Theater

“Common Ground,” J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece about Boston’s turbulent attempt to desegregate its schools via court-ordered busing, is inspiring a stage play.The Huntington Theater Company in Boston plans to present the drama, called “Common Ground Revisited,” next winter, with performances starting in January. The adaptation is by Kirsten Greenidge and directed by Melia Bensussen; the two artists began collaborating on the project in 2011, when they jointly taught a class exploring the subject at Emerson College.“It’s become a delightful beast of a project — it’s huge, and it’s taken many years to figure out how to get it right, but I love the enormity of it,” Greenidge said. “It’s also highly charged, and we want to make sure that people feel seen and heard.”The journalistic book, published in 1985 with the full title of “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families,” was a sensation, particularly in Boston, as it offered new insight into the controversy over school integration that had torn the city apart. The book, as its full title suggests, follows three families as their lives are affected by the city’s turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s.The book was previously adapted for television in 1990.Greenidge noted that audiences who see the play — primarily set in the mid-1970s, with a cast of 12 playing multiple roles — are likely to have a wide variety of relationships to the history being depicted. “We will have audience members who come and say, ‘I went to Charlestown High in ’76,’ or ‘I was bused to Southie,’ and we’ll have people who are transplants and do not know this history at all, as well as people who say, ‘I know Boston has a reputation for having deep-seated problems with race, but that’s all I know.’” Part of our task is to figure out how much an audience needs to be able to track the story and connect with what we’re doing.”The play, originally commissioned by ArtsEmerson, is scheduled to begin performances Jan. 8 and run through Feb. 7 as part of the Huntington’s next season, which also includes Calista Flockhart starring in a revival of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband,” as well as productions of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” by Heidi Schreck; “Witch,” by Jen Silverman; “Teenage Dick,” by Mike Lew; “Songbird,” a musical by Michael Kimmel and Lauren Pritchard; and “Hurricane Diane,” by Madeleine George.The Huntington is only the latest regional theater to cultivate a new work of theater about its home city. Last year, Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, R.I., had a substantial hit with “The Prince of Providence,” a new play by George Brant about that city’s onetime mayor, Vincent A. Cianci Jr., widely known as Buddy. Trinity Rep has already announced plans to revive that play next year. More

Do you miss the finger snap? The new “West Side Story” has retired it. But that generation-defining gesture isn’t just the stale move of a 1950s beatnik. In the original production, based on a conception by Jerome Robbins, it set more than the beat. It was the tone, the vivacity, the pulse behind dancing that articulated the raw physicality of rage, of yearning, of love — emotions contained within a group of youthful bodies on a hot summer night.That snap may not seem like much, but in the revamped version now on Broadway, which has replaced Robbins’s choreography with new dances by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, it’s a ghost on the stage. That’s because what Robbins created wasn’t just a series of dances, however peerless, but an overarching view of how, beyond anything else, movement could tell a story.Robbins’s choreography — with its searing blend of tension and freedom — gives “West Side Story” its joy and its horror. It springs the events into action. Arthur Laurents wrote the book, but Robbins’s choreography is the true libretto.So while the stellar combination of Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics endures, dancing has always been the true star of “West Side Story,” where the overheated body is the reason these young men and women, so full of nerves and pride, are ready to burst out of their skin. Choreographers, the best ones anyway, don’t just think about steps. “The Dance at the Gym” is more than a battle between the Jets and the Sharks. It’s a physical and emotional release: A murmur that builds to a scream.While it’s understandable that the current show’s director, Ivo van Hove, and Ms. De Keersmaeker, both Belgian, would want to distance themselves from Robbins to present their own version of this classic American musical, there’s a major hitch: film. Not the 1961 one directed by Robert Wise and Robbins (until he was fired) that won a bunch of Oscars, but film you’re forced to endure throughout this production.The video, by Luke Halls, is impossible to ignore. Like a landscape painting, it stretches across the entire back of the stage, showing us ponderous footage of street scenes moving in slow motion or close-ups of the actors’ faces, both prerecorded and