Theater

Eight short plays take cues from the 1930 Noël Coward comedy — but now the stakes are different. More

Kwame Kwei-Armah, Julia Wissert and Eva Doumbia met online this week to talk about challenging the establishment, Black Lives Matter and the issue of white universality. More

Electric performances, led by André Holland, transcend didacticism in an audio rendition that replaced a Shakespeare in the Park production. More

For a Cantor Fitzgerald lawyer, a summer ritual in Central Park is a reminder of how New York can heal the hurting. More

Not so long ago, top stars brought top musicals to suburban arenas that started their lives as tents. More

Shakespeare in the Park and other outdoor venues are shut. But for performers and directors, open-air memories are as sharp as the bite of a mosquito. More

How can you get your cultural fix when many arts institutions remain closed? Our writers offer suggestions for what to listen to and watch, and a reason to take a stroll in Lower Manhattan. More

“The hateful plague spreads like a raging wildfire, devouring the city without mercy, emptying homes and filling the streets with moans and wailing and heaps of rotting bodies,” declares a priest in “The Oedipus Project,” Theater of War Productions’ recent reading of scenes from “Oedipus the King,” translated and directed by Bryan Doerries.Since the coronavirus has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and upended even the most basic functions of daily life — hugging a friend, buying toilet paper — people have been turning to stage depictions of mass illness as a means of understanding the present moment.As cities shut down, conversations on Twitter and elsewhere debated Shakespeare’s productivity during the plague (earning old King Lear his own hashtag) and surfaced allusions to the plague in all of those English-class favorites.In “Romeo and Juliet,” Mercutio famously declares, “A plague o’ both your houses,” while in “King Lear,” the doddering royal spits an insulting “plague-sore” at his daughter Goneril. In the first scene of “The Tempest,” facing the ruckus of the sailors while a storm ravages the boat, the boatswain groans, “A plague upon this howling!”But the plague as a literary device isn’t well served by adaptations, or by framing that seeks to baldly tie its relevance to Covid-19. As the author and filmmaker Susan Sontag has written, “Illness is not a metaphor … the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”ImageFrances McDormand as Jocasta in the Theater of War production, which was presented twice, in May and in June.In “The Oedipus Project” reading in late June — winningly delivered by a cast of such screen- and stage-friendly faces as Oscar Isaac, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Frankie Faison and John Turturro — the title character’s story is meant to serve as “a catalyst for powerful, healing online conversations about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to the theater. More