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      ‘A Level of Abuse’: Laying Bare Theater’s Dirty Secrets

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      Robert O’Hara and Torrey Townsend discuss their collaboration on “Off Broadway,” a biting satire about a company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases.One day in 2016, Torrey Townsend unexpectedly received a message from Robert O’Hara, a writer and director then on the rise thanks to his raucous, exuberantly provocative satires “Bootycandy” and “Barbecue.”The email was actually sent to Townsend’s boss, the artistic director of a respected New York theater, but he had access to the account as part of his administrative duties. O’Hara was not writing about some exciting new project, though.He was calling out the company, which both men declined to identify, for its failure to employ artists of color.“He really struck me as somebody who I felt aligned with politically,” Townsend said. He reached out and eventually invited O’Hara to his show “The Workshop,” in which an aging almost-was leads students in a playwriting class.Benja Kay Thomas, Jesse Pennington and Jessica Frances Dukes in Robert O’Hara’s 2014 play “Bootycandy” at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was enthralled and amazed,” O’Hara said. “It challenged sacred cows of our industry, and I think we all need to be held accountable for the work we do.” He agreed to direct Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway,” a lacerating, wickedly funny portrait of a struggling New York company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases, which include stunt casting so preposterously offensive, you can only laugh at it. Enablers of the status quo, meanwhile, include a wealthy patron and, yes, The New York Times.O’Hara’s star rose further after he directed Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” and an industry reading of “Off Broadway,” starring Dylan Baker as the white heir apparent to a white artistic director, took place in 2019. “If Robert wanted me to work on something, I was totally going to do it,” Baker said. “And as soon as I read the script I said ‘Who is this guy Torrey Townsend? He knows how to write.’ ”Yet the play wasn’t getting picked up, with only the Brooklyn incubator the Bushwick Starr expressing interest, according to Townsend.Eventually, he and O’Hara worked out a deal for a streaming iteration with Harris, who has been helping produce theatrical projects (including the recent Pulitzer Prize finalist and digital native “Circle Jerk”) with HBO seed money, and producers from “Slave Play.” The production — with Baker again, alongside his wife, Becky Ann Baker, Jessica Frances Dukes, Richard Kind and Kara Wang — has already been recorded, and will be free to stream on the new platform Broadstream Media from June 24-27. (Advance sign-up is required.)O’Hara and Townsend recently sat down for a joint video chat about the nonprofit theater world’s dysfunctions and the play’s comedic sneak attacks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Austin Pendleton, center right, as a washed-up playwright who teaches a course in dramatic writing in Torrey Townsend’s “The Workshop.”Knud AdamsDo you think American theater is wary of scrutinizing itself too closely because it feels so beleaguered that it closes ranks?ROBERT O’HARA Yes, and we also take things much more personally: We think that if you talk about a play, you’re actually talking about the personal worth of the people who created it. And so if you criticize, it’s almost like you’re criticizing that person, as opposed to criticizing the institution and the systemic racism inside those choices.I am obliged to point out the obvious, which is that Torrey is a white man.O’HARA Well, racism was invented by white people [chortles] so I would love to know what white people think of their invention. It was exciting to see how a white guy would deal with their invention of racism in the American theater, and own it.Do you think theater has gotten away with so much for so long because it assumes artists can be judged by different rules?TORREY TOWNSEND I think there’s a quasi-religious component to this whole culture. There’s no other way to explain the level of exploitation that goes on unless it’s being sustained by an illusion of that kind. In 2018, Michael Paulson published a story [in The New York Times] about Gordon Edelstein and the Long Wharf Theater. [Edelstein, at the time the artistic director of the theater, had