Theater

Mart Crowley, whose 1968 play, “The Boys in the Band,” put gay characters and their stories front and center in a way that had rarely been seen in a mainstream New York theater, died on Saturday night in Manhattan. He was 84.His friend the actress Natasha Gregson Wagner said the cause was complications of heart surgery.Where previous plays and movies often tiptoed around a character’s homosexuality or, worse, demonized gay characters, Mr. Crowley’s play presented gay men talking forthrightly and in depth about their lives. It featured nine men at a birthday party in which alcohol flowed and conversation grew brutally honest as a result.“The power of the play,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times, “is the way in which it remorselessly peels away the pretensions of its characters and reveals a pessimism so uncompromising in its honesty that it becomes in itself an affirmation of life.”The play, opening more than a year before the Stonewall Inn uprising in Greenwich Village, a catalyst of the gay-rights movement, gave new visibility to the world it depicted, with the show drawing both gay and straight audience members, including high-profile ones like Jacqueline Kennedy and Mayor John V. Lindsay. Staged at Theater Four on West 55th Street in Manhattan, it ran for more than two years and more than 1,000 performances.Fifty years later, the play finally made it to Broadway, in a revival directed by Joe Mantello and with a cast that included Zachary Quinto. The production won the Tony Award for best revival.“I think that was the highlight of his life,” the actor Robert Wagner, Ms. Gregson Wagner’s stepfather and Mr. Crowley’s longtime friend, said in a phone interview.Although groundbreaking, “The Boys in the Band,” which was made into a movie directed by William Friedkin in 1970, was not universally embraced. With the gay-rights movement evolving quickly and vocally even as the play was still in the midst of its initial run, some critics attacked it as presenting an image of gay men that was unflattering and full of self-loathing.“I went to see ‘Boys in the Band’ several times,” Edward Albee said in the documentary “Making the Boys” (2011) by Crayton Robey, “and more and more I saw an audience there of straights, who were so happy to be able to see people they didn’t have to respect.”Yet over time it has come to be seen as pivotal to opening up dialogue.“The people who criticize the play,” Mr. Mantello told The Times in 2018, “have the luxury to do so because of the play.”Edward Martino Crowley was born on Aug. 21, 1935, in Vicksburg, Miss. His father, he said later, was an alcoholic, and his mother was a drug addict.“I always resented that Eugene O’Neill already had my best plots,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002.He attended an all-boys Roman Catholic high school and graduated from the Catholic University of America in Washington in 1957 with a degree in theater. While there he designed a production of a stage adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” whose cast included Jon Voight, a fellow student.Mr. Crowley went to New York and was hired as an assistant by the director Elia Kazan. Kazan was filming “Splendor in the Grass,” and Mr. Crowley befriended one of its stars, Natalie Wood (Ms. Gregson Wagner’s mother). When she was cast in the film version of “West Side Story,” Ms. Wood — who was twice married to Mr. Wagner — hired Mr. Crowley as her personal assistant.In 1966, the critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote a provocative essay in The New York Times pointing out that although many leading playwrights were gay, their drama did not address their world directly.“In society the homosexual’s life must be discreetly concealed,” he wrote. “As material for drama, that life must be even more intensely concealed.”Mr. Crowley, who had dabbled unsuccessfully in television writing, was among those struck by the essay’s call for more open playwriting.“Kauffman’s article was, ‘Isn’t it about time that one of these homosexual writers writes a play that’s openly about his own experience?’” he said in a 2013 interview on the television program “Theater Talk.” “And I thought that was a very, very good point.”Mr. Crowley wrote “The Boys in the Band” in five weeks while house-sitting for the actress Diana Lynn. It was his first play. The New York production spawned productions in England and elsewhere.“I ran around the world on ‘Boys in the Band’ money,” he told The Washington Times in 1993.Mr. Crowley wrote several other plays, including “The Men From the Boys,” which looked in on the apartment and some of the characters from “The Boys in the Band” 30 years later.Another Crowley drama, “For Reasons That Remain Unclear,” involved an encounter between a priest and a younger man who share an unsettling past.“The play has its hard nugget of truth,” Lloyd Rose wrote in a review in The Washington Post when the play was staged at the Olney Theater in Maryland in 1993. “Crowley is more honest, and wiser about human nature, than many playwrights with more obvious and accessible writing skills.”Mr. Crowley leaves no immediate survivors.In 2010, when “The Boys in the Band” was being revived by the Transport Group Off Broadway, several playwrights spoke of the work’s influence on them. Larry Kramer had seen the play both in New York and in London.“It was the London one that was life-changing in a way for me,” he said, “because it showed me as a writer, as a gay person, as a gay writer, what was possible to do in the commercial theater. The theater in London was packed, and people loved the play and gave it a standing ovation.”Mr. Wagner, in the phone interview, said simply of his longtime friend, “He was his own man at a time when it was really, really difficult.” More

