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      An Accidental First Date Leads to Lifelong Partnership

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      Lily Ramirez and Michael Fasano were not looking for love … until they missed a few flights and attended a Denver Broncos game.When Lily Gene Ramirez and Michael Anthony Fasano attended the same December 2017 holiday party in Denver, both were nursing wounds from recent romantic woes.“I recall just saying hi to each other very quickly, and I didn’t really give him the time of day,” Ms. Ramirez said.The next day one of their shared personality quirks emerged, and the seeds of an accidental first date were planted.Mr. Fasano has a propensity to ignore boarding times for his flights, and on Sunday morning he skipped his departure to his home in New York City altogether. Ms. Ramirez, who tends to postpone travel plans depending on the situation, also decided to stay. She had planned to fly to Gainesville, Fla., for the holidays that day.Their friends had persuaded them to attend a Denver Broncos game later that Sunday.Both got tickets at the last minute and sat together, just the two of them (they took in a 23-0 thrashing of the New York Jets). For three hours, they got to know each other. Both liked what they saw and heard.“We weren’t looking for anything romantic,” Ms. Ramirez said. “We just went to the game and had a fun time together.”“I moved my flight again to Tuesday, and we ended up spending the day together on Monday,” Mr. Fasano said.They exchanged numbers, kept in touch, and quickly began to communicate every day.“It was super easy,” Mr. Fasano said. “There was never any conversation about ‘where we stood.’ We both just knew we wanted to be together.”The couple visited each other every other weekend. Their shared background as athletes also bore out a love of food, traversing the culinary scenes of Denver, New York and beyond. Mr. Fasano eventually moved to Denver where they briefly lived together. Then Ms. Ramirez passed the Florida bar exam and found a new opportunity in Miami, where they now reside.Ms. Ramirez, 33, was born and raised in Gainesville, Fla. She has a bachelor’s degree in criminology and was an all-American swimmer at the University of Florida, following in the footsteps of her father, Robin Ramirez, a member of the class of 1981 and Alumni Hall of Fame Honoree. She has a law degree from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law in 2016 and practiced law in Colorado until moving to Miami in 2022, where she is a senior associate with Kasowitz Benson Torres.Mr. Fasano, 36, was born in Bridgeport, Conn., and grew up in nearby Southport. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Arizona State University and was a member of the rugby team. He is now a director at RIPCO Real Estate in Miami.Matt Wilson PhotographyThe couple’s bond deepened about two months into their relationship when Ms. Ramirez traveled to the Fasano family home in Vermont. She recognized another important facet of their personalities — love of family.“My parents are madly in love and have been together for more than 35 years,” Ms. Ramirez said. “They were a model couple for me to find the love of my life. I knew that night I had found him.”Their mothers echoed similar sentiments about their relationship.“They really ‘get’ each other,” Ms. Ramirez’s mother, Susan Ramirez, said. “I liked Mike immediately because Lily seemed so taken with him, and I could tell he was a good person.”Mr. Fasano’s mother, Laura Fasano, said: “There’s so much joyfulness when they’re together. There’s never any drama with them.”The couple flew to Portugal right after Christmas 2021 to ring in the New Year at a black-tie event, for which they purchased formal attire. The couple spent a great deal of time planning this trip only to realize after strolling up that night to the party in Cascais that they had not purchased tickets to the event.“We decided to make the best of it. We ordered a nice takeout dinner and had a great night exploring the city,” Ms. Ramirez said.[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]Both knew the proposal was coming on this trip — Ms. Ramirez simply didn’t know when. In truth, Mr. Fasano didn’t either. Until the morning of Jan. 1, 2022.“Every time we were doing something romantic on the trip, I could see her looking at me to see if it was time,” Mr. Fasano said. “But I wanted to surprise her. So that morning we had just got back to the hotel with an amazing view of the sunrise on the Mediterranean Sea, and Lily was distracted. I knew that was the perfect time.The couple married Oct. 13 at the Addison of Boca Raton, in Florida, in front of 165 guests. Karen Steinhauser, a lawyer Ms. Ramirez used to clerk for who was ordained by Universal Life Church for the occasion, officiated.When it came to the moment of allowing anyone to object to this union, Ms. Steinhauser proclaimed, “To the many lawyers here, we know that motion should’ve been filed a long time ago.”Under the canopy of two gargantuan banyan trees in the Addison courtyard, the couple exchanged impromptu vows.“He’s always put me first and been there for me unconditionally,” Ms. Ramirez said. “He makes me a better person.”Mr. Fasano said in his vows, “I’m truly at my happiest when I can make her happy. And I’m going to chase that feeling for the rest of my life.” More