shot in real time. It smothers any actual aliveness.That includes, of course, the dancing, which operates, to various degrees, like wallpaper. Choreography doesn’t make this reimagined “West Side Story” breathe. (The former Miami City Ballet principal Patricia Lucia Delgado, who is also an associate producer, and the Tony-winning choreographer Sergio Trujillo are the production’s dance consultants.)Ms. De Keersmaeker is a well respected contemporary choreographer. If you know her work, it feels like a fun secret to see her spirals and circles at play on Broadway, rather than the concert stage or the floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Alas, there are problems.Even when you’re swept up by flocks of dancers sailing across the stage in formal arrangements, the choreography has little sustained urgency. Because of the looming video, you glean more of the structure of the dance — its frame — than its interior details. Ms. De Keersmaeker plays with gravity and buoyancy in her passages, which borrow from hip-hop, martial arts and house along with her own contemporary vocabulary. Yet on a stage this large and hampered by the film, the in-between moments are lost.Those transitional moments — how you get from one step to the next — are what dancing is all about. Here the choreography is part of a larger vision that renders it extraneous or, worse, inconsequential.Ms. De Keersmaeker is fond of giving her performers movement that takes them to the floor — the leads writhe in passion; the ensemble rolls and whirls — but the results can be muddled. The fight scenes look like outtakes from the 1960s “Batman” show (without words like “Kapow!” and “Sock!”).And the extended onstage rainstorm isn’t much of a thrill: The performers, sopping wet, don’t tear through the fight choreography so much as push forward with a grit-your-teeth kind of tentativeness. You can hardly blame them: A soaking floor is an injury waiting to happen.Ms. De Keersmaeker’s roots are not in musical-theater but contemporary dance where her heroes are postmodern artists like Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. When you can make out the details of her movement here, you grasp its rippling flow and bodies, seemingly unhampered by bones.Marc Crousillat, a Shark, tells you everything you need to know about how her phrases can be transcendent — he is a vision of clarity and looseness. But there are awkward moments with many of the dancers who are not equal to sustaining qualities of drive and undulating motion. What is it all building up to?Robbins, both a micro and macro choreographer, was able to show the body’s expressiveness without self-conscious touches, while taking care that every bit of the stage served a purpose — even the negative space. And there is the naturalness of his movement, which never required that a dancer add anything extra. His way to get dancers to tone it down? He would say, “Easy.”It’s not a dirty word. Mr. Crousillat gets easy. Yet the production seems to be aiming for that cheesiest of words: gritty. It doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s important not only how a dancer leaps but how he stands. Here, the most macho gang members are almost comical: Arms hang down and curl in at either side, and feet are planted feet wide — like cowboys fresh from the gym — so as not to reveal classical turnout. It’s posturing.Robbins’s deep movement investigations revealed — and still do — how emotions, even the most imperceptible ones, live within the body. That’s not always an easy quality to draw out. Shereen Pimentel, as Maria, is a powerful singer but not a natural mover; you ache for her when she has to dash happily around the stage. And Isaac Powell, as Tony, has many charms as an actor, but when he moves — even just stretching his arms from side to side — he suddenly looks like he’s the lead in a rom-com.There are other questionable moments, as when the Sharks and the Jets position themselves on either side of Maria and Tony to pull them apart, after the couple meets at the gym. It’s an image embarrassingly more suited to an Instagram post, which is sad but fitting: This is an Instagram show.I love a modern remake or rethink. Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!,” which closed last month, was searing. Keone and Mari Madrid’s “Beyond Babel,” a retelling (like “West Side Story”) of “Romeo and Juliet” through West Coast urban dance, has an endearing teen-spirit sensibility. The show, at Judson Memorial Church, is overlong but genuine — and the choreography is front and center.What is this “West Side Story”? Its desire to get at something bold and contemporary seems at odds with the script’s creaky mentions of “buddy boy” and “daddy-o.” At times, it comes closer to parody, like a dream sequence on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” starring Andy Samberg as Tony. It thrusts and thrusts, yet little penetrates; for the most part, the characters remain objects — highly evolved physical beings but not so subtle emotionally.For Robbins, personalities — and their desires — grew from the inside out, just as his classical ballets grew out of pedestrian movement: standing, walking, running. And it was never obvious.He could reveal the big picture with one dancing body bursting across the stage like there was no tomorrow. For the Sharks and the Jets, that feeling — chasing freedom — is the dance. As for that snap? It anchored everything. More

