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      A Tireless Actress, Back at the Scene of the ‘Crime’

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      Before the pandemic, Catherine Russell had missed only four performances of an Off Broadway perennial since 1987. She was onstage for its reopening.On Sunday, before a small, masked, spaced-apart audience at the Theater Center, the most persistent show in New York made a return after what might be described as — in the scheme of things — a brief intermission.Warren Manzi’s “Perfect Crime” opened on April 18, 1987, and stubbornly stayed put. The unflashy murder mystery has remained more or less the same as everything changed around it. It took a pandemic to shut the show down for 13 months.Until then, Catherine Russell, now 65, had missed only four performances in the lead role of a possibly murderous psychiatrist. She is also the general manager of the Theater Center, which is also the venue for “The Office: A Musical Parody.” That show is running again, too; Russell hands out tickets at its box office.“Perfect Crime” was the first Off Broadway show with a live audience to open with approval from Actors’ Equity. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke before Sunday’s show, telling theatergoers, “The show must go on.” Russell has been outspoken in her belief that the show might have gone on much sooner.After her 13,524th curtain call, Russell selected a familiar spot in her book-lined office onstage to talk about 34 years of “Perfect Crime.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations on reopening. How does it feel to be back?It’s wonderful being onstage in a room full of people. I value that so much, and this is what I always wanted to do. I’m selling the tickets before the show to the other show. I get offstage, and I go downstairs and take the garbage out of the dressing rooms on the third floor. Occasionally I plunge a toilet. I love every part of it.I’m a person who likes stability who chose a field that wasn’t very stable. But I’ve been able to have a fairly stable life in the theater.What was it like to suddenly lose that stability last year?I was fine! I missed being onstage, but it was fine not doing it. I didn’t dream about it.You weren’t itching to do a version on Zoom.Oh God no. I went to the theater every day to work. It’s a few blocks from my apartment.If I were not near a theater, I think I would have missed it. But I was still here, in my home away from home, teaching acting privately, and working toward reopening. We found extra unused paint and repainted walls unusual colors, fixed seats, Marie Kondo-ed the backstage areas.I did a lot of research on how to make it safe, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how, not just for me to get back onstage, but for theaters to open again in New York. We have our Atmos air scrubbers over there. It’s very safe here.Russell, as a psychiatrist, with costar Patrick Ryan Sullivan in the murder mystery.The Theater CenterYou also organized a lawsuit against the city and state, pushing for reopening?I felt really strongly that everything needed to be closed down and I was fine with that. But then things started reopening. Restaurants were open, gyms were open. Bowling alleys is what pushed me over the edge. I have nothing against bowling, but if you put your fingers in these holes and wear rented shoes, why can’t you go to the theater? It was nothing malicious, but theater fell through the cracks.The suit is still going on. We’re pushing for 50 percent capacity. I think we will prevail.Mr. de Blasio was here tonight. Did you bring this up with him?No. I don’t know if he knows that I’m suing him. I’m grateful that he and [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo let us open. But I’d like to be more open.I’m also raising money to convert a garage down the street into a five-theater complex. We need more Off Broadway theaters, especially now after Covid. Smaller theaters are going to be more practical — it’s a lot easier to raise money for an Off Broadway show than a Broadway show. And I really think we need more midtown theaters that are clean and safe, and Covid-safe, that people feel comfortable going to. I built this place 15 years ago. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I kind of want to take what I learned here and apply it.You must have missed interacting with audiences.In normal times, I love talking to people after the show and hearing what they thought about it. Occasionally someone will wait for me afterward and say: “You know what? I’m a librarian and I’ve never missed a day of work.” That sort of mentality, showing up to work every day, strikes a chord in many people. They admire that.There are no times when your heart’s not in it?People sometimes come thinking, She’s going to be phoning it in. And I’m kind of like, Screw you! You can think I’m stupid or something for doing it, but I am not phoning it in. I’ve done it when I didn’t feel well, I was really tired, when I was grieving horribly. But honestly, if I thought that I was phoning it in, I would say it’s time to go.“She’s a really complicated character, and it’s fun to find different aspects of this character as I’ve gotten older,” Russell says.John Taggart for The New York TimesDo you feel you’ve missed out on anything because of your commitment to the show? There must have been a few refused dinner invitations over the years.I was actually engaged to somebody else when I first started doing “Perfect Crime.” He said it ruined his life. He did not want to be married to somebody who would be onstage eight times a week. Though I didn’t know the play was going to run this long … obviously.But I was blessed to eventually be married to somebody who understood it. We got married at City Hall at 11 o’clock and had lunch at The Palm. Then I went back to work and he took a nap, and we were both really happy.I notice there’s a prop book of the complete works of William Shakespeare there. Do you ever fantasize about doing another play eight times a week?I’m happy in this play. She’s a really complicated character, and it’s fun to find different aspects of this character as I’ve gotten older. I haven’t gotten bored doing it.One good thing about doing a play like this, it lets out whatever you’ve been feeling during the day. I can cry onstage, pick myself up, walk off the stage, and whatever I’ve been feeling is gone. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to say it cleanses the soul. That sounds pretentious. But it’s a good way to use all the stuff that’s happened to you in your life.Does the character feel different to you today?I think that my performance is a little different after the year that we’ve had. At the end of the play, I used to fall apart more. But she pulls herself together. She’s a little steelier, a little stronger. More