As the festive notes of a guitar fill the room, and smartly dressed men and women set up towers of tamales that threaten to overwhelm their containers, it feels for a moment as if nothing could go wrong in the world of Andrea Thome’s rapturous “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes).”But the truth is that most of the characters in this En Garde Arts production are undocumented immigrants gathering in a church on the eve of an ICE raid that threatens their presence in the United States.They are there for a fandango, a traditional gathering in which musicians, dancers and guests take turns performing on a wooden platform surrounded by the others. Inspired by stories of real-life immigrants (including Sinuhé Padilla, who wrote the songs and portrays a musician), Thome’s play is a sensitive portrait of the in-between: characters balancing the small joys of everyday life with the fear of uncertainty.At the center of the festivities is Mariposa (Jen Anaya), who has become the unofficial leader of this immigrant community. As Anaya portrays her, Mariposa (the word for butterfly in Spanish) is the embodiment of Zen, all sweet smiles and softly spoken responses. But look closely at her careful movements and alert eyes and Anaya also reveals anxiety. She is not exempt from the terror.Still, she encourages others to let the music of the fandango transport them to a place beyond panic. And as they step up onto the platform, cast members both perform and share their stories of border crossing.Originating in Spain, fandangos gained prominence when the conquistadors brought the tradition to Mexico. They are common in Veracruz, where composers created the son, jarocho and jarabe, upbeat genres that revolve around guitars and tap dancing. Less common in Latin America, the musical gatherings have been adopted by Latinx immigrants in the United States, who use them to quench their thirst for the culture they left behind.When Rafaela (Silvia Dionicio) explains that she can’t stay for the fandango because she’s Dominican, Pili (a scene-stealing Frances Ines Rodriguez), who is of Mexican descent, counters: “You don’t have parties? With music, dancing and food?”Rafaela stays, of course; who would refuse an offer of such merriment? And we in the audience are invited to partake in the singing and dancing with the cast after the play is over. But under the astute direction of Jose Zayas, it is clear that this a bittersweet get-together: We tap our feet to the music but also to the unease of not knowing what awaits the characters.In between songs, dread fills the room, Beckett-style, as attendees wonder when their loved ones will arrive. Honduran cousins Rogelio (an extraordinary Carlo Albán, who you might remember from “Sweat”) and Elvin (Andrés Quintero) are expecting Johan (Roberto Tolentino), who just took the trip across the border.We hear Johan’s story in a riveting scene in which Marcelo Añez’s harrowing sound design, Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting and Johnny Moreno’s projections converge to show us the way in which the faintest light provides hope.The light here is music, as Johan remembers how the ominous sounds of the freight train in which he traveled started to sound like drumbeats.Following its premiere at La MaMa, where I saw it, “Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)” will be presented in every borough of New York, in the hope of reaching immigrant communities and audiences who don’t always go to the theater. May they come to realize there are maladies that can only be healed by a guitar.Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes)Through March 28 at various locations; engardearts.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

In “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday’s protest song from 1939, the jazz singer evoked the gruesome imagery that haunted her: black bodies hanging from trees after being lynched by angry white mobs. Originally written as a poem by Abel Meeropol, Holiday’s rendition became an anthem of sorrow and anger, but from its endless pain also emanated a soulful wish, that the spirits of these wronged bodies would find solace in the world to come.One might draw a line connecting Holiday’s lament to the transcendent “Skinfolk: An American Show,” a play with songs by the writer and performer Jillian Walker and a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Bushwick Starr (where it’s currently running).Three black spirits, or perhaps nymphs (Walker allows audience members to interpret each character and symbol as they see fit), transport us to an underground cave where happiness and pain coexist, unable to distance themselves from each other. Here, they guide us through vignettes that retell Walker’s family history — and by extension, the history of America — in the hopes of reclaiming the joys of blackness in all its complexity.Walker plays one of the nymphs, a character inspired by her own life whom she calls Me. Me is a gracious host, using poetry and song (Walker wrote all of the songs with her co-composer, Kasaun Henry) to share her complex personal story and her views on the African-American experience.