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      ‘Between Two Knees’ Review: A Virtuosic Romp Through a Century of Terrors

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      Two deadly standoffs at Wounded Knee are the bookends for a show that manages to narrate a violent history with moments of light and humor.Rapid-fire punchlines and crafty sight gags may not seem the most obvious means to convey a brutal history of displacement and extermination. But “Between Two Knees,” which opened at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan on Tuesday, uses both in an audaciously sidesplitting comedy that’s an indictment of Native American persecution.The show’s antic account of Indigenous struggle was written by the 1491s, an intertribal sketch comedy troupe that includes Sterlin Harjo, a creator of “Reservation Dogs.” The action is bookended by two deadly standoffs: the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that site in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who were protesting government injustice.A narrator named Larry (Justin Gauthier) welcomes the audience with the casual air of a stand-up breaking in the crowd, saying that Indians have experienced some “pretty dark” stuff. White audience members are warned that guilt pangs lie ahead — and encouraged to assuage them by depositing donations into a basket being passed around. “Don’t be cheap now,” Larry prods. “I promise, when you leave, you will still own everything.”Playful daggers like these are cloaked throughout the production, directed with ingenuity and finesse by Eric Ting, with a vaudeville-style emphasis on amusement and artifice.When we meet Ina (a wryly deadpan Sheila Tousey) clutching her baby during the Wounded Knee massacre, for example, an ensemble member demonstrates the severity of Ina’s wounds by detaching her false arm and absconding offstage with it. (Victims of the siege, many of them women and children, were unarmed.) A red streamer unfurls from Ina’s shoulder like a clown’s handkerchief, the show’s recurring signifier of bloodshed.Ina’s murder starts a multigenerational story that follows her descendants’ turmoil through the 20th century: Ina’s orphaned son Isaiah (Derek Garza) and his love interest, Irma (Shyla Lefner), defeat the wicked nuns at their Native American boarding school (a video-game-style showdown with witty projections by Shawn Duan) to become vigilantes. Their son William, a.k.a. Wolf (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), departs to fight in World War II. A cascade of soapy twists, including a baby left on a doorstep, eventually leads the family back to Wounded Knee.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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      Dating Woes? Nina Conti Has the Answer, or at Least Some Jokes

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      In “The Dating Show,” the British comedian and ventriloquist initiates close encounters of the potentially romantic kind. Laughs will definitely ensue.Meaningful, long-lasting connections can take a while to form, but when Nina Conti met her future partner-in-crime, she knew they were simpatico right away.“It was one of those moments where I felt very grounded as soon as I saw his face,” Conti, a British performer and writer, said in a video conversation. “It was the chemistry between my personality and something so cozy about him. You can put him in a handbag, no problem.”It might be worth mentioning that the face in question belongs to Monkey, the puppet that has been Conti’s main scene partner for most of her nearly 25 years as a ventriloquist.“You can actually project anything onto that face,” she said. “Wisdom is what I choose to project onto it. When I look at him, I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch. But it’s weird because onstage it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Creating and sustaining personal relationships seems to matter to Conti, who inherited the dummy collection of her lover and mentor, the theater maker Ken Campbell, after he died in 2008. (She explored that grief-stricken time in the 2012 documentary “Her Master’s Voice,” which also follows her to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky.) Now, close encounters of the potentially romantic kind are at the center of “The Dating Show,” which Conti is performing at SoHo Playhouse through March 2.Monkey, however, is not her main collaborator in that piece — the audience is.“I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch,” Conti said of Monkey. “Onstage, it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Charlotte Hadden for 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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      Is Earlier Better for Theater Start Times?

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      In an effort to entice audiences back after the pandemic, Britain’s National Theater is testing a 6:30 p.m. curtain.At 6:30 p.m. on a recent Thursday, most London theatergoers were still busy at work, or eating a preshow dinner, or maybe waiting at home for a babysitter.Except at the National Theater. There, about 450 theater fans were already in their seats, where the curtain had just gone up on “Till the Stars Come Down,” a dark comedy about a wedding that goes disastrously wrong. That night was the first performance in a six-month trial to see if starting some shows at 6:30 p.m. instead of 7:30 can lure back theatergoers who, since the coronavirus pandemic began, don’t want to stay out late in London anymore.The early performances were “marginally outselling” other midweek shows, said Alex Bayley, the National Theater’s head of marketing. The theater will wait to see the trial results before making the early starts a permanent fixture. In interviews in the bustling foyer before the show, 20 attendees said that they thought the early start was a good idea. Ruth Hendle, 65, an accountant, said that it meant she wouldn’t have to run out at the end to catch the last train home. “I’m too old to be doing that anymore,” she said. Mary Castleden, 68, said that an early finish would mean an easier drive home.The only complaints concerned the lack of time to have dinner first. “I hope they’re not eating food in this play,” said Karim Khan, 29, “otherwise I might get hungry.” (Khan did not get his wish: Soon after the play began, the ensemble cast performed a scene in which they snacked from an overflowing buffet.)In New York, there has been some movement on curtain times, too. Jason Laks, the Broadway League’s general counsel, said that about 10 years ago, an 8 p.m. theater start was sacrosanct. Now, there was “a trend to a 7 p.m. curtain,” he said, although he noted that that shift began before the pandemic.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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      ‘Munich Medea: Happy Family’ Review: A Friendship Crushed by the Past

