Theater

Earlier this month, in what already feels like a different world, I found myself onstage, holding a pen I had swiped from the hotel’s reception desk and reciting a garbled version of the dagger speech from “Macbeth.” It felt giddy, hyperreal and a little like a benign version of a nightmare — the kind of nightmare I still have even though I haven’t acted in almost two decades and my professional career, if you want to dignify it that way, lasted months. In the nightmare, I come to in the middle of a play and I don’t know any of my lines. See? Dreams do come true.This was on a Sunday morning, the final day of Mohonk Mountain House’s Mystery Weekend. Mohonk, a 259-room resort perched beside a glacial lake atop the Shawangunk Ridge in upstate New York (think of “The Shining,” East Coast edition), claims to have invented the murder mystery weekend in 1977. Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Edward Gorey and Donald Westlake all contributed, the hotel’s program director, Shawn Rice, told us. Westlake even repurposed some of his weekend plots as novels.I understood the individual actions that had led me to the weekend — a promotional email arrived, I flagged it for my mother, who hadn’t wanted to go alone — without completely grasping how I had ended up there, onstage, improvising jokes about the dining room’s toast. I feel this way about a lot of my life, confident in particular choices, vaguely baffled by the outcome.My mother had provisioned herself with two snowsuits, a hefty flask of vodka and five quart bags of homemade dehydrated fruit. “What could go wrong?” I pecked into Twitter as we rode up on the Trailways bus. I had come with other baggage: a longtime fascination with the “cozy” mystery (a relatively bloodless form of detective fiction) and a more recent interest in the ways that theater is performed and received beyond Broadway, Off Broadway and the major regional theaters — school plays and religious pageants, theme park shows and cruise ship performances, amateur dramatics and yes, sure, a live murder mystery.Murder Cafe, a Rosendale, N.Y., outfit, supplies Mohonk with the performers for its yearly mayhem. For this incarnation, “Murder by Magic,” the company had adopted a Jazz Age theme, situating the murder among a troupe of bickering vaudevillians who called themselves Masters of Magic and Merriment. I don’t want to say too much about it, save that Murder Café’s motto is “Killing audiences one laugh at a time since 1998,” and as I sat through Friday night’s first act, a grin plastered to my face like so much cement, that seemed about right.We met the troupe’s producer, Phineas Phibes, and the various performers: the magicians Lord Taylor and the Great Merlini; the dramatic actress Dame Serena Steinhart; the medium Madam Klotsky; the juvenile singer Baby Rose Bowman; and the clowns Leonard and Julius. Julius was played by a wooden dummy that Leonard failed to ventriloquize.An hour later, the Great Merlini would be discovered in his escape trunk, visibly breathing, but apparently quite dead — shot through the front, stabbed in the back and poisoned besides. Up until a few years ago, the Mohonk weekend had favored a more serious and interactive kind of mystery in which attendees could grill characters and examine clues, with plants seeded throughout the audience. But Murder Cafe skews lighter and more comic in a way that makes logical deduction superfluous. Who had motive, means and opportunity? Everyone? I guess?My mother and I had been assigned to a team, the Marlowe Maniacs. Our teammates included teachers, lawyers, an oncologist and a man who was, his wife told me, in “textiles,” most of them murder mystery veterans. We spent our first meeting in a conference room (remember when people gathered in rooms?) equipped with water and a whiteboard, trying to solve the case. The dummy had done it, Paula, the oncologist hypothesized. Or the Great Merlini had done it. Had anyone seen “Murder on the Orient Express”? Our team, I was told, could present its solution in the form of a skit, with points awarded for creativity and accuracy. The grand prize: a two-night stay.Maryann, a lawyer from Westchester County, volunteered to write our playlet. She suggested a scenario in which Merlini, in an attempt to one-up Houdini, would, with the supernatural help of Madam Klotsky and almost everyone else, escape death. We were assigned parts. I drew Dame Serena. Howard, another lawyer, offered to provide the gunshot sound effects. He first tried, “pop pop,” then “boom boom” and finally “bada bing.” “It’s a pivotal role,” he said, to no one in particular.The next morning, after a madcap post-breakfast rehearsal, we gathered in the hotel’s parlor for the presentation. One group offered its skit in the style of an old-timey radio show. Another group pinned it on Julius. Then it was our turn, and we hurried up the aisle with that hectic excitement I remember from past performances. Paula had repurposed a hotel bathrobe as a diaper. Her husband, Steve, wore a bathrobe as a cape. The trunk wouldn’t shut on our Merlini. Martin, the textiles guy, played Houdini