Theater

I was enchanted by Claudia Rankine’s smile.Even though this was our second interview together (the first was by phone), and we have several friends in common, I was still surprised by her welcoming hug and warmth when we met at a conference room in the Shed three weeks before the world premiere of her play “Help” there on March 10. Forty minutes later, I realized that after years of teaching her poetry, especially “Citizen,” her book-length poem on American race relations, my mind somehow had constructed Rankine as reserved, scolding and confrontational.I left our conversation even more out of sorts as I asked myself: “If I, as a black woman, could so easily misread Claudia Rankine, what hope is there for any white man not to do the same?”This dilemma — between the racial and gender stereotypes that our society projects onto black women and how they have to reject those roles in order to assert their own identities — is the central conflict of “Help.” Commissioned by the Shed, New York City’s new $475 million arts center that is now in its second season at Hudson Yards, the play is partly based on Rankine’s New York Times Magazine article from last July, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”In that essay, Rankine described her repeated experiences being rendered invisible by white men as they waited in first-class lines together at the airport, and her attempts to ask other white men sitting next to her in the intimate and elite space of the airplane cabin how they perceive their own white privilege. “I wondered, what is this ‘stuckness’ inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies?” she wrote. “I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.”Rankine explained why she chose the transitory setting of air travel. “It was the only time where I found myself sort of thrown in intimacy, if I wanted it, with random white men who were, just through proximity, there,” she said in our interview. “Sometimes you’re on these long flights, you’re exhausted, and you’ve done whatever you were going to do or you’re on your way to do it. And people are willing to just sort of launch, partly to let the time pass and partly because you’re drinking a lot. Both things are happening at the same time.”In response to the piece, Rankine received over 2,000 comments on the Times website and more than 200 letters or emails sent to her at Yale University. White men who wanted to engage in the debate or explain why they took offense to her characterizations made up the majority of the correspondence.“There are these letters that are three pages in which somebody sat down and wrote, ‘Dear Professor Rankine’ or ‘Dear Claudia Rankine,’ This is my life. This is what you’re not thinking about,” she said. “As I read through most of them, I realized that I’m talking about privilege as a way of being, period. The ability to live, the ability to be alive in the world. And they’re talking about privilege as making money. I hadn’t really understood that disconnect until I actually parsed all of those letters.”She went on, “It made me go back and think about what felt so offensive about ‘All Lives Matter.’ White people start with that as a given. And because they’re white, they don’t understand that black people are starting with, ‘Will my life matter? Can my life matter? Does my life matter?’ And so that step backward into nonbeing is not one they’ve had to take.”“So they don’t understand why you’re addressing it,” she concluded. “I don’t think it’s willful aggression. I think it is symptomatic of whiteness in and of itself, that they don’t have to think about it, so they don’t think about it, and they think you’re being presumptuous by asking them about their lives.”With “Help,” unlike her plays that were first conceived for performance — “The Provenance of Beauty” at the Foundry in 2009, and “The White Card” at American Repertory Theater in 2018 — Rankine had taken on the task of dramatizing an already well-circulated essay.To do so, she reinvented herself as the Narrator, a middle-aged black air traveler played by Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), and created 20 white male characters who are on the plane with her. Rankine said that “90 percent of what is spoken by the white men in the script” is taken from the letters she received.She drew the rest of the script from interviews and an assortment of writings and statements by the black feminist theorists Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, the Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the civil rights activist Ruby Sales and President Trump, as well as a video of police diversity training in Plainfield, Ind.It then fell on Rankine, and a diverse artistic team led by the director Taibi Magar, to turn that prose into a full-fledged theater experience. Or, as Magar suggested to me in an interview, something else entirely.“Sometimes I come home from rehearsal and I’m like, ‘Is it theater?’ I’m not even sure,” Magar said. “‘Is it performance art?’ Sometimes she’s creating a poem onstage, sometimes we’re referencing a lot of stand-up. What has been exciting for me to embrace is that its form does not feel traditional.”She continued, “This is important to me in plays about confronting racism. We really have to shake up our narratives in order to see a black woman’s reality.”At the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal I attended, I caught a glimpse of what Magar meant. In a scene choreographed by Shamel Pitts, as the white male actors frenetically danced around an empty airline seat meant for the Narrator with movements that referenced everything from gyrated hips to Hitler salutes, it felt a bit like a vaudeville flash mob. And because both Rankine and Ruff were out at a photo shoot, I was one of two black women in the room, heightening my sense of being overtaken by the actors’ whiteness and maleness.In many ways, that is the point. Recent productions like “Slave Play,” “Fairview” and “Toni Stone” have all explicitly taken on the white gaze. By doing so, they risked reproducing the very racial hierarchy in the audience that they sought to criticize onstage.When I asked Magar if she was worried about focusing on whiteness at the expense of the Narrator or the black people in the theater, she said, “We’re not centering whiteness in the ways that it’s centered in our culture. Whiteness is the problem, and whites are the ones who need to fix themselves. So you sort of need to center them.”Before leaving, however, Magar reminded me that the play ultimately revolves around Rankine’s character, and that Magar and Ruff worked hard to always remind the audience that a black woman lies at the center of this work. In one scene, a white man steps in front of the Narrator without excusing himself or acknowledging her. By having Ruff stand next to her empty space in the line, her character’s invisibility is rendered hypervisible for the audience.Ruff admitted that at first she was hesitant to accept the part of the Narrator, the sole black woman among so many white men.“After having an intense two years with ‘Fairview,’ I really had to have a conversation with myself about taking on this narrative, subject matter, and this theme again,” she said, “because sometimes it can just be a bit much.”Ruff noted that she can’t just switch off the story when she leaves the Shed.“I am navigating that world as myself on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “This ‘work’ is my life, my personal life, when I go home, turn on the television, watch CNN or MSNBC, and deal with the climate that we’re in right now.”Ruff also recognized that much of what Rankine wanted in her essay — an honest interracial conversation about white male privilege — has already taken place among the cast and crew as they prepare for opening night. In the beginning, Ruff said, some of her castmates would offer “a defense” of one of the white men’s comments in the script, derived from the letters to Rankine.“That was fascinating,” she said, and sometimes led to “a reflective moment. An ‘OK. Wait a minute.’ And a real realization that in their defensiveness, that, too, is privilege at work.” More

First impressions might suggest otherwise. But Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” a one-woman drama that explodes expectations at every turn, is one of the richest, most complete works of theater to come along in many seasons. And by its end, you realize that its singular power could be achieved only in real time, on a stage, with a live audience as its witness.Watching the early moments of this production, which opened on Tuesday night at the Vineyard Theater, you may wonder, a bit impatiently, why its account of a violent kidnapping is being told in the way it is. “Dana H” is not a conventionally scripted or acted drama.It is, or at first appears to be, a rather basic documentary work, which consists almost entirely of a recorded interview with the title character. (In some ways, it is a perfect companion piece to the uncanny documentary play “Is This A Room,” recently staged at the Vineyard.) The subject is Dana Higginbotham, a Florida hospice chaplain — and the playwright’s mother — who was held hostage for five months by a psychotic client, and who is indeed telling her own story.But while it is Higginbotham’s voice we hear, she is not the woman who appears onstage. We see instead the wonderful actress Deirdre O’Connell, who mouths, with near-perfect specificity, what is said on the recording. It is, in other words, a deliberately limited performance, stripped of a whole layer of interpretation that O’Connell might bring to the part if she were allowed to speak it herself.Yet that implicit distance between performer and character winds up bringing us closer to both. As directed with virtuosic pace and shading by Les Waters, this first-person account of a season in hell becomes an ever-deepening exercise in concentrated listening — and a journey into an empathy so intimate that it melts the boundaries of your own sense of a solid self.At the center of “Dana H.,” a coproduction of Vineyard, Center Theater Group and the Goodman Theater, is a tale about an unspeakable violation of autonomous self, one so upsetting it perhaps can be approached only by the staggered degrees that give this work its form. Higginbotham says in the recording that this is the first time she has ever talked this explicitly about what happened to her during those five months in 1998. “I can’t be who I am with people,” she says. “I can’t tell people about this.”She had certainly never spoken about it in such terms to her son, Hnath, a dramatist of quicksilver intellect and probing compassion who was a college student in New York at the time of his mother’s abduction. Hnath, whose earlier works include “A Doll’s House, Part 2” and “Hillary and Clinton,” did not conduct the interviews that make up “Dana H.” The other voice we hear in the recording belongs to Hnath’s friend, the writer and director Steve Cosson, who conducted the sessions nearly two decades after the events took place.Those sessions occurred over several days and have been pieced together into a production that is said to last 75 minutes, though what you experience eludes any usual measurement of time. No one here is pretending that what occurs onstage is a facsimile of the interviews.The tapes include the distortions of a do-it-yourself recording project, with its prickly static and wandering amplification. (Mikhail Fiksel did the crucial sound design.) We periodically hear metallic beeps, to indicate editing and elisions.Supertitles are projected, dividing the show into self-contained segments (“A Patient Named Jim,” “The Next Five Months,” “The Bridge”). Well, sort of, since what is being discussed