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      Marian Zazeela, an Artist of Light and Design, Dies at 83

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      She pivoted from painting to lighting exhibitions, performance art, graphic design and minimalist music, performed with her husband, the composer La Monte Young.In avant-garde New York, one of the most pilgrimaged sites has been the “Dream House,” a sensory environment that since 1993 has occupied the third story of a walk-up on Church Street in Lower Manhattan.From the ceiling of that small, carpeted room, theater lights treated with red and blue filters combine to throw auras of deep magenta on opposing walls. Four split discs of aluminum hang from the ceiling at torqued angles. As visitors enter and lie down, these mobiles spin slowly, catching light and casting morphing shadows of cursive E’s and wishbones.Instead of being absences of light, the shadows are positives: The lights are angled so that as one mobile shines red, its corresponding shadow speaks in blue, and vice versa.Behind this novel optical inversion was the artist and musician Marian Zazeela, who died in her sleep on March 28 after an illness, said her longtime student Jung Hee Choi, who did not specify a cause. Ms. Zazeela was 83.Ms. Zazeela never gained the renown of James Turrell or Dan Flavin, light artists who equaled her curiosity about altering optical perception in controlled environments. That oversight may have owed less to the ephemeral nature of her works than to the fact that hers were exclusively collaborative.Ms. Zazeela, right, with her husband, the musician and composer La Monte Young, and her longtime student Jung Hee Choi in New York City in 2009. The couple married in 1963.Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Abe Koogler’s New Play Is an Ode to Intense Culinary Experiences

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      In “Staff Meal,” in previews at Playwrights Horizons, a restaurant becomes a refuge as the world ends.Abe Koogler didn’t grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Wash. — sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle — in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks.So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s highbrow establishments fascinating.“Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience,” Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. “And I like looking at these windows and imagining what it’s like for the people inside.”“A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why,” he added.Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic plays about labor-intensive jobs in, for example, package inventory centers and slaughterhouses. Works about work. His latest, “Staff Meal,” about a beloved restaurant with a mysterious owner, has a similar setting (much of the story takes place in the prepping of food and serving of drinks) but with a notable diversion from his previous productions: Here is a job where the employees enjoy their work. In fact, they revere it.The restaurant’s culture of veneration for food, wine and care-taking nods to Danny Meyer’s hospitality manifesto, “Setting the Table,” and though the play, which opens on April 28 at Playwrights Horizons, begins as a familiar meet-cute, it “progressively gets weirder and weirder,” said the show’s director, Morgan Green.After first reading the script, she wondered, “How the hell do you stage it?”“I was really excited about this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling,” she said, and about mapping out “that trajectory.”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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      ‘Agreement’ and ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!,’ Two Irish Imports

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      “Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.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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      Video Games Are a Playwright’s Muse, Not Her Hobby

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      In Bekah Brunstetter’s new play “The Game,” women withhold sex from their partners who are obsessed with a Fortnite-like game. Her previous work includes “The Oregon Trail.”The writer Bekah Brunstetter is decidedly not a video game aficionado. Her personality type — “psychotically obsessed with productivity,” as she put it — has sealed off all gaming rabbit holes for the past 25 years.And yet Brunstetter, perhaps best known for her television work on “This Is Us” and the book for the current Broadway adaptation of “The Notebook,” has now written not one but two plays about the ways that video games can hinder or facilitate human connection.“The Game,” which is currently having its world premiere, is about a fictionalized version of Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. It comes seven years after Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” inspired by the game that condemned countless 1990s middle schoolers to an array of awful deaths (cholera, dysentery, snake bites, etc.) as they tried to replicate the grueling 19th-century passage west from Independence, Mo.In “The Oregon Trail,” Brunstetter paralleled the modern-day struggles of a young woman with the higher-stakes perils of her video game counterpart. With “The Game,” she is taking the outsider perspective, focusing on a support group of wives who decide to withhold sex to get their partners off Fortnite — or The Game, as it is called here. (The play is a very loose adaptation of “Lysistrata,” the ancient Greek comedy in which the sex strike is designed to end the Peloponnesian War.)Brunstetter, 41, spoke over a video call about “The Game” the day after its final dress rehearsal at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. She discussed the two plays, her learning curve and the TV show that might lure her back into the world of gaming.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Megan Ketch and Lucas Dixon in “The Game,” in which a group of women try to get their partners to stop playing a video game that resembles Fortnite.HuthPhoto, via PlayMakers Repertory CompanyWe 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 ‘Sally & Tom,’ Plantation Scandal Meets Backstage Farce