in the Egyptian gallibaya he had happened to pack. He killed. My mother delivered the epilogue. We lost to the following group, who set their solution to “Memory” from “Cats.”Murder Café then presented the official denouement, which my mother had already guessed, thanks mostly to a loose-lipped handyman. Baby Rose did it! And maybe also Merlini? I am still blessedly fuzzy on most of it.Which is to say that I did not solve the assigned mystery, but those few wonderful, terrible minutes onstage clarified — usefully and in this strange, showless moment, poignantly — how little theater needs: a stage, purloined linens, willing humans. As art? Insupportable. As minimally competent communal effort? Tremendous.Sue, our videographer, texted us the footage; a flurry of Facebook friend requests followed. That afternoon, my mother descended to the reception desk and signed herself up for next year. More

Broadway producers have agreed to pay hundreds of actors, musicians, stagehands and others for the first few weeks of the industry shutdown, and to cover their health insurance for at least a month.The “emergency relief agreement,” announced Friday evening, was negotiated by the Broadway League, a trade organization, with 14 labor unions representing a range of workers, from ushers to makeup artists to publicists.The Broadway shutdown, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, has cost thousands of people their jobs, and is causing trickle-down damage to many Times Square businesses that depend on theater patrons. The industry, which was idled on March 12, had initially said it hoped to resume performances on April 13, but now expects a reopening is more likely to be in May or June.Under the agreement, all unionized employees will be paid for the week that was cut short by the shutdown, and the following two weeks. For the first, partial, week, they will receive their normal salary, but there is a cap of 150 percent of the minimum salary for their positions as spelled out in labor contracts. For the following two weeks, everyone will be paid at the contractual minimum, meaning that those who normally earn more than the minimum will see a pay cut for those weeks.The workers will get full benefits (health, pension, and 401(k)) for those two and a half weeks, and after that will get only health benefits through April 12; the two sides agreed to talk before then about whether those benefits can be further extended if the shutdown continues.“It’s the best deal we could get under trying circumstances,” said the actress Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity Association, which represents 1,142 actors and stage managers working on affected productions. “We’ve been trying to find the sweet spot between getting the greatest number of benefits for our members, while still trying to make sure we don’t bankrupt the individual shows in the process. Our members would like to have jobs to go back to.” More

James V. Hatch, a historian of black theater who, with his wife, the artist and filmmaker Camille Billops, created a vast archive of interviews with black actors, singers, writers and artists, died on Feb. 14 in Manhattan. He was 91.His son, Dion Hatch, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Professor Hatch, who taught English and theater at City College for three decades, was the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including “The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938” (1990), which he edited with Leo Hamalian, and “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson” (1993), about the black poet and playwright.His area of scholarship sometimes raised eyebrows because Professor Hatch was white.“I was born in Iowa, and the only thing I knew about black people was what I read in books — Mark Twain,” he said in an interview for an exhibition called “Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” mounted at Emory University in Atlanta in 2016.“I wanted to find out, Who were all the other people that didn’t live in the Baptist church in Oelwein, Iowa?,” he added.“I got good cooperation from almost all black people,” he said. “Some of them were jealous — ‘White man, what are you doing writing about our history?’ ‘I’m trying to learn it. Help me!’”Certainly the person who helped him the most was Ms. Billops, who was black and whom he met in 1959; they began a romantic relationship and married in 1987. For years their loft, purchased in 1973, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan was a gathering spot for artists, academics and others.