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      Searching for Brian Friel, and His Mythical Ballybeg

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      Irish Repertory Theater’s season-long survey of the playwright’s work prompted our reporter to seek out the Irish town that inspired the imaginary site of so many of his plays.Up a steep and grassy windblown hill, in the top row of what’s known as the new graveyard, the playwright Brian Friel lies buried under a dark, glossy slab etched with an image of a St. Brigid’s cross, a traditional Irish symbol woven from rushes.This little cemetery in a remote northwest corner of Ireland has a sweeping view of valley, hills and tiny town: Glenties, County Donegal, which in a way is a curious choice for Friel’s final resting place. It isn’t where he was born, in 1929; that was Omagh, across the nearby border with Northern Ireland. It isn’t where he died, in 2015; that was Greencastle, quite a bit farther north in County Donegal, on the sea.But it is, arguably, a place he spent a lot of time in his head. Glenties (population 927 in 2022) is his mother’s hometown, where he would go during childhood summers. Not a son of the town but a grandson, he became, as the New York Times critic Mel Gussow asserted in a 1991 profile, “a writer on a level with Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge,” two of the most esteemed Irish playwrights in the canon.What claim to fame Glenties has, and what brush with Hollywood, is because of Friel. In his writing, he transformed it into a place called Ballybeg: the site of many of his plays, including the most famous, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), which is inspired by his mother and aunts, and dedicated “In memory of those five brave Glenties women.”At St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history around the corner from Main Street, material about Friel includes news clippings of his funeral and old show posters.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe grave of the Irish playwright Brian Friel overlooks the western Irish town of Glenties.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOff Broadway this season, Irish Repertory Theater’s Friel Project will revive three of his Ballybeg plays, starting with “Translations” (1980), about a 19th-century British colonialist project to Anglicize Ireland, directed by the Tony Award winner Doug Hughes and running through Dec. 3. It will be followed in January by “Aristocrats” (1979), set amid a once-grand Catholic family in Chekhovian decline, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director; and in March by “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964), in which a young man prepares to leave Ballybeg for the United States, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director.After Friel died, the critic Michael Billington called him “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation,” citing a body of work that examined “exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland [and] the subjective nature of memory.” All of it, he pronounced, was “bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theater and his breadth of understanding.”In a phone interview, O’Reilly said that “if there was such a thing as a poet laureate of the Irish Rep, it would be Brian Friel”: an intellectually curious, deeply empathetic playwright who probed the makeup of Irish identity. As profoundly as Friel fathomed small-town Irish life, he also recognized the urge to escape it — or in O’Reilly’s words: “Let me get the hell out.”“In so many of his plays, it’s about the departure from it and the need to break beyond it,” said O’Reilly, who was 19 when he left his hometown, even tinier than Glenties, in County Cavan.A current view of Main Street, which is pocked with vacant storefronts.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA photograph on display at St. Connell’s Museum shows Main Street in 1912.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOf course, the true Ballybeg — whose name in Irish, Baile Beag, means “small town” — exists only in Friel’s plays. Still, you can hear echoes of Glenties in those plays, and echoes of those plays in Glenties.And if you go there looking for him, as I did in late September, you will find him — even if the post office where his mother is said to have worked is long gone, succeeded by a branch tucked efficiently inside the Costcutter supermarket, on an unbusy Main Street pocked with vacant storefronts.I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast at one end of the road, near the electric vehicle charging point that communicates loud and clear that Glenties is a 21st-century town. At the other is a hotel whose website commemorates the occasion, 25 years ago, when Meryl Streep, star of the film adaptation of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” slept there “on the night of the local premiere.” In between, a creative arts center and a gift shop both have Lughnasa — “the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh,” as the narrator of Friel’s play explains, and a harvest festival — in their names.With a dozen Broadway productions in his lifetime, most of them Ballybeg plays (including “Faith Healer,” from 1979, in which a pivotal, sinister event occurs on the outskirts of town), Friel was not given to sentimentalizing rusticity.A peat bog in the hills and mountains surrounding the town.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesBut outsiders have a tendency in that direction, as a Ballybeg woman says in Friel’s comedy “The Communication Cord” (1982): “You know the way strangers get queer notions about a place like this; and foreigners is the worst.”Yet when a visitor remarks, in “Give Me Your Answer, Do!” (1997), “The view up that valley is breathtaking,” he could easily be talking about Glenties, whose name in Irish, Na Gleannta, means “the glens.”The town has stunning vistas of the Blue Stack Mountains that hem it in — and make driving there from Dublin, as I did, an adventure, fraught with the risk of toppling off some narrow, winding road into a patch of gorgeous scenery.Phillip Rodgers, owner of Roddy’s Bar, shares a drink with his patrons.