Theater

“A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s meta-musical about race, sexuality and musical theater, and “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” Will Arbery’s play about faith and politics in a corner of the conservative Catholic world, were the most-honored shows Tuesday night at the annual Obie Awards.The creative teams and ensembles of both productions were given special citations, and their writers were given playwriting awards at the ceremony, which honors shows staged Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony had been scheduled to take place in May before a live audience; it was moved online and delayed by the coronavirus, and then delayed again by protests over racial injustice that have swept the nation.ImageThe playwright Will Arbery accepting his Obie for “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”Both “A Strange Loop,” which in May won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, and “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a Pulitzer finalist, were staged by Playwrights Horizons. The retiring artistic director of that Off Broadway theater, Tim Sanford, was given a lifetime achievement award.The Obies, copresented by the American Theatre Wing and the Village Voice, are an unusual ceremony — there are no set categories, so the judges, led this year by the choreographer Sam Pinkleton and the set designer Rachel Hauck, can recognize any work they choose. The ceremony, emceed by Cole Escola, was prerecorded and streamed on YouTube; it honored shows that opened between May 1, 2019 and March 12, 2020. The two-hour-long broadcast included a performance of “Our Time” by alumni of several casts of “Merrily We Roll Along.”ImageSinging at the Obies ceremony, from left: Amy Ryder, Ann Morrison and Jessie Austrian, three performers who played the same role in different productions of “Merrily We Roll Along.”Along with Jackson and Arbery, Haruna Lee was granted a playwriting award for the conception and writing of “Suicide Forest,” which had productions at the Bushwick Starr and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Among the other winners:Directing awards were given to JoAnne Akalaitis, for “MUD/Drowning,” Kenny Leon, for “Much Ado About Nothing,” and Whitney White for “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.”Performance awards were given to Liza Colón-Zayas and Elizabeth Rodriguez for “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” Emily Davis for “Is This a Room,” Edmund Donovan for “Greater Clements,” April Matthis for “Toni Stone,” Joe Ngo for “Cambodian Rock Band” and Deirdre O’Connell for “Dana H.”Sustained excellence awards went to Les Waters for directing, Camille A. Brown for choreography, Arnulfo Maldonado for set design, Jen Schriever for lighting design and Alexandria Wailes as an artist and advocate. The actress Vinie Burrows was recognized for lifetime achievement, and the critic Michael Feingold, a longtime Obies judge, was given a special citation for his service.The presenters Page 73 and the Tank were singled out for helping to develop artistic careers. The National Black Theater was recognized for sustained excellence in production and advocacy on behalf of Black artists, while the Asian American Performers Action Coalition drew notice for advocacy on equity and inclusion.Also honored: David Cale for writing and performing “We’re Only Alive For a Short Amount of Time”; Dave Malloy, Or Matias and Hidenori Nakajo for the music and sound of “Octet”; David Neumann and Marcella Murray for creating and performing “Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed”; Tina Satter for conceiving and directing “Is This a Room”; Yu-Hsuan Chen for the set design of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”; Mikhail Fiksel for sound design in “Dana H.” and “Cambodian Rock Band”; and Andrea Hood for costume design at the Public Works program. More

The posthumous debut album by the Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke, who was shot and killed in February, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart this week, arriving as one of the biggest releases of a slow summer in the music business, one of countless industries greatly affected by the coronavirus pandemic.“Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon,” Pop Smoke’s third career release following two mixtapes, had the largest opening week since Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica” in early June, earning the equivalent of 251,000 albums sold, factoring in both streaming and traditional sales. Songs from the album were streamed 268 million times — the fourth best streaming week of the year — while bundles of the music and merchandise helped lead to 59,000 units in sales, according to Nielsen.Pop Smoke, born Bashar Jackson, was shot and killed during a home invasion in the Hollywood Hills earlier this year, interrupting his meteoric mainstream rise from the streets of Canarsie, Brooklyn, where he was at the forefront of the bubbling drill scene. Last week, the Los Angeles Police Department arrested five men in connection with the crime.In the No. 2 spot this week is the original Broadway cast recording of “Hamilton,” which reached its highest chart placement in its 250th week on Billboard, surging nearly 300 percent thanks to the July 3 streaming premiere of the filmed version of the show on Disney+. The cast album, released in September 2015, previously peaked at No. 3 on the chart in 2016, following its 11 wins at that year’s Tony Awards. This time, songs from “Hamilton” were streamed 90 million times — a record for cast recordings — and the album sold 32,000 units, for a one-week total of 102,000.The arrival of Pop Smoke and the resurgence of “Hamilton” bumped the rapper Lil Baby’s “My Turn,” which sat at No. 1 for the last four weeks in lieu of major new releases, to No. 3 in its 19th week on the chart. “Blame It on Baby” by DaBaby fell one spot to No. 4, while Post Malone’s “Hollywood’s Bleeding” landed at No. 5. More

