Theater

Bernard Gersten, a canny executive who helped turn two of New York’s nonprofit theater companies into powerhouse producers and presenters of award-winning plays and musicals, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Jenny Gersten said.Mr. Gersten was Joseph Papp’s top deputy at the New York Shakespeare Festival for 18 years in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the two worked together to build the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for free summer productions of Shakespeare, and to turn the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village into the Public Theater, the original home of such notable plays as David Rabe’s Vietnam drama “Sticks and Bones” and Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, “That Championship Season,” as well as the landmark musicals “Hair” and “A Chorus Line.”The two men championed the work of Mr. Rabe, Vaclav Havel, Ntozake Shange, John Guare and other playwrights and helped propel the careers of actors like James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Martin Sheen and Raul Julia.For 28 years beginning in 1985, Mr. Gersten was executive producer — the chief business officer, with responsibility for management, marketing and budgeting — of Lincoln Center Theater.Working first with Gregory Mosher as artistic director and then with André Bishop, Mr. Gersten took a theater that had almost been completely dark for eight years and a failure for 20 and helped turn it into one of the nation’s leading nonprofit stage organizations.Its successes have included Mr. Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation”; “The Sisters Rosensweig,” by Wendy Wasserstein; Tom Stoppard’s vivid intellectual dramas “The Invention of Love” and “The Coast of Utopia”; Tony-winning revivals of “Carousel” and “South Pacific”; the Tony-winning best musical “Contact”; and the Tony-winning play “War Horse.”Though Mr. Papp was the driven public face of the Shakespeare Festival, many theater people have said that Mr. Gersten was an almost equal partner. The two men were complementary, to be sure, with Mr. Gersten willing to take on the tasks that Mr. Papp hated — accounting, advertising, dealing with agents — and mending the fences that the quick-to-anger Mr. Papp was prone to tear down.In 1971, after pleading with New York City to help solve the Public Theater’s financial crisis, Mr. Papp stormed out of a meeting with the all-powerful Board of Estimate rather than respond to criticism about the way he ran his theater. Only Mr. Gersten’s swift apology, witnesses said, persuaded the board to approve the city’s purchase of the theater’s building, giving Mr. Papp the relief he had sought.It was Mr. Gersten who brought the work of the director and choreographer Michael Bennett to Mr. Papp’s attention. Mr. Gersten had seen Mr. Bennett’s work in the Broadway musicals “Follies” and “Seesaw,” and when a musical about Vietnam, “More Than You Deserve,” was struggling in previews at the Public in 1973, Mr. Gersten recommended that Mr. Bennett be brought in to help. Mr. Papp rejected the idea, but not long afterward Mr. Bennett said there was something else he wanted to talk to Mr. Papp about: He had been making some tapes, and he had a crazy idea for a musical.“And the next day he came down to the theater with the tapes,” Mr. Gersten recalled. “He had been a gypsy, a chorus dancer, and he had taped hours and hours of interviews with dancers just like himself, the kind who would journey from show to show, never become stars, never even get speaking roles. They talked about their lives, their careers, their doubts, their hopes, their frustrations, their desires, their fears, their love of the theater. He played some of the tapes for Joe and said he thought they could be the basis for a musical. He said he needed time to create it and shape it, and wanted to use the Public Theater as a home for a workshop to make it work.”Mr. Gersten urged his boss to go along with the idea, and Mr. Papp was won over.The musical, “A Chorus Line,” opened to ebullient reviews on May 21, 1975, and with its move to the Shubert Theater on Broadway, it eventually grossed almost $150 million for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Its 6,137 performances — the last one was on April 28, 1990 — made it the longest-running show in Broadway history until “Cats” surpassed it. During the run Mr. Bennett died of AIDS-related lymphoma, in 1987.“The overwhelming point is the shadow that AIDS cast on the show,’’ Mr. Gersten said after its closing-night performance. “It’s so painful to sit there and think of the innocence of the show 15 years ago, when there was no shadow of AIDS, and to the think of the number of people connected with the show who have fallen to AIDS, Michael most notably.’’ Mr. Gersten was born on Jan. 30, 1923, in Newark, N.J., to Jacob and Henrietta (Henig) Gersten. His father was a garment maker and active in his neighborhood synagogue, and his mother was a homemaker.Bernard graduated from West Side High School in Newark, spent two years at Rutgers University and went into the Army, passing much of World War II in a special services entertainment unit in Hawaii. There he became friendly with a fellow soldier, an actor named Robert Karnes, who after the war invited Mr. Gersten to join his troupe, the Actors Laboratory in Los Angeles, as technical director. Mr. Papp had joined the company a year earlier and become managing director.The Actors Laboratory was known as a center of Communist Party activity, and in 1948 Mr. Gersten and Mr. Papp campaigned for former Vice President Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president. Both men later left for jobs in New York.Ten years later, in 1958, Mr. Gersten and Mr. Papp appeared before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Questioned about past Communist Party membership, they invoked the Fifth Amendment. Mr. Papp was fired from his production job at CBS, although he was later reinstated by an arbitrator. Mr. Gersten, by then working as a stage manager at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., did not lose his job, because Katharine Hepburn, a member of the festival’s board, and the director John Houseman said that if Mr. Gersten were ousted, they would quit.Two years later, Mr. Gersten joined Mr. Papp as associate producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, beginning an 18-year tenure in which he also helped Mr. Papp run Lincoln Center’s theater company from 1973 to 1977. In 1978, their partnership ended abruptly in a dispute over whether the Public Theater should co-produce Mr. Bennett’s follow-up to “A Chorus Line,” the musical “Ballroom,” a bittersweet tale of a late-in-life romance.Mr. Papp didn’t like it. But Mr. Gersten felt that they owed it to Mr. Bennett to be involved because of all the money “A Chorus Line” had made for the festival. Mr. Papp fired him, and even removed Mr. Gersten’s name from the “Chorus Line” credits, restoring it only several years later, when the two men reconciled. Mr. Papp died in 1991. (Mr. Gersten co-produced “Ballroom,” which opened on Broadway in December 1978 and closed in barely four months.)Mr. Gersten subsequently worked for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios and the Radio City Music Hall.Then, in 1985, Lincoln Center’s board, seeking to revive its moribund theater program, chose Mr. Mosher, formerly of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, as artistic director and Mr. Gersten as executive producer. To attract audiences to the center’s two theaters — the Mitzi E. Newhouse, for Off Broadway work, and the Vivian Beaumont, for Broadway — they offered a $25 season membership that allowed members to buy a ticket to any production for $10. In the first three years, they oversaw more than 20 plays and 2,100 performances, including a smash revival of Mr. Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves,” and took in $35 million. Mr. Bishop replaced Mr. Mosher in 1992.Over all, during Mr. Gersten’s tenure, Lincoln Center Theater produced more than 120 shows, many winning Tony and Drama Desk awards.In addition to his daughter Jenny, Mr. Gersten is survived by another daughter, Jilian Cahan Gersten; his wife, Cora Cahan, a former dancer who became the founding president of the nonprofit development agency the New 42nd Street and is now the president and chief executive of the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and four grandchildren. In 2010, on the 25th anniversary of his joining Lincoln Center Theater, Mr. Gersten reflected on the nature of theater as having four elements: a building, artists, money and an audience.“How you mix them, how you adjust them, how you administer them is the secret of success or failure,” he said.“We have taken a place that was considered to be an impossible theater,” he added, “and made it into the most likely theater one could want for, long for, hope to have.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

Recently, The Times’s co-chief theater critics put together a musical cast recording starter kit for those of us stuck at home — 10 cast albums they’d take with them to a desert island. We asked some of their fellow critics to pick one cast album each and extol its pleasures. On Wednesday, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote about the Shakespeare in the Park production of “Twelfth Night.”I first heard “Hair” as a teenager, because an aunt had the original Broadway cast recording on vinyl. I had no idea what the story was about, and didn’t care — I just loved the songs.Since then I’ve listened to “Hair” more than all my other cast albums put together, and possibly more than any other record, period. I’ve listened to it on headphones at home and on road trips, tinny car speakers straining at high volume. I’ve listened to it in order and on shuffle. I’ve listened to it while deep in absorbed concentration and while yelling back the best lines.I watched the 1979 Milos Forman film adaptation and liked it well enough, but it was seeing the show live for the first time — in 2008, at the Delacorte Theater — that secured “Hair” in my personal pantheon.Why it’s on repeat“Hair” is often said, somewhat accusingly, to be stuck in the 1960s. But while it certainly is of that time, the show is also outside of it, transcending the decades thanks to its evocation of timeless themes of repression and liberation, anger and joy. The score is intricately crafted yet feels instinctive, reactive, passionate.“Hair” works so beautifully because it’s a bit of a freak accident, resulting as it did from the unlikely meeting of Galt MacDermot, a seemingly strait-laced Canadian-born composer who played jazz with interpolations of African music, with the lyricists and book writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who came from the East Village’s wild theater scene. More