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA 2008 photo of the “The Laurels,” the old family home where Friel’s grandparents, mother and aunts once lived. Mary Ita BoyleA local resident sells bread at a weekly street market.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesFOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, starting in the 1890s, a railway stopped in Glenties. I learned that at St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history just around the corner from Main Street. Its collection of Friel material tends toward news clippings (more Meryl) and old show posters (like the one that informs you that both Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea were in the original cast of “Translations,” in Derry).There is also the text of a cheeky piece that Friel wrote for The Irish Times in 1959, ribbing Glenties for its second consecutive win of the national Tidy Towns contest. “My mother’s people were MacLoones,” he notes, wryly claiming “direct descent” from that “mecca of tidiness.”An early-20th-century photograph at St. Connell’s Museum shows a train traveling in western Ireland.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe family home was not far from where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather was the station master.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe cottage where the family lived, the home of the impecunious sisters who inspired “Dancing at Lughnasa,” is in Glenties — close to where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather had been the station master. The Brian Friel Trust, which reportedly has plans for a cultural center elsewhere in town, owns the house.From the road, the path to the old family home passes under a low canopy of branches. Then, in a clearing, there it is, looking grimy and forlorn, with moss-carpeted stairs and a gold-lettered plaque beside the door. “‘The Laurels,’” it says, which is the house’s name. “Unveiled by Brian Friel, Meryl Streep and Sophie Thompson. 24th September 1998.”Sheep are free to graze the rolling hills.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAnd this is where the soft glow of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a memory play set in imaginary Ballybeg in 1936, collides hard with a reality that is too earthbound, too bleak, too untouched by poetry. But also — maybe because of the plaque, and the gloom — more like an exhibit than a remnant of history.“Translations” (in which, somewhat mind-bendingly, a character from Ballybeg mentions Glenties in conversation) takes place a century earlier, in 1833, as the British are mapping all of Ireland and rewriting every Irish place name into English. It’s more than a decade before the Great Famine, but jobs are scarce — a theme that runs through Friel’s plays — and a fear of blighted crops is making some locals nervous.“Sweet God,” another scoffs in response, “did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never!”If you go simply by the sign on Main Street in Glenties, with its arrow pointing vaguely north, you will never find the town’s famine graveyard. If you consult Google Maps, it will tell you that the place is “temporarily closed.” Not so.The famine graveyard has a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMichael, who now lives in Australia, was visiting family in Glenties. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesWhen I pulled up behind the group of houses where my GPS said it was, a man in a purple sweater instantly emerged to find out why I was there. Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. Down the hill, sheep were grazing.The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. Sickness spread among the desperate poor at the Glenties workhouse. Inmates who perished were interred out back.So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.I got back in the car and headed to the Atlantic Ocean, about eight miles away, where the island of Inishkeel and its medieval monastic ruins lie not far across the water from Narin/Portnoo Beach. At low tide, you can walk to it on an exposed sandbar, but you will need to keep careful watch of the time if you don’t want to get trapped there, and heed a sign, fixed to a gate on the island, that warns, surreally: “Beware of the bull.” (I saw no bull.)The island of Inisheel in the distance. A sandbar that is exposed during low tide connects Narin/Portnoo Beach and Inishkeel.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThere is a wildness and a timelessness to Inishkeel. A rugged desolation, too, even though all you have to do is face the far shore to see the houses on the mainland, and wind turbines spinning in the hills beyond: a side-by-side coexistence of the eerie ancient and the unsettled now that is very Friel.Glenties doesn’t have a coastline, but Ballybeg does, with at least one island off it: in “The Gentle Island” (1971), called Inishkeen; in “Wonderful Tennessee” (1993), called Oilean Draiochta, which is translated in the play as Island of Mystery. Neither island is tidal like Inishkeel — you need a boat to get to them — but each shares a bit of the real island’s past.In those plays, Friel taps into the primal, the mythic, the spiritual. And maybe it was just the gray and chill the day I was there, and the tiny needles of rain that stung my face. But on that marvelous, rock-strewn island, all of those forces seemed entirely conjurable — somewhere off beautiful Ballybeg, County Donegal. More