been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment.] About six months later, a firm in New Haven hired an attorney, Penny Mason, to write an independent review. In her concluding remarks she says that Edelstein’s mantra at the theater was “we are a family” — not a workplace, a family.O’HARA We’re always using words like “home” or “artistic home.” But there’s a level of abuse that happens in homes that we sort of allowed to happen: “Well, that’s just the way I was brought up.” We accept a level of trauma, I think, in our childhood and upbringing.Why tweak “Off Broadway” so it now also deals with theater during Covid-19, instead of simply transposing the 2019 version on Zoom?TOWNSEND The script lent itself to an update because it was already about the catastrophization of the theater. A lot of behavior that we witnessed in theaters during the pandemic has been totally absurd and deranged, and we wanted to honor that [laughs].O’HARA I feel that it would be ridiculous to create a new piece about Off Broadway that doesn’t acknowledge that it was gone for a year. That, to me, led to an even deeper sense of satire: you’re still holding on to these beliefs, but you don’t have a theater.The married couple Becky Ann Baker and Dylan Baker in a scene from Torrey Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway.”via Torrey Townsend“Off Broadway” has dark undertones, but it also is, unabashedly, a comedy. Was it hard to refine what gets a laugh, considering some of the subject matter?TOWNSEND It requires constant effort, constant trial and error. It is very important to me that the work be funny.O’HARA There’s a comfort level where people can laugh, and then you can get behind them and show them some truths. Sometimes funny is painful; sometimes pain is funny. Sometimes the way I can deal with the institutionalized racism and homophobia and sexism and assault and harassment is to simply laugh. Because if I don’t, I will go out and harm something, or harm an individual, or say things that are harmful.Why focus on a small Off Broadway company?O’HARA When you think of the shows that address the theater, they’re usually about Broadway. But on Broadway you have to create your whole team every time, whereas Off Broadway and regional theater are set inside institutions. And what an institution does with creativity is never really examined.TOWNSEND It was important to me to weave the language about money into this play. The corporate world is more a part of the nonprofit theater world than we’re really aware of. There is a connection between this corporatization of American theater and the underlying abuse that ensues because we are conducting business as if we’re inside Trump Tower. I don’t think there’s a difference between the way Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are doing business and the way people are doing business inside an administrative office. It’s the dirty secret of the American theater: These theaters are run by bank managers, by accountants, and their donors are rich people working on Wall Street.O’HARA I have been head-hunted to see if I was interested in running an institution, and one of the most important skills they are looking for is an ability to fund-raise. For an institution to work, you have to know the lay of the land. And the lay of the land is that, although it says nonprofit, we are not trying to lose any more money — we’re trying to get as much money as possible.What is the solution: more public funding, more division of labor between artistic and fund-raising duties?O’HARA One of the things I think is necessary is diversity. Diversity will breed different people with different skill sets to show you different ways to run this institution. You need to disrupt the person in charge, you need to disrupt what power means and how power is distributed. That in itself will generate a new relationship to fund-raising. I don’t know very many happy artistic directors. There’s also a level of division that needs to be had: Am I going to be the artistic head and can that actually allow other people to deal with the educational and the finances and all this other stuff?The show points out how the system has long reproduced itself.O’HARA You have people who feel it’s OK to run an institution for 30 [expletive] years. “I’m against white supremacy but I want to run this [expletive] for 30 [expletive] years.” And I’m like, “No, get out! Go run something else!” They know who they are. And it’s unacceptable. They’re fossils.Off BroadwayJune 24-27; broad.stream/off-broadway More

