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      Review: Royalty as Horror Show in ‘Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!’

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      An uncanny new play imagines Meghan (and Kate, too) trapped in a nightmare palace where racism reigns.“Were you silent,” Oprah Winfrey asked Meghan Markle, “or were you silenced?”That transfixing moment from Sunday’s televised interview between the Queen of Empathy and the Duchess of Sussex rang in my ears as I watched, on Monday, a new play, by Vivian J.O. Barnes, that explores the same question in 32 minutes instead of two hours. With uncanny timing and daring theatricality, “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” — now streaming from the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago — dissects the phenomenon of Black women who, in exchange for privilege, forfeit their ability to speak, or have it taken from them.I don’t mean Winfrey, of course. In Barnes’s play, which she started writing in 2018, the interview is rather between a woman called the Soon-to-Be Duchess, who is like Markle shortly before her wedding to Prince Harry, and a woman called the Duchess, a Kate Middleton figure reimagined as Black. The occasion is a meeting, evidently arranged by palace apparatchiks, in which the experienced royal wife is supposed to school the totally inexperienced royal fiancée in the finer points of duchessing: how to hold one’s legs (“the Duchess slant”) and especially how to hold one’s tongue.Cooper, right, conferring with Sydney Charles as an experienced royal in the Steppenwolf Theater Company production.Lowell ThomasBy making the Middleton figure Black, Barnes both generalizes the problems of royalty to encompass any woman who joins “the firm” and stakes a claim on particular themes without having to spell them out. The Duchess (Sydney Charles) is sleek and sophisticated, with straight hair, silky diction and a profound mastery of self-abnegation. Soon-to-Be (Celeste M. Cooper) is less processed in every way: She shows too much skin, says what she thinks and has condoms in her purse.Still, she’s jittery. At night she dreams of her mouth turning into a hand that waves as if to perpetual crowds. She has already been pilloried in racist terms in the press and, even within the palace, has been advised to tone herself down. One internal memo asks that she try to be “a little less cocoa, a lot more beige” — a line that, though written earlier, recalls Markle’s description of royal family members expressing concern about the skin tone of the children she and Harry might have.Unlike them, Soon-to-Be laughs off the matter, tearing the memo to pieces along with many others. But if she expected to find the Duchess a comforting sister, “one person who gets it, who’s gonna look out for me,” she is as mistaken as Markle apparently was in the parallel situation.There is no solidarity to be found in a hollowed-out personality; the Duchess, who has recently had a baby she can’t quite recall giving birth to, imagines her public self as a “person who’s taking up the me-shaped hole I left behind.” She has bought so deeply into the royal mythology that she seems to believe she now exists in a rarefied world beyond personality and thus beyond race.As the Markle interview made clear, no such world exists. Institutions can be racist even when their leaders (as Markle said of Queen Elizabeth) have “always been wonderful.” Because this can only be seen from outside, it is not the assimilated royal in Barnes’s play who ends up teaching the outsider how to speak, but the reverse. In ways that are both fascinating and intensely disturbing, Soon-to-Be takes both women to places they could not reach in real life.This puts “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” in the line of recent movies, including “Get Out,” “Us” and “Antebellum,” that figure racism as a species of horror, complete with surrealistic touches, eerie mash-ups of sounds and music (by Pornchanok Kanchanabanca) and a culminating dose of (implied) gore. Yet it is still recognizably a play: The director, Weyni Mengesha, stages it elegantly on a minimal set, against a black backdrop, with just enough editing to stitch the two characters, who were filmed separately, together.Even aside from creating mini-studios in their own apartments, the cast has a difficult job here. Working hard to split the genre difference, they aim for a performance style that is neither too stagy for film nor too subtle for theater. Charles has an easier time of it; Barnes has given the Duchess a clear dramatic profile with a rising arc of crisis. Cooper’s role is rangier and harder to corral: Soon-to-Be toggles so fast between nerves and nerve that she starts to seem like a firefly.That’s a trap built into the setup: Someone has to keep goading the action when the primary antagonists are deliberately kept offstage. Another trap is that horror can lend those absent antagonists a kind of otherworldly glamour; why were the Duchess and Soon-to-Be — or Markle and Middleton, for that matter — attracted to royals in the first place?Yet as Markle reminded us, racism isn’t glamorous, even when it wears a tiara. It’s ordinary and sour.If “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” can’t strike that note clearly, it strikes plenty of others. The obtuseness of privilege — and the mania that aims to preserve it with absurd rituals and at unimaginable emotional cost — get a thorough workout, even in such a short play. The writing itself is wonderfully operatic; you could almost imagine the script as a libretto. No surprise that among Barnes’s inspirations are such musical stage stylists as Ntozake Shange, Caryl Churchill and George C. Wolfe.Beyond that, it’s no small thing to find a young playwright — Barnes is still in graduate school, at the University of California, San Diego — using the theater’s big tools so presciently and fearlessly. She’s got a voice, and she knows it.Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!Through Aug. 31; steppenwolf.org More

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      ‘We’ll Be Back,’ Broadway Says, on Shutdown Anniversary

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeRoast: Thick AsparagusVisit: National ParksRead: Shirley HazzardApologize: To Your KidsAndré De Shields, singing in Times Square at the “We Will Be Back” pop-up performance.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York Times‘We’ll Be Back,’ Broadway Says, on Shutdown AnniversaryA pop-up performance in Times Square on Friday, featuring stars like André De Shields, was full of excitement as reopenings may be on the horizon.André De Shields, singing in Times Square at the “We Will Be Back” pop-up performance.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2021, 5:50 p.m. ETOne year ago, the grim news that Broadway was shutting down was sweeping through the theater district. Performers were packing up their things and heading home; theater staff were stationed in lobbies to intercept ticket holders and explain to them that the show was canceled.As a return date was pushed further and further, performers and theater staff resigned themselves to finding work elsewhere.But on Friday, the anniversary of the day their beloved industry shut its doors, Broadway singers, dancers, actors and front-of-house staffers gathered in Times Square, just across from the TKTS discount ticket booth, to perform live for a small audience of industry insiders and passers-by.Chita Rivera spoke about the power of theater to heal society, at the pop-up show.