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      Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Short, Shallow ‘King Lear’

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      The veteran actor directs and plays the title role in a brisk and curiously weightless London production.“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,” Lear famously lets rip in an open-air encounter with the elements that should strike at the heart.But in a new West End revival of “King Lear,” directed by its leading man, Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare’s most nerve-shredding tragedy doesn’t sweep us headlong into savagery or sadness. It sounds good, as you might expect with a seasoned Shakespearean actor at the helm, but too rarely succeeds in stopping the heart.The notably brisk production, which opened Tuesday night at Wyndham’s Theater, in London, runs straight through at just under two hours. It is a tough ticket to get during its limited run through Dec. 9, with a New York run at the Shed scheduled for next fall. Time may well deepen the production’s sense of pathos, if the company can connect more with the roiling fury of Shakespeare’s text. As it stands, a central urgency is missing, from the leading man on through the rest of the cast.The production feels like an accomplished rhetorical exercise that doesn’t run deep, when this, of all plays, needs to rattle the soul. The litmus test of any “Lear” is whether you emerge from the theater moist-eyed, and my cheeks were dry throughout.The set, designed by Jon Bausor, evokes the jagged and austere English countryside.Johan PerssonReturning to his theatrical roots, Branagh speaks the verse with crispness and clarity, articulating the journey of the mentally wayward ruler who wreaks havoc by setting his three daughters in competition with one another.Branagh offers a growing awareness of Lear’s verbal command faltering, and a silent scream late in the show will surely resonate with anyone who has seen dementia up close. Yet a more visceral sense of the play’s power remains out of reach.You have to wonder about the demands of juggling a role such as Lear from the dual perspectives of director and star. On film, of course, you can look at footage along the way, but it must be tricky for Branagh to get a sense of the production when he is at its center. How can he tell what’s landing, or isn’t?Onstage, the visuals are suitably austere. Jon Bausor’s set evokes Stonehenge, or the English coastline, with jagged outcrops of rock underneath a circular disc, and the costumes, with fur boots and collars, give off a “Game of Thrones” vibe.The acting ensemble, made up of graduates from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Branagh’s alma mater), many in their West End debuts, transmits a feral, take-no-prisoners energy appropriate to a play that famously includes an eye-gouging scene. That atrocity leaves nothing to the imagination, and as its victim, the stricken Gloucester, Joseph Kloska stands out among a variable supporting cast.Edmund, played by Corey Mylchreest, battling with Doug Colling as Edgar.Johan PerssonWonderful though it is to give newcomers a chance, the overall impression is of a company that has yet to jell. Corey Mylchreest is impressive as Edmund, the schemer at odds with the virtuous Edgar (Doug Colling), whose baleful pronouncements close the play. Deborah Alli’s imposing Goneril has an instantly striking stage presence missing from her sisters, though Jessica Revell is better when she shifts from playing the tongue-tied Cordelia to the witty, if woebegone, Fool.At 62, Branagh is relatively young to be playing a character who speaks of an “unburdened crawl toward death.” Appearing bare-chested at one point, he looks more likely to be riding a mountain bike toward the grave, and when he comes in carrying the dead Cordelia, it looks as if she were no burden at all.And for the first time ever, I had to wonder whether brevity in Shakespeare — an attractive idea, in principle — wasn’t working against the play. The full majesty of “King Lear” needs time to unfold, and I’ve often seen productions twice as long that flew by. This one was over when many of those would be having their intermission, and emerging onto the street after the show, I found myself pondering a curiously weightless production in which the wellsprings of human emotion have yet to be tapped.King LearThrough Dec. 9 at Wyndham’s Theater, in London; kinglearbranagh.com. More

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      ‘Artificial Flavors’ Review: Blame ChatGPT for This Musical

