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      ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Review: Community Building One Dice Roll at a Time

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      Improv adds a theatrical dimension to the role-playing game, which has been undergoing a renaissance as it turns 50 this year.While familiarity with things like non-player characters and their degree of disposability is not strictly necessary to enjoy “Dungeons and Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern,” it certainly helps. At the very least, try tagging along with someone with an awareness of tabletop role-playing games.Indeed, hearing such jokes as “Be gentle — this NPC doesn’t have the ‘essential’ tag,” made me grateful for the quality hours I spent playing Chivalry & Sorcery in my 20s. And the raucous laughter that welcomed the line at a recent performance of this Chicago import, now at Stage 42, confirmed I was among folks who shared an understanding.This is less restrictive than it might sound in terms of potential audience because Dungeons & Dragons, which is turning 50 this year, has been undergoing a startling renaissance. People gather for regular sessions and the game maintains a strong pop-culture presence, from being a key component of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” to providing the framework for films like last year’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”But unlike that straightforward fantasy tale, “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” is basically a play session. This makes it closer to the wildly popular output of Critical Role Productions, which presents live role-playing campaigns on various platforms.Practically speaking, the show follows the basic steps of a D&D adventure. Three actors try to pull off a mission by reacting to prompts, solving riddles and, naturally, engaging in fights. This all happens under the direction of a dungeon master, played by DAGL (though his real name is David Andrew Laws), who created “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” with David Carpenter and Sarah Davis Reynolds (herself playing the watering hole’s keeper).Three of the actors can handle several characters within the same class: Madelyn Murphy can play three versions of a mage, Tyler Nowell Felix three versions of a fighter and Diego F. Salinas three types of rogue. The specific characters and their mission are assigned at the start of the show, the first of many narrative forks each performance can take. The audience can use their phones to participate via the browser-based platform Gamiotics. (My phone sometimes lagged, preventing me from casting votes I like to think would have been crucial, but most likely weren’t.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Problems Between Sisters’ Puts a Spin on the Berserk Boys Club

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      Julia May Jonas turns the menacing male siblings of Sam Shepard’s “True West” into squabbling pregnant sisters in Vermont.When we first see Rory (Annie Fox) she is flaunting a septum piercing, cutoff jeans girdled by a rubber band, and a level of hygiene seemingly designed to repel anyone within her smell radius. She has hitchhiked her way to her aunt’s cozy cabin in Vermont, where her older sister, Jess (Stephanie Janssen), has been temporarily staying. Jess is also pregnant. And there the similarities ostensibly begin and end.Whereas Rory takes pride in being a “transient outsider, raw and untrained,” in Julia May Jonas’s “Problems Between Sisters,” Jess is an emotionally Spanxed up, expensively shampooed and educated visual artist preparing for her first solo show.Jess’s art dealer (Maya Jackson), visiting the cabin, is taken with Rory’s unorthodox “look” and, on the strength of zero pieces of original art, commissions a video from her. Rory, a lapsed multimedia artist, tries to rope her sister into helping her create a video “de-sainting the idea of the pregnant woman,” a project that may or may not involve nudity.Cortisol-spiking chaos ensues.Jonas’s play, directed by Sivan Battat at Studio Theater in Washington, was conceived as a “response” to Sam Shepard’s “True West.” “Problems Between Sisters” is one of five projected works in Jonas’s “All Long True American Stories” cycle, which reimagines canonical dramas by white male playwrights for “other people (mostly women).” Shepard’s 1980 play made hay of the fraternal rivalry between Austin, an Ivy-League-educated screenwriter, and Lee, a rough-hewed petty thief. After a producer greenlights an underbaked movie idea of Lee’s, the brothers attempt to write a passable script, only to dance a pas de doom.The sneaky brilliance of “Problems Between Sisters” is that it doesn’t simply ask, “What if the brothers were sisters?” but rather the more complex question: “What if the sisters gave themselves permission to act as men do?” More precisely, what if women ceded control to their inner art monsters? The question has special resonance for Jess, who has toiled for 20 years to get that solo show.Rory has a leg up on Jess in the chutzpah department and, as in “True West,” much of her badassery rubs off on her starchy sister over the course of the play’s fleet 100 minutes. A keyboard gets smashed, tables and chairs are overturned, food is spilled, weed is smoked and verbal hand grenades are hurled.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sutton Foster to Star in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ on Broadway