PARIS — Theater rarely pauses to mull over its past. What happens when the curtain rises next is the main preoccupation of stage artists and critics. Keeping up with the huge number of productions on offer is usually a Sisyphean task, leaving little room for historical perspective.Yet with theaters currently shut around the world, time has opened up to look back. As luck would have it, the National Audiovisual Institute, which archives all French television and radio programs, began a new streaming platform, Madelen, shortly after a stay-at-home order was issued here in March.Madelen gives subscribers a chance to watch theatrical productions that were taped for television from the 1950s on. While the platform is clunky to use, with no advanced search options and a limited catalog for now, it offers glimpses of theater’s early popularity on the small screen. And a sample of recordings from exactly half a century ago provides a window onto an onstage world that unfolded at a much slower pace than plays today.As a snapshot of theater in France at the time, Madelen’s selection is skewed. It leans heavily toward what is known as boulevard theater, a mix of popular comedy, vaudeville and melodrama. Some of the most influential French directors of the 1960s and ’70s, from Roger Planchon to Ariane Mnouchkine and Patrice Chéreau, as well as the overtly political stage works that echoed the events of 1968, don’t get a look-in. (Programming decisions played a part, but some artists simply didn’t believe in TV as a medium for their work.)Still, it is a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate what has long been considered a lesser genre. Theater history tends to erase boulevard productions in favor of more innovative and radical forms, yet most of the televised plays on Madelen averaged 15 million to 20 million viewers in 1970. They were shown on a popular program, “At the Theater Tonight” (“Au Théâtre Ce Soir”), that introduced the Paris theater scene to the rest of the French population. Under the guise of entertainment, they also spun well-crafted stories out of the era’s social mores.What do they have in common? An obsession with death, crime and extramarital affairs, for starters. The stakes of domestic entanglements, all staged with conventional, realistic sets and costumes, are certainly heightened: Even the comedies are rife with casual death threats.André Roussin’s “The Husband, the Wife and Death” (“Le Mari, la Femme et la Mort”), for instance, features a woman looking to hasten her husband’s death so she can inherit a secret fortune. In Jean Guitton’s “I Loved Too Much” (“Je L’Aimais Trop”), which takes place in a florist’s store, an unfaithful lover is shot not once but twice. At one point, the store’s oldest employee sighs, “No one believes in love, everyone uses it, and here is the result: a game of massacre.”Cheating is portrayed as both a cardinal sin and a commonplace occurrence, for men and women alike. Robert Lamoureux’s “Heres Comes the Brunette” (“La Brune Que Voilà”) alternately lionizes and punishes its hero, Germain, played by Lamoureux, for having four lovers at once. When the husband of one woman threatens to kill him if he doesn’t leave his wife alone, yet declines to give his name, Germain is forced to break up with all four women just in case: a comeuppance that leads him back to monogamy.These 1970 productions reinforce how deeply social context shapes our storytelling expectations. “The Old Fogies Are Doing Fine” (“Les Croulants Se Portent Bien”), a 1959 comedy by Roger Ferdinand, initially sets up a generational clash when a divorced father in his late 40s introduces his 20-year-old fiancée to his adult children, who are the same age. To get back at him, they decide to find older partners, too: The daughter (played by a future star, Nathalie Baye) seduces her father’s best friend, while the son goes out with a 40-year-old widow. I naïvely expected the characters to conclude that the age difference was too great for all involved. Wrong: Ferdinand ends up extolling the virtues of dating a much older partner.Par for the course, sadly, is the casual sexism woven into these productions, all written and directed by men save for a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” The age difference between male actors and their younger, more attractive stage partners is often stark. Women are cast as superficial housewives and airheads, easily overwhelmed by their emotions. In “The Husband, the Wife and Death,” a man even says to his wife, without a trace of irony: “I might rape you afterward, but it’s part of ordinary life.”Elsewhere, women are also feared. “What About Hell, Isabelle?” (“Et l’Enfer, Isabelle?”), written by Jacques Deval in 1963, pits