Rename half of all Broadway theaters. Impose term limits for theater industry leaders. Require that at least half the members of casts and creative teams be made up of people of color.A coalition of theater artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” has posted online a 29-page set of demands that, if adopted, would amount to a sweeping restructuring of the theater ecosystem in America.The coalition, made up of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) theatermakers, has declined to make anyone available to answer questions, and says on its website that it has no leadership or spokesperson. “We understand the desire for individual interviews, but this is a collective movement and it would not be appropriate for any of us to speak on behalf of the all,” the group said in response to an email inquiry.The group’s initial statement was signed by more than 300 artists and then endorsed by thousands online; among its more visible supporters are the playwrights Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau, who on Wednesday called attention to the list of demands online.Stephanie Ybarra, the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage, said she too is a supporter of the demands. “We’re in the business of reflecting on the human condition, and the fact of the matter is that Black folks and Indigenous folks and non-Black people of color are telling us the conditions they’re working under in the theater are not humane in a lot of ways,” she said in an interview. “I believe them and I think that their lived experiences should be taken seriously.”An Off Broadway nonprofit, Ars Nova, also welcomed the document.The demands are wide-ranging and far-reaching. Among them:Black, Indigenous and People of Color should make up “the majority of writers, directors and designers onstage for the foreseeable future.” At nonprofit theaters they should also make up a majority of organizational leadership and middle management, as well as of literary departments.Theater organizations should stop working with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents stagehands, unless it makes a series of changes to its leadership and practices, including instituting an anti-nepotism policy. (A spokesman for the union said “We have no comment at this time.”)Broadway producers should stop relying on the Casting Society of America until it diversifies its leadership and membership and changes many of its employment practices. (The society’s president, Russell Boast, responded by email that the organization was aware of the document and that continuing to create “visibility and opportunity for BIPOC” is an “immediate and ongoing priority.”)Theaters should end all security arrangements with police departments.Theater leaders should have term limits. Those who have served more than 20 years (that includes the heads of many New York nonprofit theaters) should view it as “an act of service to resign.” And top paid staff members should make no more than 10 times the lowest paid staff members.Theater owners should rename half of Broadway theaters after artists of color, and ensure that half of Broadway shows are “stories written by, for and about BIPOC.” (A spokesman for the Shubert Organization, which with 17 Broadway houses is the largest of the theater owners, declined to comment.)Tony Awards administrators should appoint a group of nominators that is at least half people of color, and increase the number of voters of color. (The producers of the Tony Awards responded by email: “Every path to equity will be fully explored. These ideas and others will be presented to the Tony Management Committee for further review and discussion.”)Influential news outlets, including The New York Times, should stop funding salaried critics and feature writers, and instead “invest in contract-based positions that are filled with at least 50% BIPOC writers.” And theater producers and presenters should stop buying ads in publications, including The New York Times, unless at least half of the feature writers and critics are people of color. (A spokeswoman for the newspaper said “The Times is committed to a diverse staff in all parts of our newsroom, one that reflects the society we report on.”)Productions should provide on-site counseling for those working on shows that deal with “racialized experiences, and most especially racialized trauma.”Theaters should acknowledge Native peoples who have lived on land being used for theatrical endeavors, and offer free tickets to members of those communities.The We See You coalition is one of several pressing for change in the theater industry as the nation grapples with its history of racial injustice in the wake of a series of killings of Black men and women by police officers.Another new organization, Black Theater United, on Thursday held what it said would be the first of a series of virtual town halls; at the event, the actors Audra McDonald, Wendell Pierce and LaChanze interviewed Sherrilyn Ifill, president of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., who encouraged the establishment of specific goals for change. More