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      Themes of incest and sexual abuse of minors loom large in this strikingly becalmed play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother.“Munich Medea: Happy Family” carries the wrong trigger warning. Rather than cautioning us that Corinne Jaber’s debut play “addresses, but does not depict, sexual assault,” it should warn us that its tropes will be ploddingly predictable to just about anyone who has seen the #MeToo movement play out in recent years.On opposite sides of a sparsely furnished split-level stage, two women, Caroline and Alice, tell us about the dissolution of their childhood friendship after they were sexually abused by the same man. While the script seems to be pitched somewhere between a memory play and an exorcism, what unfolds onstage, under the director Lee Sunday Evans’s light touch, is as dry and sober as a deposition — with its mentions of consent (uttered 10 times in the play’s 75 minutes), forensic descriptions of rape and clockwork-like moments of catharsis. For a play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother, “Munich Medea” (a co-production of PlayCo and WP Theater) is a strikingly domesticated and becalmed production.This is not to say that mothers come off entirely well in this play. At one point, Caroline (a granite-faced Crystal Finn) — looking back on the abuse that her father (a louche Kurt Rhoads) inflicted on her best friend, Alice (Heather Raffo) — reflects that “none of this would’ve happened” without her mother’s consent, “which she gave, always, willingly and silently.” Her mother never materializes in the play. That the mother is effectively silenced could be a way for her daughter to exact poetic revenge, by silencing the person who wove a conspiracy of silence around her husband’s crimes. But the play is not wily enough to ambush the accomplice in her own trap.Alice’s own mother, a refugee from East Germany, is also conspicuously absent. A more sympathetic character, she’s described as a “virtuous, well-behaved Protestant” who once confronted Caroline’s father, asking him to leave her daughter alone, to no avail. As played by Rhoads, the father (he is given no proper name) is a silver-tongued theater actor who spends much of the play in his dressing room, elevated about 10 feet above the floor. Lines from Friedrich Schiller rain down on us from his lair, and even in old age, he has no trouble quoting Georg Büchner and Rainer Maria Rilke from memory. As with Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous pedophile, Humbert Humbert, the father in “Munich Medea” seems to believe that aesthetic ingenuity more than makes up for ethical lapses.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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      Marc Summers Is Still Up for a Double Dare. (Hold the Green Slime.)

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      “I made Nickelodeon,” the former “Double Dare” host said. Now he’s telling all in his Off Broadway show “The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers.”Rehearsing at a studio space in Times Square earlier this month, Marc Summers was crouched low, engaged in a conversation with God. Such scenes are staples of one-person shows like the kind that Summers is bringing to Off Broadway, but his arch tone suggested he wasn’t approaching this existential moment too earnestly.“What is my purpose in life?” Summers called out, wondering what he should do if he encountered disappointments or impediments on his journey.A booming, recorded voice answered that life may be full of pain and regrets, but it also offers humor and joy. “The only question,” the voice said, “is are you ready for it?”After further contemplation, Summers answered confidently. “I think I’m ready,” he said, pausing for effect. “I think I’m ready to take the physical challenge!”Summers is 72 with a head of mostly white and gray hair, but his toothy smile and exuberant cadence still make him easily recognizable to the generation of television viewers who were introduced to him as the host of the children’s game show “Double Dare.”“Double Dare,” which debuted in 1986 on Nickelodeon, blended a trivia competition with outrageously messy obstacle courses. A team of two youthful contestants could dare a rival duo to field a question, but their opponents, of course, could double dare them back. In that case the original team had to either answer the question or submit to a physical challenge.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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      ‘Six’ Creators Announce Their Second Act