an investigative judge against a presumed “black widow,” the self-assured Isabelle Angelier (the superb Françoise Christophe), whose husbands keep dying shortly after naming her a life insurance beneficiary.This slow-burning detective story would probably never make it to the stage today. The static set of the judge’s nondescript office and the long exchanges between the main characters would be seen as lacking variety and energy. Audiences have grown used to rapid-fire scene changes, and crime stories are told very differently in current movies and TV series. Yet “What About Hell, Isabelle?” shows, by fleshing out the characters’ psychology without quite solving its central mystery, that there is value in a more old-fashioned approach, too.In 1970, there was relatively little of the frantic movement that often fills the stage nowadays. The technical constraints of filming at the time may have played a part in how these productions come across, but the moments of silence and stillness also allow viewers to process the action differently. Three knocks are even heard every time the curtain is about to rise, an old French stage tradition that has fallen by the wayside, and it is also a joy to hear the clear, occasionally overemphatic diction of this generation of French actors.There is at least one play on Madelen that is ripe for a contemporary spoof: “Frédéric,” another work by the prolific Lamoureux, who was a star of the boulevard stage for several decades. It is an absurd, over-the-top spy story about a man, Frédéric, who has the ability to recite perfectly from memory every page he has ever read. When he accidentally reads an atomic physicist’s top-secret formula, he instantly becomes a sought-after commodity in an international arms race.A self-involved antihero, Frédéric is reminiscent of Jean Dujardin’s role as the James Bond surrogate in “OSS 117,” a parody French film franchise that began in 2006; a tongue-in-cheek revival of “Frédéric” (minus some racist lines that have aged poorly) might well be similarly entertaining. When theaters reopen, there will be plenty of plays about our current ordeal. Perhaps a few unexpected blasts from the past would be welcome, too. More

Under normal circumstances cast albums are used by musical theater fans to experience shows that are no longer running, playing too far away or prohibitively expensive. But with live theater currently on hiatus, these recordings are now one of the few ways that musicals remain accessible.Recently, The Times’s co-chief theater critics, Ben Brantley and Jesse Green, each chose the 10 albums they’re grateful to have during this time of isolation. Readers reacted with suggestions of their own. Here are but a few lightly edited responses:Calls for Classics“Guys and Dolls”! Seriously! And “The Music Man”! I don’t know what you would take out, but you have to include these two just for the joy if nothing else. PAULANeither of you two listed “Candide”? Sure, the book is a mess, but that doesn’t play a role in the cast album (or albums as there is no definitive compilation and so several different selections to choose from). My favorite is {John} Mauceri’s with City Opera. A more gorgeous score and wittier lyrics cannot be found in all of theater. And sue me, but I prefer it to “West Side Story.” GARYWhatever happened to “The Sound of Music”? If you are to be marooned, why not some of the happiest songs? It’s your choice whether it’s the Broadway cast album (Mary Martin) or the movie soundtrack (Julie Andrews). JIMSeriously? A desert island list is exactly THE top 10 must-have and ONLY list — the ones that you listen to on repeat forever, not the weird obscure ones to show us that you’re a show critic! “Hamilton”: of course!! “West Side Story”: definitely! But not to include “Fiddler,” “Evita,” “Oliver,” “A Chorus Line,” “Sound of Music” and “Les Mis”? DR TEL“Porgy and Bess.” The only recording I now have is from the 1959 film, but the music is still glorious, especially those numbers by Sportin’ Life, sung by Cab Calloway. JONATHAN“Hair,” a great album from a great musical that reset the stage for many to come. JOECAreas of AgreementPersonally, I would switch out “My Fair Lady” for “Camelot.” Julie Andrews shines always. MAYASo happy to see “She Loves Me” on the list. My favorite show. Succeeds at making the ordinary sublime. MARKI agree with many of these choices, especially “Gypsy,” “Chicago,” “The Threepenny Opera,” “The Most Happy Fella,” and “Hamilton” among others, but I could not do without “Parade,” one of the best musical scores ever. CHIRPER“Funny Girl” is my favorite Broadway Cast Album. The movie soundtrack is excellent too. Barbra Streisand at her best. Great songs. IWCSondheim SubstitutionsI have to add my Sondheim favorite: “Assassins.” A look at those left out of the American dream. Both recordings, Off Broadway (1991) and Broadway (2004), have their strengths; in fact, I combine the two to create one complete version of the show. However, if I had to choose, I would take the earlier version. MADISON MINIONSNo love for “Assassins”? I do like “Passion,” but “Assassins” I think just beats it out. And then nothing for “A Little Night Music” either? “Pacific Overtures” also