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      The revival, which had an earlier run at New York City Center, is scheduled to open in August and close in November, followed by a run in Los Angeles.Sutton Foster, a classic Broadway triple threat beloved for her comedic skills and her big belt, will star this summer and fall in a Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress.”The production had a brief and exuberantly received run earlier this year as part of the Encores! program at New York City Center, where the critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing for The New York Times, said Foster “makes a banquet of the material” and added that “Foster’s glee in taking possession of the stage creates an all-encompassing manic energy that both the audience and her scene partners feed off.”The musical, first staged in 1959, is loosely based on “The Princess and the Pea” fairy tale; Foster plays Princess Winnifred, a graceless minor royal who is a possible bride for a local prince. The role is a fun one for comedically gifted actresses — it was first played on Broadway by Carol Burnett, and then, in a 1996 revival, by Sarah Jessica Parker.The show features music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Marshall Barer. The original book was by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer; the current revival is a new adaptation by Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”).The revival is being directed by Lear deBessonet, who is the artistic director of the Encores! program. It is to begin previews July 31 and to open Aug. 12 at the Hudson Theater. The run is scheduled to end Nov. 30, and then to transfer to Los Angeles, where Foster will star in a four-week run, beginning Dec. 10, at Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater.Foster, a two-time Tony Award winner, for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and a revival of “Anything Goes,” just wrapped up a three-month run in a revival of “Sweeney Todd” that she began five days after ending her two-week City Center run in “Mattress.”The “Mattress” revival is being produced by Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Creative Partners Productions (C. Graham Berwind III and Eleni Gianulis-Vermeer). More

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      Does a Smash Hit Like ‘Lion King’ Deserve a $3 Million Tax Break?

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      Broadway is still recovering from the pandemic. A state tax-credit program has helped, but watchdogs say it aids some shows that don’t need a boost.There is no greater success story on Broadway than “The Lion King.” It is reliably among the top-grossing stage shows in New York, where it has brought in nearly $2 billion over its 26-year run; its global total is five times that amount.The musical’s producer is the theatrical division of the Walt Disney Company, an entertainment industry behemoth that earned $89 billion in revenue during its last fiscal year.And yet, the show was one of roughly four dozen productions that have received millions of dollars in assistance from New York State under a program designed to help a pandemic-hobbled theater industry in New York City.Over the three years since the program was established, New York State has bestowed over $100 million on commercial Broadway productions.“The Lion King,” along with other juggernauts like “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Wicked,” each got the maximum $3 million subsidy.The program was initiated by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as theaters were nervously preparing to reopen after being shut for a year and a half. It was later tripled to $300 million by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is now considering whether to seek an extension when it expires next year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Samm-Art Williams, Playwright, Producer and Actor, Dies at 78

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      He challenged racial barriers in Hollywood, was a producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and earned a Tony nomination for “Home,” a paean to his Southern roots.Samm-Art Williams, who made his mark in several fields — as an executive producer of the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as an actor on both stage and screen and as a Tony-nominated playwright for “Home,” died on Monday in Burgaw, N.C. He was 78.His death was confirmed by his cousin Carol Brown. She did not cite a cause.An imposing 6-foot-8 (a lefty, he once served as a sparring partner to Muhammad Ali), Mr. Williams appeared in films including Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and the Coen brothers’ neo-noir, “Blood Simple” (1984). He had a memorable turn as Jim in the 1986 adaptation of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” part of PBS’s “American Playhouse” series.Mr. Williams as Jim with Patrick Day in the 1986 television version of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”Everett CollectionCommitted to expanding the Black presence in Hollywood, he was both a writer and an executive producer on “Fresh Prince,” the hit 1990s NBC comedy starring Will Smith as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who moves in with his aunt and uncle in the moneyed hills of Los Angeles.He also served as a writer and a producer on the television shows “Martin” and “Frank’s Place.” He was nominated for two Emmy Awards — for his work as a writer on “Motown Returns to the Apollo” in 1985 and a producer of “Frank’s Place” in 1988.Raised in Burgaw, a former railroad town north of Wilmington, N.C., he moved to New York in 1973 to pursue a career in acting. It was his wistfulness for his small Southern hometown that inspired “Home,” a production of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company that opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in Manhattan six years later before moving to Broadway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Are Nuns Either Saintly, Seductive or Sadistic?