The kindergartners in the crowd at “She Persisted, The Musical” are unlikely to get the reference in the title, but then again they were toddlers at the time.In 2017, when the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, shut down a speech by Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, he explained himself with words that feminists have flung back at him ever since: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”Chelsea Clinton quickly responded with a children’s book, “She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World” — a cheerful, affirming collection of mini-biographies for little ones. But is it really the stuff of theater?Indeed it is. “She Persisted, The Musical,” by Adam Tobin (script and lyrics) and Deborah Wicks La Puma (music), is an exuberant, time-traveling history lesson that instills confidence, too, encouraging girls to listen to their own voices and not be afraid of using them.Directed and choreographed by MK Lawson for Atlantic for Kids, which recommends it for ages 5 and up, the play begins with a fourth-grade field trip to a women’s history museum. The teacher, Ms. Chan, played by Heather Sawyer as an endearingly irrepressible geek, wants to inspire Naomi (Amber Jaunai) and her classmates with stories of great achievement.Things turn fantastical when Naomi slips into the past, where she meets a young Sonia Sotomayor (Jianzi Colón-Soto), intent on becoming a detective; Virginia Apgar (Amanda Corday), the physician whose namesake test for newborns occasions a charming baby-doll dance; and Ruby Bridges (Auberth Bercy), the first grader who in 1960 integrated a New Orleans school.Best of all are a commanding, kind Harriet Tubman and an appealingly down-to-earth Florence Griffith Joyner, both played by the show’s M.V.P., Cynthia Nesbit, who is very funny as a museum guard, too.The cast’s singing is not uniformly strong, and Saturday’s performance at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater suffered some technical hiccups. There is also a touch of what feels like product placement, when a character sits upstage reading “Ella Persistió,” the Spanish-language version of Clinton’s book.Another moment stands out for its possibly unintentional message. When the astronaut Sally Ride (Corday) tells Naomi about sexist questions she got from the media, she’s right: The assumptions behind them (that women cry easily, for example) are dumb. That’s a perfectly fair point.But the reporters asking those questions are women — a distinct minority in newsrooms in 1983, when Ride first went into space, and thus unlikely to be the main culprits. More troubling is the Ride character’s evident contempt for the press. At a time when children hear the president denounce “fake news,” is that an attitude this show wants to teach? (This is not, by the way, a reflection of the book, whose pantheon includes the investigative journalist Nellie Bly; she is not a character in the musical.)For the most part, though, “She Persisted” cleverly conveys positive values. This is bouncy fun with a serious streak.As a college-age Sotomayor sings, “It’s not enough to say that it’s always been this way. We have to be heard, and it’s plainly absurd to ignore half the world every day.”And when the show finishes with a reprise of its defiant, triumphant anthem, “Walk On,” the optimistic takeaway for the youngest generation is clear: Persevere. You’ve got this.She Persisted, The MusicalThrough March 22 at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

Angie is Italian-American and single; Seth is a divorced Orthodox Jew. She lives in apartment 4C; he is down the hall in 4J. She’s a curator at a Chelsea gallery; he runs a knish shop on the Lower East Side. She finds inspiration at the Metropolitan Museum; he translates an obscure Yiddish writer for fun.You’ve guessed it: We are in a romantic comedy, “The Sabbath Girl,” and its protagonists are fated to be mated, as Cole Porter put it back in 1957 (some things never change). But while it is refreshing to see the young writer Cary Gitter unabashedly dive into a genre as rare onstage as it is popular onscreen, his play, at 59E59 Theaters, can’t escape the clichés and clunky setups that burden rom-com as much as they fuel it.Angie (Lauren Annunziata) and Seth (Jeremy Rishe) meet — cute, obviously — when he asks her to turn on his air-conditioner: It’s Friday night and as an observant Jew, he can’t do it himself. Soon enough, Angie becomes Seth’s bemused “Shabbos goy.”It will take a bit longer, however, for them to realize they are each other’s person.Angie is sidetracked by Blake (Ty Molbak), a hunky artist she’s trying to lure to her gallery, undeterred by the fact that he’s the kind of guy who prefaces a declaration with “Here’s what I see in your soul.” As for Seth, he must overcome the objections of his sister, Rachel (Lauren Singerman), who is appalled that he’s even thinking of dating outside their faith.