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      Taking Over Victory Gardens to Make a ‘Theater for All’

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      CHICAGO — Ken-Matt Martin, the incoming artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater here, said he never has revealed this publicly before, but he has a Sankofa bird tattooed on his back.This mythical creature, with a name that means “return to retrieve” in Ghana’s Akan language, is depicted with its feet pointing forward and its head turned backward — a reminder, Martin said, of “making sure you have a reverence and understanding of the past so that as you move into the future, you know what the hell you’ve come from. That’s key to how I move, how I operate in the world.”And that’s the delicate balance Martin, at 32, intends to strike as he takes the reins of this 47-year-old Tony Award-winning institution that had an even more tumultuous 2020 than most theater companies.Between late May and early June, a key group of affiliated playwrights quit en masse, protesters demonstrated outside the boarded-up Lincoln Park theater, and its white executive director, who recently had been named artistic director as well, and board president resigned.Victory Gardens has a new board president, Charles E. Harris II, and a new acting managing director, Roxanna Conner, and on March 17 it announced that Martin would become its third artistic director since its 1974 founding. He begins April 19.That this new leadership triumvirate is entirely Black represents a first for Victory Gardens, a theater that has championed diversity while sometimes struggling to live up to those ideals. And this shift is being echoed throughout the Chicago arts scene, where Black leaders have secured the top jobs at House Theater, Sideshow Theater Company, Hubbard Street Dance and the Second City.These moves came in the wake of the social-justice movement spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and fueled by the demands of the “We See You, White American Theater” national coalition of theater artists of color.“I would not be in the position I’m in if we had not had that collective awakening this past year,” said Lanise Antoine Shelley, the House Theater’s new artistic director.“Sure, something is shifting,” Martin said, “but you’re also talking about highly qualified people getting jobs that they’re more than qualified for.”The cast of “Prowess,” a play by Ike Holter that Martin directed at the Pyramid Theater Company, which he co-founded in Des Moines, Iowa.Mark TurekPunctuating his assertions with laughter while sitting outside a South Loop cafe blocks from his apartment, the Little Rock, Ark., native was casual and comfortable as he discussed the weighty issues facing theater and the larger culture.“I woke up this morning and was like: You know? I’m not going to be cagey today. I’m just going to tell it straight,” he said.He wore a baseball cap from Brown University, where he received his M.F.A. in directing, and a black mask from Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where he was serving as associate producer alongside the longtime artistic director Robert Falls when he landed the Victory Gardens job.He was introduced to the entertainment world at age 12, when his mother drove him to Atlanta to audition for the Nickelodeon series “All That.” He landed a bit part and when that contract later prohibited him from taking a role on another network, he said he became determined to learn the business side of entertainment.In Little Rock, Martin said, the majority of his classmates — as well as teachers, principals, and doctors — were Black. Moving to predominantly white Des Moines, Iowa, where he earned degrees in musical theater and public relations at Drake University, and encountered racism on the street, was a shock to the system.Yet he remained in the city to pull off what he said will remain his crowning achievement: He co-founded the Pyramid Theater Company, which has thrived connecting the work of Black playwrights and artists to majority-Black audiences.Martin said it took “chutzpah” to make that happen in such an environment: “There were people saying, ‘We don’t need another theater. You all need to be working to make the theaters we already have more diverse.’ ”Antonio Woodard, left, and Tiffany Johnson in the Pyramid production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner,” which Martin directed.Andrea MarkowskiIn 2015 Martin began a yearlong Goodman Theater apprenticeship. Afterward, as he pursued his M.F.A. at Brown University, he did work at the affiliated Trinity Repertory Company, where he recalled being asked at a meeting: “Hey, can you help us figure out how to better market this show to Black audiences?”“Mind you, I’m a student.” He laughed. “What does that say that you have to come to me to figure that thing out?”As producing director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, he spent the non-summer months in New York City negotiating contracts and transfer deals while having such random encounters as passing Adam Driver in a stairwell while the “Star Wars” actor practiced lines for a play.“I’m the only person of color, period, in 90 percent of the conversations that I’m having,” Martin recalled, “and yet here I am, just this kid from Little Rock, and I can run into Kylo Ren on the way to my office.”The Goodman enticed Martin to return to Chicago in November 2019 to take the No. 2 artistic position to Falls. Martin did hands-on work with such productions as Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of all Black women.“None of us had been in a room like that before,” the show’s director, Lili-Anne Brown, said. “He understood how significant that was, and he worked to uplift it and protect it.”Ciera Dawn in the Goodman Theater production of “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of Black women.Liz LaurenThen the pandemic hit, live performances were suspended, and the team had to navigate a new path through the shutdown and ensuing social unrest.Martin stressed the need for “nuance” as he discussed the Goodman. He referred to Falls and the Goodman executive director Roche Schulfer each as a “mentor” and “dear, dear friend” yet said his experiences there and at Williamstown and Trinity Rep solidified his determination to pursue a leadership position.“What I wasn’t interested in doing any longer was being the Black or brown shield and token within some of these larger institutions that had snatched me up,” he said.