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      In uncertain times, religious sisters are often invoked as vessels for collective doubt.From Chaucer’s supercilious Madame Eglantine in “The Canterbury Tales,” with her spoiled lap dogs and secular French airs, to Ryan Murphy’s ruthless Sister Jude in 2012’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a woman who wears a red negligee under her habit and is not above indulging in some communion wine, fictional portrayals of nuns have long captured and confounded the imagination. How could it be otherwise? The sisters’ vows of chastity and poverty and the air of secrecy that shrouds their cloistered lives are all intriguingly antithetical to modern Western values of sex, money and fame. Many of us have also encountered nuns in our actual lives — I spent much of fourth grade facing a corner of the classroom at the punitive behest of Sister Rosalia — and are left with what I’d call a primal fascination. But if the aesthetic interest in nuns is an enduring one, it’s also true that every few years, like fashion trends or viral flus, nuns have a particularly concentrated cultural moment. We’re living in one now.Perhaps the starkest, knottiest contemporary depiction of nuns is the playwright John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable.” First staged on Broadway in 2005, it recently wrapped another run there, directed by Scott Ellis. (Three of the cast members have been nominated for Tony Awards.) The play tells the story of the iron-fisted Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan in Ellis’s revival), the principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, who, based on the hunch of a guileless novice, Sister James (Zoe Kazan), accuses Father Flynn, the parish priest (Liev Schreiber), of making advances toward the school’s only Black student (whose mother was played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine). It’s a detective drama with no resolution, a morality tale with an insoluble ambiguity at its heart. Ellis says he was drawn to stage the play because its titular emotion feels more crucial than ever in our increasingly polarized world. “Given everything that we are in society right now, the black and white of it all, the red and the blue,” he says, “doubt is the most important place to live.”Liev Schreiber as Father Flynn (left) and Amy Ryan as Sister Aloysius in the recent Broadway production of “Doubt: A Parable” by John Patrick Shanley.Joan Marcus/Polk & Co., via Associated PressRebecca Sullivan, the author of the 2005 book “Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture,” says that “in times of deep doubt,” we tend to see cultural representations of nuns crop up. She notes that the cascade of nunsploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s — a campy, provocative, mostly European cinematic subgenre in which nuns are sexualized, tortured or possessed — occurred at a time of great social upheaval. Second-wave feminism was afoot, secularism was on the rise and the Second Vatican Council, held between 1962 and ’65, had ushered in numerous church reforms: Nuns, for example, were encouraged to get out of the convent and serve the community and were no longer required to wear habits. The liminal status of sisters — they were independent women who also exhibited a “subversive subservience,” as Sullivan puts it, to a patriarchal institution — made them rich and complex symbols, ciphers for exploring the era’s feelings about women at large.We’re in another profound moment of disruption, particularly when it comes to women’s rights and roles: Roe v. Wade has been overturned; tradwifery is a trend. And thus we’ve seen a new spate of arty nunsploitation films, with “Immaculate” (2024), starring Sydney Sweeney, being the latest. (Others include Paul Verhoeven’s 2021 erotic lesbian nun satire, “Benedetta,” and Rose Glass’s taut 2019 psychosexual horror, “Saint Maud.”) Directed by Michael Mohan, “Immaculate” follows a devout Midwestern novice, Sister Cecilia, who arrives at a gloomy convent in the remote Italian countryside and mysteriously becomes pregnant, leaving church elders to conclude that she’s carrying the savior. In a turn reminiscent of “Rosemary’s Baby,” the sinister Father Tedeschi more or less imprisons Cecilia in the dark, labyrinthine building. For all its gory, sexy-nun fun, the film raises all-too-familiar questions about female bodily autonomy in oppressive male institutions. But this nun, a feminist heroine for the 21st century, is the agent of her own destiny: Unlike so many sisters in the first wave of nunsploitation films, she frees herself.Cate Blanchett and Aswan Reid in the 2023 film “The New Boy.”via Cannes Film FestivalWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Terraces’ Review: A Stunning Tragedy Revisits the Paris Terror Attacks