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDancers at the show, on the anniversary of the theater shutdown in New York.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pop-up show was part concert, part rally. The Broadway legend Chita Rivera spoke about the power of theater to heal a beleaguered society, and then André De Shields, decked out in a glittering gold suit and a transparent face shield, sang the opening song from “Pippin” along with an array of Broadway stars, backup singers and dancers.“I’m just happy that we’re all trying to remind the world that we’re still here, and we will be back,” said Bre Jackson, a singer who belted out a solo in the “Pippin” number.One year ago, Jackson, 29, was returning to New York from a national tour of “The Book of Mormon,” and preparing herself for five auditions. Within 12 hours, she said, the auditions were all canceled, and suddenly she was thrust into a job market without much need for professional singers and actors. Jackson eventually found work as an office manager for a therapy practice, finding performing gigs every so often.Jackie Cox was in Times Square as Broadway singers, dancers, actors and front-of-house staffers gathered to perform for a small audience of industry insiders and passers-by.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesA dancer at the show. Bre Jackson, a singer who belted out a solo in the “Pippin” number, said, “I’m just happy that we’re all trying to remind the world that we’re still here.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHeath Saunders, singing at the show. The performance was funded by several organizations, including the nonprofits Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and NYCNext.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOne of the main purposes of these pop-up performances — of which there have been dozens across the city — is to provide paying gigs for people in the industry who have lost their entire incomes during the pandemic, said Blake Ross, one of the event’s producers. The performance was funded by a collection of organizations, including the nonprofits Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and NYCNext.Although they aren’t likely to perform inside theaters again until after Labor Day, the message of the show was that the end of the industry’s nightmare seemed to be getting closer. Last night, President Biden asked states to make all adults eligible to be vaccinated by May 1, a hopeful sign that shows might be able to start rehearsals over the summer.Lillias White, right, who, with Nikki M. James, Peppermint and Solea Pfeiffer, joined in “Home” from “The Wiz.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesJoel Grey, giving a speech in between numbers.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe performance landed on one of the first warm springlike days of the year in New York City, adding a jolt of excitement. It felt like a reunion of sorts: After a long time working from home, some people shrieked when they saw each other, keeping their distance, but air-hugging or elbow-bumping. To make sure that crowds didn’t form in Father Duffy Square, the event planners made no public announcement of the performance, but passers-by gathered on the edges of the makeshift stage and stood on elevated surfaces to get better views.The actor Charl Brown, among the participants in the event, which was part rally.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCostumes from shows including “Wicked” and “Phantom of the Opera” lined the stage edges, glittering and gleaming on mannequins.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThere was no formal announcement of the pop-up show, and passers-by moved around to get better views, capturing it on cellphones.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesPeppermint, center, taking a photo with Nikki M. James, left, and Lillias White.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe cast started with a topical classic, George Benson’s “On Broadway,” with a group of high-energy sneaker-clad and masked backup dancers. (There had been barely any time to rehearse beforehand, so just before showtime, the dancers ran through their choreography just offstage on the concrete.) Next, the singers Lillias White, Nikki M. James, Peppermint and Solea Pfeiffer joined in “Home” from “The Wiz.” And a choir sang an original song written about the pandemic hiatus, “We Will Be Back,” by Allen René Louis. Costumes from shows like “Wicked” and “Phantom of the Opera” lined the stage edges, glittering and gleaming on mannequins.During the pandemic, two musicals, “Mean Girls” and “Frozen,” announced that they would not be returning to Broadway, as well as two plays that were in previews, Martin McDonagh’s “Hangmen” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” On Friday, several shows promised that they would indeed be back, including “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which got through three performances before it was forced to close, and “Six,” which had been scheduled to open on March 12, 2020.Nikki M. James, in Times Square. She is among those who sang “Home” from “The Wiz.”Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMembers of the media and other onlookers, capturing the midday show.Credit…Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThat day, Judi Wilfore, the house manager for the Imperial Theater, remembers standing in the lobby before the scheduled evening performance of “Ain’t Too Proud” and breaking the news to ticketholders. Even though Broadway shut down on a Thursday, Wilfore came to work that weekend, too, in case any audience members showed up.Over the summer, Wilfore decided that she needed to find work elsewhere, so she took an online course at Health Education Services, to get certified as a Covid compliance officer. At Friday’s event in Times Square, it was her job to make sure people were following safety guidelines and to manage a team of front-of-house theater staffers who were hired to help run the event.Wilfore has been a compliance officer for gigs here and there — including the load-out of the “Beetlejuice” set from the Winter Garden Theater — but like many in the industry, she yearns for the eventual return to indoor theater, where she oversaw the bustling movements of staffers and audience members.“We love what we do,” she said, “and the fact that we haven’t been able to do it in a year is unfathomable.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rescuing an Off Off Broadway Theater With a Storied Past