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      Theater Heads North, and in Every Direction at Once

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      A psychological drama from Japan and a classic English comedy are among the high-contrast offerings in the Berkshires and Hudson Valley.Theater is confusing this summer. As the return to live, in-person performance accelerates, many productions conceived under earlier limitations are emerging in a world that looks different than expected.Last week I saw two shows that exemplify the extremes of this mixy moment. One, “The Dark Master,” a psychological drama from Japan, was supposed to be part of a live North American tour but emerged as something remarkably different, remote yet in person, with virtual-reality goggles. The other, a revival of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” was supposed to take place in a socially distanced, open-sided tent but wound up tightly packed into an indoor theater, with everyone breathing the same air, albeit through masks.That the two productions moved in opposite directions — one toward stricter precautions, one toward laxer — may be more than an accident of timing; it seems to be an example of content calling out to form. “The Dark Master” is as dour and antisocial as “Earnest” is giddy and garrulous, but both productions are intense experiences in part because the shifting terrain of coronavirus precautions has made them more themselves.I have trouble imagining how “The Dark Master,” which I saw at PS21, in Chatham, N.Y., and which continues this week at Japan Society in Manhattan, could ever have been performed live. Adapted and directed by Kuro Tanino from an indie manga, it stars Kiyobumi Kaneko as the owner and chef of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Tokyo. Over the course of the play, he forcibly turns the business over to a customer, demonstrating his best recipes and worst scowls.Kiyofumi Kaneko in “The Dark Master,” an adaptation of a manga. A live audience views the production through virtual-reality goggles.Japan Society.I say that Kaneko stars, but that’s not quite accurate. As rendered through the virtual-reality goggles, “The Dark Master” now stars you. Each audience member — there’s room for 10 pods of one or two people — in effect plays the customer dragooned into service; without actually moving at all, you become implicated in the action: cooking, eating, sleeping. Kaneko (who, like the other actors, dubbed his lines in English) doesn’t exist in real space in the show, yet he leans into you so closely that you may feel the urge, as I did, to push your chair away. At the same time the smells of the sizzling garlic and steak are urging you closer.Virtual reality is as yet a plaything in the theater, not really mature as an expressive device, and yet its use in “The Dark Master” emphasizes the isolation and interiority of the story and also of life during the pandemic. Kaneko may get in your face — and later, you may be troubled to find a prostitute you hire doing even more — but I found myself just as fascinated by my own weird hands, which of course were not really mine, as I could tell by their manicure. Food aiming for my mouth seemed to hit my sternum instead; I won’t even speak of the bathroom.Though I was not always sure who I was or what was happening, that seemed to be part of the point. Alienation and paranoia, exhausted themes of avant-garde theater, came roaring back to relevance in “The Dark Master,” in part because of Kaneko’s engagement in the material but in part because of mine. (Or yours.) The removal of all external sensation — you wear not only goggles but also headphones — has the effect of unmooring you from the pilings of your own personality.That effect is enhanced by the theater, a beautiful, reconfigurable indoor-outdoor space that appears to have landed like an exotic bird in the midst of a 100-acre former apple orchard in this tiny Hudson Valley town. It’s not the first place you would expect to encounter cutting-edge performance, yet PS21 offers little else. In “The Dark Master,” the contrast between the fragrant fields of astilbe and the pungent prison of your own perceptions makes both feel a bit more precious.The Unicorn Theater, where I saw a preview of the Berkshire Theater Group’s production of “Earnest,” could not be more different: a traditional auditorium with 122 seats near the tony Main Street gift shops and galleries of Stockbridge, Mass. If the play’s characters, Londoners with grand country homes, were contemporary Americans instead of Victorians, this is where they might summer. Wilde’s comedy, directed by the playwright David Auburn, thus seems like an evening’s entertainment in a local home, if its owners were people of exceptional wit.As Lady Bracknell, Harriet Harris makes a convincing dragon in the Oscar Wilde play.Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware.Wilde’s wit is tricky, though; it sits on bedrock of great moral heft, yet if played with any weightiness, it droops. The four lovers are enmeshed in webs of superfluousness — Gwendolyn and Cicely mostly concerned with marrying a man named Earnest; Algernon and Jack obsessed with muffins and cucumber sandwiches — but they must believe these things to be of utmost importance. And Lady Bracknell, whose faith in her own values is absolute, must dispense justice as if it were meringue.At the early preview I attended, Auburn’s well-cast company was approaching the right balance. As Bracknell, the great Harriet Harris was still applying the finishing coat of comedy to her detailed, nuanced performance, but already made a convincing dragon. Conversely, the lovers (Rebecca Brooksher, Claire Saunders, Shawn Fagan and Mitchell Winter) were as yet too focused on the comedy to achieve it fully, missing opportunities to let the repercussions of their actions sink in. When sweethearts of 1895 kissed for the first time, surely it was no joke; it was a revelation.My sense that this cast will soon completely inhabit Wilde’s wit is partly based on the way the show is already hitting its marks by Act III and partly on its completely successful design. The simple, elegant set by Bill Clarke, all black-and-white Art Nouveau swirls and sheer curtains, suggests the fineness of taste that the writing requires. Swinging far the other way, the outrageous costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski — Gwendolyn wears a three-foot hat to the country, and Algernon sports rhinestone-buckled pumps — give proper due to hilarity.The elation that comes from the intensity of such choices, whether in design or acting (or, as in “The Dark Master,” in conceptualization), is what we go to live theater for. To the extent the pandemic has denied us that elation, we can’t be rid of it too soon.But this intermediate period has its own elations. Returning to difficult material after a diet that has too often consisted of comfort food, and returning to theaters where people crowd together and feel — not just hear — one another laugh, is its own source of emotion. When the Berkshire Theater Group’s artistic director, Kate Maguire, appeared before “Earnest” to make the usual preshow announcements about emergency exits, she first broke into tears. She wasn’t the only one.The Dark MasterPerformances June 23-28 at Japan Society, Manhattan; japansociety.orgThe Importance of Being EarnestThrough July 10 at the Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Mass.; berkshiretheatregroup.org More

