see as if from overhead.“Seven Deadly Sins” is eye candy, no doubt, and a fun interactive experience for those who crave a lively outdoor performance with a few raunchy surprises. But given the emphasis on sexuality, and nods to the meatpacking district’s transgressive history, I expected a more exacting sociopolitical statement. There should be more than meets the eye.Seven Deadly SinsThrough July 18 at 94 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; sevendeadlysinsnyc.com More

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      How to Undress Someone Quickly

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      Don’t start frantically grabbing at someone’s garments; trust is key. Let the person you’re disrobing do some of the work. “Wear kneepads, there’s lots of kneeling involved,” says Lacie Bonanni, 36, who works as a so-called dresser, a theatrical worker who helps actors into and out of their costumes. Bonanni got her start on Broadway 11 years ago on a show called “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which involved stripping off a multitude of skintight bodysuits. Although Bonanni’s husband occasionally jokes about her taking people’s clothes off for a living, her skills don’t necessarily translate outside the theater, where the focus of undressing is never singularly speed and where sometimes fumbling is part of the fun. During a show, it’s not uncommon that a complete costume change, including mask and shoes, needs to happen in less than 30 seconds.Let the person you’re disrobing do some of the work. Bonanni tends to go for the bottom half of the body and lets the actor undress up top. At first, you both might stumble, reach for the same garment simultaneously, bump heads even. You’ll get faster as you become more familiar with clothing and bodies. By the time a show opens, costume changes should feel like a choreographed dance.Undressing happens mostly in a theater’s darkened wings and backstage. “Wear a headlight,” says Bonanni, who learned the craft from her mother, a longtime dresser on shows like “Rent” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Costumes get what wardrobe people call “quick rigged,” which mostly means replacing buttons with Velcro. Some garb is unavoidably time-consuming. “A corset is the thing you’re dreading,” Bonanni says. Once you’ve got a person’s clothing off, toss it into a basket to be sorted and cleaned later. Unless, of course, you’re required to put the same outfit back on, as Bonanni had to do repeatedly for the musical “Groundhog Day.” In that case, keep it organized and lay it out in such a way so that the sweat can dry. Backstage is often hectic and crowded; don’t start frantically grabbing at someone’s garments or you’ll exacerbate their nervousness and discomfort. The person needs to trust you. “You want them to feel like they’re in a safe space,” Bonanni says. More

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      Review: Martha Washington, Hilariously Haunted by Her Slaves