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      ‘The Great Gatsby’ Review: A Musical Take on Tragic Desire

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      This new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic remains largely faithful to the novel, but it trades subtle prose for a straightforward production.F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” requires no critical endorsement. His slim 1925 novel still takes up permanent residence in the book bags of students across the nation. Often it is crushed under tomes of greater size, but what “Gatsby,” lacks in length it makes up for in heart, opulence and tragedy. A new musical adaptation trades Fitzgerald’s subtle blend for a blunter approach.“The Great Gatsby,” now playing at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., replicates its literary prototype. Jay Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) is the elusive seigneur of a mansion in West Egg, a fictional Long Island town. His newfound wealth fronts lavish parties that brim with bubbly and gossip. He is satisfied by none of it.What Gatsby most craves is Daisy (Eva Noblezada), a product of old money who lives across Manhasset Bay with her adulterer of a husband, Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski). Gatsby hatches a plan to have Daisy’s new-to-New York cousin Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts) move in next door to him, with the intent to lure Daisy. But the scheme results in calamity.Though the musical remains largely faithful to that plot, Kait Kerrigan, the book writer, takes liberties with the point of view. Her Nick is no neutral narrator ransacking his memories, but a morally upright man who condemns both Gatsby’s initial pursuit of Daisy and the flagrant behavior of other characters. While others indulge in whiskey and sex, Nick sings desperately about wanting to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Under the direction of Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”), all the characters get a moment like this to divulge their desires. The result is a more democratic story freed from Nick’s control, but also one stripped of compelling subtext and Fitzgerald’s enviable prose.Jason Howland’s swanky score follows suit. There are traces of contemporary influence (groovy rock refrains, pop music rhythms), yet the overall sound, particularly in the ensemble numbers (with rousing choreography by Dominique Kelley) conjures 1920s percussive swing. What Howland does best is compose solo songs that showcase his leading actors. When speaking, Jordan’s Gatsby is grounded and debonair, which makes it all the more thrilling when his voice scurries up to a delicious falsetto. Noblezada (“Miss Saigon”) captures Daisy’s longing with an emotive and powerful voice.Company members provide great support, particularly Samantha Pauly as the rambunctious Jordan Baker, Daisy’s unmarried best friend. Pauly taps into the skills she previously displayed in “Six,” carrying pop belts with a modern-day spunk that counter Noblezada’s ballads in a meeker tenor. It makes for two characters that effectively foil one another, but oddly belong to different decades.The design team’s choices do not suffer this confusion. Art Deco abounds in Paul Tate DePoo III’s scenery and projection, whether the geometric décor in Gatsby’s home to the haunting projections of the hazy Long Island Sound. Cory Pattak, the lighting designer, intricately balances darker emerald tones and bouncy bright ones. The overall effect, further complemented by Linda Cho’s dazzling costumes, is bewitching. More than once I wished I were sitting farther back in the audience because a production this lush, however unadventurous in narrative direction, deserves, like the novel, the long view.The Great GatsbyThrough Nov. 12 at Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      ‘Make Noise Enough’: Excavating Shakespeare’s Songs