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      Each performance culminates in a production, composed on the spot, with misguided help from artificial intelligence.Artificial intelligence can paint meddlesome monkeys, speak in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones and play a tune to suit a hall of mirrors. But it can’t write a musical that doesn’t feel canned (at least, not yet). That’s the argument put forward by “Artificial Flavors,” a live demonstration of A.I.’s creative capabilities — and tedious limitations — at 59E59 Theaters.The writer and director Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the restlessly curious company the Civilians, here assumes the role of a somewhat befuddled narrator, explaining that this project was born from his late-night tinkering with programs like ChatGPT. Cosson, who says he is not a performer, at times doesn’t seem to know where to stand or what to say next. Whether or not it’s an act (and I suspect that it is), Cosson’s apparent insecurity provides a stark contrast to the technology he is investigating.Cosson solicits Mad Libs-style audience input to show that generative A.I. merely needs prompting and a few seconds to spit out an unconvincing Picasso or write vaguely in the voice of Stephen King, examples projected on a screen. Six actors then step in to perform A.I.-generated skits, including a scene between socialist comrades quibbling over a Birkin bag on the night I attended. Cosson promises that each performance of “Artificial Flavors” will culminate in a brand-new musical, with text written by ChatGPT and melodies composed on the spot by the Civilians and the onstage music director Dan Lipton.The problem is that every example of A.I.-generated content proceeding it portends how bad that musical will be. That seems to be Cosson’s point, though it becomes tiresome as his experiment balloons to 90 minutes. What scant humor A.I. produces here is inadvertent and its metaphors are clichéd. (“We’re more than gears, circuits and wires,” one early sample lyric goes, “We are the spark igniting untamed fires.”)There is ingenuity in the varying parameters for a musical that Cosson feeds into ChatGPT, including conflict, setting and structure (for example, a pie-eating contest at a beachside resort). But by Cosson’s design, A.I. is squarely to blame for the resulting artistic failure. The cast does impressive impromptu work, singing on the fly and reading live text from hand-held tablets. Michael Castillejos and Trey Lyford add lo-fi percussion to Lipton’s electronic keyboard, while Heath Saunders appears to lead the ensemble’s unpolished vocals. But the songs and dialogue, though generated anew each night, are no doubt consistently inane.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘I Can Get It for You Wholesale’ Review: Rag Trade Revival, Recut for Today

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      A story considered too dark for Broadway in its time is too much of a patchwork in ours.What a shame that the 1962 musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” a critique of vulture capitalism disguised as a rag trade comedy, is now best known as the Broadway show that gave Barbra Streisand her start at 19. No matter how good she was — and the recording of her big number, “Miss Marmelstein,” overflows with stupendous, youthful invention — hers was only a small, comic role in a much darker story by the novelist Jerome Weidman; her song a bauble in a fascinating and multifaceted score by Harold Rome.A clash of styles probably contributed to the show’s meh run. In Weidman’s novel, the main character, a garment industry climber named Harry Bogen, is an impenitent snake, a moral bottom feeder who knows no bottom. (On his way up, he breaks a strike, lies to his mother, dupes his pals, two-times his girlfriend and embezzles from his partners.) Despite the antiheroes of “Pal Joey” and “Carousel” in the 1940s — and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a recent hit when “Wholesale” opened — Bogen was apparently deemed too awful for Broadway, so Weidman softened him. Casting Elliott Gould further dialed up the twinkle.The revisal of “Wholesale” that opened on Monday at Classic Stage Company was meant, in part, to address the tonal problem, and who better to do it than Weidman’s son John, himself a fine musical librettist. (Two great Sondheim shows are among his credits: “Pacific Overtures” and “Assassins.”) He has restored some of the novel’s first-person narration, so that Harry (Santino Fontana) gets to work his charm directly on the audience. (Fontana being a charmer, he almost succeeds.) Weidman has cut a song, moved two, added three from Rome’s archive and trimmed several others. He’s excised any hint of redemption at the end.That the show, directed by Trip Cullman, still doesn’t hold together is unfortunate. Its bones are too big for the 196-seat Classic Stage space, which makes the story feel as if it were stuffed into a dress several sizes too small. Likewise, the music is too complex for six players weirdly doubling. The violinist naturally enough plays viola, but also percussion, occasionally at the same time.This doesn’t matter when the show’s best singers are given its best songs: Judy Kuhn, as Harry’s Yiddishe momme, offers an exquisite “Too Soon”; Rebecca Naomi Jones, as his long-suffering girlfriend, a touching “Who Knows?”; and Joy Woods, as the gold digger he trades up to, a cynical duet called “What’s in It for Me?” (with Greg Hildreth as a salesman). And Julia Lester’s clarion honk in “Miss Marmelstein” recalls Streisand without being a copy. Still, the lack of orchestral texture makes the songs, dotting the highly episodic book, feel like one-offs, not a score.Rebecca Naomi Jones, center left, and Fontana as a couple in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘Lempicka,’ New Musical About Art Deco Artist, to Open on Broadway