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      James Ijames’s amusingly cynical and eclectic new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” is at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through July 30.On an evening train back from the Hudson Valley last weekend, I overheard two drunken friends — one white, one Indian American — having a loud, expletive-ridden debate two rows behind me.History was irrelevant, the white friend was saying. Between Cold Spring and Yonkers, they argued about police brutality, institutional racism and citizenship, but they kept circling back to the topic of reparations. “If my grandfather was a serial killer, why do I have to pay for his crimes?” he asked. He said history was being used against him. The past is the past — so why should he suffer?That this experience followed a performance of James Ijames’s stunning new play, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” directed by Taylor Reynolds at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was an event of stage-worthy irony. The theater gods certainly have a sense of humor.And so does Ijames (“Fat Ham,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”), though his is laced with a brutal sense of cynicism. I say that as a compliment: What else could be more appropriate to the obscene joke that is this country’s treatment of its Black residents? In “Miz Martha Washington,” George Washington is dead and his wife, Martha (played by Nance Williamson), seems about ready to follow him to the grave. Ann Dandridge (a sharp Britney Simpson) — her slave and also her half sister, who is unfortunately tangled up in Martha’s line of ancestry — tends to the former first lady while raising her own son, William (a perfectly jejune Tyler Fauntleroy).Martha is weak and feverish, talking nonsense and having hallucinations while Ann and the rest of her slaves — the Washingtons held hundreds, historically — continue to cook her food, clean her floors, chop her wood and polish her silverware, as they’ve done her whole life. But now they’re antsy and less accommodating: In his will, Washington offered the slaves freedom upon his wife’s death.In a series of hallucinations, her slaves appear as lawyers, prosecutors and historical figures who try to show her how accountable she is in a system of oppression. Her fever dreams include chats with Abigail Adams, Betsy Ross and Thomas Jefferson, all of them Black; a game show hosted by a Black King George and Queen Charlotte; and a “People’s Court”-style trial. She should just do the right thing and free her slaves while she’s still alive, but it’s hard to be ethical when you’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle.“Miz Martha Washington” bears the signature of Ijames’s clever wit: He writes the slaves as more than docile stereotypes; these slaves have personality to spare, and they joke and sing with a threatening jocularity. You know how baring one’s teeth can be a sign of joy or hostility? Ijames does.Two female slaves, Doll (Cyndii Johnson) and Priscilla (Claudia Logan), act as twin jesters in the play, clowning and gossiping at Martha’s expense — as when Priscilla acts out what she hopes will be Martha’s “death rattle,” a hilariously odd sound that falls somewhere between a groan and a screech. They don’t talk purely in the expected dialect of stage slaves, but in an anachronistic mix of that with modern Black American vernacular.All of the elements of the production have a bit of this playful mash-up approach (which recalls the style of other great Black playwrights like George C. Wolfe, Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks). In terms of plot, the play recalls, of all things, “A Christmas Carol,” as Martha is haunted by her wrongs. But “Miz Martha Washington” is never as procedural as that; scenes set in the real world are broken up by dance interludes with disco lights and by surreal fantasies like a reverse auction in which the slaves, posed as owners, examine and bid on Martha.Even the costumes, by Hahnji Jang, are sportively eclectic, with clashing patterns and colors — along with additional anachronistic details, like hoop earrings and sneakers. Under Reynolds’s puckish direction, the tone, too, whips from exaggerated sitcom-style humor (hammy facial reactions, quick comedic beats) to poetic surrealism (a young slave boy’s prophetic monologue) to tragedy (accounts of abuse, sexual assault).Cyndii Johnson, foreground center, plays a slave who also serves as a kind of jester, joking and gossiping at Martha’s expense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the slaves sing and dance and drum around poor, sick Martha’s bed, it looks like a dark sacrificial ritual or an exorcism of America’s evils. And when one slave laughs, and the sound is joined by an offstage chorus of laughter from other slaves, the thunder is spirited at first but then quickly becomes unnerving. As Ijames notes in his script, “Laughter is a weapon.”And yet Martha isn’t a meek, quivering pupil to the slaves’ lessons on the debts America owes to its Black people; Williamson pivots from pleas to commands, fear to rage, declaring herself America’s mother, a woman who “did right” by her slaves, and refusing to be spooked into more righteous behavior.Behind the simple staging of Martha’s bed on a sandy patch of ground, an opening in the tent on the beautiful lawn of the Boscobel House and Gardens, in Garrison, N.Y., revealed a backdrop of mountains and a hazy blue sky. This view, which dimmed over time into the buzzing, uninterrupted darkness of the evening, for me recalled the ways our American mythos is tied to grand landscapes — “amber waves” and “purple mountain majesties” for white explorers and white landowners. All fitting for a show confronting questions about freedom, inheritance and birthright. (“Miz Martha Washington” is part of the festival’s 34th and final season before it moves to a new location.)I couldn’t help but imagine how much greater the show would be on a big Broadway stage with all the fixings, so to speak. After all, Ijames’s revisionism works, in many ways, as the inverse to “Hamilton.” “Hamilton” uses its Black and brown actors to reclaim history as a story of hope for immigrants, minorities, the disenfranchised. It’s a rebranding of the American dream. “Miz Martha Washington” uses its Black actors to expose the blights of the American dream and the hypocrisies of our historical narratives.And so the hilarious Brandon St. Clair is the obliging slave Davy as well as a very Black — and priceless — George Washington, resurrected from the dead. And another slave, Sucky Boy (Ralph Adriel Johnson), appears as a humorously tactless Black Thomas Jefferson.Does the play have a happy, inspirational ending? Well, let me just say that despite Ijames’s antic fabrications, he is ultimately tethered to the tragedy that is America. And we all know how that story goes.On the train after the show, the conversation between the two friends seemed to stretch on forever. When the white friend got off, after saying he had enjoyed the “discourse,” a fresh silence took over. Infuriated by the ignorant, racist statements I had been hearing, I walked over and spoke to the Indian American man, a lawyer named Ash.“You’re totally right on everything,” I said. “I’m not sure you should bother.” He gave me a fist bump and said that he still wanted to try.About halfway through the play, Priscilla says to Doll, “Hard work openin’ folks’ eyes,” to which Doll responds, “Huh … you can say that again.”But are we all accountable for our fellow citizens who are, if not explicitly racist, at least complicit in the systems and institutions that degrade and oppress? Does Ijames consider his work educational, a corrective? I would wager not. History has taught us that even our most high-minded foundational ideals — “all men are created equal” — can be interpreted to a single group’s advantage or be a basis of manipulation. You can’t teach a person humanity if it’s a lesson they don’t want to learn.In the fairy tale version of our country’s racial politics, we all learn about justice and skip happily toward the future. I, for one, am done with fairy tales as history — and patient explanations. Give me the harder truth of Ijames’s fantastical version any day.The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha WashingtonThrough July 30 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; 845-265-9575, hvshakespeare.org. More