here renders all dividing lines arbitrary and inadequate.And of course from the beginning, we know that O’Connell is not Higginbotham. We watch the actress being fitted with the earpieces that will pour her character’s voice into her head, allowing her to concentrate fully on the arduous task of precisely lip-syncing every word she hears.We are thus deliberately made aware of the conscious exertion required for this process. But there’s a point, maybe five or ten minutes into the show, in which O’Connell’s effort to become another person melt into Higginbotham’s struggle to describe a chapter in her life that still feels, in many ways, beyond imagining. (She occasionally consults a well-worn manuscript she has written, like a talisman that might bring order to chaos.)As Higginbotham’s voice stumbles, stutters and trails into silence — while O’Connell’s face subtly registers the ache and exasperation of words failing their speaker — a part of us can’t help leaning in, silently and forcefully willing her to continue. What follows may be deeply upsetting to hear, but there’s a sense that it has to be given voice.It says much about this show’s power that I have had to rise from my desk and pace before even trying to summarize the events at the heart of “Dana H.” The play’s catalyst is Jim, a former convict and member of the Aryan Brotherhood, whom Higginbotham mentored at a psychiatric ward after he tried to kill himself.He became increasingly reliant on her. And one night, when she wouldn’t open the door of her Florida house to him, he broke in through the bathroom window. He hit her with the home alarm system he had ripped off the wall, knocking her unconscious. “That was the beginning of the end,” Higginbotham says. “That was the beginning of the next five months.”What followed was a life on the road, and on the lam, with an abductor who told his captive that he was the only person in the world who could protect her. She is beaten and raped and is (by her own admission) an unreliable witness to Jim’s other, often violent crimes.She also comes to feel that she has entered a claustrophobic underworld, a parallel universe that has no connection to what she once thought of as real life. A part of her thinks that she was a natural victim for Jim. And when she explains why she feels this way, your heart cracks open.You have probably come across newspaper or television accounts of survivors of similar crimes, and registered them with a shivery, prurient detachment. “Dana H.” allows no such self-protecting sense of remove. Higginbotham’s descent into a black hole that erases the most basic outlines of selfhood is mirrored here by stealthy, perception-warping stagecraft.I won’t elaborate except to say that the contributions of the lighting designer Paul Toben are essential. So is Andrew Boyce’s set, which summons a dingy, mildewed generic motel room. As the show proceeds, a room that you may not have paid much attention to at first will assert a stranglehold on both the woman seated at its center and on your imagination.Even when she leaves the room, she’s still there. So are you.Dana H.Tickets Through March 29 at Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; 212-353-0303, vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

Of all the antagonists the theater has thrown at us over the centuries — the bloodthirsty royals, the cannibal barbers — death is the most formidable, if also the most dramatically inert. How can everyone’s end be anyone’s turning point? If certainty were as exciting as its opposite, “Waiting for Godot” would be “Godot’s Here, On Time as Usual.”The inevitability of death is thus an almost-inevitable theme for Young Jean Lee, the downtown disrupter lately making an uptown turn. Like a lot of her work, the strangely pleasant “We’re Gonna Die,” which opened on Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater, ought to be untenable. Yet it finds ways to make an unswallowable premise go down easy.That premise is nothing more or less than the title indicates; “We’re Gonna Die” is not a trick, a joke or a disguise for something else, but a flat-out memento mori.What gives its foregone conclusion drama and the possibility of theatricality is the disjuncture between its subject and presentation, which is about as downbeat as a good pop act in a nice local bar. For about an hour, a singer (Janelle McDermoth) tells can-you-top-this stories of the awfulness of life — in one, a friend accidentally claws out her cornea — interspersed with catchy songs with titles like “Lullaby for the Miserable” and “Horrible Things.”That’s the whole show, so frank in outline you may at first be tempted to sift through its simplicity for something more complex. I spent a good deal of time wondering whether the originating idea — Lee has said that the show arose, after her father’s death, as a way of seeking and offering comfort — had somehow refluxed into a satire of its own mechanics. Lee’s lyrics are so literally deadpan (“You’ll hold my hand until I’m dead”) that the sweet and peppy tunes (by Lee and Tim Simmonds and John-Michael Lyles) seem to be spoofing them, or the other way around.But as conceptually ornate as Lee’s other works may be — including “Straight White Men,” which recently ran on Broadway — “We’re Gonna Die” is totally direct and sincere. That doesn’t mean it’s sentimental; the lyrics keep things dry and so does the deliciously matter-of-fact performance by McDermoth, who sounds fantastic accompanied by a five-person band that eventually helps turn the wake into a party. As de facto host, McDermoth makes deflationary lines like “What makes you so special?” feel like warm invitations.Of necessity, it’s a low-key party. The director and choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, takes his staging cues from the idea built into the lyrics that life can be tolerable despite its ending, if