When New York theaters reopen — in January, or next spring, or when some epidemiological genius figures out how to make enclosed spaces with cramped seating even passably hygienic — I have a suggestion: Revive Lorraine Hansberry’s “Les Blancs.” This drama, unfinished at her death in 1965, and completed by her former husband, had a monthlong run on Broadway in 1970. In 2016, the South African director Yaël Farber, the dramaturge Drew Lichtenberg and Joi Gresham, the literary executor of Hansberry’s estate, collaborated on a revised version of the script, which then ran at London’s National Theater.Now National Theater at Home has made the production available for streaming on its dedicated YouTube channel, through Thursday. Haunting, haunted, devastating, it’s a work of the past that speaks — lucidly and startlingly — to the confusions of the present.Set in Ztembe, a fictional African country, the play begins with the arrival of Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan), a white American journalist, at a rural mission. Reporting on Ztembe’s struggle for independence, he hopes to interview Tshembe Matoseh (Danny Sapani), an intellectual who has returned home to bury his father. Tshembe lives in England. He has a white wife and a young son. While he sympathizes with the revolt, he doesn’t see himself joining it. But his time at the mission and his interactions with his brothers — Abioseh, who is in training to become a Catholic priest, and Eric, the product of his mother’s rape by an English officer — make the conflict personal and necessary.In Farber’s production, bathed in Tim Lutkin’s tenebrous lighting, a skeletal outline of the mission revolves on a carousel. (The designer is Soutra Gilmour.) Around the mission stand the Black characters, including a group of women who sing in the Xhosa split-tone style as they trail smoke and incense. Under Farber’s direction, the play moves away from realism and toward expressionism, even as it becomes a kind of ghost story, in the sense that no one participating in colonialism — as oppressor, oppressed or ostensibly neutral observer — can ever be fully alive.Farber is a powerful director, not a subtle one. But the play, unfinished and purposefully unresolved, has a way of sidestepping easy moral judgment. Not that Hansberry indulges relativism or both-sides-ism. She portrays whiteness, not blackness, as the “other,” and refuses to see the revolution as more violent than the regime that provokes it.Charlie’s character, a seeming audience surrogate, has to reckon with his own blinkered perspective and culpability. “White rule, Black rule, they’re not very different,” he tells Tshembe.“I don’t know, Mr. Morris,” Tshembe says. “We haven’t had much chance to find out.”If “Les Blancs” ultimately argues that any means, including violence, may be necessary to overthrow oppression, the argument isn’t a happy one. The play ends in fire and death and a howl of absolute anguish. Set in an invented African nation, it reflects on America, too. Tshembe has traveled in America, in the South, particularly. He has no admiration for what he calls “American apartheid.”In 1970, that parallel terrified many Broadway critics. The Variety reviewer Hobe Morrison reduced the play’s message to “revolution and that ghetto slogan, ‘kill whitey.’” John Simon said that it works to “justify the slaughter of whites by blacks.” But Clayton Riley, a Black critic, argued that the play rather offers something of Hansberry herself, of a brilliant mind “struggling to make sense out of an insane situation, aware — way ahead of the rest of us — that there is no compromise with evil, there is only the fight for decency.”That prescience that Riley identified persists, as does the moral clarity of Hansberry’s questions — questions that still don’t have answers. Watching “Les Blancs,” I wondered what Hansberry would have made of the upheavals of the present and about the play she might have written in response. We don’t have that play. We do have this one.In more ordinary times, I would hope that a theater — BAM, say, or St. Ann’s Warehouse — would import Farber’s production. But international touring may not resume for years. Besides, “Les Blancs” is a work that’s rich enough and fluid enough to invite multiple interpretations. It’s time that America again took “Les Blancs,” a work that was always, at least in part, about America, and made it our own. More