“The Sabbath Girl” shares a lot with the 1988 film “Crossing Delancey,” including an immersion in Jewish faith and culture, an arty female lead who hesitates between a flashy suitor and a humble working man and the influential presence of a benevolent grandmother.In Angie’s case it’s Sophia (Angelina Fiordellisi), who keeps reminding her granddaughter, cheerily but insistently, that being a successful professional is all well and good, but a woman is not complete without true love. Never mind that Sophia’s ideas are just a tiny bit retrograde: Nonna gonna nonna.While the cast of Joe Brancato’s Penguin Rep Theater production mostly does well by the forced characters and situations — almost everything having to do with the art world is ludicrous — Rishe stands out with his endearing portrayal of a nebbishy romantic.It helps that Gitter is most comfortable writing that character, endowing Seth with a sweetness that falls just short of precious, whether he’s teaching Angie the proper way to eat a knish (“you put the mustard inside and close it up”) or standing up to his sister as he questions their religion’s demands.Rachel tells her brother that he has “adorably flustered charm” — which may be a pattern for Gitter heroes, as the male protagonist of his earlier one-act “How My Grandparents Fell in Love” was said to be “admittedly charming, in a sort of bumbling way.”Lest we think Angie and Seth gallop too easily toward a predetermined happily ever after, the play gives them a formidable final test, with an assist from costume designer Gregory Gale: Seth turns up in a screamingly ugly blazer and tie.That Angie doesn’t recoil in horror means Grandma Sophia can rest easy: This love is made to last.The Sabbath GirlThrough March 8 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

“The Inheritance,” an ambitious two-part play exploring contemporary gay life, will end its Broadway run on March 15 after a twisty journey that saw the show soar in London but sink in New York.The play, written by Matthew Lopez and directed by Stephen Daldry, was inspired by E.M. Forster’s masterful novel “Howards End,” and similarly explores issues of class and real estate through the intersecting relationships of a small group of people. In “The Inheritance,” which is set in and around New York City, the intergenerational relationships are shadowed by differing experiences of the AIDS epidemic.The play, which began previews Sept. 27 and opened Nov. 17, is presented in two parts, each running nearly 3 hours and 15 minutes. At the time of its closing, there will have been a total of 46 previews and 138 regular performances (each part is counted as a single performance).The play, with Tom Kirdahy, Sonia Friedman and Hunter Arnold as lead producers, was capitalized for about $9.1 million, according to a spokesman, and will close at a loss. It opened in New York to mixed reviews, and struggled at the box office; during the week that ended Feb. 16 it grossed $345,984, which is just 33 percent of its potential, and played to houses that were only half full.The New York failure came as a surprise because the show was hailed as a triumph in London, where it first opened. It won four Olivier Awards — the British equivalent of the Tonys — including one for best new play. And some of the reviews were rapturous; in The Telegraph, the critic Dominic Cavendish described it as “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far” and said, “Star ratings are almost beside the point when confronted by work of this magnitude but hell, yeah, five.”The reception in New York was polarized but chillier. Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, said, “Its breadth doesn’t always translate into depth.” And although many theatergoers found the play profoundly moving, others were quite critical.Lopez, writing in The New York Times, explained his thinking. “I wanted to write a play that was true to my experience, my philosophy, my heart as a gay man who has enjoyed opportunities that were denied Forster,” he said. “It was my attempt to explain myself to the world as a gay man of my particular generation. I wasn’t attempting to create a generationally defining work of theater that spoke for the entire queer experience.” More