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      Rachel Chavkin of “Hadestown” will direct the show, which had developmental productions in Massachusetts and California.“Lempicka,” a new musical about the painter Tamara de Lempicka, will open on Broadway next spring after a decade in development.The show will join a Broadway season crowded with new musicals — at least a dozen are expected — at a time when the industry is facing smaller audiences, and higher costs, than it had before the coronavirus pandemic.An Art Deco portraitist who was married and had female lovers, Lempicka was born in Poland in 1898 and lived in Russia, which she fled because of the Russian Revolution; France, which she fled because of World War II; and then the United States and Mexico. Though her art and her social life glittered for a period, she later faded from prominence, and died in 1980. In recent years, her art has sold strongly; contemporary collectors of her work include Madonna.The show, scheduled to begin performances March 19 and to open April 14 at the Longacre Theater, features music by Matt Gould and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer, who also collaborated on the book. The director is Rachel Chavkin, the Tony Award-winning director of “Hadestown,” and choreography is by Raja Feather Kelly.“This is a massive epic, in the company of ‘Les Mis’ or ‘Evita,’ about this incredible artist who has been, for a variety of reasons, dismissed from our history books,” Chavkin said. “It’s fierce and queer and traces the first half of the 20th century through the eyes of this very complicated and ambitious and visionary woman.”Eden Espinosa, a onetime Elphaba in “Wicked,” will star in the title role. She is currently appearing in a new musical, “The Gardens of Anuncia,” running Off Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater. The rest of the “Lempicka” cast has not yet been announced.The musical has had two previous productions, at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts in 2018 and last year at La Jolla Playhouse in California, as well as several workshops and presentations over the years. (A previous effort to dramatize Lempicka’s life, a play called “Tamara,” ran in New York in 1987.)“Lempicka” is being produced by Seaview, a production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea, and Jenny Niederhoffer. It is being capitalized for up to $19.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      Review: In ‘Stereophonic,’ the Rock Revolution Will Be Recorded