“An experience that no one has asked the right questions for,” exclaims Avery (an ethereal Tsebiyah Mishael Derry), who, along with the Smiling Tuxedoed Man (an impish Lori Sinclair Minor), helps Walker convey a sensuous evening filled with the promise of mutability, an existence without the restraints of what our skin color binds us to.That potential transformation is implied by the performance space itself. Scenic designer You-Shin Chen transforms the Starr into the cave beneath a tree, brimming with smaller alcoves filled with curlers, lotions and other domestic accouterments that create a sense of homeyness. But those small details also establish an atmosphere that this is a place where people have been stuck for a long time, waiting to leave.And Tuçe Yasak’s warm lighting, which sometimes peers from the ceiling from among the hanging roots, suggests cracks leading to the surface; the nymphs, along with their “skinfolk” — wronged black souls and their mortal descendants — might finally break through.The insightful writing and the play’s free-form structure have a jazzlike quality. Walker layers dialogue and songs so that the two engage in a multipurpose dance, filled with both conviction and questioning, while always staying grounded. A scene in which the trio sit one above the other, recreating the process of getting their hair braided, becomes a metaphor for the hierarchy in a matriarchy as well as a visual nod to the choreography of girl groups like Destiny’s Child or the Supremes.The director Mei Ann Teo cleverly balances the varying moods: When Walker recounts the brutalities of slavery and segregation, she conveys a sense of unearthing ancient artifacts while still maintaining the kind of urgency that makes the audience want to jump from the seats to demand justice.It’s in this duality and unwillingness to let audiences off the hook that “Skinfolk: An American Show” plants its seeds of hope. Although we never leave the cave under the tree, we have been granted a vision of the forest above. If we could only get there.Skinfolk: An American ShowThrough March 14 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

After a tumultuous few years, the revered Canadian theater director Robert Lepage is returning to a tried-and-tested production.“The Seven Streams of the River Ota,” which became a worldwide hit after its 1994 premiere, takes the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, as the starting point of a seven-hour saga. Seven stories, spanning 50 years, explore the repercussions of the 1945 attack on survivors and their descendants around the world.Lepage, 62, has made his mark internationally as an imaginative storyteller who draws on a variety of media and cultural influences. In 1994, he founded the multidisciplinary company, Ex Machina, in Québec City, Canada, and it soon became renowned for monumental productions like “The Seven Streams of the River Ota” and “Dragons’ Trilogy,” which delved into Chinese culture.Lately, however, Lepage has been embroiled in debates around cultural appropriation.In 2018, his production “SLAV,” which initially featured a predominantly white cast singing African-American slave songs, was canceled after protests. It returned to the stage in a reworked version, before Lepage ultimately pulled the plug on it.“Kanata,” a play inspired by the history of Canada’s indigenous groups, known as First Nations, lost North American investors the same year after activists accused the production team of ignoring indigenous input. A version of it, “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy,” was eventually presented at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris.“The Seven Streams of the River Ota” was revived in September for the opening of Le Diamant, a new cultural center Lepage founded in Québec City, and the show is now set for another world tour. The revival is a coproduction with the Chekhov International Theater Festival in Moscow and the National Theater in London, where it runs until March 22. The show is to travel to Japan this summer as part of the culture festival of the Tokyo Olympics, and commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.A few days before “The Seven Streams of the River Ota” opened in London, Robert Lepage spoke by phone. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.How much did you alter “The Seven Streams of the River Ota,” 25 years on?We were happily surprised to what extent the whole thing holds. It doesn’t feel like an old show at all. The challenge in remounting it was that the younger generations are ill-informed about the context of Hiroshima and World War II. We feel that we have to remind people of certain things.And how have you changed as a director since it was first performed?I feel more secure about a lot of things. I’ve learned not to fear the process as much. What I do works when you start in complete chaos. You can’t start with a recipe. I still have doubt, but I have the impression that I’m more courageous.For a long time, I was trying to be faithful to a style I was developing. I’ve got rid of all that. Whatever the subject matter for a creation, I try to find its own sauce.“The Seven Streams of the River Ota” is very long. How do you make a seven-hour performance work for an audience?Nowadays you have such a huge offer of storytelling in every form and shape. People will actually go to the theater if it’s an event. We’re asking them to be marathon runners. When you go to see a show that lasts two hours, it’s an individual experience. But when you’re there for seven hours, it creates a community. There is this spontaneous thing that happens at curtain call: actors and technicians applaud the audience for staying, and the audience takes it as an achievement.“SLAV” and “Kanata” caused debates about cultural insensitivity. You met with black activists after the initial cancellation of “SLAV.” What did you learn from that exchange?I was thinking that it would be the opportunity for a big confrontation. It was exactly the contrary. There was nothing against me personally: It was a big movement in Canada at that point about cultural appropriation. It’s a debate that needed to happen.Of course there was something a bit obscene and naïve on our part in having only white women singing slave songs. It was a really bad judgment from the start. People volunteered to come and see us work, we had a great collaboration, and now we have projects together. What’s more complex and unresolved is the relationship with the First Nations.What differences do you see between the two situations?The First Nations have been robbed of so many things, and suddenly here we are telling their stories. But at the Théâtre du Soleil, most of the 36 actors who were part of “Kanata” were people from Afghanistan, from different parts of the world, who had fled to France — people who had been exploited and recognized themselves in the First Nations’ tragedies.To this day, I can understand their position. But I think it’s very moving that somebody who comes from another part of the world, who had to flee because of the Taliban, compares that oppression with how the First Nations were oppressed.You first took “The Seven Streams of the River Ota” to Japan in 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. How was your vision of Japanese history received then?Hiroshima is a strange thing for Japanese to talk about. We saw them as victims, and the Japanese don’t necessarily feel comfortable with feeling like victims — certainly not in World War II, where they also have their lot of atrocities. They were very interested and surprised to see the way we portrayed the whole tragedy of Hiroshima as something that resonates years later in London, or elsewhere in the world.Since then, Japan has lived through another nuclear tragedy, at Fukushima. Do you think it will be seen differently now?For sure. I did a few interviews in Tokyo a few months ago, and everyone was very intrigued to see how it will resonate. In Japan, they emerge from these tragedies in a very noble, beautiful way. The way they express that pain is always understated, very discreet, but at the same time profound. That was an inspiration for the show from the very start.The Seven Streams of the River OtaThrough March 22 at the National Theater in London, then touring in France, Russia and Japan; nationaltheater.org.uk. More

Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.Previews & Openings‘ENDLINGS’ at New York Theater Workshop (in previews; opens on March 9). On a Korean island, three elderly women — the last of their kind, known as “haenyeos” — dive for shellfish. A world away a Korean-Canadian playwright, now based in New York, wrestles with how to write about race and ethnicity. Sammi Cannold directs Celine Song’s aquatic comedy-drama, with Jiehae Park. 212-460-5475, nytw.org‘FLYING OVER SUNSET’ at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (previews start on March 12; opens on April 16). In this hallucinatory new musical, more or less based on real events, Cary Grant, Clare Boothe Luce and Aldous Huxley drop acid in Malibu, Calif. Tony Yazbeck, Carmen Cusack and Harry Hadden-Paton star, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Michael Korie and a book by James Lapine, who also directs. What a long quaint trip it looks to be. lct.org‘GNIT’ at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (previews start on March 7; opens on March 19). Henrik Ibsen’s fairy tale of man’s search for self — plus trolls — arrives in a new, modern-day adaptation from the existentially oriented playwright Will Eno. In this Theater for a New Audience production, Jordan Bellow, Joe Curnutte, Crystal Dickinson, Deborah Hedwall, Matthew Maher and Erin Wilhelmi star. Oliver Butler directs. 