“We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators,” Ms. Billops told Topic Magazine in an interview for an article published just before her death last June.The two began amassing their archive, not only recording interviews with prominent and not-so-prominent black artists and performers, but also accumulating play scripts, handbills, photographs and other materials. They published a number of the oral histories in the journal Artist and Influence; 20 volumes of the journal appeared from 1981 to 2001.Much of the archive is now at Emory; another cache is at City College. Pellom McDaniels III, curator of African-American collections at Emory, said by email that the couple’s work “has had a monumental impact on the practice and execution of theater specialists, art historians, and scholars for decades.”James Vernon Hatch was born on Oct. 25, 1928, in Oelwein, a small city northeast of Des Moines. His father, MacKenzie, was a mason, welder and boilermaker, and his mother, Eunice, was a homemaker.Professor Hatch earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949 at the University of Northern Iowa and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa, where he encountered black intellectuals like the playwright Ted Shine. He received a master’s degree there in 1955 and a Ph.D. in 1958.In 1958 he took a job teaching theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he struck up a relationship with a black pianist and composer, C. Bernard Jackson. The two collaborated on a musical, “Fly Blackbird,” which addressed race relations and civil rights; it was staged in Los Angeles in 1961 and had a run in New York the next year.“In the course of that, I learned a lot about black culture and attitudes and why things happened,” he said in the interview for the Emory exhibition.He also met Ms. Billops, who was the stepsister of a member of the Los Angeles cast. Professor Hatch had married Evelyn Marcussen in 1949 and had two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1965.Professor Hatch, who joined the City College faculty in 1965 after a stint as a Fulbright lecturer in Egypt, became an expert in the history of black theater, not only rediscovering overlooked works but also unearthing the black origins of elements that had been appropriated by white playwrights and entertainers, including those who found fame by performing in blackface.“The names of the Big Four white minstrel men — Christy, Rice, Emmett, Bryant — were widely known and written about,” he wrote in the introduction to “Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940” (1996), which he edited with Mr. Hamalian, “but who knows the slave musicians, street performers, church singers and riverboat roustabouts whose songs and jokes and dances were stolen by the white minstrel men?”He called out stereotypes in plays and movies like “Gone With the Wind,” whose Mammy character is “still pushing the image of Blacks-as-retarded at our neighborhood theaters and in our living rooms,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938” (1990), another project with Mr. Hamalian.Professor Hatch wrote a number of plays in addition to his books, and he and Ms. Billops collaborated on several films. Most notable among those was “Finding Christa” (1991), a documentary about Ms. Billops’s decision to give up a daughter she had had before she met Professor Hatch, and her reunion with that daughter 20 years later. The film won the grand jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival.Professor Hatch took emeritus status at City College in 1996. In addition to his son, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by a daughter, Susan Blankenship, also from that marriage, and a grandson.Professor McDaniels took a version of the “Still Raising Hell” exhibition to a middle school in Atlanta (though the name was eventually changed to “Speak What Must Be Spoken” because a principal didn’t want the word “hell” in large letters on the wall). A sixth grader asked him what it was about.“I explained to him who Jim and Camille were,” Professor McDaniels recalled, “and how throughout their lives they challenged the gatekeepers of the New York art scene and encouraged their students and colleagues to speak truth to power.”The boy studied the exhibition, he said, “then looked at me and stated, ‘I’m going to raise hell all my life.’” More

If you’re stuck at home and hankering for the fine arts, there’s plenty online. Since the coronavirus pandemic began temporarily shutting down performing arts venues and museums around the world, cultural organizations have been finding ways to share their work digitally. Performances are being live-streamed, archival material is being resurfaced and social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are serving as makeshift stages, concert halls and gallery spaces.Here’s a list of some of what’s streaming and otherwise available on the Internet. The offerings are increasing by the day, so be sure to check in with your favorite arts institutions to see what they’re providing as things develop. And check back here for updates.Theater“The Rosie O’Donnell Show” will return for one night only on Sunday at 7 p.m., in support of the Actors Fund. Patti LuPone, Kristin Chenoweth, Harvey Fierstein, Stephanie J. Block and other Broadway stars will appear or perform. The broadcast will be on Broadway.com and the site’s YouTube channel.The Sirius XM host Seth Rudetsky and his husband, James Wesley, are also producing a daily online mini-show called “Stars in the House,” with actors performing from home, to raise money for the Actors Fund.Tickets to watch a video of Ren Dara Santiago’s “The Siblings