Like most other large regional nonprofit and commercial theaters, the Wilma in Philadelphia plans to stay closed through the fall.But this theater has an unusual idea for how to reopen when the time comes: it will prevent theatergoers from breathing on one another by separating them with wooden dividers.The Wilma, which normally seats 300 people in a traditional auditorium, says it will build a new structure, seating as many as 100 or as few as 35, on its stage. The two-tiered structure, which can be configured in the round or as a semicircle, is based in part on Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.The most distinctive feature is that each party of patrons — whether they be solo or in groups of up to four — is seated in a box, physically separated from all other parties.“As we were thinking about how to approach next season, and recognizing that even when we gather we would still likely have some sort of distancing and limited capacity, the idea of having everyone spread out in our existing space didn’t feel like it served our work,” said Leigh Goldenberg, the theater’s managing director. “So we looked at other models through history that allowed both distance and intimacy with the artists.”The structure is expected to cost up to $115,000, which the Wilma said it should be able to afford with its production budget, because it will be spending less on sets. The theater also hopes to be allowed to stream its productions, to recapture some of the revenue lost as a result of having a lower seating capacity.The theater has not yet decided what other safety measures it will put into place upon reopening, and plans to consult with medical professionals.The Wilma, established in 1973 as a feminist collective called the Wilma Project, moved into its current theater in 1996.Earlier this year, it announced an unusual leadership structure, in which four artistic directors are jointly overseeing the organization; their hope for next season is to stage productions of “Fairview,” the Pulitzer-winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a play by Will Arbery that was a Pulitzer finalist, as well as “Fat Ham” by James Ijames and “Minor Character” from the troupe New Saloon.“We’re embracing forward motion,” Goldenberg said of the seating plan. “We want to experiment with how we can keep creating and producing, and this feels like the next step of that.” More

This file was published in error More

There was a time when American readers kept pace with new plays, even if they didn’t live in New York or couldn’t afford tickets. Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” published by Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” made good money in hardcover and paperback for Atheneum.When theaters went dark in March, good plays were left dangling early in their runs. Some will never re-emerge, at least not as audiences knew them. One was the Italian writer Stefano Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” a broad-backed epic about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers.Massini began writing “The Lehman Trilogy” in 2008, shortly after the firm precipitously crumbled, like a cigar ash, amid the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. When I initially saw photographs of the New York production, showing dark-suited men gesturing in a gleaming office cube, I assumed the play was a boiler-room account of that collapse.That’s not it at all. Massini’s play pans across 160 years of the firm’s history, beginning when Hayum (soon to be known as Henry) Lehman moved from Bavaria to Alabama and entered the cotton business. The play’s Italian version ran five hours. Sam Mendes, who directed the London and New York productions, whittled it down to three and a half.Massini’s original text, a novel in verse, has now been issued in English for the first time, in a translation by Richard Dixon. It’s a monster, a 700-page landslide of language with no obvious speaking parts. But it’s apparent right from the start that Massini is the real thing. His writing is smart, electric, light on its feet.At the same time, his book ominously circles the big questions: Were the original three Lehman brothers and their descendants heroes or villains? Did they inject spirit and muscle into the American experiment, or were they simply cowbirds, laying eggs in other birds’ nests? The answers are complicated.Less complicated is the criticism, articulated most exactly by Sarah Churchwell in a New York Review of Books essay, that Massini’s play glosses over the Lehmans’ participation in the slave trade in Alabama. Future productions should have to pinch and zoom in on these realities.Henry emigrates to America. Having arrived, hecan smell the stench of New Yorkall over him:a nauseating mix of fodder, smoke and every kind of mold,such that, to the nostrils at least,this New York so much dreamed aboutseems worse than his father’s cattle shed,over there in Germany, in Rimpar, Bavaria.He moves south, to Alabama, for the sunshine. Bertolt Brecht, another Bavarian, had never been to Alabama when he wrote “Alabama Song” (also known as “Moon of Alabama”) in the 1920s. One wonders what Henry expected. He arrives, as do his two brothers shortly thereafter. They are in constant motion, making sure their materials are the finest and their prices the lowest.ImageStefano MassiniThey perfect, if not invent, the all-American idea of the middleman. They become brokers, buying cotton and selling it elsewhere. Their business expands to coffee, oil and coal, and eventually to electricity, railroads, planes, comic books, Hollywood and computing. They enter banking, and the idea of what they do becomes increasingly abstract.Early on we read:First: when we were in businesspeople gave us moneyand we gave something in exchange.Now that we’re a bankpeople give us money just the samebut we give nothing in exchange.At least not for the moment. Then we’ll see.By the end of the book, the debt swapping and complicated mathematics lead a character to ask, “Have you at least asked whether a rodeo like this is entirely legal?”