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      Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow spent years working out how to follow their hit musical about Henry VIII’s wives. “Why Am I So Single?” is their answer.In January 2019, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of the musical “Six,” were on a writer’s retreat in Connecticut, wondering how to follow up their celebrated first show.That month, “Six” — in which Henry VIII’s wives tell their stories via pop songs — was starting a major West End run, and a Broadway transfer was on the horizon. The show had already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a growing number of American fans were streaming the show’s soundtrack. More and more, people wanted to know what the pair would do next.During the Connecticut retreat, they struggled to come up with new ideas, Marlow recalled in a recent interview, and instead gossiped about their love lives. Then, they had a breakthrough: “Maybe this is what we should write about,” Marlow said.On Wednesday, Marlow, 29, and Moss, 30, announced that their second musical, “Why Am I So Single?,” will open at the Garrick Theater in London on Aug. 27.The show, which has a 12-person cast, follows two friends struggling to write a musical and asking each other why they’re chronically single. That idea may sound similar to the creators’ time in Connecticut, but Moss, laughing nervously, said it was “definitely not a complete autobiography.”Marlow said that the musical, which includes songs inspired by Dua Lipa hits and numbers from “Singin’ in the Rain,” was “about friendship and love and loneliness and everything that goes with it.”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 ‘The Apiary,’ the Bees Have a Troubling Tale to Tell

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      Worldwide colony collapse is the subject of a bright, strange, upbeat thought experiment about insect hives, and our own.Here’s a pitch you haven’t heard before. It’s 2046. Bees in the wild have succumbed to a planet-wide die-off, taking almonds, avocados and honey down with them. But in a subterranean lab, three women doing “palliative care” with four remaining broods make a hopeful if gruesome discovery.Also, it’s a comedy. Call it “Little Hive of Horrors.”That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey.I say “almost too good” because a staging so sensitive yet confident could disguise whatever flaws may lurk in the text. So be it: “The Apiary” flies by with so much good humor and novel eye candy (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bee lab represented onstage before) that you barely register the way the playwright’s thematic focus comes dangerously close to obsession.The insects are everywhere. To begin with, Walt Spangler’s set is dominated by four hive boxes and a gigantic gauze-walled chamber filled with little prop bugs I could swear were swarming. The backdrop features a honeycomb pattern. The floor, the railings and even the paper in the beekeepers’ desktop inboxes are bumblebee yellow.It’s not just the visuals, though. The characters talk bees, live bees, dream bees. Gwen (Taylor Schilling) is perhaps the least emotionally attached: As the lab’s manically insecure manager, she’s freaked out by the decline of the broods under her care less because it might mean ecological collapse than because it might mean funding cutbacks from “upstairs.” Countering her, the relentlessly optimistic Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) fully stans the critters: They are “very sensitive and so so smart,” she explains merrily to a newcomer. “They dance! They tell jokes.”We don’t hear those jokes, but between scenes we do see Stephanie Crousillat, in yoga wear and a gas mask — the costumes are by Jennifer Moeller — performing Warren Adams’s creepy bee choreography.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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      Shakespeare to Hit the Road While Central Park Theater Is Closed

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      The Delacorte is being renovated, so this summer will instead bring a mobile production and then a filmed play to outdoor sites in the city’s five boroughs.Free Shakespeare in the Park, one of the longtime treasures of summer in New York City, will be smaller-scale and itinerant this year because a gut renovation of the program’s Central Park home is underway.The Public Theater, the nonprofit organization that presents the annual Shakespeare festival, announced Tuesday that, instead of its usual large-scale productions at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, this year it would send a smaller production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and plazas around the city between Memorial Day and the end of June, followed by outdoor screenings of a filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in July, August and early September.The production of “The Comedy of Errors” is a 90-minute bilingual musical adaptation from the director Rebecca Martinez and the composer Julian Mesri that the Public staged last year at city parks and recreation centers as part of the theater’s mobile unit. This summer’s five-week touring production will have a slightly larger company, and will visit some larger venues than last year’s production. It will start in Manhattan, with a week on a plaza in front of the New York Public Library’s flagship building in Bryant Park, followed by a series of dates at Hudson Yards and other locations in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. All performances will be free.“It’s not a replacement for the Delacorte — it’s not intended to be a replacement — but my hope is that it will be successful enough as an experiment that this expanded version of what the mobile unit does can keep going indefinitely,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said in an interview.The filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kenny Leon and starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, was shot during a run in Central Park in 2019; it will be screened outdoors, free, at sites in all five boroughs.“Much Ado About Nothing,” filmed for the PBS series Great Performances, will also be among four Shakespeare in the Park productions that can be streamed online during May and June. The others are a 2023 production of “Hamlet,” a 2022 production of “Richard III” and a 2021 production called “Merry Wives.” Streaming the Great Performances films will be free.The Delacorte has been closed since last fall for a $78 million renovation. A groundbreaking was held in October and the project is scheduled to finish sometime next year, and the summer of 2025 is expected to include Shakespeare back in Central Park. More