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      ‘What Became of Us’ Review: Reflections on a Family’s Immigration Tale

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      Shayan Lotfi’s topical play about a family building a new life in a new country leaves the details vague, deliberately.Details are sparse in Shayan Lotfi’s play “What Became of Us,” but the imprecision is by design. Onstage at Atlantic Stage 2 in Manhattan, the two-hander is meant to be one size fits all, to a degree: a story of immigration that doesn’t specify its characters’ country — neither the one they quit, in the Global South, nor the one they adopt, in the Global North.Q (Rosalind Chao), the daughter of the family, is alone onstage when she begins mining her memories of what she will always call “the Old Country,” from which she emigrated with her parents when she was 6.“They wanted to leave because of the economic, and the political,” she says, her vagueness allowing space for imagination. “They wanted to leave to find autonomy, and safety.”And, she suggests, they wanted their then-only child not to be frightened by the momentous change they had decided on: “They explained the journey to me using words from the fantastical stories I loved to read: adventure, new, exciting.”Q’s gaze hovers above the audience, but she is not talking to us. These recollections are for Z (BD Wong), her sibling, who was born in what she calls “This Country,” when Q was 7. For all of them, the new baby would be “a root into This Country that could never be ripped out.”Does it need mentioning that there is nothing sinister in that sentiment — that their parents were simply building their family as they built a new life in a new place, to which they wanted to be connected? Such are the electrified politics around immigration these days, and not just in the United States, that maybe it does.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zack Winokur Leads an Arts Reboot at Little Island

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      Zack Winokur, an ambitious dancer-turned-director, now has a New York stage to call his own as the park’s artistic leader.On Saturday night, Zack Winokur stood at the top row of the amphitheater of Little Island. Hundreds of people had taken their seats for the first performance of the park’s summer season, but he didn’t feel like joining them. “I’m just going to pace,” he said.If Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, was restless, it was for good reason. The park, a cluster of tulip-shaped structures that support rolling hills above the Hudson River, had been open since 2021, and its amphitheater had been used plenty of times before.But Saturday’s performance, the premiere of Twyla Tharp’s “How Long Blues,” was a milestone for Little Island, and for New York City: the opening, or rather rebooting, of an institution dedicated solely to commissioning and supporting artists, with Winokur’s curatorial vision and the extremely deep pockets of the billionaire mogul Barry Diller.Outdoors, with a thrust stage, Little Island’s theater is subject to the elements and open to onlookers, who can watch performances, for free, from the winding paths of the park. (Tickets for amphitheater seats are $25.) The only real barrier to entry, Winokur said, is the West Side Highway.What really sets the theater apart, though, is its programming of world premiere after world premiere by top-shelf artists. Behind that is Winokur, 35, a Juilliard-trained dancer-turned-director who was a founder of the essential, increasingly visible collective American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC. Now, with Little Island, he is at the vanguard of his generation’s artistic leaders, with a New York stage to call his own.The financial support that Diller has pledged to Little Island’s programming, millions of dollars with no end in sight, is the kind that most artistic leaders only dream of. Winokur does not have to spend his days courting fund-raisers or securing residencies; instead, he can provide money and space, like a producer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Breaking the Story,’ All’s Unfair in Love and War

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      Maggie Siff plays a war journalist facing the most dangerous assignment of her life: domesticity.“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” So Chekhov instructed playwrights, and so they are taught in drama schools everywhere.But perhaps there should be a corollary: If you start your action with a bang, a gun had better follow.In Alexis Scheer’s “Breaking the Story,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage Theater, the initial bang is an earsplitting doozy: an explosion that throws a war journalist and her videographer to the ground. Nor is it the first life-threatening attack that the journalist has experienced. We quickly learn that in her 20 years on the front lines, Marina (Maggie Siff) has been knocked down, knocked out, cut up and resewn many times over. A scar runs up the right side of her face like a cherry gummy worm.Arresting and alarming though that is, it sets up an impossible comparison with the rest of the play, which, despite the director Jo Bonney’s efforts, is woefully light on dramatic ammunition. A rom-com is no match for a war.That’s not just the play’s problem, but also Marina’s. The slim thread of story concerns her attempted retirement from conflict journalism and sudden engagement to the videographer, Bear (Louis Ozawa). But on the weekend of the wedding, it turns out she isn’t so sure she wants (or can even survive) the safe, domestic life she has spent her career avoiding. Danger was not merely a risk she took in choosing to be a war correspondent but the reason for the choice in the first place.Thrill-seeking disguised as high-mindedness might be an interesting idea to explore, and indeed Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Still,” about a war journalist likewise returning to regular life, explored it movingly in 2010. But Scheer’s framing, in which a flock of comic and undermining kibitzers descends for the wedding on Marina’s new estate in Wellesley, Mass., is too lightweight to support much content. For most of the play they treat Marina’s war-lust as an endearing character trait, already factored into their love for her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jez Butterworth’s ‘The Hills of California’ to Open on Broadway