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      Preservationists hope to save the 13th Street Repertory Company building, with a little help from the Underground Railroad. When Edith O’Hara, the mother hen and indefatigable leader of the eclectic 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, died last fall at age 103, the future became decidedly shaky for one of Off Off Broadway’s longest-operating stages.In an effort to ensure that it’s not the end of the run as well for the antebellum brick house where both the theater and Ms. O’Hara made their homes, preservationists are urging the city to grant landmark protection to the three-story Greek Revival structure.The city Landmarks Preservation Commission told an advocacy group in January that the quaint 1840s rowhouse with the intricate cast-iron portico at 50 West 13th Street was not distinguished enough to warrant landmark protection on its architectural merits, noting that further study was needed to determine the building’s “cultural significance within the context of Off Off Broadway theater.” Consequently, the group, Village Preservation, has dived into the archives to try to demonstrate that the building is a worthy cultural landmark based not only on its theatrical history but also on an intriguing, newly unearthed piece of African-American history involving a prominent 19th-century Black businessman and abolitionist.The new research “is very helpful and we have added it to our records,” Kate Lemos McHale, the commission’s research director, wrote the group on Feb. 24.A commission spokeswoman added in a statement to The Times that the city “is absolutely committed to recognizing Black history in the urban landscape,” which is why the agency recently launched Preserving Significant Places of Black History, “a world-class story map and educational tool.” She said that the city would “continue to review” 50 West 13th Street.Edith O’Hara, the leader of the 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, at the theater in 2006. Ms. O’Hara died last fall at age 103.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesA place of opportunity for generations of theatrical neophytes of varying talents, the quirky, no-frills 13th Street Repertory Company was an early stop for such performers as Richard Dreyfuss and Chazz Palminteri. “Line,” a one-act play by Israel Horovitz, ran there for more than 40 years, an Off Off Broadway record. And “Boy Meets Boy,” New York’s first hit gay musical, was first staged there in 1974, the brainchild of Bill Solly, an Englishman whom Ms. O’Hara had taken in and allowed to live upstairs from the theater.Whether the show will go on is unknown. The building is owned by White Knight Ltd., of which Ms. O’Hara’s three children collectively own a little over a third. The balance of the shares are owned in equal proportion by Stephan Loewentheil, a bookseller, and his ex-wife, Beth Farber. The O’Haras and Mr. Loewentheil previously fought a bitter, yearslong real estate battle that ended, in 2010, with an agreement that allowed Ms. O’Hara and her theater to remain in the building until her death. There is no provision for what comes next.The Thirteenth Street Repertory Company has been placed in the hands of its artistic director, Joe John Battista, who has vowed to continue making theater under the group’s name. But whether that will happen on 13th Street or elsewhere — and whether the building will ultimately be sold — depends on the outcome of an offstage drama.Jill O’Hara, one of Edith O’Hara’s two daughters, at the theater in 2017. Ms. O’Hara is a minority shareholder of the company that owns the building.John Taggart for The New York Times“It’s all still in the air at this point,” said Jill O’Hara, one of Edith’s daughters, who sits on White Knight’s board. “It’s a complex situation that’s not made any easier by the history with this guy,” she added, referring to Mr. Loewentheil.The building is managed for White Knight by Nate Loewentheil, the son of Mr. Loewentheil and Ms. Farber.“As someone who cares deeply about cities, I appreciate the history of 50 West 13th Street,” Nate Loewentheil said, “but the building has fallen into very significant disrepair over the past 15 years, so we are trying to figure out our next steps.” (Both his parents declined to comment.)Ms. O’Hara said that her mother believed that the building was once part of the Underground Railroad, the network of activists who helped enslaved African-Americans flee north to freedom before the Civil War. That belief has been perpetuated in local lore because a trap door in the theater’s dressing room leads to a hidden basement chamber unconnected to the rest of the basement.Although no evidence has emerged to support the Underground Railroad rumor, new research, performed by Village Preservation and supplemented by an independent historian and a reporter, suggests that the claim may not be outlandish.From 1858 to 1884, city directories and other records show, the house was owned by Jacob Day, a prominent African-American businessman active in abolitionism and other civil rights efforts. By 1871, Day was one of the wealthiest Black residents of New York City, according to The New York Times, with a net worth of more than $75,000, or around $1.6 million in today’s dollars.The Greek Revival house has an intricate cast-iron portico.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe building has fallen into disrepair, and its future is uncertain.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesAn 1880 issue of The People’s Advocate called Day “the fashionable caterer of East Thirteenth Street” and identified him as a leading member of “a colored aristocracy” in the city. “Beginning as a waiter, by economy and thrift after years of struggle he saved money enough to go into business himself,” the paper noted, adding that Day owned “several fine houses.”Newspaper articles appear to document Day’s involvement in civil rights causes over more than 30 years. In 1885, the year after his death, his efforts to further African-American self-determination were recognized in a history of Black Americans. “The Colored population of New York was equal to the great emergency that required them to put forth their personal exertions,” wrote George Washington Williams, spotlighting Day, along with his fellow Greenwich Village resident and abolitionist Dr. Henry Highland Garnet, for doing “much to elevate the Negro in self-respect and self-support.”Born in New York around 1817 to parents who were also born in the city, Day appears to have been publicly active in Black civil-rights efforts as a young man. Along with such prominent abolitionists as the New York publisher and Underground Railroad leader David Ruggles, a man named Jacob Day was among a group in 1840 that called, in the pages of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, for a “National Reform Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the United States of America,” an effort to combat the colonization movement that aimed to resettle Black Americans in Africa.Day was also a prominent member and the longtime treasurer of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the city’s second oldest Black church, which moved to nearby 166 Waverly Place shortly after Day bought his house and place of business on 13th Street.Tom Calarco, the author of several books on the Underground Railroad, said that an 1852 article in The Standard suggested a strong connection between the church and leading Underground Railroad figures.The newspaper report detailed an anti-colonization meeting at the church that had been called by the Committee of Thirteen, a vigorous Underground Railroad organization. The Rev. John T. Raymond, the church’s pastor, was a member of the committee and served as president at the 1852 meeting.The entrance to the 13th Street Repertory Company, which was shuttered last March because of the coronavirus. Edith O’Hara lived upstairs until her death last fall, and tenants still occupy the building.