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      Interview: Tom Foreman on Big Boys and why they really should cry

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      Big Boys is the first play from Tom Foreman Productions. It takes aim at the meaty topics of male mental health and coming of age in a time when we feel more divided than ever. We liked the sound of this, so we thought why not catch up with writer and director, Tom Foreman, to find out more.

      Let’s dive straight in with the obvious, what is Big Boys all about then?

      Big Boys is, at its simplest, a story about two boys growing up together. You see them from 11 until about 19, and all the ups and downs that that period of life throws at them. It’s hopefully a bit more than that though too! Firstly, it’s a bit of an ode to the past 10 years and coming of age in that time. Most nostalgia pieces I see focus on the 90s or early 00s, but there’s a generation of us entering adulthood who hit puberty in the early 10s. Secondly, it’s also an exploration of male friendship. I don’t think it’s something you see that much explored for its own sake, so I wanted to dive into it and really try to grapple with the dynamics of male friendships, warts and all. In extension of that, the play also focuses quite heavily on themes like mental health. The fact that suicide remains the leading cause of death for men under 30 has become so commonly quoted that it’s now become almost meaningless, but when you stop and think about that for a minute, it’s crazy. As a 21 year old male, I’m more likely to be the cause of my own death than any illness, accident or other. We still have such a long way to go with destigmatizing mental health, particularly among men, and so whilst I don’t profess to have the equation to solve it all, I really wanted to scrutinize what it is about male friendships that make them so closed off at the times they need to be the most open. I hope that gives some flavour of what it’s about!

      You had a previous play called “Big Boys Don’t Cry”, is this a reworking of that piece? Was the past year without theatres being open an opportunity to rework it into something new?

      I did. It was the original version of Big Boys, which we performed in 2019. After those performances, I got a huge amount of feedback, and I decided there was a lot that I still wanted to explore. So I went on this process of pretty brutal refinement and reworking. I was hesitant at first to edit it so much because the reception had been so positive and I didn’t want to risk losing that, but ultimately the writer in me won out over the businessman. I decided to change the name to Big Boys instead of BBDC because it really is a completely different show now. The past year has certainly allowed me to refine it even more. BBDC was originally programmed into Paradise at the Vaults at the Edinburgh Fringe 2020, so it’s pretty crazy that its (new) version will only see the light of the day for the first time in July 2021. Ultimately though I think it’s only crystallized in that time and the narrative and themes have become clearer, so I’m stoked to finally be sharing it with people.

      The play starts in 2011, is that a special year for you? And was Angry Birds really that long ago!

      2011 was the year I started secondary school! And it certainly was, Angry Birds was released in late 2009 so it was certainly in it’s boom phase by 2011. I’ve based all the timings on my own life, since so much of the play is based on my experience, hence starting in 2011.

      You’ve written and directed the play, are these two roles you feel can work together, is that any concern that maybe in doing both you could not spot any issues that need addressing?