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      The play, about a group of English sisters who reunite at their mother’s deathbed, plans to open in New York in September. It ends a London run this month.“The Hills of California,” the latest darkly comedic drama from the acclaimed English playwright Jez Butterworth, will transfer to Broadway this fall after a well-received five-month run in London.The play, directed by Sam Mendes, is about a group of singing sisters — well, they sang together as kids — who have gathered at their childhood home in northwestern England because their mother is dying of cancer. The play is set in the 1970s, with flashbacks to the 1950s.The British press gave generally high marks to the play, which garnered five-star reviews in The Financial Times and The Stage, and four-star reviews in The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Observer and TimeOut.The London production is scheduled to end its run June 15. The New York production is to begin previews Sept. 11 and to open Sept. 29 at the Broadhurst Theater. Casting has not yet been announced.Butterworth’s last Broadway venture, “The Ferryman,” was also directed by Mendes, and won the Tony Award for best play in 2019. His first play on Broadway, “Jerusalem” in 2011, is a favorite among theater critics. He also wrote “The River,” which opened on Broadway in 2014.Mendes has worked frequently on Broadway, and won Tony Awards for directing “The Ferryman” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” He is also a film director, and won an Oscar for directing “American Beauty.”The lead producers of the Broadway run of “The Hills of California” include Sonia Friedman, a prolific and enormously successful British producer who also led the producing teams for Butterworth’s three previous plays on Broadway. The play’s other lead producers will be No Guarantees, which is led by Christine Schwarzman; Neal Street Productions, which is Mendes’s production company; Brian Spector; and Sand & Snow Entertainment. More

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      Public Theater Takes Shakespeare in the Park Out on the Town

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      The Delacorte Theater is being renovated, so a musical version of “The Comedy of Errors” is touring some of the city’s outdoor spaces.On a small stage, three actors practiced a sword fight — slowly, then faster. Behind them board operators ran a sound check and a wardrobe assistant shook out costumes.“This is the part of theater you never get to see,” Rebecca Martínez said.Martínez was speaking on Saturday in the southeast corner of Bryant Park. Behind her, the cast and crew of the Public Theater’s bilingual musical version of “The Comedy of Errors,” performed in Spanish and English, accomplished their preshow rituals. Martínez, who adapted the production with Julián Mesri, is also the show’s director and choreographer. Typically, routines like these are performed backstage, out of sight. But at Bryant Park, amid the birders, the tourists and the library patrons, a backstage was not available.With the Delacorte Theater closed for renovations, the Public is taking its summer production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and other outdoor sites in the city.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesFor over 60 years, the Public Theater has offered summer Shakespeare in one place: Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. This year, the Delacorte is closed for renovations (it plans to reopen next summer, with “Twelfth Night”), so the Public has taken this free show to the streets, parks and plazas of the city’s five boroughs.This “Comedy of Errors” was seen last year, as a production of the Public’s Mobile Unit, which brings high-energy, low-tech versions of Shakespeare to venues like libraries, correctional facilities and community centers. The Unit travels light, with a rug in place of a set, which allows a simple set up and strike.“Like, boom! Rug! Let’s go!” Martínez said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Janis Paige, Star of Broadway’s ‘The Pajama Game,’ Is Dead at 101