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesDay was “a major leader of the Black community, and he was connected up with other important people that were in the abolitionist movement,” Mr. Calarco said. “We know for at least 26 years, he was still participating in these important meetings with people who were leaders of the movement, so you have to make that assumption that he, if not directly, was indirectly involved in the Underground Railroad.”Mr. Calarco also shared a document showing that in 1846, Day was one of a roster of African-Americans given land grants in the Adirondack region of upstate New York by Gerrit Smith, a major underwriter of the Underground Railroad.Mr. Calarco speculated that Day may have used his wealth to fund Underground Railroad operations, whose conductors were often pressed for cash. “They needed the money,” he said, “to pay for the food, to pay for the travel, to pay for the clothes, to pay for people who helped transport” fugitives on boats and trains.After the Civil War, with slavery abolished, Day worked to secure the vote for all Black people in New York State. In 1866, The Standard reported, he was one of a group that called for a convention to remove the discriminatory provision in the state constitution that barred Black people from voting unless they owned property valued at the considerable sum of $250. “The war of steel is over … but the war of ideas must go on until in this country true democratic principles shall prevail,” the group wrote, echoing today’s battles over voter suppression.In 1871, a year after the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution finally prohibited the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote based on race or color, a massive jubilee parade of Black citizens wended its way uptown from Washington Square, with throngs of Black and white New Yorkers lining the route. At a “grand mass meeting” at the Cooper Union, The Times reported, Day was among the officers who issued a resolution declaring that the 15th Amendment could only improve the lot of Black Americans if “the exercise of the ballot shall at once be made safe, and our right to exercise it be maintained by civil authority.”In 1880, when the Black civil rights leader Frederick Douglass spoke at a rally for the Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield at the Cooper Union, Day was among the prominent citizens, Black and white, assembled onstage around him.During the period Day lived on 13th Street, the city’s largest African-American neighborhood, known as Little Africa, had developed nearby south of Washington Square, around Minetta Lane and Minetta and Bleecker Streets. The Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose finances Day managed, had moved to the Village to serve this population. So did the Freedman’s Savings Bank, an institution founded to help former slaves after the Civil War. Day kept an account at the bank, perhaps to support its mission.Reflecting on Day’s house on 13th Street, Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian of the African Diaspora who curated a digital exhibit called “Black New Yorkers” for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said: “It’s important to preserve and show that there was an African and then an African-American presence in that area from the Dutch years and that they had institutions and businesses. It’s important to stress that, contrary to what people think, African-Americans didn’t just arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration, but they had a presence for 300 years before that.”By the late 19th century, fierce competition for housing from Italian immigrants was already pushing Black residents uptown from the Village to the Tenderloin district. And some of the lingering physical remnants of Little Africa were demolished in the 1920s by the extension of Sixth Avenue from Carmine Street to Canal Street.“Virtually all of the great institutions and landmarks and homes of leading figures of the 19th-century African-American community of Greenwich Village have been lost or highly compromised,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation. “50 west 13th Street is one of very few remaining homes of a leading African-American figure, not just in business but in the civil rights arena, that is largely intact from the many decades that he lived and worked there in the 19th century.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Sprinkled With High-Tech Fairy Dust

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Sprinkled With High-Tech Fairy DustA new online production from the Royal Shakespeare Company uses motion-capture and video game technology to create a virtual world.E.M. Williams performing in a motion-capture suit as Puck, in rehearsal for “Dream,” which will be performed live and streamed online starting Friday.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyMarch 12, 2021, 7:29 a.m. ET“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” may be one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays — but its latest version from the Royal Shakespeare Company will be unlike any seen before. Titled “Dream,” the 50-minute streamed production fuses live performance with motion-capture technology, 3-D graphics, and interactive gaming techniques that let the audience remotely guide Puck through a virtual forest.As live theater sprinkled with some seriously high-tech fairy dust, “Dream” promises to bring “a most rare vision” of the play to our screens, to borrow a line from Shakespeare. It will be available to watch online once a day at various times from Friday through March 20.“It’s part of our ongoing engagement with this brave new world,” said Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director. In 2016, the theater’s production of “The Tempest” used live motion-capture technology to create a 3-D digital avatar that was projected above the stage.The difference this time is that everything in the play — the performers and their surroundings — will be rendered virtually.A cast of seven will perform in a specially built studio in Portsmouth, southern England, wearing Lycra motion-capture suits outfitted with sensors. They will be surrounded by a 360-degree camera rig, made up of 47 cameras, with every movement almost instantaneously rendered by digital avatars, which are relayed to viewers via the stream. These magical figures move seamlessly through a computer-generated woodland, and the action is narrated in husky tones by the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave as the forest’s voice.For audiences watching at home, the virtual fairies moving through a digital forest will look more like a video game or a CGI blockbuster than your average Royal Shakespeare Company show. But the performances are delivered live and in real time. Every night’s performance will be unique.With its abridged running time and a much-reduced cast of characters, “Dream” is not a full-scale production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; rather, it is a narrative inspired by it, focusing on Puck and the fairies. But don’t expect any cute digital wings: These are elemental, mysterious forces of nature.Naomi Gibbs, left, and Alex Counsell, right, fine-tune E.M. Williams’s motion-capture sensors.