“The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” Martin says.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesA few miles north of the Goodman, Victory Gardens had its own problems.Founded in 1974 and now based in the historic Biograph Theater in upscale Lincoln Park, the theater has traditionally focused on a diverse range of new work by Chicago writers. The theater’s first official playwrights’ ensemble included Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and Charles Smith, as well as John Logan, Jeffrey Sweet and Claudia Allen, who wrote extensively about L.G.B.T.Q. characters. The Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz joined later.In 2001, Victory Gardens became the third Chicago recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. When Dennis Zacek, the first artistic director, announced his retirement in 2010 after 34 years, the board named the acclaimed director and playwright Chay Yew as his successor, making Yew a rare artistic director of color at a major American theater.Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had its premiere at Victory Gardens and later was presented on Broadway, starring John Lithgow, left, and Laurie Metcalf.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYew shook things up over his nine years in the top job, bringing in his own ensemble of playwrights while aiming for a younger, more diverse audience and tallying his share of successes. (Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had a Broadway production in 2019.) After Yew announced his departure, the board in May 2020 named Erica Daniels, already its executive director, as its new executive artistic director. In response the playwrights’ group resigned, blasting the board for not communicating with the theater’s artists or for conducting a national search.The administration’s decision in early June to board up the theater’s frontage — at a time when other theaters in Chicago and New York were opening their doors to protesters decrying racial injustice — inflamed tensions. About 100 activists assembled outside the Biograph on June 6 and posted messages such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER. But do they matter to this theater?”Two days later, Daniels resigned, as did Steve Miller, the board chair. A more inclusive, transparent search process followed.“I was one of the loudmouths yelling at them, and months later they asked me, ‘Do you want to be one of the people who helps us chose our next artistic director?’” said Brown, the “School Girls” director. “Victory Gardens’ board has done more work at transformation than anyone else I’ve seen.”She was pleased with the choice of Martin, saying, “I think this is an opportunity to show everyone in the national theater forum what it really can look like to gut rehab a historically white institution.”Falls said seeing Martin leave the Goodman was “bittersweet,” but “it’s a fantastic moment for him and the city of Chicago and nationally. He’s an extraordinary person and a wonderful artist who brings a plethora of skills that most people do not have in running a theater.”Like just about every theater company, Victory Gardens is trying to figure out when and how it will welcome live audiences back into the building.Martin said he also intends to use the connections he made at Williamstown to give more Victory Gardens productions an afterlife in New York and elsewhere. And he expressed interest in bringing back older Victory Gardens playwrights to foster “larger intergenerational conversations.”“But at the same time, yeah, I’m going to have some new writers,” he said, “because I know a lot of dope writers.”He spoke most energetically about the need for Victory Gardens, onstage and off, to reflect and engage with the city’s broad range of communities. “The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” he said.He hopes to draw on the wisdom of an emerging “cohort” of fellow artistic directors of color in theater — not to mention the inspiration of that Sankofa bird — to pull it off.He’s not worried.“If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines,” he said, “I can probably figure out how to get all peoples within this larger beautiful city to come out as well.” More

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      How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

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      She was unforgettable onstage playing seemingly serene women who rippled with restlessness.Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.More often than not, she’d be there, portraying women of wit and passion, whose commanding serenity rippled with hints of upheavals to come, masterly performances in masterworks by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter, Ibsen, Rattigan and Euripides. Sometimes, she’d take you to places you thought you never wanted to go, to depths where poise was shattered and pride scraped raw.How grateful, though, I felt at the end of these performances, even after a pitch-bleak “Medea,” at the National Theater in 2014, which she turned into an uncompromising study in the festering nightmare of clinical depression. Granted, I often felt sucker-punched, too, maybe because I hadn’t expected such an ostensibly self-contained person to unravel so completely and convincingly. Then again, that was part of the thrill of watching her.Her “Medea,” also for the National Theater, dared to hit rock bottom before the play had even started.Richard Hubert SmithMost of Ms. McCrory’s fans felt sucker-punched by her death, I imagine. Aside from her family — who include her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, and their two children — few people even knew she had cancer. The announcement of her death was a stealth attack, like that of Nora Ephron (in 2012), who had also managed to keep her final illness a secret.I have great admiration for public figures who are able to take private control of their last days. Still, when I saw on Twitter that Ms. McCrory had died, I yelled “No!,” with a reiterated obscenity, and began angrily pacing the room.Damn it, Ms. McCrory had within her so many more complex, realer-than-life portraits to give us. Imagine what we would have lost if Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen Mirren had died in her early 50s.McCrory, center, with Emily Watson, left, and Simon Russell Beale in “Uncle Vanya.”Stephanie Berger for The New York TimesLike Ms. Mirren, Ms. McCrory, at first glance, exuded a seductive air of mystery. Even in her youth, she had a sphinx’s smile, a husky alto and an often amused, slightly weary gaze, as if