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      She first made her mark in the all-star 1944 movie “Hollywood Canteen” before finding acclaim on the musical stage. Movie and TV roles followed.Janis Paige, an entrancing singer, dancer and actress who starred in the original 1954 Broadway production of the hit musical “The Pajama Game,” died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 101.Her death was confirmed by a longtime friend of hers, Stuart Lampert.Ms. Paige made her mark at 22 in the all-star 1944 film “Hollywood Canteen,” but exposure in a string of 17 movies over the next seven years left her with little more than a collection of minor beauty titles, like Miss Wingspread and Miss Naval Air Reserve. When she ran away to try the New York stage, however, it took her only three years to become the toast of Broadway.She was cast as Babe Williams, the feisty, romance-resistant union leader in “The Pajama Game,” opposite John Raitt. The production — involving theater luminaries like George Abbott (book), Richard Adler (music) and Hal Prince (one of the producers) — won three Tony Awards in 1955: for best musical, best featured actress in a musical (Carol Haney) and best choreography (Bob Fosse).When the show was adapted for a movie, the producers at the Warner Bros. studio decided that at least one big Hollywood name was needed. So while most of the New York cast, including Mr. Raitt, made the transition to film, Ms. Paige was replaced by Doris Day.Ms. Paige and John Raitt in “The Pajama Game.” She played the role of Babe Williams, the feisty, romance-resistant union leader.via Everett CollectionBroadway continued to be kind to Ms. Paige, with four other starring roles. Notably, she replaced the seemingly irreplaceable Angela Lansbury in “Mame” in 1968. Clive Barnes, reviewing her performance in The New York Times, wrote that Ms. Paige had made “an excellent job of it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When the Stage Harnesses the Power of the Movies

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      Adaptations of films will be a factor at the Tonys this year. Surprisingly the best of these shows are not always the most faithful.A passing glance at this year’s Tony nominations might trick a glancer into thinking the wrong artistic medium has crept onto the list. Among the nominees are “The Notebook,” “The Outsiders” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” based on three movies: a 2004 Nicholas Sparks romance, a 1983 coming-of-age crime drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola and a 1962 Blake Edwards melodrama about alcoholism. (They were, in turn, based on best-selling novels and a TV play.)It’s not that movie adaptations are uncommon in theater — a number of mega-budget shows have been driven by silver-screen nostalgia, whether it’s “Back to the Future” and “Aladdin” or that stalwart of the Broadway economy, “The Lion King.” Splashy musicals, in particular, often come from recognizable cinematic sources: There’s “Mean Girls,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Kinky Boots” and many more. Not all of them are hits, as “American Psycho,” “Almost Famous” and “New York, New York” prove.Given how much theater relies on visitors buying tickets to an experience they know they’ll enjoy, it makes sense. Though there’s plenty of artistry on display in these productions, blockbuster adaptations can feel, to financiers, like slam dunks, safer bets than original material. The same nostalgia that drives sequels and reboots in cinema is at play: We know audiences like it, so let’s give them some more.But intellectual property that’s bankable isn’t everything, and increasingly, interesting theater comes from movie sources hailing from left field. “Teeth,” for instance, a musical by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, made a bloody, buzzy Off Broadway splash this winter at Playwrights Horizons; it’s based on a 2008 indie horror classic about a young woman with vagina dentata. Over at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, Tobias Menzies starred in “The Hunt,” adapted by David Farr from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2013 Norwegian thriller.“Teeth” made a splash Off Broadway this year, even though the source material wasn’t widely known.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJess Weixler starred in the 2008 indie horror movie on which the show is based. LionsgateWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What if the Disabled Characters Were Just Going About Their Day?

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      Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez star in the meet-cute “All of Me” — proof that depictions of disability onstage don’t have to be “a buzz kill,” as Ferris puts it.A bizarre thing happens when the actors Madison Ferris and Danny J. Gomez are out and about in public together, using mobility aids to get around: she a scooter, he a wheelchair. Inevitably, she said, strangers approach, presuming that the two are somehow in distress.“People will be like, ‘Are you OK? What’s going on?’” Ferris said the other afternoon at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan, where they are starring in the New Group’s Off Broadway production of Laura Winters’s romantic comedy, “All of Me.”And if several wheelchair users should roll down the street together, Gomez said, “then it’s like the circus is in town.” Such as the night a few friends of his from the Los Angeles dance team the Rollettes came to the play, and he and Ferris left with them afterward.“Everywhere we went,” he said, “just stares, left and right.”To Gomez, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a mountain-biking accident in 2016, that kind of othering underscores the need for theater, television and film to depict more disabled people, and do it more matter-of-factly.“Then it wouldn’t be so weird in real life,” he added. “It would just be people going about their day. Like, I don’t stare at you when you’re with your group of friends.”Not that “All of Me” is intended as pedagogical, but he does think it could help.In “All of Me,” Ferris and Gomez play characters who rely on electronic text-to-speech devices to talk. Kyra Sedgwick, left, plays Ferris’s mother.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More