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyThe arts collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, which works with virtual, mixed and augmented reality, has created digital avatars for the actors so they look sprung from the natural world. Puck is formed of pebbles and stones, while Titania’s fairies are made up of moth wings, cobwebs, earth or roots. The fairies are shape-shifters that coalesce into recognizable human and animal forms onscreen, and grow or shrink so that they are small enough to “creep into acorn-cups,” as Puck puts it.“It’s a form of puppetry,” said the Royal Shakespeare Company’s director of digital development, Sarah Ellis. “Those avatars come alive when they breathe, and how they breathe is through the live actor.”The software that drives the performance, called Unreal Engine, is used across the video games industry and is behind popular titles like “Gears of War” and “Fortnite.” Since 2013, the company that developed it, Epic Games, has been branching out to create interactive 3-D content with the tool for film and TV, and, increasingly, for live events such as music festivals, museum exhibitions and theater productions.Layering the tech with live performance, and relaying it instantly via a web player to thousands of devices, is an experiment for both Epic Games and the Royal Shakespeare Company. And then there’s the interactive component.Up to 2,000 audience members for each performance can become part of the show, and will be invited to guide Puck through the forest. Onscreen, the chosen spectators will appear as a cloud of tiny fireflies: By using their mouse, trackpad or finger on the screen of a smart device, they will be able to move their firefly around the screen, and Puck will follow their lead through the virtual space.“Without the fireflies — the audience — Puck wouldn’t be going anywhere,” said E.M. Williams, who plays the role. “The audience are very much the fuel, the energy, of the show.”Steve Keeley operating the technical platform in rehearsal.Credit…Stuart Martin/Royal Shakespeare CompanyIn a traditional stage production, the “tech” rehearsals come last, after weeks of work by the actors on character and narrative. For “Dream,” the process began with fittings for the motion-capture suits, so the players could calibrate their movements. Their digital avatars were refected on giant LED screens around the studio to orient the performers within the virtual environment.“It looks so 3-D, like it’s coming out the screen sometimes,” Williams said of the computer-generated forest. “There are times when if I touch it, I expect to feel it. It’s thinning the veil between the technological world and the real world.”The Royal Shakespeare Company has long been seen as a bastion of traditional British theater: reverent toward text and verse, powered by great actors. Did the company anticipate any resistance to its high-tech, experimental approach? Several reviewers said its motion-capture “Tempest” was gimmicky.“There’ll be some criticism, of course,” said Doran, the company’s artistic director. But, he added, he hoped “Dream” could speak to a traditional theater audience, as well as viewers drawn in by the technology.Besides, the genius of Shakespeare means his plays can take whatever new inventions are thrown at them. “It’s the same as an experimental production of any of these plays,” Doran said. “Shakespeare is robust: He’ll still be there.”DreamPresented online by the Royal Shakespeare Company, March 12-20; dream.online.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Battered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New Era

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBattered but Unbowed: How Beckett Speaks to a New EraAdaptations of “Happy Days” and “First Love,” works by the master of existential wheel-spinning, show us how to live in place.Tessa Albertson is a younger-than-usual Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” directed by Nico Krell.Credit…via The Wild ProjectPublished More

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      Protesters Occupy French Theaters, Demanding Reopening

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      The pandemic is still raging, but arts workers in France want to know when cultural life can restart.PARIS — Dozens of protesters stood outside the La Colline theater here on Wednesday, waving signs. “Better ‘The Rite of Spring’ than a massacre until spring,” read one; “We want to dream again,” said another.The protesters were there to support others inside the building who have occupied the playhouse since Tuesday, demanding the reopening of theaters across France.Cultural institutions here have been closed since October, when rising coronavirus cases led the government to heavily restrict social life. France has lifted some restrictions since, including on some stores, but there is still a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in cities, restaurants can only offer takeout, and museums, music venues and movie theaters remain closed.Protesters, most of them actors, theater workers and students, now occupy at least seven theaters across the country — including the Odéon Theater in Paris and the National Theater of Strasbourg — in the hope of forcing the government to restart cultural life.“We want to bring life back to these venues, not blockade them,” said Sébastien Kheroufi, a drama student and one of the occupiers at La Colline.Actors and students outside the National Theater of Strasbourg on Wednesday.Jean-Francois Badias/Associated PressAt the La Colline theater in Paris on Tuesday.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFrustration at the continued shutdown of cultural life in France has been building for weeks. Last Thursday, trade unions representing arts workers organized more than 30 protests around the country to demand a reopening date, as well as an extension to special unemployment benefits for actors and musicians.During one of those marches in Paris, around 50 people entered the shuttered Odéon, one of the city’s most prestigious theaters, which was also occupied in the student protests of 1968. The demonstrators have since refused to leave, although they have allowed rehearsals taking place there for Christophe Honoré’s new play “The Sky of Nantes,” initially scheduled for a March premiere but now postponed until next season, to continue.On Saturday, Roselyne Bachelot, France’s culture minister, made a surprise visit to the Odéon to meet with the demonstrators. “I understand the concerns,” she wrote on Twitter after the meeting. “My objective is to continue to protect artistic employment,” she added.But this week, her tone changed. “Occupying performance venues is not the answer,” Bachelot told lawmakers on Wednesday, calling the occupations “pointless” and “dangerous.”Yet a number of theater directors have welcomed the occupations, including La Colline’s director, Wajdi Mouawad, who said in an emailed statement: “La Colline supports, in dialogue and trust, the actions of the students.”France is still recording high, if stable, levels of coronavirus infection. On Wednesday, the French government announced that a further 30,000 people had tested positive for the virus in the last day, while there had been 264 deaths after a positive test.Joachim Salinger, an actor who is part of the occupation at the Odéon, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday night that there were around 45 protesters in the building, and that everyone was wearing masks and maintaining distance from one another.At La Colline, the occupiers all took coronavirus tests before they entered the building, Kheroufi, the student protester, said.