866-811-4111, tfana.org‘HELP’ at the Shed (previews start on March 10; opens on March 21). The poet and essayist Claudia Rankine (“Citizen”), who years ago created a performance aboard a Bronx bus (“Provenance of Beauty”), makes a stop at the Shed. In this piece, directed by Taibi Magar and starring Roslyn Ruff, Rankine adapts her conversations with white men about white male privilege. theshed.org‘THE LEHMAN TRILOGY’ at the Nederlander Theater (previews start on March 7; opens on March 26). The financial services firm Lehman Brothers was not too big to fail. This theatrical version of its century-and-a-half-plus run, staged with just three actors, is not too small to succeed. Stefano Massini’s play, directed by Sam Mendes, “unfolds a tale of extravagant wealth with an even more dazzling economy of means,” Ben Brantley wrote of the Park Avenue Armory production last year. 877-250-2929, thelehmantrilogy.com‘MRS. DOUBTFIRE’ at the Stephen Sondheim Theater (previews start on March 9; opens on April 5). A musical about an unusual approach to custody agreements, this adaptation of the Robin Williams movie bustles onto Broadway. Rob McClure stars as an actor in the midst of a divorce who puts on a dress — for the kids! Karey Kirkpatrick co-wrote the music and lyrics with Wayne Kirkpatrick and the book with John O’Farrell. Jerry Zaks directs. 212-239-6200, mrsdoubtfirebroadway.com[embedded content]‘ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS’ at Ars Nova at Greenwich House (previews start on March 10; opens on March 30). The singular singer-songwriter Heather Christian premieres a new music-theater piece for Ars Nova. Christian, who gracefully straddles a host of styles and genres, contemplates the mysteries of human existence with the help of an 18-member ensemble surrounding the audience. Lee Sunday Evans directs. arsnovanyc.com‘72 MILES TO GO …’ at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (in previews; opens on March 10). When Anita is deported — from Tucson, Ariz., to Nogales, Mexico — family life goes on with and without her. Hilary Bettis’s border-crossing, decade-spanning drama stars Maria Elena Ramirez as Anita, with Triney Sandoval, Tyler Alvarez, Jacqueline Guillén and Bobby Moreno. Jo Bonney directs. 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]‘SIX’ at the Brooks Atkinson Theater (in previews; opens on March 12). In a time before marriage counseling and no-fault divorce, the much-married Henry VIII racked up six wives. And in this rock musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, they come together to debate who had it worst. “‘Six’ delivers pure entertainment throughout its headlong 80 minutes,” Jesse Green wrote of the Chicago production last summer. 877-250-2929, sixonbroadway.com‘UNKNOWN SOLDIER’ at Playwrights Horizons (in previews; opens on March 9). A late work by the composer Michael Friedman, who died in 2017, and the book writer and lyricist Daniel Goldstein comes to New York. Spread across three time periods and nearly a century, it follows a Manhattan obstetrician’s investigation of her family’s past. Trip Cullman directs a cast that includes Kerstin Anderson, Estelle Parsons and Margo Seibert. 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org‘WHISPER HOUSE’ at 59E59 Theaters (previews start on March 12; opens on March 24). In this spooky musical from Kyle Jarrow and Duncan Sheik, directed by Steve Cosson, the living and the dead converge on a Maine lighthouse during World War II. When a young boy is sent to live with his aunt (Samantha Mathis), a pair of ghosts help him acclimate. 646-892-7999, 59e59.orgLast Chance‘ANATOMY OF A SUICIDE’ at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (closes on March 15). Alice Birch’s play, dazzling in its form and devastating in its effect, ends its Off Broadway run. With dizzying simultaneity, the play follows three generations of women (Carla Gugino, Celeste Arias, Gabby Beans) in the throes of suicidal depression. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs. 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org‘HAMLET’ at St. Ann’s Warehouse (closes on March 8). Ruth Negga’s sweet prince bids his final good night as Yaël Farber’s shadowed version of Shakespeare’s tragedy closes. In an admiring review, Ben Brantley wrote that Negga “has created a portrait of the theater’s most endlessly analyzed prince that is drawn in lines of lightning.” 718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org‘THE INHERITANCE’ at the Ethel Barrymore Theater (closes on March 15). Matthew Lopez’s diptych, a six-hour visit with gay men in contemporary New York and the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, leaves Broadway. Ben Brantley noted, “Ambition and achievement are not entirely commensurate” in Stephen Daldry’s production. The play’s breadth, he added, “doesn’t always translate into depth.” 212-239-6200, theinheritanceplay.com‘A SOLDIER’S PLAY’ at the American Airlines Theater (closes on March 15). Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 drama, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Blair Underwood and David Alan Grier, reaches the end of its tour. Set on a Louisiana army base in 1944, the play is both a crime story and an exploration of immutable racism, a structure and theme that, as Jesse Green wrote, “can sometimes seem at odds.” 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org More