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      In Shakespeare, music is an integral part of the action. But the First Folio, which turns 400 this year, failed to transmit how it should sound.Musicians from the early-music ensemble Collectio Musicorum were practicing a 17th-century round on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. The tune was jaunty, full of the cantering rhythms and mimetic horn calls that fit a song about hunting. But sung in canon, some of the notes bumped roughly against one another in daring dissonance. The singers broke off, looking at their conductor for guidance.Jeff Dailey, the group’s director, glanced up encouragingly from his music stand. The dissonances they were hearing were not a mistake, he said, then added: “If you want to make it any more chromatic, like you’ve just killed a deer, you could do even more shouting than singing. Remember, you’re drunk at this point.”The performers were preparing a program of songs, ballads and rounds from Shakespeare plays that brings to life the tunes scholars think might have been part of the earliest productions. Some of the numbers that will be featured in a concert on Friday at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side are exquisite settings for voice and lute by composers like Robert Johnson and Thomas Morley.But there are also humble songs laced with innuendo, the kind that would have appealed to the groundlings in the cheap section of the Globe Theater, like the one Dailey and his singers were rehearsing, “What shall he have that kill’d the deer?” from “As You Like It.” A nobleman commands a forester to “Sing it: ’tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.”This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of what is known as the First Folio, which comprises 36 Shakespeare plays, half of which had never been published previously. Put out by members of his company only a few years after his death in 1616, in the weighty format normally reserved for important religious works or histories, the First Folio determined how Shakespeare’s writings would be transmitted.Dailey leads singers in a rehearsal. From left, Christopher Preston Thompson, Chad Kranak and Alex Longnecker.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut the folio failed to transmit one vital part of Shakespeare’s vision: the music. His plays are punctuated by drum rolls, fanfares and dances, indicated in stage directions. And they are teeming with verses meant to be sung. In the First Folio these verses are clearly marked as “song” in the stage instructions and set apart typographically with italics. Singing is essential for rendering Ophelia’s madness, Ariel’s magic and the inebriated antics ratcheting up the comic confusion in “Twelfth Night.”In much of Shakespeare, Dailey said in an interview, “music is an integral part of the action.” But figuring out what it sounded like is another matter.Music printing was a specialized craft, and it would have been too expensive for even a luxury edition like the First Folio to include notated music. And though settings of Shakespeare lyrics appear in many 17th-century English song collections and lute books, these often date to later decades, making it difficult to determine their origin. A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time, but even then, Dailey said, “it’s a chicken and egg question: Did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 2004, the musicologist Ross W. Duffin published “Shakespeare’s Songbook,” which sets hundreds of lyrics to tunes he identified as likely matches. Among them is the hunting round “What shall we have” that was first published, with textual variants, in a collection from 1652. In a manuscript in the Folger Library, Duffin found a version appearing to date back as far as 1625, with a text that more closely aligns with the First Folio. That’s nearly contemporaneous with the play’s publication, but it’s still a quarter century off from 1599, when scholars think Shakespeare first wrote “As You Like It.” In the play, moreover, a single forester is bidden to sing it, whereas this is a round for four voices. Which characters would have joined in onstage?Another song from the play, “It was a Lover and his Lass,” survives in a setting by Morley printed in 1600, which some see as evidence that it was the original song, perhaps even commissioned by Shakespeare. Yet even such a seemingly clear attribution raises questions in performance. Morley’s setting is for a solo voice, whereas in the play it is sung by two pages.“How do you then perform it?” Dailey asked. “Do you have two singers sing it in unison? Do you have two actors alternate verses? Or do you compose an additional part for the second singer?”In concert, Dailey will have his performers take turns with the verses and then sing the refrain in unison. But Duffin, in a recent article, makes a case for reconstructing the song as a duet. He argues that the lute accompaniment in Morley’s printed version is so unusually awkward that it was probably adapted from a previous version for two voices.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesRecords show that Shakespeare and Morley were neighbors, leading some to conjecture that they were friends and collaborators. But Duffin sees no reason to believe that Shakespeare ever commissioned specific music. The clues linking him to Johnson, a master lutenist and the author of artful settings in the plays, are also inconclusive. “The evidence that he was the composer of the King’s Men is so circular,” Duffin said in an interview, referring to Shakespeare’s company of actors. “Everybody wants him to be. The songs are beautiful, but were they the original songs? Probably not.”Much of Duffin’s research has focused on the humble tunes that were the currency of popular culture in Shakespeare’s time. He said ballads in particular were so ubiquitous that an actor presented with a particular meter and rhyme schema would have known which tune to supply. Looking into the names of actors listed in the First Folio, he said he found evidence that many were “tumblers, jugglers and song-and-dance men,” adding that they would have brought their musical skills into the theater.A few popular songs can be traced back to Shakespeare’s time. But, Dailey said, “did Shakespeare include them because they were famous, or did they become famous because they had been in his plays?”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesDuffin believes that there is even more music in Shakespeare’s works than is evident from the italicized lines in the First Folio. He has identified dozens of what he calls “snatches” of songs embedded in dialogue that turn out to be the opening lines or key phrases of popular songs. These would have sparked a shower of associations in contemporary audiences.In “Winter’s Tale,” a brief allusion to a ballad about a murderously jealous husband would have raised the stakes for an audience following the play about a jealous king. In “Twelfth Night,” an otherwise out-of-context reference to “The 12th Day of December” would have been recognized as the title of a famous ballad about a battle, evoking the noise of war in a scene of domestic mayhem.“Everybody would have known these ballads from down the pub,” Duffin said, “so when he quotes a line everybody would have made the connection.”Part inside jokes, part cryptic crossword clues, these brief references would have made performances interactive experiences for contemporary audiences. In 1623, the readers of First Folio would have still been able to listen between the lines, as it were. But over time, the brilliance of Shakespeare’s imagination would come to be defined by what the First Folio was able to capture: the language, divorced from the real and imagined music of the plays. More