she had already seen more than you ever would.In the early 21st century, I saw her as the languorous, restless Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” a role she was born for (in repertory with a lust-delighted Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” directed by Sam Mendes); as a defiantly sensual Rosalind in “As You Like It” on the West End; and (again perfectly cast) as the enigmatic friend who comes to visit in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” at the Donmar Warehouse.In those productions, she brought to mind the erotic worldliness of Jeanne Moreau. It was her default persona in those days, and one she could have coasted on for the rest of her career. She brimmed with humor and intelligence, and I could imagine her, in another era, as a muse for the likes of Noël Coward.But Ms. McCrory wanted to dig deeper. And within less than a decade, between 2008 and 2016, she delivered greatness in three full-impact performances that cut to the marrow of ruined and ruinous lives. First came her electrically divided Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” a freethinking “new woman” torn apart by the shackling conventions of a society she could never comfortably inhabit. Then there was her heart-stopping Hester Collyer, an upper-middle-class woman destroyed by sexual reawakening, in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.”In between, she dared to be a Medea who had hit bottom before the play even started. In Carrie Cracknell’s unblinkingly harsh production, Ms. McCrory played Euripides’s wronged sorceress as a despair-sodden woman who believed she would never, ever feel better. It was the horrible, dead-end logic of depression that drove this Medea.“Nothing can come between this woman and her misery,” observed the household nanny (played by a young Michaela Coel). But it was Ms. McCrory’s gift to lead us into that illuminating space between a character and her most extreme emotions, and to make us grasp where those feelings come from and how they have taken possession of her.I never failed to experience that flash of revelation watching Ms. McCrory. London is going to seem so much lonelier whenever I return to it. More

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      Scott Rudin to Step Back From Broadway Amid Bullying Reports

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      The powerful producer of “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Book of Mormon” regrets “the pain my behavior caused” and says others will directly run his shows.Scott Rudin, a powerful Broadway producer facing renewed accusations of bullying, apologized Saturday for “troubling interactions with colleagues” and said he would step aside from “active participation” in his current shows.Rudin, who has won a raft of awards for prestige productions not only onstage but also in Hollywood, was facing renewed scrutiny over a long history of tyrannical behavior toward workers in his office following a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter. He made his apology in a written statement first given to The Washington Post.“After a period of reflection, I’ve made the decision to step back from active participation on our Broadway productions, effective immediately,” he said in the statement. “My roles will be filled by others from the Broadway community and in a number of cases, from the roster of participants already in place on those shows.”Rudin, a prolific producer of starry plays whose biggest Broadway success is the long-running musical “The Book of Mormon,” acknowledged the concerns about his behavior, without detail. Through a spokesman, he declined a request for an interview.“Much has been written about my history of troubling interactions with colleagues, and I am profoundly sorry for the pain my behavior caused to individuals, directly and indirectly,” he said in the statement. “I am now taking steps that I should have taken years ago to address this behavior.”Rudin has been dogged for decades by reports that he threatened, verbally abused, and threw objects at people who work in his office, but had continued to thrive in an entertainment industry with a long history of tolerating poor behavior by people who produce acclaimed art.The Hollywood Reporter article, coming at a time of intensified concern about abusive behavior in many sectors of society, described an assistant who said Rudin had thrown a baked potato at his head and an earlier incident in which Rudin allegedly smashed a computer monitor on a different assistant’s hand.Over the last week, some performers had begun to publicly express concerns about his dominant role in the industry. When Karen Olivo, a Tony-nominated star of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” which was not produced by Rudin, announced a plan last week not to return to that show when performances resume, Olivo called on others to speak up, saying, “The silence about Scott Rudin: unacceptable.”Rudin is known as a detail-oriented producer involved with every aspect of the shows he produces, from casting to marketing, and his statement Saturday did not explain what stepping back from active participation means, prompting immediate skepticism from some corners of the entertainment industry.The Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union representing more than 51,000 stage actors and stage managers, called on Rudin to release his former employees from nondisclosure agreements that in some instances bar them from describing their experiences in his employ.“We have heard from hundreds of members that these allegations are inexcusable, and everyone deserves a safe workplace whether they are a union member or not,” said a statement from the union’s president, Kate Shindle, and executive director, Mary McColl.Actors Equity, joined by SAG-AFTRA and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, had issued a statement on Monday saying that “No worker should be subjected to bullying or harassment” but not mentioning Rudin by name.Rudin, 62, has for years been a dominant figure in the American entertainment industry. He is among the handful of people known as EGOTs by virtue of winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards, and he was able to combine a keen eye for casting with relationships in the film and theater industries to put together many starry projects in both industries.Although for a time he worked as a studio executive in Hollywood, in recent years many of his highest profile projects have been onstage. Recently, he has been active as a producer of NY PopsUp, a series of performances funded by the state in an effort to remind people of the value of performing arts and to employ some artists during the pandemic.Rudin had a sizable slate of projects in the works, and his move appears intended to allow those projects to proceed without the distraction of protests about his behavior.The most anticipated of those projects was a revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, that was scheduled to begin previews Dec. 20 and open Feb. 10.Rudin, with Bette Midler behind him, accepting a 2017 Tony for the revival of “Hello, Dolly!”Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards ProductionsBut he also had three shows running before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway that were candidates to reopen once full-capacity commercial theater rebounds in New York: “The Book of Mormon”; “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a hit stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel; and “West Side Story,” an adventurous revival of the beloved classic.“My passionate hope and expectation is that Broadway will reopen successfully very soon, and that the many talented artists associated with it will once again begin to thrive and share their artistry with the world,” Rudin said in the statement. “I do not want any controversy associated with me to interrupt Broadway’s well deserved return, or specifically, the return of the 1,500 people working on these shows.”Cara Buckley contributed reporting. 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      Head of New York Theater Workshop to Depart in 2022

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      James C. Nicola, who balanced provocative programming with shows aimed at Broadway, will have served 34 years as artistic director.As the New York theater world points toward reopening, one major force within its nonprofit sector — and a central figure in its often lucrative collaborations with Broadway — is preparing to walk away.James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, announced on Friday that he will step down in June 2022. At that point, he will have spent 34 years — nearly half his life — at the off-Broadway theater, which spawned the once-in-a-lifetime hit musical “Rent” and grew under his leadership into a steady home for provocative fare by the likes of Caryl Churchill, the Five Lesbian Brothers and the director Ivo van Hove.“I’ve been around long enough to see some of my colleagues carried out of their jobs in a pine box,” Nicola, 71, said on Thursday. “I didn’t want to go that route.”His announcement comes at a time when theaters in New York are grappling with numerous internal and external pressures. Besides the protracted closures related to Covid 19, which has wreaked havoc on theaters’ finances, several groups of theater artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color have pointed out the overwhelmingly white and male demographics of their artistic leadership, most notably in the “We See You, White American Theater” manifesto that came out in July 2020.One of its demands was that theater leaders should view it as “an act of service to resign” if they have served in the role for more than 20 years — a benchmark that Nicola reached when George W. Bush was president. Nicola is the first prominent New York artistic director to announce his departure since then, and the process of replacing him will undoubtedly be closely watched.Asked about his replacement, Nicola said he would “love to see someone who has the trust and faith of all the constituencies of the community.”Unlike many artistic directors, Nicola was not primarily a stage director himself. He came to New York Theater Workshop in 1988 after stints in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s casting office and at Arena Stage in Washington.In recent years, the workshop has seen several works transfer to Broadway from its airy East Fourth Street theater, including the Tony Award-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown”; the acclaimed personal-meets-political memoir “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and “Slave Play,” which is currently nominated for 12 Tonys. (Another transfer, “Sing Street,” was two weeks away from its first preview on Broadway when the Covid-19 lockdown happened.)Nicola — who recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of “Rent,” the theater’s first Broadway transfer, with a starry online fund-raiser — says he is of two minds about the pipeline between commercial and nonprofit theater.“There are many wonderful people in the commercial Broadway world, but I think we’ve become too dependent on their enhancement money,” said Nicola, referring to the funds that commercial Broadway producers will invest in smaller productions with an eye toward larger subsequent productions.“If it’s a large project and it doesn’t have commercial enhancement, it’s probably not going to happen,” he said. “And I think that’s something we as an industry need to be really concerned about.”New York Theater Workshop still plans to present two works that were canceled last year, the Martyna Majok play “Sanctuary City” and a new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by Clare Barron.Until that is feasible, the theater has established an ambitious Artistic Instigators program, connecting traditional theater artists, filmmakers and digital artists on projects that subscribers can watch in their evolving states. As Nicola envisions a post-coronavirus theater landscape, he hopes theaters will learn from these innovations.“This year, we had 18,000 people view the ‘Rent 25’ gala from all over the globe,” he said. “Eighteen thousand. That kind of access — it’s hard to imagine not having the capacity to do that going forward. So maybe instead of doing eight shows a week, we do seven live shows and then stream a capture.”Members of the original “Rent” cast during the recent anniversary fundraiser.via New York Theater WorkshopBut those decisions will ultimately fall to his successor. Whoever it is, Nicola will be watching from the sidelines.“I want to absolutely stay out of it,” he said. “I think it’s completely inappropriate to be hovering or hanging out, both during the process and when that person comes in. They shouldn’t have to contend with the old guy.”He said he was at peace with what comes next.“As a child, my dad told me he thought he was going to die at 37,” Nicola said. “He didn’t, but I started thinking the same thing: Was I going to make it past 37? And oddly, I was 37 when I started at New York Theater Workshop. In a certain way, it was like the beginning of my life, not the end.” More

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      Karen Olivo Won’t Return to ‘Moulin Rouge!’