The writer Walker Percy’s foreword to “A Confederacy of Dunces” is only a couple of pages long, but in it he gets across the dramatic essentials of the novel’s tortuous path to publication: that the much-rejected manuscript was orphaned when its author, John Kennedy Toole, killed himself in 1969; that Toole’s mother, Thelma, was tenacious in pressing Percy to read it; that when at last he did, he discovered a “gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy” that he helped usher into the wider world.Because the book, a New Orleans picaresque, became a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, the play “Mr. Toole” — a fictionalized recollection of the novelist written by Vivian Neuwirth, a student of his in the 1960s — elicits a glimmer of curiosity based on its concept alone.Casting the Off Broadway stalwart Ryan Spahn in the title role, opposite Linda Purl as Thelma, amps the allure. Yet, as admirably as they acquit themselves in Cat Parker’s Articulate Theater Company production at 59E59 Theaters, there is the dispiriting sense of watching talented actors trapped in a show that they cannot save.Ostensibly, “Mr. Toole” is a memory play. Its narrator, Lisette (Julia Randall), is an undergraduate in a poetry class that Toole teaches in New Orleans. She has a raging crush on him, which might be why, after his memorial service, she goes to his parents’ house and tells a devastated Thelma that she wants her paper on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, back. Priorities, right?Lisette never knew her teacher well, which limits the quantity and insight of her memories. Neuwirth does show us Toole lecturing on “Prufrock,” in scenes meant to probe for signs of frustration and despair in his dissection of Eliot lines like “Do I dare disturb the universe?” But the play is more banal biography than firsthand reminiscence. You could get much the same understanding from Wikipedia.At the core of the play is the relationship between Toole and Thelma. If they are less colorful cousins to Ignatius J. Reilly — the grandiose hero of “A Confederacy of Dunces”— and his hovering, put-upon mother, there is also quite a bit of Tennessee Williams’s Tom and Amanda Wingfield to their dynamic.Spahn and Purl consistently outperform the material, his Toole as restrained as her Thelma is relentless. There is only so much that actors can do to bring depth to superficial storytelling, but they have built characters with palpable interior lives that we only wish the play would let us in on.Neuwirth, in the script, does offer guidance about how to stage “Mr. Toole” that Parker would have been wise to heed. The production lacks Neuwirth’s suggested “dreamlike quality,” because the set (by George Allison) depends on projected digital photos whose 21st-century crispness whisks us right out of Toole’s time, however much the period costumes (by Angela Harner) try to root us there.And of the few objects that Neuwirth suggests be realistic, Toole’s hulking manuscript is bafflingly off. Inside its manila envelope, it never looks more than about 30 pages long.The main trouble with “Mr. Toole,” though, is that it tries to force a tenuous connection.Visiting Thelma once again, Lisette stalks her around the room, demanding to know the contents of Toole’s suicide note — as if that would provide her an answer that she requires, or has a right to.“You’re forgetting your manners,” says Thelma, who always maintained that professional rejection killed her son. “I might just have to ask you to leave.”That would be for the best. Narrator or not, she has no significant place in this sad story.Mr. TooleThrough March 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

PARIS — Some performances come at just the right time. On Monday, the French author Virginie Despentes was greeted with a roar when she stepped onstage at the Théâtre Bobino for “Viril,” a performance that was part rock concert, part feminist monologues. After Roman Polanski’s triumph three days earlier at the César Awards, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, Despentes had just published a furious opinion piece in the French newspaper Libération — under the headline “From Now On, We Get Up and We Leave” — and the youthful crowd was clearly on her side.The contrast with the chill that had descended during the Césars ceremony spoke to a deep rift in the French arts world. Led by Adène Haenel, a handful of actors and directors walked out after Polanski, who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, was named best director. (Polanski denies the accusations.) In her piece, Despentes pointed the finger at French cinema’s disregard for gender inequality, writing that “the real message is: Nothing must change.”French theater, which shares many artists with the film industry, has some of the same problems. Yet audiences can vote with their wallets. Alongside “Viril,” which was