you lower your expectations. On a set by David Zinn that looks like a recording studio crossed with a hospital waiting room, the ensemble moves in patterns that suggest dreamy afternoons rather than late-night raves. (There’s even a slow-drip balloon drop.) Gorgeous light in shifting shades of lilac and goldenrod (by Tuce Yasak) suggests both an arena concert and the natural world of which, like it or not, we are always a part.Kelly, a choreographer with a reputation for developing contextual movement in Off Broadway shows including “Fairview” and “A Strange Loop,” has done wonders directing “We’re Gonna Die,” which in its first incarnation, at Joe’s Pub in 2011, was a bare-bones cabaret affair. That production, as well as later iterations in 2012 and 2013, featured Lee herself as the singer, a challenge she admits was a horrifying idea, though critics thought she acquitted herself well.But unlike such earlier Lee plays as “Untitled Feminist Show,” which depend on a certain amount of raw energy to support and set off their complex ideas, the plainer “We’re Gonna Die” benefits from having the most polished production (and best singing) possible. In that, it resembles David Byrne’s “American Utopia,” the beautifully upbeat Broadway songfest about a fallen world and how we might yet survive it.Lee’s particular daring is in denying that survival option. Still, daring cuts two ways. Many of her plays, she says, are the result of heading directly toward her fears. And though writing what she least wants to write is a better policy than writing what people least want to see, there’s a slightly ambivalent quality to this one, a couching of its subject that becomes the subject instead. So even as the audience joins in the quasi-title tune at the end — halfheartedly, the night I saw it — it is not so much facing the facts of life as comforting itself with a prettified version of them.That’s clearly part of Lee’s plan: to defang mortality by turning it into a “Hey Jude” singalong at a Beatles tribute concert. But the play also suggests that the trick isn’t so easy. In answer to the central question — “What makes you so special?” — the singer at first answers: “I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also from aging, sickness and death.”Surely I was not the only audience member nodding vigorously in agreement at that point. Which may mean that “We’re Gonna Die” is not for everyone, except to the extent that it is.We’re Gonna DieTickets Through March 22 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 212-541-4516, 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

We should probably talk about Kara Young and how this woman can fit what feels like a mountain of blood, heart, sinew and febrile emotional response into a frame that can’t stretch past five feet.Young (“Syncing Ink”) is now starring in “All the Natalie Portmans,” a top-heavy coming-of-age dramedy by C.A. Johnson at MCC Theater. She plays Keyonna, a queer teenager grappling with an alcoholic mother, a dead father, an overburdened older brother, a complicated crush and the threat of eviction. It’s too much, but somehow Young meets that too-muchness with a restless, vital performance, all busy hands and tight lips and twitching eyelids.Could Natalie Portman do that?Set in Washington in 2009, the play tracks a tumultuous few months in Keyonna’s life. A charter school student with a spotty attendance record and an obsession with white actresses, she shares a small apartment with her brother, Samuel (Joshua Boone), who works nights at a local bar, and her mother, Ovetta (Montego Glover), who cleans hotel rooms and occasionally disappears for days on end, sunk at the bottom of a bottle.Keyonna soothes herself with collaged vision boards and ’90s movies, and dreams of writing screenplays for Natalie Portman, or someone like her. “Smart, but sweet,” Keyonna says. “And kinda sexy in an untouchable way. Like one part princess, one part stripper, one part Russian spy.” A woman cannot live on DVDs and dry cereal alone, but Keyonna gives it her best shot. When she needs extra comfort, she imagines a Portman character emerging — from the bedroom, through the front door or, chillingly, out of the fridge — just to hang or battle with lightsabers. This could suggest a dissociative disorder; Johnson treats it as a quirk.“All the Natalie Portmans,” affectionately directed by Kate Whoriskey, fluctuates between realism and surrealism on the same crowded, kitchen-sink set, designed by Donyale Werle. The volatile family dynamics might suggest Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” with a gender-reversed gentleman caller (that would be Renika Williams’s soothing Chantel). A black girl’s fixation on a white actress could evoke Adrienne Kennedy’s “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.” But Johnson’s script — eventful if not always assured — leans instead toward how-will-we-pay-the-rent melodrama and lukewarm fantasy. Even the choice of Portman (a plucky Elise Kibler) as her imaginary friend — a gag that doesn’t keep giving — feels insufficiently bold.Portman is, Keyonna insists, “the best in the game.”“Better than Charlize Theron?” Samuel asks.“Well, no, but that ain’t even a fair comparison,” Keyonna says.Johnson is a new talent; this is her Off Broadway debut. “All the Natalie Portmans” already displays a deft way with character, enhanced by the playwright’s palpable sympathy. Are these characters nice? Not especially. Are they good? Maybe. But Johnson evidently likes them, so we like them, too. The script softens their harder problems — a stretch in juvenile detention, a period of homelessness — and expresses compassion even for Ovetta, who wants to be a good mother, at least between benders.Necessarily, Johnson saves the most love for Keyonna. While a better script might nudge her to grow or change, this one accepts her just as she is, even having Ovetta tell her, “Just keep on doin’ what you do.” Young’s full-body, whole-heart, tensed-muscle portrayal never apologizes. Instead, she embraces the character in all her individuality. Young should absolutely keep on doing what she does. And we should all be there to watch it.All the Natalie PortmansThrough March 29 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; 212-727-7722, mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