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      David Adjmi’s riveting new play, with songs by Will Butler, is about a ’70s band that nearly destroys itself making an epochal album.It’s an imperfect rule of thumb that musicals lift up and dramas drill down. So what do you call David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which does both?You could rightly say it’s a play with music, emphasis on the “play”: In a little more than three hours it features just six songs, some of them fragmentary.But that would be to shortchange the ingenious way Adjmi weaves sound and story into something as granular as it is operatic. Granular because the songs (by Will Butler) are not decorations but are elemental to the plot, in which the five members of a rock band spend a year of the mid-1970s writing and laying down tracks for an epochal new album while bickering over each riff and tempo. Operatic because what they wind up recording, however refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury.There is plenty of each in “Stereophonic,” which opened on Sunday at Playwrights Horizons in a relentlessly compelling production by Daniel Aukin that has the grit of a documentary. In a way, it is one: If you know anything about the year Fleetwood Mac spent making the 1977 album “Rumours,” you will grasp the template at once, even though Adjmi has said he was inspired by many bands of the era after listening to Led Zeppelin on a flight to Boston.Nevertheless, the bones are Fleetwood Mac’s. Like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the play’s Diana and Peter are an American couple, she on vocals, he on vocals and guitar. Like John and Christine McVie, the fictional Reg and Holly are British, he on bass guitar, she on keyboard and vocals. And like Mick Fleetwood himself, Simon is the drummer, playing Daddy to the others while missing his wife and actual children back home.That they all behave childishly once aesthetic arguments arise is a given of the milieu. The constant drinking, toking and dipping into a big bag of cocaine don’t help, even if it’s part of the job of the two overwhelmed engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, hilarious) to keep the sessions going at any cost.Daniel Aukin’s relentlessly compelling production has the grit of a documentary, and David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut something is already wrong when the band arrives at the studio in Sausalito, Calif.: The intimacy and blend so riveting in their music has not worked out as well in their lives. Reg (Will Brill, heartbreakingly unhinged) and Holly (Juliana Canfield) are evidently on the skids. Indeed, Reg is so cataclysmically strung out by the third day of recording he can barely walk; he looks like a drowned rabid squirrel. Holly and the rest of the band, who all live together in a house nearby, are past the breaking point of patience and exhaustion.Drugs and sleep deprivation are the accelerants here, exacerbating Reg and Holly’s flip-flops of affection while undoing the couples who at first seem properly glued. Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and Peter (Tom Pecinka) have been a couple for nine years, held together by mutual admiration and complementary flaws. (He’s a control freak and she’s insecure.) Even so, they too begin to crack. Peter’s volcanic temper erupts as Diana, gradually emerging as the group’s breakout star, gingerly tries to assert more independence.By the time Simon (Chris Stack, suavely coiled) announces that his wife has left him, we begin to adjust to the depths toward which Adjmi has quietly been leading us, beneath the expert polyphony of his overlapping dialogue, the keenly imagined naturalism of the setting — David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder — and the nervy patience necessary to let characters come to their own boil.Pidgeon and Pecinka are riveting as a couple whose relationship begins to crack during the protracted recording session.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat deep story is about the disaster of maleness, and thus of mating, behind the pop-rock revolution of the period. (The Bicentennial vibe is firmly established by Enver Chakartash’s late-hippie costumes, including some wild peacockery for Simon.) And though Adjmi’s depiction of the men as stunted adolescents at first seems lightly satirical — the casual thumbing of Playboy in the control room, the engineers high-fiving each other over shared fantasies of oiled-up women reclining on Corvettes — the atmosphere eventually turns menacing.When challenged, Peter, who fancies himself (and may be) the band’s best musician, rigidly defends a fraying idea of what you might call monaural masculinity. Women are accomplices, not equals: incomprehensible witches, strange in their sisterliness (the men are Cains and Abels) and artists only accidentally.To the extent that “Stereophonic” dramatizes a victory of any kind it is in the way Diana (Pidgeon is riveting in all aspects of the role) inches herself away from Peter (Pecinka, too, is riveting) and at last defies him. Not without a price, of course. Another of Adjmi’s main interests here is in the tricky duality of music and, by extension, of art. However cathartic, writing and performing do not fix anything, the soul being too complicated for that. “I thought I was getting things out with the music because it’s so expressive and exhausting, but you don’t,” Diana laments. “It’s just a trick, all the conflict gets like submerged and hidden in some other weird pocket of your psyche.”Or as Holly, beguilingly cool in Canfield’s portrayal, sums up: “It’s a torture to need people.”Adjmi, first known for plays like “3C” and “Marie Antoinette” that push satire past the gates of surrealism and then push even further, works a new path here, after some years away from the stage. He is still very funny but now without the quotation marks, devoting himself in every playwriting way — thematically, dialogically, structurally — to real things emerging in real time. “Stereophonic” may even be slightly attenuated by its refusal to take shortcuts; I wouldn’t have minded a 20-minute trim, if only to keep the material from falling, as it does occasionally, into the gap between drama and mini-series. (It would make an excellent mini-series, though.)The discipline is otherwise unexceptionable. Aukin’s staging, which carefully tracks the different worlds of the control room downstage and the sound room, protected by glass, behind it, supports the variations on revelation and concealment that make the play so compelling. Sometimes the control room is silent and we hear only the sound room, sometimes it’s the other way around; sometimes there’s dialogue between them on mics and sometimes a mic is surreptitiously left live to spy on people in an isolation booth. And though superior work from the sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the lighting designer, Jiyoun Chang, help direct our ears and eyes, we have to assemble the story ourselves.I don’t really understand how the cast (under the music direction of Justin Craig) did the same, but backward and from the inside out, all while playing their own instruments and singing richly enough to sell Butler’s songs. Whether barnburners with chunky hooks or dreamy reflections with rangy lyrics, those songs sound every bit like the pop hits they are meant to be — perhaps not a surprise from a former member of Arcade Fire, but a joy nonetheless.So however you want to categorize “Stereophonic” — perhaps a playical? — the great thing is that it doesn’t founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi’s best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum.StereophonicThrough Nov. 26 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More

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      ‘Nosferatu, a 3D Symphony of Horror’ Review: A Lip-Smacking Scare

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      This creepy Halloween show is the latest visual feat from Joshua William Gelb, presented by Theater in Quarantine and produced in a closet.“Are you alone?” a disembodied voice asks softly. “Are you in a dark room? Have you locked your door?”The questions could be seen as caring, initially, but they are threatening. I hear footsteps. The voice gets nearer, intimate and chilling: “So close, we could almost touch.” The murmur suggests a terrifying prospect: The words are coming not from inside the house, but from inside my mind.Vampires are not rare onstage, but “Nosferatu, a 3D Symphony of Horror,” a Halloween show livestreamed by Theater in Quarantine and NYU Skirball, is the first theatrical tale of bloodsucking that has really creeped me out. (Like previous offerings by the company, this one will be available on YouTube, but not until three months after the live run, which ends Oct. 31.)The piece is the latest feat from Joshua William Gelb, a man who loves a challenge: He created Theater in Quarantine in 2020, when physical venues were shut down in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and livestreams his work from inside a small closet in his apartment. Half of the pleasure of watching a Theater in Quarantine creation comes from the jaw-droppingly inventive problem-solving on display.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

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      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More