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      Citing recent reports of abusive behavior, including by the powerful producer Scott Rudin, the actress said advocacy mattered more than a lucrative role.Karen Olivo, a Tony-nominated star of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” said Wednesday that she would not rejoin the show’s cast when Broadway performances resume.She made the announcement in a five-minute Instagram video. “I could easily go back to the show and make a lot of money,” she said, “but I still wouldn’t be able to really control what I was putting out into the world, and what I’m seeing in this space, right now, with our industry, is that everybody is scared, and nobody is really doing a lot of the stuff that needs to be done.”She referred specifically to the powerful producer Scott Rudin, who has long been described as abusive toward staffers, most recently in a detailed April 7 article in The Hollywood Reporter. Rudin is not a producer of “Moulin Rouge!,” and Olivo has not worked with him, but she has been vocal with her concerns about overall industry practices.“The silence about Scott Rudin: unacceptable,” she said in the video. “That should be a no-brainer.”She challenged colleagues to speak up. “Those of you who say you’re scared — what are you afraid of?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be more afraid of not saying something and more people getting hurt?”In a phone call later Wednesday, Olivo said that the lack of a broader response to The Hollywood Reporter story “cracked me open” and contributed to her feeling that “Broadway is not the place I want to be.”A Rudin spokesman said he would have no comment.Olivo, 44, began her Broadway career as an understudy in “Rent.” She broke out in the original cast of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “In the Heights,” and in 2009 won a Tony Award playing Anita in a revival of “West Side Story.”She has stepped away from the industry before. In 2013 she relocated to Madison, Wis., where she and her husband have a home and are co-parenting two children. She has been living there since Broadway shut down last spring.Olivo has been teaching classes virtually at her alma mater, the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, and said she remained committed to helping develop aspiring artists. During the pandemic, she and another actor, Eden Espinosa, also formed an advocacy organization, Afect, that seeks to bring greater financial transparency to the theater industry.In an interview conducted in December, Olivo expressed concerns about whether Broadway would evolve after the shutdown, and whether she would return to it. “I hope that everyone is working to change the industry and not just trying to get back so we can fill our coffers again,” she said.Since the Broadway shutdown, Olivo has moved back home to Wisconsin and is teaching classes virtually.Lauren Justice for The New York Times“Social justice is actually more important than being the sparkling diamond,” she said in Wednesday’s video, alluding to her “Moulin Rouge!” character, Satine, who is referred to that way in the musical. “Building a better industry for my students is more important than me putting money in my pockets.”In the telephone interview, Olivo added: “I’m going to make art with the people that I think match my integrity, who want to do it right, and if those people don’t come, then I will make it myself.”The “Moulin Rouge!” producers said in a statement that the show “is forever indebted to Karen Olivo’s artistry, passion, and craft in creating the role of Satine onstage. We applaud and support Karen’s advocacy work to create a safe, diverse, and equitable theater industry for all.”Earlier this week, three entertainment industry unions issued a statement calling for “harassment-free workplaces,” prompted by the Hollywood Reporter story, but not referring to it.“No worker should be subjected to bullying or harassment, whether or not they are a union member,” said the statement from the presidents of SAG-AFTRA, the Actors’ Equity Association, and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802. More

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      With ‘Dramazon Prime,’ Streamed Theater Goes Head-to-Head With TV

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      A German playhouse realizes it’s no longer competing merely against other local venues for audience attention.MUNICH — When playhouses throughout the world first closed their doors in the early days of the pandemic, many scrambled to upload recorded performances to their websites as a way of staying connected to their audiences. The result was an overwhelming — but short-lived — explosion of archived theater that varied in artistic and technical quality. Virtually all of it was free.Since then, a growing number of theaters have flirted with pay-per-view formats, devoting lavish resources to professionally filmed productions for online premieres. Along with ensuring that the show goes on, these pay-per-streams are designed to test the hypothesis that people are willing to open their wallets for quality shows they won’t find anywhere else.It took decades before anyone figured out how to successfully charge for media content on the internet. It’s easy to forget just how difficult it was to convince people that digital subscriptions were worth paying for. That pay-per-view theater has taken off so quickly seems one measure of how the pandemic has changed the way people consume culture.Here in Germany, theaters like the Volksbühne, in Berlin, and the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich, are finding that audiences starved for culture are willing to fork out significant sums to virtually experience the drama that they love and miss.Perhaps nowhere else have these streaming efforts been so focused and abundant as at Schauspiel Köln, the main theater in Cologne, in western Germany.In little more than a year, its pandemic-era streaming platform, Dramazon Prime, has become an increasingly sophisticated and flexible online showcase. Indeed, its programming has evolved to something resembling an actual theater schedule, with nightly streams of new and recent productions.Birgit Walter, left, and Kristin Steffen in Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” directed by Pinar Karabulut.Ana LukendaAnd despite the bad play on words, the platform’s name indicates that, even early in the pandemic, the Cologne theater had a key insight: When they offer programming online, playhouses are no longer merely competing against other local venues for audience attention. They need to contend with streaming giants like Netflix that lure us with the promise of endless “content.”Dramazon Prime’s recent schedule shows how Schauspiel Köln is attracting virtual audiences with