Sequestered in the sound booth, the playwright Paula Vogel wept her way through an entire box of tissues. It was 1997 and the last time she would get to see Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse perform their starring roles Off Broadway in “How I Learned to Drive,” the memory play that won Obie Awards for all three of them and their director, Mark Brokaw, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Vogel.“Now, I am grateful to any actor who ever does any role in my plays,” she said over a late January lunch in Providence, where she taught for years at Brown University, and where she and her wife still keep a part-time home. “But I really imprinted on this first cast.”A critically lauded downtown hit at the Vineyard Theater that transferred across the street for a commercial run, “How I Learned to Drive” arrives on Broadway for the first time this spring, starting previews on March 27 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Directed once more by Brokaw, the Manhattan Theater Club production reunites Parker as Li’l Bit with Morse as Peck, her charming uncle, who sexually abuses her throughout her childhood and adolescence. As recalled by the grown-up Li’l Bit, Peck is as methodical a predator as he is a driving instructor. In the play’s reverse chronology, the audience sees the girl get younger and younger.By all accounts, the experience on that original production was so extraordinary that the principals long ago started musing about a reprise. In the meantime, Parker starred in “Weeds” on Showtime, Brokaw directed her twice on Broadway, Morse went there with “The Seafarer” and “The Iceman Cometh,” and Vogel made it to Broadway herself for the first time just three years ago, with “Indecent.”In separate interviews, the four collaborators spoke recently about the history of “How I Learned to Drive,” evolving awareness of sexual trauma and, for Vogel’s part, why she used to say publicly that the story wasn’t inspired by her own life. These are edited excerpts.The writing: ‘A promise to my mother’PAULA VOGEL The way it came about was a complete fluke. I had this idea for a play. Cherry Jones was going to come with me to Alaska. I wanted her to play a young Farinelli. Week before, Cherry calls me and says, “Paula, I don’t know what to do. I went for an audition. I never thought I’d get it, but I got it.” She said, “It’s ‘The Heiress.’” I said, “You’ve gotta take that. You can’t go to Alaska.”I was so freaked out I didn’t tell the theater company. I got off the plane in Alaska and they said, “Where’s Cherry?” I said, “OK, some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. Cherry is playing ‘The Heiress.’ Now the good news. I have this play about —” And I think to the artistic director I said, “about my uncle.” I wrote it in Juneau in about two weeks, staying up all night.MARK BROKAW When you hear what the play is about, the last thing you would think is that there’s laughs in it. But Paula was so wise to lure the audience in. And the way that she spaces out the events of the play — you know, she saves till the very end what is really the gut-punch, and by that time you’re ready to receive it.VOGEL I became obsessed with “Lolita” in college and grad school. I was fascinated by the empathy for Humbert Humbert. I was fascinated by the look at Lolita as a peer to Humbert Humbert. I had already thought when I was 23 or 24, “I don’t know how you would do this as a play” — my story as a play. I became extremely obsessed, I still am, with the notion of negative empathy.DAVID MORSE I was offered a movie, a very classy movie from a great novel, and the character in it was a father who molests his daughter. I thought, “I can’t do this.” Then I was asked, just out of the blue, to come to the Vineyard Theater. Reading the play, it’s an uncle and his niece, and along the same lines of the movie. But the tone of it was so different. There have been women in my life who have experienced things like this. So it felt important to be able to tell this story, because of the way it was told.VOGEL Three things that I want to talk about. One was a promise to my mother, who read it. To say that her health was fragile is putting it mildly. She asked that I not say that it was autobiographical. The other thing is that whenever women write autobiographically, we are told that we are confessional. No one says that about Sam Shepard, or David Mamet, or Eugene O’Neill.Third thing was there’s a myth, and it’s I think a very perilous myth, that the reason that women become lesbians is because of sexual trauma, a fear and a hatred of men. The last thing I’m going to do is get put into that category. Now I’m 68, man; I’m in the grandmother category. So say whatever you will.MARY-LOUISE PARKER They sent it to me and I read it. It took a few times. I went and asked if I could read it aloud. I wasn’t sure if I was too young at the time, which is so ironic because now I’m a little too old, but the second I went to read it out loud, I just felt, I can’t wait to do this. It was a scene where she’s 13. There are certain ages that are just viscerally so available to me because the memories are so strong, you know? Something about being a 13-year-old girl, an 11-year-old girl.VOGEL I had written the play where Li’l Bit was going to be my age, 45. It was something about Mary-Louise and her ability, in the blink of an eye, to shape-change, where I thought, “That’s