has some gems, if not continuous greatness on its cast album. The show itself doesn’t seem very good, but the cast album is brilliant. M. CALLAHAN“Side by Side by Sondheim,” the original cast album, is a fantastic collection of well-ordered songs that stands up well on its own. Don’t even think about leaving “Follies” or “A Little Night Music,” or “Company” on the shelf, but “Side by Side” is also a fantastic listen that allows you to appreciate the full-strength songs on their own. Certainly get intimate with “Sweeney Todd” too. The original cast recording will take you to places that the two-dimensional Tim Burton movie never could. ROBERTONewer NotesOnly a casual fan, but we have found that “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Book of Mormon” go really well with jigsaw puzzles. MARMACNo “Book of Mormon”? I’m out. KATHY BThrilled to see “Hamilton” included on this list, but I also urge music lovers to check out Lin-Manuel Miranda’s very first Broadway show, “In the Heights.” As you might expect, the cast album features addicting salsa and rap numbers, yet it also offers so much more. ANN SCHWABI think “Come From Away” is what everyone needs to hear right now — uplift in the midst of crisis. KEVIN L.Personal Preferences“A Chorus Line” is my all time favorite and the one I still go back to when in need of a good emotional and physical lift. BRAZILIANHEATI just asked my smart speaker to play the original cast album from “Camelot.” I would listen to Broadway cast albums with my mother. Brings me back to happier times. NYCRNThis gay Jew would be lost without “Funny Girl” and “Cabaret.” SANSACROAnd for those of us who would miss our dysfunctional families … “Fun Home”! SCOTT More

Free Shakespeare in the Park, a treasured rite of summer in New York, will not take place this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.The annual festival, staged as the sun sets in an open-air amphitheater surrounded by trees, is just too big and too soon to pull together at a time when no one knows when large gatherings will be permitted again.“This is something I mightily resisted,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which founded and runs the festival, said in an interview. “But it’s just clear to us at this point that there’s no way we can responsibly prepare, build and rehearse to get shows open in a timing that might match the quarantine’s timing.”The pandemic has forced the cancellation of programming and taken a huge financial toll at arts institutions around the world. Even as elected officials begin to discuss whether and how it might become safe to restart the economy, major summer events — including, in the theater world, the Edinburgh festivals, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Williamstown Theater Festival — have already been called off.Shakespeare in the Park, which has been performed for free at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater since 1962, was to include two shows this season: a new production of “Richard II,” directed by Saheem Ali, which was to have begun May 19; followed by a musical adaptation of “As You Like It,” directed by Laurie Woolery, that had a brief run in 2017 as part of the theater’s Public Works program. More

On a November night, 22 years ago, fresh off a plane from New York, I walked into the Goodman Theater in Chicago and straight into the depths of depression. I felt privileged to be there. Because my guide that evening into the state of paralyzing unhappiness was Brian Dennehy, who was making one man’s inner darkness uncannily visible as the title character of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time.But nothing I had seen Mr. Dennehy do before prepared me for his take on Willy Loman in Robert Falls’s shadow-shrouded “Salesman,” Miller’s benchmark drama from 1949. The scale of his performance was more genuinely tragic than any version of Willy I’ve seen before or since. Mr. Dennehy had a large and brawny frame that loomed intimidatingly from a stage. Yet the character he was portraying thought of himself as a little man — so insignificant that he was afraid he was on the verge of disappearing altogether.The disparity between Mr. Dennehy’s physical stature and his character’s sense of smallness generated extraordinary pathos. It was as if he had been made outsized by pain. And there was a visceral intensity to the way he moved, always grabbing at his body and face, as if he wanted to tear off his skin.Paradoxically, this intensely physical performance conveyed the interior of Willy’s mind with a sharpness that stung. One of Miller’s early titles for “Salesman” had been “Inside His Head,” and that was precisely the location of Mr. Falls’s production.The world this Willy inhabited was the life-sapping landscape of depression. Mr. Dennehy defined this realm as a place that was both claustrophobic and all too easy to be lost in forever. When the other characters — embodied by an excellent supporting cast that included Elizabeth Franz as Willy’s wife, Linda — reached out to him, you knew that he was beyond their touch.And you felt in your gut that the death of the title was a foregone conclusion, that Willy would never be able to find his way out