finely wrought streams of everything from traditional to experimental productions that tinker with formats reminiscent of film and TV.Recently, the theater unveiled its most elaborate digital production to date, a six-part mini-series based on Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II.” Cheekily updating the 1592 tragedy for the streaming age, “Edward II: The Love Is Me” is a sendup of Netflix costume dramas, with sitcom and soap operatic touches. Each episode runs between 20 and 40 highly stylized minutes, with glamorous sets (it seems to have been largely shot in a shuttered luxury hotel) and costumes that liberally mix Elizabethan dress and modern styles.This “Edward II” was directed by the young German director Pinar Karabulut. As in her recent “Mourning Becomes Electra” for the Volksbühne, she shows a flair for pop cultural pastiche — but it threatens to overwhelm the production. She wears her movie mania on her sleeve, and one often tires of all the fangirl references to the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino and Luca Guadagnino. There’s sex and camp and violence galore.The most consistently enjoyable parts of the series are the lavish opening credit sequences, which establish a slick, tongue-in-cheek tone that the episodes struggle to sustain. The more sexually explicit installments are prefaced with disclaimers that the actors have all been tested for the coronavirus, and advise viewers never to engage in unprotected sex, in an apparent sendup of American “trigger warnings.”Nicola Gründel in Elfriede Jelinek’s “Black Water,”  directed by Stefan Bachmann.Tommy HetzelA more distilled version of theatrical madness packaged as film is “Black Water,” a short feature based on the latest play by Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian Nobel laureate. “Black Water” had its world premiere in Vienna shortly before the pandemic hit, in a production that ran to three and a half hours; the Dramazon Prime version, by the theater’s artistic director, Stefan Bachmann, is a mere half-hour. It features six of the company’s actors reciting bitter and often darkly comic monologues in a cocaine-fueled bacchanal, trapped in a freight elevator and, later, huddled together on the floor of a bathroom. There’s lots of belching, Red Bull-guzzling and expulsion of bodily fluids. And I would be hard pressed to tell you what any of it means.Even when dealing with more conventional stage works, Dramazon Prime seems committed to making online drama that is more than a secondhand theatrical experience.“Birds of a Kind” by Wajdi Mouawad, directed by Stefan Bachmann.Tommy HetzelBold camerawork and editing distinguish Bachmann’s production of Wajdi Mouawad’s “Birds of a Kind,” which premiered before a live audience in September. For its stream (which is subtitled in English), the theater enlisted the cameraman Andreas Deinert, who devised a rigorous and restrained visual style that cuts between wide- and split-screen compositions to show the characters from multiple perspectives. In the end, the cinematography and editing are far more impressive than the play itself, a sprawling and overwrought family saga set against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with dialogue in German, English, Hebrew and Arabic.A more harmonious blend of stagecraft and camerawork comes in an emotionally shattering version of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Rafael Sanchez’s production sets the action of John Steinbeck’s vast American tragedy in various backstage sites, with simple props to suggest the locations crossed by the Joad family on their journey from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl years. Sanchez is the Schauspiel Köln’s in-house director, and his production (also subtitled in English) succeeds at being at once epic and intimate.Martin Reinke, left, and Seán McDonagh in “The Grapes of Wrath.” Krafft AngererAs with all the Dramazon Prime streams, you pay what you want to watch “The Grapes of Wrath”: For most productions, you can select a price between 1 and 100 euros. According to Jana Lösch, a theater spokeswoman, people tend to choose amounts that reflect what they would ordinarily spend for a night at the theater. Even so, online ticket sales don’t nearly cover the theater’s operating costs, let alone generate profit, Lösch said.I’ve heard similar things from other theaters: Nobody’s expecting to get rich from selling online tickets. Then again, state-subsidized theaters in Germany, such as the Schauspiel Köln, do not rely on box-office receipts the same way Broadway or West End venues do. Generous government support for the arts here in the best of times means theaters and other culture venues can still forge ahead in the worst. But state largess is not enough to ensure the show goes on. For that, you need determination, creativity and a willingness to experiment with new formats and aesthetic possibilities. More

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      The Brief, Brilliant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

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      The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: “Get up!”It is the opening scene — and the injunction — of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” her friend James Baldwin would later recall. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry — at 29 — became the youngest American and the first Black recipient.How often the word “first” appears in the life of Hansberry; how often it will appear in this review. See also “spokeswoman” or “only.” Strange words of praise; meretricious even, in how they can mask the isolation they impose. Hansberry seemed to anticipate it all. At the triumphant premiere of “Raisin,” at the standing ovation and the calls for playwright to take the stage, she initially refused to leave her seat. “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all,” she later wrote, “is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”Hansberry died in 1965, at 34, of cancer. The fact still feels intolerable, almost unassimilable — her death not merely tragedy but a kind of theft. “Look at the work that awaits you!” she said in a speech to young writers, calling them “young, gifted and Black” — inspiring the Nina Simone song of the same name. Look at the work that awaited her. She goaded herself on, even in the hospital: “Comfort has come to be its own corruption.”But a flurry of recent renewed interest attests to how much Hansberry did accomplish — the range of her interests and seriousness of her political commitments. There has been Imani Perry’s 2018 book “Looking for Lorraine” and Tracy Heather Strain’s 2017 documentary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.” The pre-eminent Hansberry scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson has a book in the works.To this Soyica Diggs Colbert, a professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University, adds her contribution with “Radical Vision,” positioned as the first scholarly biography. Here is Hansberry resurrected from the archives, from her scripts, scraps and drafts. Through a series of close readings, Colbert examines “how her writing, published and unpublished, offers a road map to negotiate Black suffering in the past and present.”