“Occupying a theater is a lot of work,” said Mélisande Dorvault, 23, another protester at La Colline. “We try to listen to everyone, to take different opinions into account and vote on decisions,” she added.The demonstrators at La Colline appeared to have support from nearby business owners also hit hard by the pandemic. Achour Mandi, a barman at the nearby Café des Banques, said he felt a kinship with the protesters. “We’re in the same mess,” Mandi said, pointing to the restrictions on restaurants.Protesters occupying the Odéon Theater in Paris last week.Francois Mori/Associated PressWhen the government announced new coronavirus measures in the fall, it banned public performances but said theaters would reopen Dec. 15. That plan was scrapped when a target of bringing new case numbers under 5,000 a day was missed.“Since December, we’ve had absolutely no visibility about what is going to happen,” Salinger said.Other arts institutions, such as museums, have also called on the government for a reopening timetable. In February, the heads of dozens of the country’s major museums pleaded with the government to allow them to open their doors. “For an hour, for a day, for a week or a month, let us,” they wrote in an open letter published in Le Monde, the daily newspaper.Soon afterward, the mayor of the city of Perpignan, in the south of the country, ordered his city’s four museums to reopen in defiance of national rules, saying his city had “suffered enough, and its inhabitants need this patch of blue sky.” The government took the city to court and the museums shut again.The anger among workers in the arts sector is compounded by the French government’s recent decision to go ahead with an unpopular reform of unemployment benefits, set to take effect in July. The withdrawal of this change is one of the theater protesters’ demands.On Thursday, union representatives held a video call with Bachelot and Jean Castex, France’s prime minister, where they announced 20 million euros in new support for cultural workers and young graduates. But in a phone interview afterward, Salinger said the measures were insufficient. “We will stay,” he added.At La Colline on Wednesday, Kheroufi said he thought the protesters would be there for the long haul. “We’ll stay for as long as it takes,” he said. “If I leave, what do I do? Go home? Where can we go?” More

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      The Night New York's Theaters, Museums and Concert Halls Shut Down

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 12, 2020: The Night the City Sighed to SleepChocolate fountains, Debbie Harry and an artist’s swan song cut short. We gathered scenes from the New York City cultural landscape in the last moments before lockdown.The view from Sardi’s on March 12, 2020, as Broadway and much of New York locked down.Credit…Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesMichael Paulson, Julia Jacobs and March 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMarch began with an ominous drumbeat. A packed cruise ship with a coronavirus outbreak was left floating for days off the coast of California. South by Southwest was canceled. The N.B.A. suspended its season. And then, on March 12, Broadway shut down, and with it every large gathering in New York City.By the time the grates came down, it was not much of a surprise. The city that never sleeps was grinding to a halt.But it was impossible to imagine what was to come. The staggering death toll. The vast job losses. The isolation. The endlessness.That evening, a group of Broadway bigwigs — theater owners and producers, mostly — gathered to drown their sorrows at Sardi’s, the industry hangout famous for its celebrity caricatures. They noshed, they drank, they commiserated, and they hugged. Several of them wound up infected with the virus, although there were so many meetings, and so few masks at that point, who knows how they got it.They posted signs on their theaters saying they expected to be back four weeks later.Now it’s been 52.Do you remember your final nights out? We gathered scenes from around the city as the curtains closed. MICHAEL PAULSONFondue Fountains, Buckets of Bouquets and Fresh DolceThe dressing rooms at the Brooks Atkinson Theater were filled with flowers. The ruby chocolate fondue fountain was booked for the after-party. Brittney Mack’s mother and her brother and her best girlfriends had all flown into town, not about to miss the moment when the 30-something Chicagoan made her long-awaited Broadway debut as a 16th-century English queen.But it was not to be. Ninety minutes before the scheduled opening of “Six,” an eagerly anticipated new musical about the wives of King Henry VIII, Broadway shut down.“I got to the theater early, and there were gifts from all over — buckets and buckets of plants, and cookies, and so much love, and I was like, ‘Hell, yes,’” Mack recalled. “And then the assistant stage manager came in and said the show is canceled, and I just said, ‘How dare you!’”Credit…Lucas McMahon“It was very, very overwhelming, and all of a sudden I felt incredibly alone. And then I was like, ‘But my dress! And the earrings!’ So many perspectives hit me, and I realized this happened to our entire industry, and I thought, ‘What the hell are we all going to do?’”What most of the “Six” family did was to gather. Mack went out for drinks with her friends at Harlem Public, near her apartment. Meanwhile, the show’s producer, Kevin McCollum, fresh off canceling an 800-person opening night party at Tao Downtown, hosted about 100 members of the show’s inner circle at the Glass House Tavern, a few doors down from the theater.“Looking back, it was ridiculous that we did that, but we didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we had a buffet of crudités, and a host of droplets, I’m sure,” he said. “We were in shock. There were people crying. We were giving it our best stiff upper lip, for the British, but we were emotionally devastated.”The notice posted on the doors of the Brooks Atkinson Theater, home to the Broadway production of “Six.”Credit…Lucas McMahonBundled playbills that would have been distributed to the sold-out audience.Credit…Lucas McMahonGeorge Stiles, an English composer, was among many British friends of the show who had flown over for the opening. Stiles was once in a band with the father of Toby Marlow, who wrote “Six” with Lucy Moss, and had become a mentor and then a co-producer.