it. Age is amorphous. You always think you’re in high school. I don’t care how old you are.”The reaction: ‘People were rattled’BROKAW I remember the first few audiences especially. There’s a scene where she’s with an older man who’s trying to convince her to neck, as well as a few other things, in the front seat of a car.VOGEL We wanted it to feel like two people who are very attractive, feeling that eroticism on a summer night, until the very last moment, where she says, “Uncle Peck.”BROKAW I just remember the audience gasping at that moment, because there was no thought in anybody’s head that it was a relative.VOGEL I think we wanted to pull the rug out. People didn’t even talk at that point about saying to people, “This may cause a trigger.” That wasn’t on anybody’s mind.PARKER Reactions after that play were really, really strong, in a way that a handful of times in my life I’ve seen. People were rattled.VOGEL One of the things I heard was the men saying, “Huh. I’d have some difficulties if she were my niece.” And I heard women in the audience go, “If he were my uncle….” And then there was the other response, of people coming forward and saying, “May I talk?” Three out of 10, four out of 10, may be the percentage. I never knew that I’d write a play with that great an audience concurrence.MORSE The numbers of people who couldn’t leave after the show because they needed company — people who would just be in tears out there. But I think the thing that people were surprised by, and it’s what I responded to, was the affection you have for that man, because of the way Paula wrote it, her compassion. It’s not what you expect when you see a story about a pedophile or sexual abuser.VOGEL The thing that David gave me that was so important — I mean, Mary-Louise gave me a clarity — David gave me the ability to feel love. Which will make a lot of people very angry. Which is, sometimes good people do terrible things. Sometimes people have illnesses. I don’t forgive him [the person Peck is based on], but I feel a sympathy, a sorrow, because of David.Coming back: ‘Trauma is public now’VOGEL The fact that I got the Pulitzer, even though it never went to Broadway, meant that within a year, I had 20 productions regionally in places that I’d never been in. And then it got taught in college classes. Really, it’s an out-of-body experience. It meant that the play that you carry inside you for 30 years will be a little more visible.MORSE We got together in December for a couple days and talked about doing it together, and the passage of time and how the world has changed and how we’ve changed. All of that is going to be a part of this.PARKER There are conceptual things that I’m wanting to go after, things that I never felt I cracked before. I have a daughter now, too. I’m really, really interested to hear what she’s going to say, because she’s 13.MORSE Is there going to be a different feeling about Peck? I don’t know.BROKAW Trauma is public now and not hidden away, in a way that it was before. There’s so much out there now about these deeply damaging relationships that are caused by behavior inflicted by trusted authority figures, able to continue for so long because there was a network of people that were enabling them. In this story, that’s true also. I look at that very, very differently.VOGEL I didn’t go into this concerned with the forgiveness of that person [Peck is based on]. I went into this concerned with the forgiveness of myself. Because the truth is the children always feel culpable.And the structure of this is me getting to a point where I’m like, “You know what? You were a kid.” That’s all I wanted, to get there and feel that. And have it be such a basic truth that my childhood self would accept it.PARKER There was a picture of me and David on the cover of The Village Voice back then. It was this really moody picture, and it said, “Theater Too Tough for Uptown.” And that was kind of true. Now we’re doing it. It’s much riskier than when we did it before, because of the conversations that people are having and how everything is quite polarized.BROKAW It’s kind of crazy this play’s never been done on Broadway. I feel really lucky to be able to bring this great piece of work to be seen and taken seriously in a way it should be. When something happens on Broadway, there’s a certain stamp that gets applied to it. And I think the play deserves that. More

Broadway newcomers and two dancers from New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet are among the eight finalists for this year’s Clive Barnes Awards, the first since the death of its founder Valerie Taylor-Barnes in 2019. The winners, one for dance and one for theater, will be announced on April 6 at a ceremony hosted by the New York Post columnist Michael Riedel.Ms. Taylor-Barnes, a former soloist at the Royal Ballet in London, created a foundation in 2009 to administer the awards and commemorate her husband Clive Barnes, The New York Times and New York Post theater and dance critic who died in 2008 at 81. The prizes, which come with $5,000 for the winners, are meant to recognize promising young performers.