Play” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater are now available.At Berkeley Repertory Theater, ticket holders for Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and “Culture Clash (Still) in America” will be able to access a production broadcast of the show through BroadwayHD.American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is offering the opportunity for ticket holders to watch Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Gloria” and Lydia R. Diamond’s “Toni Stone” from home on BroadwayHD.Irish Repertory Theater is releasing videos of its actors performing songs, poems and monologues on its social media channels.Melissa Errico’s concert performance of her “Sondheim Sublime” album will stream on Sunday at 4 p.m. on the Guild Hall’s YouTube channel.Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater is offering a free series of live-streamed and archival performances on its YouTube channel. More

The actor formerly known as Harry Potter continues his post-wizard evolution. (Being named as the first famous person diagnosed — not true — wasn’t part of the plan.) More

In 1633, as the plague swept Europe, the villagers of Oberammergau prayed to God. They promised to perform the story of Jesus’s Passion — his life, death and resurrection — every 10 years, as long as God spared them from the horrors of the disease.Since then, the people of Oberammergau, in what is now Germany, have largely kept up their end of the bargain.But, on Thursday, the organizers of the play — which has a cast of some 2,500 and can feature 900 people onstage at once — announced they were canceling this year’s edition, because of the coronavirus pandemic.The first of the 103 daylong performances had been scheduled for May 16. The production will be delayed until 2022, the organizers said in a statement.Germany is on lockdown because of the virus, with large gatherings banned. On Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel used a televised address to plead with people to obey restrictions and self-isolate.“This is serious,” Ms. Merkel said. “Take it seriously. Since German reunification — no, since World War II — our country has never faced a challenge where we depended so much on our collective actions and solidarity.”Each performance of the Passion Play would have been watched by around 4,500 people, many of whom would have traveled to Germany especially for the event. Organizers said in the statement that the decision was taken with the local health authorities, who decided that, even if Germany’s restrictions on large-scale gatherings were lifted by May, there would still be “a high risk of recurrent infections over a long period of time.”“At this stage, it can be clearly predicted that an event on the scale of the Passion Play is not feasible,” the health department of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the local authority, said in the statement. “The risk is too high that new chains of infection will develop,” it added.This is not the first time an edition of the Passion Play has been canceled. In 1770, Elector Maximilian III, then Duke of Bavaria, banned all passion plays, as part of a drive against extravagance.Eight years later, a new ruler exempted Oberammergau from the ban, after it was “cleansed of all unsuitable improprieties,” according to the Passion Play’s website. After a thorough review, the villagers were given the go-ahead to stage the play in 1780.The 1920 edition was canceled because the village lost many musicians and actors in World War I, although the villagers voted to stage it again in 1922. In 1940, during World War II, the play was canceled entirely. Organizers began preparing for a 1947 edition, but this was called off over concerns about feeding and accommodating so many visitors during a period of postwar reconstruction.The cancellation is only the latest major European cultural event to fall victim to the pandemic this week. On Wednesday, the Eurovision Song Contest was canceled, as was the Glastonbury Music Festival. More

LONDON — Noël Coward wrote “Blithe Spirit” in a mere six days, and the perennially popular play opened on the West End in 1941, running for nearly 2,000 performances — setting a record in London for a nonmusical.Its longevity back then is in stark contrast with the most recent outing of the play here, with Jennifer Saunders, of “Absolutely Fabulous” fame, playing the bicycle-riding medium Madame Arcati, who communicates with the dead. A victim of circumstances beyond the control of even the most supernaturally minded, the director Richard Eyre’s comparatively somber revival played its last performance at the Duke of York’s Theater on March 14; the run had been due to finish on April 11.The production closed early after London’s West End theaters took coordinated action on Monday to close themselves down and help stop the spread of the coronavirus. London’s West End, like Broadway, has gone dark, and no one knows when the lights will come back on.As premature closings go, the timing here was somewhat ironic, when you consider how audiences throughout World War II flocked to “Blithe Spirit,” Coward’s inquiry into the frustrations, erotic and otherwise, of Charles (Geoffrey Streatfeild), a novelist whose first wife returns from the grave. (She died, we’re told, while recovering from pneumonia, which may well have had an eerie resonance for nervous playgoers today.)When she rises up, the mischievous Elvira (Emma Naomi) scatters calculated chaos in her wake. It’s giving nothing away to tell you that she ends up taking Charles’s second wife, the whiplash-tongued Ruth (Lisa Dillon, giving the performance of the night), over to the other side with her, though neither woman will go quietly from the land of the living. More