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      The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.Outdoor cafe terraces are part and parcel of the Parisian way of life — ready meeting points for socializing and people-watching, across ages and social classes. Yet the word for them in French also means to floor, or bring down, someone.On Nov. 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, bringing horror to cafes and entertainment venues in a string of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a prominent French author and playwright, has channeled the collective trauma of that night into a stunning play, “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.If you were in the city that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from relatives and friends as news alerts pinged, the prospect of a show summoning those memories may be cause for trepidation. And “Terraces” does bring it all back — the gut punch, the nausea. Yet Gaudé and the director, Denis Marleau, manage just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to haunt rather than reopen wounds.It isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays have focused on the stories of survivors.With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé works on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: The text weaves together not just the experience of victims, but the voices of people whose lives changed in other ways that night. Passers-by, spouses, parents, emergency medical workers, special forces and a janitor all make appearances, with stories that overlap and build up to a collective remembrance of the attack.Extensive research evidently went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t fit neatly into the genre of documentary theater. Its characters are composite creations rather than real people: Many introduce themselves under several names and stress that theirs are collective stories. While some characters pop up time and again over the course of the play, they often occupy a liminal space between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other shootings or speaking from beyond the grave.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Invasive Species,’ the Acting Bug Bites, Dramatically

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      Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.Maia Novi’s “Invasive Species” is being marketed as an outrageous dark comedy, but it’s a quieter play than that: about being an Argentine immigrant with Hollywood ambitions, a graduate acting student at Yale and a psychiatric inpatient plagued by intrusive thoughts.“My name is Maia,” the play’s central character (Novi) tells the audience near the top of the show. “And this is a true story.”Well, true-ish, given that we’ve just seen her get bitten by the Acting Bug (Julian Sanchez), a human-size creature with a giant proboscis whose process of infecting Maia involves spitting voluptuously onto her face from above. A bit of hallucinatory license, then, has sometimes been taken.Directed by Michael Breslin at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theater, the play fragments into different worlds. The most realistic is the hospital in New Haven where Maia wakes up, in March 2022, to find she is a patient — admitted to a children’s ward, where suicide is a temptation for some of the adolescent patients.The play’s other worlds are more heightened and satirical, though they, too, have the whiff of veracity: the drama school, where a teacher says that Maia — trying to lose her accent by diligently imitating Gwyneth Paltrow — has a “lazy tongue”; the Connecticut dating scene, where a dimwitted American bro swallows every stereotype-laced lie that Maia concocts, prankishly, about her family in Argentina; a film set where a British director who casts her as Eva Perón has a blithely wrongheaded sense of authenticity.Partially inspired by the 1977 production of Spalding Gray’s theater piece “Rumstick Road,” an investigation into his mother’s suicide, “Invasive Species” carries the thrum of fear that can accompany a family history of mental illness. Maia worries — so does her father — about what she might have inherited from her own mother.Presented by a group of producers who include the playwright-provocateur Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), Breslin’s roommate when they studied drama at Yale, “Invasive Species” is crisply directed on a nearly bare stage. The supporting cast members (who include Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez and Alexandra Maurice) are quicksilver-changeable in their multiple roles, and it’s always clear which reality or unreality the characters have stepped into, even when worlds overlap. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting is instrumental in that.)This is a well acted, neatly assembled, carefully modulated play with a cumulative force that is less than it might have been. The satire — of drama school, of xenophobia — isn’t the freshest, and the obliqueness of the hospital strand softens its impact, and ultimately the play’s.“Invasive Species” is a portrait of a young woman attempting, for the sake of ambition and survival, to force herself into various molds that do not fit who she truly is.“Pretend,” one of the teenage patients advises her, practically. “You should be good at that — you’re an actress, right?”Invasive SpeciesThrough June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; invasivespeciesplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More