The Encores! production of Jerry Herman’s “Mack & Mabel” was announced months before the composer died, in late December, at 88. It wasn’t planned as a tribute, but it makes a proper homage nonetheless.Not because this showbiz show, which opened on Wednesday night at New York City Center, is one of his greatest works or biggest hits — like “Hello, Dolly!,” “Mame” or “La Cage Aux Folles” — but precisely because it isn’t.Even a famous artist’s life, for all its grand successes, is made up too of the also-rans, the hatchlings that never flourish in the world. “Mack & Mabel,” whose only Broadway outing lasted all of 66 performances in 1974, is one of those, and this revival doesn’t fix that, can’t magic away Michael Stewart’s troubled book.Herman’s score, though, has such an embracing loveliness that it trails you right out the door post-show, its romance buoying you like a gentle tide through the Midtown streets. That graceful hummability, in songs like “I Won’t Send Roses” and “Time Heals Everything,” is the reason people have kept hoping for some way to make “Mack & Mabel” work.Don’t get me wrong. The music isn’t the only thing that this glamorous-looking reboot, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, has to offer. There is a handsomely disheveled Douglas Sills as Mack, a quietly charismatic Alexandra Socha as Mabel and a general reveling in period fashion and physicality.Yet even when Rob Berman’s fine orchestra is at its most delicate, the show scarcely comes close to stirring emotion.A dark-edged ode to old Hollywood, it tells the fictionalized story of the silent-film pioneer Mack Sennett, creator of the Keystone Kops, and the actress Mabel Normand, one of the stars of his company — and, as he recalled, the spontaneous inventor of the pie-in-the-face gag that he used again and again in his slapstick comedies.These were interesting people with remarkable, if truncated, careers. Normand, a onetime art student who was working an artists’ model when she fell into film, died of tuberculosis in her 30s, while Sennett, no fan of dialogue, was ruined by the advent of the talkies.But “Mack & Mabel,” whose book has been revised since Stewart’s death in 1987 by his sister, Francine Pascal, reduces them to worn clichés: Mabel a pious innocent turned tragic heroine, discovered and molded by Mack, who toys with her affections and looks the other way as she sinks into drink and drugs; Mack a bullying tough guy with a sentimental streak and a list of stubborn regrets about the way he treated her.Mabel (the part Bernadette Peters played on Broadway) is sympathetic, and Mack (the Robert Preston role) is absolutely not — which would be OK if he were written in more than two dimensions. So predictable are the outlines of their story that you could mime every book scene in the broad gestures of silent movies, and we’d get the gist more rewardingly.Rhodes’s production livens up whenever both movement and music take over: in the big bathing-beauties number, “Hundreds of Girls” (with miniskirted black-and-white costumes by Amy Clark); the extended Keystone Kops sequence, “Hit ’em on the Head,” starring Fatty Arbuckle (Major Attaway), a Sennett company member; and the murder scene, “Tap Your Troubles Away,” sung by Lilli Cooper as Lottie Ames, another Sennett stalwart, and featuring a scenic flourish that is one of the cleverest things in the show. (The set is by Allen Moyer.)While the romantic attraction between Mack and Mabel seems pro forma here, Sills and Socha do turn in a gorgeous “I Won’t Send Roses.” If, during that song, you feel the urge to stage an intervention to stop Mabel from getting involved with this willful cad, that is to Socha’s credit. But Mabel’s real chemistry is with a smitten screenwriter, Frank, played with near-poignancy by Ben Fankhauser.The best part of the evening, though, is the Entr’acte, when only the orchestra is onstage, and the lighting (by Ken Billington) changes color with the colors of the music. This is the one moment that is overtly a tribute to Herman, and it is touching.For those few minutes, he is right at the center of “Mack & Mabel,” and his achievement in its score washes undiluted over us.Mack & MabelTickets Through Feb. 23 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hour 15 minutes. More

PARIS — How would you like to have a go at some Shakespeare? On Wednesday night, the British theater director Peter Brook, 94, sat onstage at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, as half a dozen audience members tried their hand at a line from “Othello.”One inserted a long pause; another shouted it too close to the microphone, and the audience giggled. Brook listened intently. “Let’s just allow the words to vibrate,” he said.The evening was a rare opportunity to hear from the director, too. For three nights, Brook, who has worked as a director since the 1960s and commands awed respect worldwide, was letting audiences in on his creative process. The project, called “Shakespeare Resonance,” was divided into two parts: an interactive lesson on the musical nature of Shakespeare’s verse, drawing on other plays, and an in-progress staging of “The Tempest.”And Brook wasn’t the only esteemed director to pull back the curtain this month in Paris. At the Théâtre des Abbesses, the German director Thomas Ostermeier presented a preview of a production still in its early stages: “Who Killed My Father,” an adaptation of a 2018 book by Édouard Louis with the lead role played by the young literary star himself, in his stage debut.It’s a vulnerable setup. Many artists hate presenting “unfinished” work, and in both cases, the actors had less than two weeks of rehearsals before the public were let in. Yes, the atmosphere at both performances was sympathetic: Everyone around me seemed to be on the edge of their seats, willing the artists on. When