“Never before has something that I’ve been involved with felt so poised to go off with a crack,” Stiles said of “Six” — quite a statement given that he wrote songs for the stage musical adaptation of “Mary Poppins.” “I was anticipating the euphoria of the crowd, and the fun of the red carpet-y nonsense, and the everyone wanting to be the last one to sit down.”Instead, he and his husband and Marlow’s father licked their wounds at Marseille. What was on the menu? “The sheer awfulness of being this close to a wonderful Broadway run.” Stiles has since put his “suitably regal” gold and black Dolce & Gabbana outfit “into very careful mothballs,” anticipating that there will yet be an opening night to celebrate. “We are very gung-ho,” he said, “and hopeful, fingers crossed, that it wont be too many months away.” PAULSON“We Love You, New York! Don’t Touch Your Face!”Only about half of the people who bought tickets to the March 12 show at Mercury Lounge had turned up, but there were still throngs of people drinking, talking and grooving to the band. Debbie Harry of the band Blondie was there, and so was the music producer Hal Willner. He would die less than a month later from Covid-19.Onstage, Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter” and lead singer of the glam rock band Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, belted and wailed into the microphone.The staff members at Mercury Lounge knew they were watching their last live concert for a while; what “a while” meant, they had no idea. Bands had been canceling their appearances at an increasing rate, and on a call earlier that day, the owners had asked the staff members if they were still comfortable working, said Maggie Wrigley, a club manager. The line was silent for a moment, before one employee spoke up to say that no, it was no longer comfortable.Michael C. Hall, the star of “Dexter,” and his glam rock band, Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, were the last act to perform at Mercury Lounge prior to shutdown.Credit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressOthers piped up to agree: They felt exposed and vulnerable to the virus at work. Because the late show had already canceled, the owners decided that the club would shut down that night after the early show.At about 9:30 p.m. — painfully early for a Thursday night on the city’s club scene — the audience was asked to leave. “We love you, New York! Don’t touch your face!” Hall yelled at the end of his set.Alex Beaulieu, the club’s production manager, sanitized the microphones and packed the drum kit, amps and cables for longer term storage.“We locked the door and sat at the bar and had a drink,” Wrigley said of the club’s staff, “and we just kind of looked at each other, with no idea what was going to happen.”JULIA JACOBSA Swan Song, Cut ShortFor Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the spring of 2020 was destined to be bittersweet. The Met Breuer, the museum’s experimental satellite space, was going to close, three years ahead of schedule. But its final show was one she’d spent years preparing: “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” a survey of the stern and skeptical German artist, filling two floors of the landmark building and including loans from 30 different collections.The exhibition, intended by the now 89-year-old artist to be his last major show, opened March 4. It had the makings of a blockbuster, and it ought to have introduced New York to four paintings called “Birkenau” (2014): streaked, abraded abstractions that obscure imagery of the titular death camp. On March 12, the show’s ninth day, Wagstaff realized it had to close.The Richter exhibition at the Met Breuer had all the makings of a blockbuster when it closed on its ninth day.Credit…Charlie Rubin for The New York TimesAt first the gravity of the crisis wasn’t fully clear. “I had every anticipation that it was going to reopen in May at the very latest,” Wagstaff said recently. But soon she realized that “Birkenau” — a culmination of Richter’s 60-year engagement with German history and the ethics of representation — would not find an audience. “Beyond a kind of personal huge disappointment, it was that the artist, so aware of his own mortality, was denied the possibility of actually making a mini-manifesto to the world. Alongside that was the curtailment of the Breuer. What we ended up with was this implosion.”Richter never saw the show. A few days before it came down, Wagstaff stood alone with “Birkenau”: paintings about the possibility of perceiving history that, now, no one could perceive at all. “It was a kind of haunting experience,” she said. “They became almost anthropomorphic. They’re sitting there on the walls, and there’s nothing, there’s no one to witness them. The paintings are witnessing something, and that witnessing cannot be conveyed any further.”By autumn, the Met had ceded occupancy of the Breuer to the Frick Collection. Most of Richter’s paintings had been crated up and shipped back to their lenders. Yet “Birkenau,” which belongs to the artist, stayed in New York. Wagstaff brought these most challenging works into the Met’s main building, introducing into the lavish Lehman Collection these four speechless acts of remembrance and horror. “It was a trace of the show. The viewing conditions weren’t perfect,” Wagstaff conceded. “We had really limited attendance; we still do. But people stayed in that room for a really long time. For those who came to see it, it was a revelation.” JASON FARAGOOne Final SetBy March 15, Broadway theaters and concert halls were empty, but in the dim light of the Comedy Cellar, audience members sat shoulder to shoulder sipping drinks and watching stand-up comedy. Masks were not required.The comedian Carmen Lynch was hesitant about showing up that night: Her boyfriend was heading out of the city to stay with his family in Connecticut, and she planned to join him — it seemed like it was time to hunker down. But, Lynch said, she knew that the days of doing multiple shows in a single night were ending, and she wanted to make as much money as possible before the inevitable shutdown. She exchanged texts with fellow comedians to feel out who was still performing.“I thought, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal. I’ll just do this one show and then leave,’” Lynch recalled.In the last stand-up shows at the Comedy Cellar before it closed on March 15, comedians joked about Corona beer and the newly clean state of the subway.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesSo her boyfriend took her suitcase to Connecticut while she stayed to perform — one set at 7:45 p.m. another at 8:30. Before each comedian would walk onstage to tell jokes in front of the club’s famous exposed brick wall and stained glass, they would reach into a bucket to take a microphone that had been recently cleaned.Just before Lynch went on, the comedian Lynne Koplitz took the stage, removed the sanitized microphone from the stand and theatrically wiped it down with a white cloth another time, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this for years!”When Lynch finished her second set, she didn’t linger. She called an Uber and felt relieved when the driver accepted her request for an hour-and-a-half drive to Connecticut, not knowing how long she’d be gone (until summer) or what the city would be like when she returned (eerily empty, store windows boarded up).She drove away, and in retrospect, she remembers it like a scene in a disaster movie. “It’s like you’re in the car,” she said, “and you turn around and there’s an explosion behind you.” JACOBSAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Dench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater Greats