of his unfathomable sadness. And yet I stayed with every second of that performance — first in Chicago, and then again when the production transferred to Broadway the next year, when Mr. Dennehy won a Tony Award for best actor.He received his second Tony four years later, as the miserly, combative father in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” also directed by Mr. Falls. Though his character, James Tyrone, was a retired matinee idol, Mr. Dennehy refrained from the easy temptation of playing the ham.This production gave center stage to Mary, James’s morphine-addled wife, who was played by Vanessa Redgrave, in a wrenching performance that had something of the externalized inner anguish that illuminated Mr. Dennehy’s Willy. There was an almost self-effacing gallantry about his James, as if his primary raison d’être had become shoring up a woman on the edge of dissolution. At the same time, he registered the enduring, impossibly tested love of a man for his wife, and the wounds with which she had left him. It was as if he were always trying to rein in his instinctive urge to lash out at her.I am deeply sorry not to have caught Mr. Dennehy in the two productions of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in which he appeared, first (in 1990) as the slick-talking, pipe-dream-selling salesman Hickey; and later as the sozzled, grizzled, self-destroying Larry, opposite Nathan Lane in 2015.I am therefore doubly grateful to have seen his Willy Loman, not once but four times. There was no masochism in my returning to that production. The agony that Mr. Dennehy exuded should have been unbearable. But when darkness is rendered with such glowing detail by an actor of such strength, it becomes a triumph over the night. More

Long before the coronavirus closed most of the world’s playhouses, one company pioneered creating theater at a distance.The Belarus Free Theater, founded in 2005 by dissident artists in the former Soviet republic, has operated clandestinely in the capital, Minsk, and in London, where the artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, have lived in exile since 2011. For performances in Belarus, where most of the 12-person ensemble is still based, the troupe rehearses its provocative productions over Skype and puts them on in changing “underground” locations, in defiance of a government ban.Their plays, which often lay bare political corruption and social decay in the authoritarian country, have been raided by the K.G.B., Belarus’s secret police. Audience members and actors alike have been jailed.The Belarus Free Theater has nevertheless been able to present its productions abroad, and it has performed in over 40 countries. The troupe was getting ready to celebrate its 15th anniversary with an ambitious lineup of productions and workshops and the premiere of a documentary film. But then the coronavirus struck.With its performing activities on hold for the foreseeable future, the company has opened its digital archive. (A spokeswoman said it hoped to reschedule as many of the anniversary events as possible for later in the year). This month, it began streaming 24 productions, roughly half its repertory, on YouTube, with English subtitles.Although recordings often fail to capture the excitement of live performance, these documents of the troupe’s intimate performances convey what makes the Belarus Free Theater such a unique and artistically thrilling company. New videos will be made available each week until late June.In the early works that have streamed so far, all of which predated the government’s ban in 2010, you have to marvel at the troupe’s ability to achieve startling theatrical effects with extremely modest means. Performing in underground clubs and black box theaters, the actors often have little more than a chalkboard, bed or chair to work with. This is theatrical minimalism born of privation and necessity. Eschewing flashy stage effects, the four productions I saw achieved a remarkable theatrical purity.While the political situation in Belarus looms large in the productions, the country’s specific struggles take on a degree of universality that all revolutionary art strives for. Politically urgent though they are, these productions are not agitprop.A stark staging of the British playwright Sarah Kane’s feverish “4.48 Psychosis,” the Belarus Free Theater’s first production, from May 2005, kicked off the online programming. It premiered at the Graffiti Club in Minsk, a bar in an industrial neighborhood that hosted the group’s first three productions before the authorities pressured it to stop.A tormented monologue about mental disintegration, “4.48 Psychosis” can be staged any number of ways. In this production, two of the company’s mainstays, Maryia Sazonava and Yana Rusakevich, share Kane’s wrenching and poetic text in a performance that alternates between violence and tenderness.The video shows the audience mere feet from the performers. Many cover their laps with blankets; they look cold. Onstage, props and effects are kept to a minimum: candles, a cigarette, a thermos, projected video and blinding light against the venue’s brick wall.In its frank dissection of mental breakdown, “4.48 Psychosis” is