“It was always in Valerie’s vision that the Clive Barnes Foundation would live on past her time on earth,” said Holly Jones, the organization’s co-president. “She started the foundation in Clive’s honor but really to support and champion young dancers and actors, who she continued to stay in touch with as time went on.”India Bradley and Roman Mejia, colleagues at New York City Ballet, are up against Kellie Drobnick from Twyla Tharp Dance, and Aran Bell, a recently promoted soloist at American Ballet Theater, for the dance honor. Gia Kourlas noted Mr. Bell’s contribution to Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Seasons” at American Ballet Theater in her review for The Times last year: “In the commanding role of Winter is an impressive Aran Bell, radiating composure and elegance.”Three of the four theater finalists made their Broadway debut this season: Andrew Burnap starred in “The Inheritance,” by Matthew Lopez; Christopher Livingston played dual roles in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Robert Schenkkan’s “The Great Society”; and Celia Rose Gooding made a splash in “Jagged Little Pill,” the Alanis Morissette jukebox musical. The fourth finalist, Sophia Anne Caruso, was recently performing in “Beetlejuice” on Broadway.Ben Brantley called Mr. Burnap “electrically vivid” as Toby Darling, a “flamboyant playwright” who, he said, “has a Hidden Past he pretends never happened.” Last week, it was announced that “The Inheritance” will close March 15 after a disappointing New York run.The selection committee for this year’s awards includes Diana Byer, the founder and artistic director of New York Theater Ballet, Jenny Chiang, an instructor at the Alvin Ailey School and Frank DiLella, the host of “On Stage,” the weekly theater program on NY1. More

At first it seems as if “The Headlands,” the beguiling new play by Christopher Chen that opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, is going to fall into the trap that many staged detective stories do. Instead of enacting live conflicts, they narrate crimes that occurred in the past. If I wanted that kind of experience, I’d plug in my earbuds and listen to “Serial.”But “The Headlands,” a mystery set in the Bay Area with a vigorous nod to “Vertigo,” is merely feinting in that direction. Chen’s main character is a 30-something Google engineer named Henry (Aaron Yoo), whose sideline of solving cold cases is initially presented as just another aspect of his nerd personality.“Tonight I’m going to tell you about one particular case I studied,” he begins, as if he were hosting a podcast.That case is the murder, 20 years before the action, of George Wong, the co-owner of a kitchen contracting business in the Sunset District. No one was ever charged, no motive adduced, and Wong’s wife, Leena, who discovered the body and might have known more, is now dead of cancer. Still, Henry comes to suspect from piecemeal clues that the killing was more than the random burglary gone bad that police had declared it to be.Henry’s connection to the story also turns out to be more than random: He’s George Wong’s son. (I won’t spoil any more of the plot, which in any case includes a school of red herrings.) The clues he uncovers come not only from fresh evidence — he interviews George’s business partner (Henry Stram), Leena’s best friend (Mia Katigbak) and the detective who originally investigated the case (Stram again) — but also from his half-buried memories, garbled and enigmatic though they may be.It’s in those memories that the play’s deeper drama starts to awaken. Re-enactments of his parents’ early years, as recalled by the elderly Leena (Katigbak again), uncover conflicts of which Henry was barely aware. Some arose from the couple’s contrasting social status: George, a new immigrant working as a dishwasher in Chinatown; Leena, a second-generation princess in Pacific Heights. It was far from both neighborhoods, across the Golden Gate in the Marin Headlands, that they met and courted over braised pork and sour cabbage.Other memories are Henry’s own, from the period immediately preceding the murder — if it even was a murder. In them, the 40-ish George (Johnny Wu) and Leena (Laura Kai Chen) argue about things their curious young son could not comprehend. Why was his father so morose? Why was his mother so hurt?We see these anxious scenes repeated several times, nearly verbatim, but each repetition is recolored, like a melody underscored with different harmonies, by the new information Henry has turned up in the meantime. Even the meaning of an individual word, such as “despair,” changes as the mystery unfolds. Memory is not just unreliable, Chen demonstrates, but also highly contextual. The known facts of the past are only a small part of the picture.The picture itself is key to this LCT3 production, sleekly directed by Knud Adams on a set, by Kimie Nishikawa, that consists mostly of blank walls suitable for projections. Those projections, by Ruey Horng Sun, support not only the play’s noir sensibilities with lots of lamplit San Francisco streets but also its view of the fragmentary nature of consciousness. Images flicker, regroup, disappear, return. What seems like documentary evidence may be merely a trick of light in air.If “The Headlands” achieves greater depth than its mere procedural aspects at first suggest, it’s because of that double vision. In the outer story of Henry’s inquiry, Chen’s focus widens from the unreliability of historical memory to the unreliability of even contemporary perception. Exhibit A is Henry’s girlfriend, Jess (Mahira Kakkar), whom he introduces as an ideal helpmeet, eagerly participating in his investigation.“Some of our favorite memories as a couple involve hunching over crime photographs, brainstorming ways a man’s head could have been bludgeoned in,” he says in what passes for sweet talk.But he may not be reading Jess’s signals correctly, and when we — too briefly — get a glimpse of their relationship from her perspective instead of his, the complacency of the genre cracks open. It does so again, at greater length, with the arrival of a character I cannot tell you about. Suffice it to say that in a wonderful reorientation of perception, we are forced to review the entire story, literally, but this time from a previously unimaginable point of view.I wish these re-orientations, the most exciting part of the play, took up more of its 80-minute running time, and that the nod to noir style were sharper. (The dialogue occasionally slumps into woodenness.) Like most detective stories, “The Headlands” depends too much on the mere withholding and manipulation of information, but since that is Chen’s theme, you tend to excuse it. Even if not, the engaging cast — especially Yoo, Chen and Katigbak in the better-written roles — makes up for any authorial glibness with completely grounded performances.That groundedness is key in a play that, like Chen’s best-known earlier work, “Caught,” wants to live simultaneously on many levels. “Caught” was set in the art world; “The Headlands,” as the pun in its title suggests, in the even-narrower confines of the human imagination. The least solvable mysteries, it seems to suggest, are the ones we carry inside us.The HeadlandsTickets Through March 22 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