      Personally I find the writing and directing go hand in hand, because I have such a visceral image of it all when I put pen to paper (or fingers to keys?) What I’ve been more concerned about is starring in it as well. I’ve taken the role of one of the boys in it because as a writer who also acts, I find that writing to my acting strengths is really helpful, however also because the play is so close to me that it felt like something I wanted to do respectfully. I really admire writer/directors like Jim Cummings or John Krasinski because I always think you can feel how much the projects mean to them which only draws me in deeper as an audience member, although maybe that’s just some cognitive dissonance on my behalf! It’s definitely challenging because when blocking and acting, I can’t see it from an audience perspective and especially on stage being aware of those sightlines and perspectives is absolutely essential. Luckily I have a wonderful assistant director, Pip Pearce, who joined the team and has been enhancing the project from the first online Zoom rehearsal. I’m really lucky to have him and his artistic vision on the team.

      Clearly male mental health is a big theme of the play, still a topic you think men are scared to talk about too often?

      Absolutely. With suicide still being the leading cause of death in men under 30, we have a huge way to go in this department. The ground we’ve made in destigmatizing mental health has been valuable, but we can’t get complacent. So much of it starts at a young age, and we have to realise that targeting these awareness campaigns at young men isn’t going to make much of a dent if they’re still growing up in environments that promote toxic masculinity and norms of ‘manning up’. I’m very aware of this stuff, but even I sometimes take it on myself when I’m having a rough day and find it hard to be honest with my mates. So absolutely, there’s a deeply engrained idea of what manhood should be for guys, and put bluntly, it’s killing us. We need preventions as much as we need interventions, and it’s on all of us to keep up the fight against mental health issues. 

      Have you drawn from much personal experience in writing the play?

      Largely, yes. I went to an all boys school with a co-ed sixth form, and when the girls arrived when we were 16, I suddenly realised how bad the masculine culture was. It’s so easy for those toxic norms to ferment when you’re surrounded all day every day by only other guys, and what had been lurking in the shadows was suddenly under a spotlight as soon as there was a break in that routine. So a lot of the experiences of myself and those of my friends and peers are reflected in the show. In fact, a lot of the stories they tell are genuinely true, and just pinched from my own life (I’ll let you try to figure out which are which!) Drawing it from my own experiences and those of my friends was important to me in producing something that felt real. However, I was also really aware that, given the weight of the topic, I needed to respect that. Accordingly I did a lot of research into others’ experiences of growing up male, having male friends, and navigating coming of age. I looked on forums, YouTube, anywhere I could. So I guess it’s really an accumulation of all the research, both personal and non-personal, that I conducted before writing the play so long ago now.

      Besides drawing from your personal life, what other research went into the writing?

      One of the earliest things I did was chat to Richard Pacitti, who’s the chair of Mind in Croydon, the mental health charity. Richard was wonderful in helping me understand the mental health endemic among young men, and he gave me some really insightful thoughts on a very early draft of the script. We had a long chat in his kitchen about the issues, and it really helped to inform the direction the script should take. Besides that as I say I did a lot of research online, and I’ve also just finished studying Psychological & Behavioural Sciences at Cambridge, and part of my early studies was psychological issues like depression and OCD. So in the end I had quite a holistic idea of it, although of course still for every person it’s so so different. But yes, throughout I have tried to pay close attention to it being sensitive and responsibly explored.

      Who do you hope this play will appeal to? And what message would you hope they leave the theatre with come the end?

      It’s the hardest question you get asked when you apply for theatres and festivals: who’s your target audience? We have a tendency as performers to cry to the sky “but everyone will enjoy this piece! It’s so deep and multifaceted!” That response doesn’t tend to go down well though, unfortunately. Joking aside, in terms of a demographic, I think certainly those aged 18-28 will appreciate the nostalgia and celebration of growing up in the 10s the most, so I think it’ll really resonate with young theatre goers. However, in truth, anyone seeking a self-examination or a critical address of mental health issues we face at the moment (particularly given the psychological impact of Covid), will, I hope, enjoy this play. On top of that, I’ve made it sound very heavy but the play is genuinely very fun for the most part too. It’s intense, it’s fast paced, and you get to see two young adults play 11 year olds, so it’s a great laugh too. I’m always hesitant about admitting what I want the message of the play to be. For me, whatever someone takes from the play is the most valuable thing they could have taken. However, for me, if it sparks one conversation about male mental health, or mental health in general, I think I will have been successful in my job as a writer. A couple of conversations about sour skittles and Lucozade may also suffice, if people enjoy the nostalgia.