clearly a subversive text, although you would need to read between the lines to find a political message. Since then, the company has mostly staged original work with more explicit references to Belarus.In “Generation Jeans” (2006), Khalezin, one of the artistic directors, delivers a highly personal monologue on dissident culture in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Onstage with a D.J. and a bag full of props (including clothes, LPs, flags and pickles), Khalezin looks the audience straight in the eye as he describes the risks involved in procuring real denim jeans, as opposed to Lithuanian knockoffs.The black market for imported clothing and music was under close surveillance at the time, but being hauled in for questioning by the K.G.B. was a small price to pay: “We didn’t know that it was possible to long for anything else,” he says. “Jeans and music were our symbols of prosperity.”“Generation Jeans” is a good introduction to the troupe’s technique of building productions from simple, polished monologues that bristle with mordant humor and closely observed details. This also works for more ambitions stagings, like “Zone of Silence: A Modern Belarusian Epic in Three Chapters” (2008), a sweeping yet intimate production in which the actors’ personal reminiscences fuse with vivid character sketches to paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in the country.Painful memories, including the deaths of parents and children, dominate the play’s fast-moving first chapter. These give way to a series of colorful monologues about characters on society’s margins, including an armless guitar aficionado, a babushka whose fanatical belief in communism has not been shaken and a sex-obsessed old man with a motor mouth.In the overtly political final segment, damning statistics about Belarus are projected on a wall. They expose the country’s devastating human rights record, including the government’s hostility to the press and free expression, and high rates of suicide, domestic violence and human trafficking. Then, in an unexpected coda that lands somewhere between cheesy and stirring, the statistics give way to a list of famous Belarusians (or people with Belarusian heritage), including Ralph Lauren, Harrison Ford and several founders of the state of Israel.The personal and the political come together in the more narratively straightforward monologue that runs through Khalezin’s 2008 production “Discover Love,” inspired by the real-life case of Anatoly Krasovsky, a businessman who disappeared along with a prominent political opponent of the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 1999.Staged from the perspective of Krasovsky’s widow, Irina, the sparse production conveys the sense of disorientation and hope, shot through with panic and possibility, that the characters feel in the midst of vast social and political upheavals. The powerful dialogue, delivered with unerring directness by actors who have evolved together with the company over the past decade and a half, accomplishes far more than any amount of expensive stagecraft could ever achieve.Right now, much of the world is learning firsthand that it takes enormous courage to persevere in a time of adversity. Bravery and artistic focus have kept the Belarus Free Theater producing singularly robust stage work through the past 15 years. What they have done has gone beyond coping. They have thrived. More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.Wynn Handman, a director and acting teacher who shaped the careers of Dustin Hoffman, Joel Grey, Faye Dunaway, Richard Gere and other stars in his acting classes and at the influential American Place Theater in Manhattan, which he co-founded, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.His daughter Laura Handman said the cause was pneumonia related to the coronavirus.In addition to mentoring actors, Mr. Handman was an advocate of new American plays and those who wrote them.He founded the American Place Theater in 1963 with Michael Tolan, an actor, and Sidney Lanier, vicar of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church on West 46th Street in Manhattan, where the theater was located in its early years. Their mission was to promote new voices, approaches and subjects, an alternative to the often constricted commercial offerings nearby in the Broadway houses.“As a producer, Wynn brought the Greenwich Village theater revolution to spitting distance from Broadway, which, as far as he was concerned, was the enemy,” the theater journalist Jeremy Gerard, author of “Wynn Place Show: A Biased History of the Rollicking Life & Extreme Times of Wynn Handman and The American Place Theatre” (2013), said by email. The theater, he said, “shocked audiences — and many critics — with early plays by downtown anarchists (Sam Shepard), Black Power militants (Ed Bullins) and emerging feminists (María Irene Fornés).”Mr. Handman, who served as artistic director of the theater — which was still producing plays into this century — admitted that he wasn’t chasing the kind of success most producers and directors craved.