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      The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.If I were reviewing “The Pursuit of Happiness,” produced by a “low-budget-no-budget” troupe called Good Company, I might note that the subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which it approaches the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come as quite a surprise. After all, Good Company is best known for “politically charged,” “finger-waggy” provocations like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault” — work that leaves audiences running for the exits while casts bid them farewell with the bird.But “The Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t real: It’s the play within Suzan-Lori Parks’s backstager “Sally & Tom,” which opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater.Still, my review stands — except for one thing. The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction.Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”Luce (Sheria Irving) feels compelled to say so because her boyfriend, Mike, the show’s director — and also its Jefferson — wants a happier ending than the one she has written. As a proper white ally, Mike (Gabriel Ebert) understands that love is, at best, a problematic notion when one of the lovers is owned by the other. Even after 30 years together, Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will.But would it be so awful, he wonders, to make more money and draw a wider audience — which Luce mishears as a “whiter” one — by introducing just a bit of recognizable romance at the curtain? Can the not-yet-third president and the teenager who would soon bear six of his children at least hold hands?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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      2024 Olivier Awards: The Snubs and Surprises

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      Our theater critics and a reporter discuss the big winner — “Sunset Boulevard” — and the rest of the honorees at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.On Sunday night, the Olivier Awards — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — took place in London. As expected, “Sunset Boulevard” took home the most trophies (and will have a Broadway run later this year), but there were also some surprise winners. Matt Wolf and Houman Barekat, The New York Times’s London theater critics, joined the reporter Alex Marshall to discuss the winners, the snubs and the last year in British theater.Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, took home seven awards. Do you think it deserved to dominate?ALEX MARSHALL I saw “Sunset Boulevard” from the cheapest of cheap seats in the back row, but it was still my most memorable night in a theater last year. I’m not surprised that Andrew Lloyd Webber responded to the show’s wins by writing on X that it was “a highlight of my career.”For me, the only downside to its sweep is that Nicholas Hytner’s “Guys and Dolls” failed to win any major awards (it picked up one for choreography). If Lloyd’s reimagining of “Sunset” was brutal and stark, Hytner’s revamp was all exuberance and joy.Scherzinger in “Sunset Boulevard.”Marc BrennerMATT WOLF I loved everything about “Sunset Boulevard,” so, yes, I do think it deserved to dominate. That said, it must have been galling for the “Guys and Dolls” company to open that show to universal raves last spring, only to have “Sunset” come along and blindside them. The radical daring of Lloyd’s “Sunset” doesn’t happen every day, and “Guys and Dolls” was the unfortunate victim of that fact.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: It’s No Sunday in the Park With ‘Lempicka’

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      A musical about the groundbreaking Art Deco painter is vocally thrilling but historically a blur.Having dismissed her work as merely decorative, a fierce Italian gives harsh advice to an ambitious young painter: “You need to be a monster,” he brays. “Or a machine.”The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the advice in real life because it was never given. But “Lempicka,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, certainly did, and then some. It’s a monster and a machine.A machine because it argues, with streamlined efficiency, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and ’30s, Lempicka forever changed the representation of women in art, and thus changed women themselves. The volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead breasts that so titillated Jazz Age Paris became, the show suggests, today’s template for glamazonian feminism.As for “monster,” well, efficiency is not always pretty. Among the values compromised in the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historical precision. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, and later a fascist. But the scene in which Lempicka studies art with him is, like many others, made up.Does that matter in a musical that admits it is “inspired” by life, not faithful to it? Are there perhaps greater values than truth in play?Natalie Joy Johnson, left, as Suzy Solidor and Iman as Rafaela in “Lempicka,” directed by Rachel Chavkin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More