presented for one night only as part of the “Paroles Citoyennes” festival, a number of female-led productions are currently among the best nights out in Paris, and bring diverse characters — mythical, historical and contemporary — to the fore.Take away the period setting and some scenes from Catherine Anne’s “I Dreamed the Revolution” (“J’ai Rêvé la Révolution”) could easily belong in the collection of feminist texts in “Viril.” Performed at the Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, the play was inspired by the 18th-century writer Olympe de Gouges, whose political pamphlets were influential during the French Revolution and who advocated women’s rights, even publishing a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman.”Anne — who wrote the text, co-directed with Françoise Fouquet and plays the role of Gouges — focuses on the activist’s final months. Gouges was arrested in 1793, at the time of the Terror that followed the Revolution, and sentenced to the guillotine. Many former revolutionaries lost their lives along with Gouges because of political disagreements with the new regime, and “I Dreamed the Revolution” explores that bloody period. In the play, the mother of the young guard tasked with watching Gouges becomes fascinated with her, and covertly gives her a key to escape.Anne captures the openhearted, infectious confidence in justice that leads Gouges to refuse the offer. Opposite her, the guard (Pol Tronco), who childishly believes his superiors, and his illiterate mother (Luce Mouchel) grapple with moral dilemmas about political loyalty and women’s role in social movements, in scenes that take place almost entirely in the family’s home and in Gouges’s cell, divided only by a screen onstage. A final, didactic excursion into the present — featuring two contemporary characters who tell us about Gouges’s importance — feels forced, but the rest of “I Dreamed the Revolution” is sharply written and to the point.Not that female directors should be expected to bring only overtly feminist stories to the stage. The lovers of “Pelléas et Mélisande” have a timeless quality, like the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde, which the playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, drew on heavily. His play, which premiered in 1893, is less often seen these days than the opera that Claude Debussy based on it, but the director Julie Declos has come up with a convincingly graceful production at the Théâtre de l’Odéon.The challenge lies in Maeterlinck’s symbolist style, which resists psychological realism at every turn in favor of evasive dialogue and sibylline details. A prince, Golaud, happens upon Mélisande in a forest. She is lost, and there is a crown at her feet, which she begs Golaud to leave behind. Where does she come from? What happened to her? The two characters promptly marry, and we never find out.The central, forbidden love story, between Mélisande and Golaud’s brother, Pelléas, is hardly even articulated. When they first meet, she simply loses her wedding ring in a fountain — a silent acknowledgment that the wheels of their doomed relationship have been set in motion.Declos directs with restraint, working hard to sustain Maeterlinck’s dreamlike tension. The initial encounter in the forest is filmed and projected on a screen, and Golaud and Pelléas’s family castle is represented by a mostly empty two-tier set. Light is a central symbol in the text, and Mathilde Chamoux’s shadowy lighting leaves the lovers nearly in the dark at key moments — a counterintuitive yet effective choice.It is refreshing, too, to see the cast strip back the stereotypical gestures of onstage romance and aim for stillness. Looking apathetic is rarely a quality onstage, but Alix Riemer, as Mélisande, manages to project detachment without being bland. She seems to grasp her love for Pelléas, played by Matthieu Sampeur, only at the last possible moment, and after Golaud kills him, she convincingly suppresses any memories of the event. Regardless, she dies of a broken heart.Similarly, realism isn’t the goal in Elsa Granat and Roxane Kasperski’s new play, “V.I.T.R.I.O.L,” which just had its premiere at the Théâtre de la Tempête. In it, the playwrights map the warped inner world of a man in the throes of a mental health crisis as he summons other characters — his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend and three musicians — to spar with or support him.The first half of the 90-minute production, which Granat also directed, is as captivating as it is strange. Olivier Werner, who plays the nameless central character with a sense of manic despair, initially appears to show up at his ex-girlfriend’s door, much to her distress. But he also controls her and her new partner like puppets at times: A table onstage is set with figurines that represent them, and whenever Werner shakes or throws them, the actors wobble and fall, too.This device renders every scene brilliantly unpredictable, as the cast alternates between believable domestic drama and absurd physical theater. “V.I.T.R.I.O.L” is a portrait of Werner’s restless mind, and resourcefully mimics its fits and start.The second half doesn’t