.To quote Simone de Beauvoir, an important influence, Hansberry could not think in terms of joy or despair “but in terms of freedom.” And she could not think of freedom as a destination but as a practice, full of intervals, regressions. It is the same idea one encounters in radical thinkers today, in Mariame Kaba’s notion of abolitionist feminism as a practice of freedom.A central aim of Colbert’s biography, as with Perry’s book and Strain’s documentary, is to reclaim Hansberry as the radical she was.In the public eye, she was the slim and pleasing housewife, the accidental playwright featured in a photo spread in Vogue. “Best Play Prize Won By a Negro Girl, 28,” The New York Herald Tribune declared. “Mrs. Robert Nemiroff,” The New York Times profiled her, “voluble, energetic, pretty and small.”Studies of Hansberry excavate her behind-the-scenes activism. There is the now famous story of her confrontation with Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general in 1963 convened a group of Black activists and intellectuals. Hansberry demanded Kennedy acknowledge racism as a moral problem, not a purely social one, before walking out in disgust.Colbert adds detail and dimension to Hansberry’s work — covering, for instance, the years she spent writing for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, reporting on the Mau Mau Uprising and child labor in South Africa. She held fund-raisers, and studied alongside Alice Childress and W.E.B. Du Bois. The mythos of “the first” obscures so much of the communality of Hansberry’s thinking. “We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together,” Nina Simone wrote of Hansberry in her memoir. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.”A small interlude. Imagine another opening scene. Another dim, drab room. The alarm sounds. A woman wakes, tries to rouse a sleeping child. This is the beginning of another story set on Chicago’s South Side — Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” published in 1940. The parallels to me have always felt too uncanny for it not to be homage. Hansberry reviewed Wright’s fiction — a little uncharitably, to my mind. She had no patience for despair, for victims, really; her plays hinge on a decisive moment in which a character fends off complacency and takes a stand (quite often while making a thunderous speech about the necessity of taking a stand). There’s an odd narrowness to her vision. Her commitment to realism was absolute, a matter of moral principle. Interest in anomie, absurdity or paralysis was dismissed as liberal silliness, and an abdication of artistic responsibility.This stringency is curious, given Hansberry’s openness when it came to tactics, her insistence that the movement required a multipronged approach. “Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and nonviolent,” she wrote. “The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.” This belief, Colbert argues, was her inheritance.Soyica Diggs Colbert, the author of “Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.”Paul B. Jones/Georgetown UniversityHansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in the first Black-owned and -operated hospital in the nation. She was a “movement baby,” Colbert writes. Her father built a real estate empire by chopping up larger apartments into smaller units to provide housing for the waves of Black migrants who fled the South only to encounter deeply segregated Chicago.In 1937, the family moved to a white neighborhood — the story she revisits in “Raisin.” A segregationist landowners’ association challenged the sale of the house. White mobs harassed the family, on one occasion throwing a concrete mortar through the window. It narrowly missed Hansberry, who was 7 years old.These years taught Hansberry the necessity of fighting on all fronts. Her father filed a lawsuit, and Hansberry recalled her “desperate and courageous mother,” home without him, “patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children.”Colbert’s study is loving, lavishly detailed, repetitive and a little stilted in the telling. (The notes, however, are splendid — fluent, rich and full of a feeling of discovery; here she permits herself to speak more freely.) The book circles a few points very dutifully — even as we feel Colbert itching to rove. She has a habit of making arresting asides and then refusing to follow their trail: “Hansberry’s writing suggests that she understood Blackness to implicitly include what we would now describe as queerness.”It’s not incidental, I think, that these asides often have to do with desire. Colbert pays forensic attention here to scripts, articles and stories, but takes less intellectual interest in the jottings and journals — to the self that was feverish, exultant, wary in its sexuality. The thinking gets pleasantly tousled and unsure here; Hansberry is off the podium and on her second glass of Scotch, wondering at her attraction to femininity — “the rather disgusting symbol of woman’s oppression.” And yet: “I am fond of being able to watch calves and ankles freely.” She divorced her husband in 1964 (they remained artistic collaborators) and began to move in lesbian circles that included Patricia Highsmith and Louise Fitzhugh, the author of “Harriet the Spy.” For years, she kept annual inventories of her loves and hates. (“My homosexuality” made both at age 29.) To read these notes, their shame and their thrill (At 32, under “I like”: “the inside of a lovely woman’s mouth”) recalls some of the pleasures of the private writing of Virginia Woolf and the fragmented diaries of Susan Sontag — two other writers capable of caginess about their attraction to women.Hansberry exhorted students to “write about our people, tell their story. Leave the convoluted sex preoccupations to the convoluted.” And yet out of her own convolutions, a new self was emerging, a new understanding. “I feel I am learning how to think all over again,” she wrote anonymously to a lesbian magazine.What would this thinking have wrought? Her impatience, her greed for work, for thought — for more life — is palpable until the end. The final journal entries burn. She is desperate for her lover (“I consumed her whole”) stuck in the hospital, she is hungry to return to her play. “The writing urge is on,” she wrote. “Only death or infirmity can stop me now.” More