Clap your hands, everybody, and sing along with Pol! That’s as in Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which wiped out nearly a quarter of that country’s population during the second half of the 1970s.All right, to be exact, it’s not Pol himself who’s shaking a tambourine and urging the audience to get up and dance at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Lauren Yee’s adventurous, tonally scrambled “Cambodian Rock Band” opened on Monday night. Instead, this enthusiastic master of ceremonies is called Duch. That is the nom de guerre of the former math teacher Kang Kek Iew, a Pol confederate known as “Cambodia’s Himmler,” who ran the notorious S21 prison (read: death) camp.The real Duch, who was the first of the Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for mass murder, is now serving out a life prison sentence. But Yee, a playwright of great heart and audacity to match, has seen fit to give her version of Duch the run of her brash but conventionally sentimental play, which features the songs of the Los Angeles-based Cambodian surf rock group Dengue Fever.Duch is bravely portrayed by Francis Jue with a flaming archness that neither he nor Chay Yew’s production can quite pull off. Think of him as a combination of the creepy Weimar-era M.C. from “Cabaret” and the antic Hitler from the recent Oscar nominee “Jojo Rabbit,” and you’ll understand that Jue’s assignment is not an easy one.“Genocide, genocide, genocide — boo!” Duch says, taunting us with a full dose of snark, in his opening monologue. He proceeds to ask us, with justification, “Are you confused? Welcome to Cambodia, 2008!”That’s the year in which Duch’s trial begins. And in Yee’s fictionalized evocation of that time, Neary (an earnest Courtney Reed) — a young American NGO worker of Cambodian descent — has stumbled upon crucial evidence. It was thought that only seven people had survived their time in S21. But Neary has unearthed a photograph the suggests there may have been an eighth.And who might he or she be? Oh, dear. This is where the Code of the Spoilers dictates that I become evasive. But it’s pretty much impossible to discuss this play without disclosing its essential plot twist, which, after all, is revealed fairly early.The eighth survivor is a man who, hearing of Neary’s involvement in the case, has come to visit her in Phnom Penh. His name is Chum (Joe Ngo), and he is Neary’s father.Cloaked in a camouflage of hard-smiling passive aggression, Chum has always been reticent with his family on the subject of his life before coming to America. However, the demands of international justice and an insistent daughter force him into memoir mode, which means propelling the play into a sustained flashback, set in the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.I’m making “Cambodian Rock Band” sound more straightforward than it is. It is structured, a bit haphazardly, as a nest of frames within frames.It is as if Yee, whose earlier works include the similarly ambitious time-traveling play “The Great Leap” (set partly in China), feels that a subject as monstrous as the Khmer Rouge cannot be approached head-on. So she tugs us, by degrees, into the horror at her play’s center with bait-and-switch tactics, which include sitcom coziness, cheerfully packaged shock effects (including dark commentary by Duch) and good old rock ’n’ roll, Cambodian-style.Takeshi Kata’s mutable set is dominated by a bandstand, and the show begins with a performance by the Cyclos, the fictional group of the title who here perform the Dengue Fever’s music. The songs — a bright, raucous confluence of varied international pop strains — are agreeably performed by Abraham Kim, Jane Lui and Moses Villarama (who doubles in the role of Courtney’s boyfriend), as well as Reed and Ngo.The Cyclos are not here just for our listening pleasure. They will turn out to be a pre-revolutionary Cambodian combo of which Chum was a member. Their band bears weighty significance in terms of both plot and theme. “In case you were not aware,” Duch informs us, “music is the soul of Cambodia.” It will also become an early casualty of the Khmer Rouge.To Yee’s credit, she neatly connects all the seemingly far-flung dots of her story. But neither her script nor Yew’s production — which features period-defining costumes by Linda Cho and lighting by David Weiner — can comfortably reconcile the radical shifts in style and mood, between the bright sardonicism of Duch’s speeches to the audience and the furrowed-brow sincerity of the father-daughter scenes.This is a shame. For there is indeed a compelling heart of darkness in “Cambodian Rock Band,” explored in a long, second-act sequence set at the S21 Prison and performed unflinchingly by Jue, Villarama and Ngo.In these scenes, Ngo’s Chum sheds his middle-aged mantle of strained affability to become a raw, quivering soul whose raison d’être is to exist, no matter the cost. And Yee’s adroit use here of the characters’ real names and assumed names becomes a heartbreaking reminder of how what we think of as a fixed human identity can melt into pulp under inhuman conditions.Cambodian Rock BandTickets Through March 15 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More