      And finally, would it be bad of us to point out Woolworths closed in 2009 (Woolworths is mentioned in the press release as things that happened in the 10s)

      God, I’ve just looked it up and you’re right! When I wrote the marketing, I could swear I read somewhere that whilst it shut down in 2009, the very last store to close was in 2011, although I can’t find that anywhere now so I guess I was dreaming (who doesn’t dream of Woolworths?) Luckily Woolworth’s doesn’t actually feature in the show (spoilers) because otherwise I may have had to change that to HMV (another high street giant I lay a flower for before bed.) 

      ==================================

      Thanks to Tom for giving up his valuable rehearsal time to chat with us for this interview.

      Bad Boys will be playing at Lion & Unicorn Theatre between 6 and 10 July. Further details and tickets can be found via the below link. More

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      At a Queer Theater Festival, the Plays Are Brazenly Personal

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      The Criminal Queerness Festival offers three works that address subjects including addiction, fluid identity and social change.Dima Mikhayel Matta has written about her home city before with language like “In Beirut, the streets smell of jasmine and coffee, and the morning call to prayer mingles with church bells.”Was it lyrical? Yes, Matta, a queer playwright from Lebanon, said during a recent video interview. Was it also rosy? Yes.“In the past, I was writing short stories that romanticized Beirut,” she said, “because it’s ‘poetic,’ right?”Matta’s autobiographical play, “This is not a memorized script, this is a well-rehearsed story,” is one of three making its New York premiere this week as part of the National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival, which presents innovative new stories by L.G.B.T.Q. artists from countries that restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights.And with that project, she made a decision: no more romanticizing.With Beirut, she wanted “to face how I feel about it, and how so many of us feel about it,” she said of the city that in the past year has endured crises including a massive explosion in its port, economic collapse, political instability and the pandemic. “Because it’s difficult to live there, and it’s becoming more difficult.”The festival runs Tuesday through Saturday outdoors at Lincoln Center and near the United Nations, and is part of Lincoln Center’s Pride programming, which also includes a concert on Friday by the multi-hyphenate artist Taylor Mac.Adam Odsess-Rubin, the National Queer Theater’s artistic director, founded the festival in 2018 with the Egyptian playwright Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, who had recently immigrated to the United States.“There was really no space for the kinds of stories I was trying to tell,” said Elsayigh, who now serves as the festival’s co-producer. “I wanted to create a space for stories about queer people outside of the United States and outside of a Western context.”This year’s plays — which also include the Mexican playwright Victor I. Cazares’s “﹤﹤when we write with ashes﹥﹥,” and a staged reading of the Iraqi playwright Martin Yousif Zebari’s “Layalina” — address subjects including addiction, fluid identity, and global and social change.In other words, they are not, Zebari said, works that he could present in his home country, where same-sex marriage is illegal and queer people do not have any protection against discrimination.“It’s really risky for the writers to share these plays,” Odsess-Rubin said. “They might fear persecution even emailing in the script.”But in interviews, the playwrights underscored that their works, while sourced from their specific life experiences in countries that criminalize queerness, contain themes anyone can relate to.For Matta, it was her complicated relationship with Beirut — a feeling that, she said, people who have lived in the same place for most of their lives can relate to.“The people who’ve attended my rehearsals have said they feel the same way about New York,” she said.Cazares, a Tow playwright in residence at New York Theater Workshop, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, said that they had felt pressure in the past to produce work that glossed over the less idyllic aspects of life on the border.“As a queer Latinx playwright coming up in 2013, I was encountering a lot of resistance from other Latinx producers that did not want to produce work that was about drugs, guns or gangs,” Cazares said. “But that was my work, and it was also my lived experience of the border. I lived through a very violent drug war. You’re suffering through nights where you’re worried about your family.”Jose Useche, left, and Noor Hamdi rehearsing Victor I. Cazares’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCazares’s play, a love story set in Mexico, draws from their experiences as an addict and as someone whose family withdrew them from high school and shipped them off to a rural Illinois town to “go find Jesus Christ again” when they came out. (Cazares and their parents have since reconciled.)“It was a very personal story for me,” they said. “But it’s not something I’m reluctant to share. I want to destigmatize addiction and being H.I.V. positive. I want people who have had these lived experiences to walk away not feeling alone.”For Zebari, who is making his playwriting debut with “Layalina,” it was important to tell a nuanced story of the community he refers to as SWANA — Southwest Asian and North African.“As an actor, I never spoke up when I felt like my voice was filler,” he said. “But now, as a playwright, I can tell my story.”Odsess-Rubin and Elsayigh said that, in an ideal world, the festival would not exist because its plays would be produced elsewhere in New York. A recent study by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition found that at 18 major nonprofit theaters in the city, 81 percent of writers and directors were white.Cazares said that they have had opportunities in which “if I would’ve written the happy story, or the more marketable, let’s-all-sing-about-conchas-and-abuelita take, it would’ve been produced.”The festival’s audiences, the three playwrights acknowledged, likely will be mostly white. But they did have their dreams for who would be there on opening night. Cazares said their past self. Zebari said his father, though having him there would amount to coming out — something he hasn’t done, and isn’t ready for, with his family.Matta said, “I would take great pleasure if a homophobic, racist person ends up in the audience and is too embarrassed to leave, and has to stay for an hour of me basically sharing things that go against everything that person believes in.”“I’d find that very amusing,” she added. “My goal is not to make you comfortable. I am not here to explain why it’s OK for me to exist. I am here to transport you somewhere for an hour, and leave you with more questions than answers.”Criminal Queerness FestivalTuesday through Saturday; nationalqueertheater.org. More