In a sign that American theaters are desperately worried about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, playwrights are reporting that they have been asked to return payments for productions that have been canceled or postponed.Two Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights, Lynn Nottage and Annie Baker, said on Twitter that they had been asked to refund money paid for forthcoming productions, and that they were resisting the requests. The two are among the nation’s most heralded living playwrights, and their work is regularly performed around the country.Just happened to me.— Annie Baker (@AnnieNBaker) March 18, 2020
The Dramatists Guild of America, a national trade association representing playwrights and composers, said it had heard the same from less well-known writers as well, and denounced the practice. The requests, the guild said, have been coming from nonprofit theaters, which depend on a combination of philanthropy and ticket sales to stay afloat; some of those theaters have also been asking ticketholders for canceled shows to consider donating the value of their tickets, rather than seeking refunds.“Our request to the theatrical community is to stop scapegoating the dramatists at this unprecedented time,” the guild said in a statement Wednesday, “and our advice to dramatists confronted by these demands is to just say no, with the full knowledge that it was unfair for you to be put in this position in the first place.”An advance is an amount of money paid by a theater to a writer for the right to produce a play. According to Ralph Sevush, the guild’s general counsel, advance payments generally range from $500 to $10,000, and are usually contractually guaranteed to a writer, even if the production never happens. “Every contract I’ve seen says options and advances are nonrefundable,” he said.Writers, who are among the few theater industry workers who are not unionized, also then earn some money from a royalty — perhaps a percentage of the box office — when their show is produced by a nonprofit, and then sometimes earn money from licensing fees for future productions.“Since writers aren’t unionized, they don’t have collectively bargained compensation, they don’t get health insurance, and they don’t get unemployment,” Sevush said. “A few thousand dollars to a theater is really paper clip money, whereas for a writer it’s grocery money, it’s rent money — it allows them to keep working.”Sevush said he would not name the theaters seeking their money back because “we prefer them to accept our advice and not alienate them to the point where we have to expose them to public ridicule.”But in response to a question from The New York Times, the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles acknowledged that it was responsible for the request to Baker. The theater’s artistic director, Michael Ritchie, and managing director, Meghan Pressman, issued a joint statement on Thursday, calling the move a mistake:We are deeply committed to the art of theater and we pride ourselves on supporting everyone involved in bringing their work to our stages. In the moments after we learned that the County of Los Angeles had closed our theaters and that we would need to cancel performances for a still-undetermined amount of time, we felt it critical to take stock and figure out what the baseline of our financial commitments were in the coming weeks and months so we could attempt to chart a path forward that would be as fair as possible to all of our artists, staff and crew that have been impacted by this truly unprecedented moment. In that hurried cancellation process, we automatically reached out to Samuel French to assess all our financial commitments surrounding the upcoming production of ‘The Antipodes,’ which needed to be canceled before going into previews. As we moved beyond our initial steps and realized our mistake in asking the playwright to return a payment, we took actions to rescind the request.Baker, who won the Pulitzer for “The Flick,” did not respond to a request for comment. Nottage, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “Ruined” and “Sweat,” declined to identify the theater that asked her for a payback, other than to say that it is a “large regional” theater. “Everyone is in pain and I really do not want anyone suffering, including theaters,” she said. A spokesman for the League of Resident Theaters, which represents 75 major American regional theaters, did not respond to a request for comment. More