“I was drawn to challenging plays, plays that would not succeed commercially and therefore needed a home,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “It was never in my mind to do a play that would become a hit. But that’s what most New York theaters are all about today.”His greatest hits, it might be said, were the actors who came through his classes, which he began teaching in the 1950s. Other acting teachers, like Lee Strasberg, may have been better known, but Mr. Handman’s workshop, for years held in a cramped space near Carnegie Hall, was just as intense.“It was a lot of technique, truth, moment-to-moment, how to listen, improv,” Burt Reynolds, a student early in his career, told The New York Times in 1981.In the 2019 documentary “It Takes a Lunatic,” directed by Billy Lyons, the actress Marianne Leone Cooper recalled, “He worked with me for six months on nothing but stillness.”James Caan, another of the many actors who paid tribute in the documentary, remembered serious work seriously tackled. “We didn’t spend a lot of time being trees, you know what I mean?” he said in the film.Mr. Handman was still teaching decades later when John Leguizamo tested out “Mambo Mouth,” his breakthrough solo show, which became an Off Broadway hit in 1990, in one of his classes.“Wynn sat there laughing and carrying on like any other audience member,” Mr. Leguizamo wrote in the foreword to Mr. Gerard’s biography, “but when I was done he cut into it like a surgeon trying to save an organ without killing the patient.”Irwin Leo Handman (Wynn had long been his legal name, his daughter said) was born on May 19, 1922, in Manhattan. His father, Nathan, ran a printing business, and his mother, Anna (Kemler) Handman, was a saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue.He grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, although that may conjure a different image to the reader of 2020 than it did almost a century ago.“There was a farm across the street,” Mr. Handman said in the documentary. “A real farm. That’s true. I had such a happy childhood that I never wanted to leave Inwood.”Mr. Handman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1938 and the City College of New York in 1943, later earning a master’s degree in speech pathology from Teachers College at Columbia University. After graduating from City College he enlisted in the Coast Guard, serving on an icebreaker that was assigned to knock out a German weather station in the Arctic. The mission was a success, and a number of Germans were taken prisoner.“When the Germans came aboard the ship, I didn’t feel like saluting them,” Mr. Handman, who was Jewish, said in the documentary, but his commander ordered him to follow protocol and do so.While at sea he would sometimes entertain his shipmates with skits, and the experience led him to think about acting once the war ended. He applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse, Sanford Meisner’s theater school, and studied there from 1946 to 1948.He wanted to act, but Mr. Meisner saw him as a director and in 1949 suggested he lead a summer theater in the Adirondacks where some Neighborhood Playhouse students were in repertory. Mr. Handman was reluctant, but Barbara Ann Schlein, whom he would marry the next year, urged him to try it.“I found myself, my calling, that summer,” Mr. Handman told Mr. Gerard in an interview for the biography.Mr. Handman taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse from 1948 to 1955, but in 1952 he also began teaching his own acting classes, and in 1955 he broke away from Mr. Meisner. His studio across from Carnegie Hall was furnished with salvaged wooden auditorium seats.“Its warmth and funkiness were chemical to him,” said Jonathan Slaff, a theater publicist who studied with Mr. Handman and represented the theater in the mid-1990s, “and he transported its seating and décor into a studio he established on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall and, later, on the 10th floor of 244 West 54th Street.”Separate from his teaching was the American Place Theater. For the first year or so it devoted itself to readings. Its first full production, in November 1964, was “The Old Glory” by Robert Lowell, the poet, his first stage production. It won an Obie Award for best American play.The next year the theater staged “Harry, Noon and Night” by Ronald Ribman, with Mr. Grey and Mr. Hoffman in the cast. “Hogan’s Goat” by William Alfred was also done that year, with Ms. Dunaway in the cast.In 1970 the theater moved to a custom-built space on West 46th Street.Over the decades, the theater’s offerings were nothing if not eclectic. In 1968 there was “The Cannibals,” George Tabori’s gruesome tale of cannibalism in a Nazi death camp. In 1986 there was Eric Bogosian’s “Drinking in America.” In 1998 came Aasif Mandvi’s solo show, “Sakina’s Restaurant.”“He helped foster idiosyncratic work,” Mr. Bogosian told The Times in 2007. “He has a great eye for what’s good, what’s honest.”Mr. Handman’s wife, known as Bobbie, died in 2013. In addition to his daughter Laura, he is survived by another daughter, Liza Eleanor Handman; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Mr. Handman was still teaching when he contracted the virus.“As soon as the lockdown was over,” Mr. Slaff said, “he would have been back in class.” More