“The Lehman Trilogy” lives on the page because of its human moments: the wooing of spouses; the scandals and feuds; the perilous attempts to climb the class ladder.The best running set piece is one in which the Lehmans seek a better row in their Manhattan temple, competing with families like the Goldmans and the Sachses, with whom they have much in common. Massini writes:The only difference—since the truth should always be told—lies in the fact that the Goldmansdeal in that particular metalcalled goldand are so proud of itthat they flaunt it in their surname.For this, and only for this,they’re in the second rowof the Temple.The family has a lot of worms to drop, via well-buffed fingernails, into the beaks of their young. They learn to launder reputations through philanthropy. A long-anaesthetized sense of morality emerges among some of the young members of the clan.Lehman Brothers grows more predatory. Massini pauses to examine the language of finance. Where once words like “succeed” and “competitor” were used, now the terms are “impose” and “enemy.” The Lehmans wield their power through discipline, control and punishment. Upon their conquered enemies, they impose Carthaginian terms. Business isn’t business, business is war.There is a savvy and strange digression into the movies of the golden age, many of which Lehman Brothers financed. The European author contends that these movies, and actors like John Wayne, permanently dented American ideas of masculinity.“The man who kisses? Better if he spits,” Massini writes. “The man who understands? Better if he snaps.” He adds: “Years and years of good manners / swept away by a dozen movies.”Massini writes language that’s excited about itself, and that nearly always casts a spell. If at a few moments I wished I were reading a short nonfiction history of the firm instead, well, those moments were few.The Lehman brothers were good at what they did. They were also blessed with luck. They were a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the Tom Stoppard play, who toss “heads” on a gold coin 157 times in a row.The firm throws and throws until, in Massini’s words:they achieve a resultthey then regret. More

Broadway will remain closed for at least the rest of this year, and many shows are signaling that they do not expect a return to the stage until late winter or early spring.The Broadway League said Monday that theater owners and producers will refund or exchange tickets previously purchased for shows through Jan. 3. Given the unpredictability of the coronavirus pandemic that has prompted the shuttering of Broadway, the League said it was not yet ready to specify exactly when shows will reopen.“Returning productions are currently projected to resume performances over a series of rolling dates in early 2021,” the League said in a statement. Among the logistical issues industry leaders are discussing with government and medical officials: “screening and testing, cleaning and sanitizing, wayfinding inside theaters, backstage protocols and much more.”“I’m cautiously optimistic, with the latest information that we’re getting from scientists and medical professionals, that we’re getting close to some protocols that would work in New York and on the road,” Charlotte St. Martin, the League’s president, said in an interview. “As long as they hold up, I do think that after the first of the year, a rolling rollout of shows reopening is possible.”St. Martin said that the rising levels of coronavirus cases in some parts of the country reinforced the industry’s cautious approach. “Frustration goes by the wayside when you’re talking about risking people’s life or health,” she said.Broadway shows went dark on March 12, and already this has been the longest shutdown in history. At the time, there were 31 shows running, including eight still in previews; another eight were in rehearsals before beginning previews.Thus far three shows, the Disney musical “Frozen,” which had opened in 2018, a new Martin McDonagh play called “Hangmen,” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” both of which were in previews, have announced that they will not resume performances when Broadway reopens.Several producers have indicated that they are looking several months into the new year for a resumption of Broadway shows. The earliest date chosen thus far is for “The Minutes,” a new play by Tracy Letts, which hopes to open March 15. A revival of “American Buffalo,” a play by David Mamet, is aiming for April 14; “MJ the Musical,” a new show about Michael Jackson, says it will open April 15, and “The Music Man,” a revival starring Hugh Jackman, plans to open May 20.Several other shows have said they plan to open next spring, but have not announced exactly when, including a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, as well as Lincoln Center Theater’s new musical, “Flying Over Sunset,” and Roundabout Theater Company’s revivals of the musicals “1776” and “Caroline, or Change.”Roundabout last week also announced that it would stage “Birthday Candles,” a new play by Noah Haidle that had been scheduled to open this spring, in the fall of 2021, and that in the winter of 2021-22 it would stage the first Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind,” a 1955 play by Alice Childress. The Childress play, which is to be directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, is about racism in theater, and is the first by a black writer added to the Broadway calendar since an intensified national discussion about racial injustice was prompted by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. More