quite build on that promise, unfortunately, in part because it sidelines the female character (a playful performance by Kasperski) in favor of an emphasis on theory, as the men discuss excerpts from radio interviews with psychology experts. The relationships “V.I.T.R.I.O.L” sets up may be imaginary, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t reach a meaningful conclusion.Granat, who is also an actor, is still relatively new to stage direction; she can certainly build on this idiosyncratic offering. As France fights over old narratives, it’s worth remembering that women are writing new stories.Viril. Directed by David Bobée. Festival “Paroles Citoyennes”/Théâtre Bobino. Further performances in Rouen, May 12-16, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, July 1.J’ai Rêvé la Révolution. Directed by Catherine Anne and Françoise Fouquet. Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, through March 8.Pelléas et Mélisande. Directed by Julie Duclos. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, through March 21.V.I.T.R.I.O.L. Directed by Elsa Granat. Théâtre de la Tempête, through March 29. More

Before “Sideways: The Experience,” Rex Pickett’s stage adaptation of his novel, begins, guests who have plunked down an extra $100, can participate in the experiential portion, a preshow cocktail party at the Theater at St. Clement’s. As waiters circulate with duck rillettes pot pie and tuna tartare tacos, two barmen pour wines meant to mimic those tasted by the play’s characters, old friends on a California spree. There is also merlot, though fans of Alexander Payne’s 2004 film version will remember a profane line arguing against that grape.The cocktail party — less an immersive experience than a digestive one — is a nifty idea. Enough passed hors d’oeuvres will improve almost anyone’s mood. And booze goggles, I would imagine, would help to soften the show’s unrepentantly male gaze. But since my head goes swimmy after the first drink, I spent the hour and a half nursing, neglectfully, a small rosé, and approached the show sober, which I would not recommend. Creaky, queasily sexist and directed by Peccadillo Theater Company’s Dan Wackerman with oblivious joie de vivre, the play, I’m afraid, is corked.Jack (Gil Brady), an actor turned director with a surfer dude drawl, and Miles (Brian Ray Norris), a pre-success novelist and unacknowledged alcoholic, have fled Los Angeles for Jack’s bachelor party — a week in the Santa Ynez Valley, low-key wine country. Miles envisions an orgy of rare vintages; Jack envisions an orgy. Inevitably, they meet Maya (Kimberly Doreen Burns), a waitress described in the script as “an earthy beauty” with her uniform shirt “provocatively unbuttoned,” and Terra (Jenny Strassburg), a tasting room manager, “like a wine geek’s most surreal fantasy.”Before you can knock back a pinot noir, they have all decamped to what everyone insists on calling a “hot tub spa.” Will Maya open up her best burgundy? Will Jack make it to the church on time? How much more should I have swilled to make this white male wish fulfillment even baseline palatable?Pickett has decanted his novel to the stage with an imperfect grasp of how stage plays work. He shoves observation into dialogue like a stepsister trying to stuff her feet into too-small shoes. How else to explain a scene in which Miles’s mother (Allison Briner-Dardenne) suddenly directly addresses the audience with her gripes about her son? “I just don’t understand why he won’t get his teaching credential,” she soliloquizes.Still, formal infelicities are easily forgiven. Less defensible: a show which dilates on men’s sexual and romantic needs with female characters only present to enable them; a story of a misanthropic schlub who lands a smart, beautiful lady, just because. On the night I saw it, “Sideways” performed for a mostly female audience, but the surreal fantasies only went one way. Miles describes wines as “young, fresh, nubile,” “pornographically good,” “tighter than a nun’s—.” The rest, like his metaphor for a silky pinot, is unpublishable.There are halfhearted attempts to endow Terra and Maya with interiority. (This is a problem of the script, not the actresses, who do what they can with the dregs afforded.) But when every woman is either a goddess or a problem, things start to feel ugly — then uglier still when the script asks Burns to remove her top (albeit with her back to the audience) and pour wine over her breasts. Suddenly, I wished I had drunk more — enough to black out, perhaps.In the days following, I tried to suss out why the movie, which scored Payne an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, worked so much better than the play. It might owe to a different cast or the play’s pointed lack of golf carts. But I would guess it’s because Payne recognized that these blinkered characters are awful, and Pickett and Wackerman can’t or won’t. Or because some stories, unlike fine wines, don’t age well.The merlot, a friend told me, was delicious.Sideways: The ExperienceThrough May 24 at Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, sidewaystheexperience.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More