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      Control of New York’s Stages Remains in White Hands, a Study Finds

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      The Asian American Performers Action Coalition is hoping for a season of change when theaters reopen.As New York’s theaters prepare to reopen following the twin crises of a pandemic and rising discontent over racial inequity, a new study which found that both power and money in the theater world have been disproportionately controlled by white people is calling for “a fundamental paradigm shift.”The study, by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, found that at the 18 major nonprofit theaters examined by the group, 100 percent of artistic directors were white, as were 88 percent of board members. On Broadway, 94 percent of producers were white, as were 100 percent of general managers.The study offers a direct challenge, not only to theater leaders, but also to those who fund the institutions, saying, “it remains to be seen whether or not the multitude of antiracist solidarity statements and pledges to diversity will result in real action and systemic change.”“Our expanded leadership stats confirm that almost every gatekeeper, employer and decision maker in the NYC theater industry is white,” the coalition declares in a letter introducing the study.They examined the 2018-19 New York theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — looking at every Broadway show, as well as the work of the nonprofits.The coalition called particular attention to a dearth of shows about Asian Americans. “Even as the industry has made small gains in diversity in recent years, particularly at the nonprofits, our work at AAPAC has shown that Asian-focused narratives remain consistently minimized and overlooked,” the report says.Among the other findings:Using publicly available tax forms, the coalition calculated the public and private contributions to nonprofit theaters, and said that $150 million went to the 18 big nonprofits in the city that it referred to as “predominantly white institutions,” compared with $12.6 million to 28 theaters of color.At the theaters studied, 59 percent of roles went to white actors, compared to 29 percent for Black actors, 6 percent for Asian American actors and 5 percent for Latinos (the coalition uses the gender-neutral term Latinx).Creative teams were less diverse, with 81 percent of writers being white, along with 81 percent of directors and 77 percent of designers.The report gave grades to individual theaters, and declared the Public Theater to be the most diverse, and the Irish Repertory Theater to be least diverse.The intense focus nationally on diversity issues has prompted an increase in research about race, gender and disability within the theater industry. A coalition of groups doing such research, called Counting Together, formed in 2019, and this month introduced the CountingTogether.org website, hosted by the Dramatists Guild and the American Theater Wing, to make the research more readily available. More

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      Special Tony Awards Go to 'American Utopia,' 'Freestyle Love Supreme'