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookDench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater GreatsWith British venues closed and years advancing, there’s even less time to see some of the finest actors in their 80s onstage.From left: Maggie Smith attending the 65th Evening Standard Theater Awards at the London Coliseum in November 2019; Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench at the world premiere of “Murder on the Orient Express” in London in November 2017; and Ian McKellen at the Evening Standard awards in 2018.Credit…Ian West/Press Association, via AP Images; Rune Hellestad/Corbis, via Getty Images; Associated PressMarch 11, 2021, 3:53 a.m. ETLONDON — I’ll say this for the pandemic: It’s brought acting talent together — and into your living room — in ways that might not have seemed possible previously. That sense was probably shared by many on a Sunday night in November when Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench participated in a Zoom event titled “One Knight Only,” which was facilitated by another, younger member of Britain’s acting nobility, Kenneth Branagh.There, sharing a single screen, were four octogenarians — each a knight or a dame and a winner of Tony and Olivier Awards and heaven knows how many other accolades. Gathered for an online conversation in aid of charity, the quartet embodied a lifelong devotion to the theater that has found time for screen renown as well. The realization that the pandemic and advancing age have significantly reduced the already scarce opportunities to see these actors onstage again gave the occasion an underlying piquancy.How glorious, then, to clock their interplay, McKellen taking the reins as a raconteur, with a puckish Jacobi, nattily dressed, not far behind. Dench leaned into the screen as if Zoom were some inconvenience keeping her from sharing an actual space with friends, while Smith, notably more reticent, seemed to pull back from her screen. The conversation ranged from life during lockdown (McKellen has been painting) to their attitude toward critics and on to embarrassing onstage moments and roles they might like to play now. “Anything,” Dench said. “I would be pleased to be cast in anything.”All four belong to a tradition in British acting where theater was what you did and anything else was a happy add-on. Smith, alone among them, won the first of two Oscars (for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) when still in her 30s, while the others took far longer to become known overseas the way they had long been at home. Whether in college and drama school or covering the expanse of Britain’s once-storied network of regional theaters, these players cut their teeth on theater and waited for the screen to recognize the gifts already well known to live audiences. (More than once I have taken a seat aboard a trans-Atlantic flight only to find a smiling McKellen on video, advising me on in-flight protocol.)Whether as Gandalf, the stammering Roman ruler Claudius or the tart-tongued Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” McKellen, Jacobi and Smith, respectively, boast screen roles with which they will forever be associated, especially for those who haven’t seen them chart a course across the classics, and many a new play as well, onstage. (Smith’s Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies found her a following among preteens, too.) More people probably saw Dench’s inimitably brisk M during just one of the weekends her seven Bond films were in cinemas (she also made a cameo in an eighth) than saw her onstage during a theater career spanning 60 years and counting.Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 1985 film “A Room With a View.”Credit…Cinecon, via Everett CollectionDench and Smith in David Hare’s play “The Breath of Life” in 2002.Credit…Geraint Lewis, via AlamyIan McKellen as Freddie and Derek Jacobi as Stuart in the British television series “Vicious” in 2018.Credit…via ShutterstockThe joy of hearing their reminiscences came with an appreciation of how often these actors’ lives and work have overlapped: Think of them as a continuing Venn diagram from the start. McKellen and Jacobi acted together as students at Cambridge, where McKellen has spoken of harboring a crush on his classmate. The pair reunited a half-century later as the waspish elderly couple in the British sitcom “Vicious.” Jacobi and Smith were integral to the early glory days of the National Theater under Laurence Olivier, and McKellen and Dench played the Macbeths for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a 1976 production that exists on disc and is still spoken of in reverential tones.Dench and Smith, longtime friends, have appeared several times together onscreen, in “Tea With Mussolini” and “A Room with a View” among other titles, and in 2002 made up the entire cast of the David Hare play “The Breath of Life.”Surely, there are plenty of younger actors who are no less committed to the stage, and as we saw at this year’s Golden Globe awards, there’s a direct path in Britain from theater training to screen acclaim. Jude Law is a star who loves the theater, as are Benedict Cumberbatch (TV’s “Sherlock”) and George Mackay (the fast-ascending leading man from “1917”).The difference has to do with career paths that no longer require, or even suggest, the lengthy apprenticeship in Britain’s flagship subsidized theaters — the RSC and the National — that gave these senior practitioners an established perch early on. An actor nowadays may do a play or two only to be siphoned away to TV and film. Some return a fair amount (Matt Smith, a former and popular Doctor Who, is one example), whereas others vanish from in-person view: When’s the last time you could see Colin Firth in a play? Not since 1999, when he starred in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” at the Donmar Warehouse here.From left, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench in “Tea With the Dames,” a 2018 documentary directed by Roger Michell.Credit…Mark Johnson/IFC FilmsIan McKellen in his one-man show “Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others … and You” in New York in 2019.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy contrast, McKellen even now is visibly rejuvenated whenever he takes to the boards. In 2019, he toured a physically demanding one-man show the length and breadth of Britain (and for one night in New York) to mark his 80th birthday, and he has begun work on an age-inappropriate stage production of “Hamlet” that was put on hold by the coronavirus. Attending a Sunday matinee of the solo show, I was especially moved by his presence directly afterward in the lobby of the theater. Energy undimmed, he seemed ready to engage his public in chat well into the night.That same year found Smith onstage for the first time in 12 years not in the more-anticipated realms, perhaps, of Wilde or Coward but going it alone as Goebbels’s secretary, Brunhilde Pomsel, in “A German Life,” a bravura solo performance that by rights should travel to New York. (The plan now is to adapt the play into a film.) Dench has spoken candidly of her waning eyesight due to macular degeneration and her desire to nonetheless carry on acting. How exciting it would be to see her once again on a London stage, perhaps as the agelessly witty and worldly grandmother in “A Little Night Music,” a musical in which she once played that same character’s daughter, Desiree.Dench and Smith were part of a separate, scarcely less distinguished quartet when they joined Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright in “Tea With the Dames” (called “Nothing Like a Dame” in Britain), a lovely documentary that was aired in the United States in 2018 and lets the camera roll as the four great ladies of the stage take stock, gossip and reflect. To see this generation of talent in any iteration is to applaud their longevity while pausing to note the inevitable passing of a collective kinship with the stage that will live on well after it’s no longer possible to enjoy their talents in person.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More