Brook, supported by one of his actors, and the rest of the cast first entered, the audience burst into spontaneous applause.As a critic, workshop presentations are a tricky proposition. It would be churlish to review them like any other production or to complain about slip-ups (not that they were many in either performance). Yet this format also cuts through the pretense that we are dispassionate, all-knowing observers of fundamentally fixed works. Watching “Shakespeare Resonance” and “Who Killed My Father,” I didn’t care about the loose ends. I rooted for the artists involved, and I learned a great deal.It’s a special privilege to listen to Brook talk about Shakespeare, a playwright he has returned to time and again over 70 years. He made his remarks in French, but the actors performed in English. While Brook’s main focus was on rhythm and inflections, he isn’t precious about accents: As often, he cast actors from all around the world in “Shakespeare Resonance.”In the first part, Brook asked them to read a handful of lines from various plays, gently chiding them if their musical phrasing wasn’t to his satisfaction. On hearing Lear’s “Is man no more than this?”, he asked the performer to let the word “man” resonate “like a question.”Brook moved to the first row of the orchestra level for the second part, and the cast launched into a one-hour condensed version of “The Tempest,” which pared the play down to an elliptical suite of scenes, performed with just a handful of props. At one point, when the mercurial Marcello Magni, playing Ariel, concluded a reply to Prospero with the words “were I human,” he lingered for a second on “human,” with a hint of regret. Suddenly, after hearing Brook’s earlier notes, his inflection stood out in the flow of the dialogue. It felt like being in on a trade secret.Anyone hoping to see Brook direct in real time, however, will be disappointed. On the first night of “Shakespeare Resonance,” neither he nor his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, intervened during the run-through, or commented afterward. Then again, the cast didn’t need much help. Alongside Magni, Ery Nzaramba grew nicely into the role of Prospero, occasionally channeling a sinister, Gollum-like voice. As Miranda, Brook’s granddaughter Maia Jemmett, continued the family tradition with endearing sincerity.Brook has worked at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord since 1974, when he discovered the abandoned venue and brought it back without bothering to add a fresh coat of paint. The wear and tear on the walls and the arch framing the stage (on which Hiran Abeysekera, as Caliban, climbs dexterously) are an integral part of the play’s atmosphere. “Resonance is a word that holds special meaning for me in this place,” Brook said at the beginning. “At night, here, you can hear the sound of silence.”Ostermeier, the director of Berlin’s Schaubühne playhouse, made himself scarcer during the workshop presentation of “Who Killed My Father.” He warned the audience at the start that he might interrupt if anything went wrong, but he didn’t have to. In this one-man-show, Louis held the stage for 90 minutes with genuine instinct and feeling.It would be impressive under most circumstances, but Louis, 27, who shot to global fame with his novelistic memoir “The End of Eddy,” had never acted professionally before. While he writes in his books that theater classes were an escape for him during his teenage years, working with a star director like Ostermeier — who has previously adapted Louis’s autobiographical novel “A History of Violence” — is like going from high-school music lessons straight to the Paris Opera.“Who Killed My Father” starts with family history and ends in social critique, as Louis explores the government policies that cut his father’s welfare benefits and, according to him, worsened his dad’s health. Given that Louis wrote it, it might be unfair to say that he was far more believable than the actor and director who initially commissioned and performed “Who Killed My Father” for the stage, Stanislas Nordey.Louis’ physical presence is more restrained, and he and Ostermeier are much bolder in highlighting his unease with the masculine norms his father imposes. He often wrings his hands, the very gesture that was deemed, he says, too effeminate in the working-class milieu of his childhood.At several points, Louis dons a wig or a skirt and dances wildly, unselfconsciously, to the songs he loved as a child, shimmying and camping it up to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” He sings the latter to an empty armchair that stands for his father, with a raw-feeling mix of relief and hurt.Perhaps it was the unvarnished magic of a workshop performance, but it would have taken a heart of stone not to indulge Louis, and repay his vulnerability with open arms.Shakespeare Resonance. Directed by Peter Brook. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, through Feb. 21.Who Killed My Father (work in progress). Directed by Thomas Ostermeier. Théâtre des Abbesses. Further performances at the Schaubühne Berlin, March 20-22. More