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      The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, “David Byrne’s American Utopia” and “Freestyle Love Supreme” win special Tonys.The Tony Awards, long delayed by the pandemic, announced on Tuesday the first recipients, honoring the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization started five years ago by a group of actors and others as a tool to work toward dismantling racism through theater and storytelling.The other recipients were “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” an intricately choreographed concert by the Talking Heads singer, and “Freestyle Love Supreme,” a mostly improvised hip-hop musical that was created, in part, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. These honors, called special Tony Awards, were presented to three recipients that the Tony administration committee thought deserving of recognition even though they did not fall into any of the competition categories, according to a news release.The recipients were announced more than one year after the ceremony had originally been expected to take place. During the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony was put on indefinite hold. The awards show — a starry broadcast that will celebrate Broadway’s comeback — is now set to air on CBS in September, when Broadway shows are scheduled to return to theaters in almost full force. Most of the awards, however, will be given out just beforehand, during a ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.The award for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is indicative of how deeply the American theater industry was affected by the mass movement for racial justice set off by the police killing of George Floyd last year.In a statement, Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, and Heather A. Hitchens, the chief executive of the American Theater Wing — the two organizations that present the awards — said that the coalition has provided an “unparalleled platform for marginalized members of our theater community and tools to help us all do better as we strive for equity.”Among the organization’s projects is Theater of Change, a social justice methodology — developed with Columbia Law School — that brings together Broadway artists, legal and policy experts and people whose lives have been shaped by forces such as the criminal justice, immigration and educational systems to collaborate on storytelling as a means to advocate “just policies.”This year’s ceremony for the Tonys, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, will be the 74th such event and will recognize work performed on Broadway between April 26, 2019, and Feb. 19, 2020.Broadway’s 41 theaters have been closed since March 12, 2020; right now, the first planned performances are for “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which is set to open this Saturday at the St. James Theater. As of now, the next show scheduled to open is “Pass Over,” a play about two Black men trapped on a street corner, on Aug. 4 at the August Wilson Theater.“American Utopia,” which opened on Broadway in October of 2019, is planning to restart performances on Sept. 17. “Freestyle Love Supreme,” which opened that same month, is scheduled to play again for a live audience on Oct. 7. More

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      Broadway’s ‘Music Man’ Names British Producer, Kate Horton, to Replace Rudin

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      Kate Horton will become executive producer of the show, which stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. It is scheduled to begin performances on Dec. 20.A veteran British theater administrator will take over the day-to-day management of a starry Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” assuming many of the duties previously performed by Scott Rudin.The administrator, Kate Horton, who previously held high-level management positions at the National Theater, Royal Court Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company in England, will become executive producer of “The Music Man,” which stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and which is scheduled to begin performances on Dec. 20 and to open Feb. 10.Rudin, who was the revival’s lead producer, departed that role earlier this year, saying he was stepping back from all of his theater and film productions amid renewed scrutiny of his bullying behavior toward subordinates and collaborators.Horton was hired by the business titans Barry Diller and David Geffen, who had been producing the revival alongside Rudin, and who are now the sole lead producers. The production, at the Winter Garden Theater, reunites much of the creative team behind the Tony-winning 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” led by the director Jerry Zaks.Horton currently runs, with her longtime collaborator Dominic Cooke, a British producing company called Fictionhouse. She was previously deputy executive director of the National Theater, executive director of the Royal Court Theater and commercial director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. She and Rudin both were previously involved with the team behind Little Island, a new park and performance space in New York, but no longer have any role there, a spokeswoman said.Horton declined a request for an interview.“The Music Man,” like many Broadway shows, has been delayed by the pandemic. It was originally scheduled to open last fall. The show sold a large number of tickets before the pandemic; rather than refunding those tickets, as many shows did, the production exchanged them for future seats. During the pandemic, the producers stopped selling new tickets; tickets to the show are going back on sale starting Tuesday.Several other Rudin-related Broadway productions have found new leadership teams. A stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” named Orin Wolf as executive producer; the musical “The Book of Mormon” and the play “The Lehman Trilogy” said their existing leadership teams would simply proceed without Rudin. (“The Book of Mormon” is overseen by members of the “South Park” team, while “The Lehman Trilogy” is overseen by Britain’s National Theater.) More