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      ‘Lyonesse,’ With Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, Is a Starry Mess

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      In London, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas do their best in a new play that careers between near-slapstick one minute and speechifying the next.“We dream big,” says a no-nonsense film executive early in “Lyonesse,” the starry, if overstuffed, new play that opened Wednesday night at the Harold Pinter Theater, in London. And so, too, does this West End debut from Penelope Skinner, a British playwright whose works have long enlivened small theaters on both sides of the Atlantic.The themes arrive thick and fast across nearly three hours: #MeToo, cancel culture, the tyranny of men and many others. But not even Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, the production’s commercial draws, can transform the scattershot material into a coherent whole.It takes courage to open a new play in the West End without a previous run somewhere else, but “Lyonesse” whimpers where it should roar. You emerge less enlightened than bewildered at the inability of so much talent — including the show’s usually excellent director, Ian Rickson — to come up with something better.James shoulders the bulk of the narrative, playing Kate, an eager-beaver movie exec whose habit of continually apologizing doesn’t inspire confidence in her judgment.Her boss, Sue (Doon Mackichan), nonetheless has enough faith in Kate to send her on a mission to Cornwall, southern England, where she meets Elaine (Scott Thomas), an actress who has emerged from a decades-long hibernation and wants to tell her story on film.Doon Mackichan plays Sue, Kate’s boss, who sends Kate to Cornwall to work on a film project about a long-forgotten actress.Manuel HarlanThe women’s first encounter isn’t especially auspicious, though Elaine’s entrance certainly catches the eye. Waddling onstage in Wellington boots, a swimming cap and a fur coat worn over a swimsuit, she suggests an English seaside equivalent to Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” She also comes bearing an ax that she’s been using to chop up furniture, and you feel from her bizarre behavior that she could put it to other uses, as well.“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine announces with a flourish, and at first, you think she will send Kate packing, frustrated by this new arrival’s flightiness and her inability to light a fire. Instead, the two bond over a shared desire to take ownership of their lives. Elaine is reckoning with the fallout of a brutal relationship with a now-dead film director, just as Kate, a generation younger, chafes at the control exerted by her own film director husband, Greg (James Corrigan, in the play’s lone male role).Freed from her own difficult relationship, Elaine encourages the impressionable Kate to leave Greg and start afresh. But any hope of a clean break is dashed when Sue suggests that he be hired to direct the film of Elaine’s life.Keeping an eye on these complications, and others, is Elaine’s calm neighbor and friend, Chris (Sara Powell, first-rate), a poet who develops feelings for Kate that aren’t reciprocated.Sara Powell as Chris, Elaine’s neighbor.Manuel HarlanAnd yet the play’s tone is so wayward — near-slapstick one minute, speechifying on societal ills the next — that any focus is lost. Skinner writes tremendous parts for women, as her earlier plays “Linda” and “The Village Bike” have shown. But the principal performers in “Lyonesse” are sufficiently confounded by the gear shifts in the writing that you start to look toward the gentler presence of Chris for respite. The playwright is clearly drawn to this secondary character, too, and Chris ends the play onstage alone.The likable James has an animated stage presence, but it’s hard to believe that a serious company would employ such a flibbertigibbet. Chattiness in both life and art can grate, and so it proves here.Scott Thomas looks fantastic as the willfully daffy Elaine. And as a onetime film star herself, who has enjoyed a renewed career onstage, she may understand Elaine’s desire, however misguided, to put herself in the public eye once more. The role couldn’t be further from the cool, cryptic women Scott Thomas often plays, so is a welcome change of pace.But the fact remains that the character of Elaine never rings true: She’s an amalgamation of eccentricities, most of which feel borrowed from elsewhere. For her big set piece, Scott Thomas careers about the living room of Lyonesse, her decaying house, in a wig, recounting the details of Elaine’s bruised and bruising life.But when she later poses the question, “What if I’m no longer spellbinding?,” it feels like time for the character, and the play, to face facts.LyonesseThrough Dec. 23 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London; lyonesseonstage.com. More

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      Hundreds of Shadow Puppets Were Stolen. A Bystander Helped Crack the Case.

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      Many of the puppets were still missing, however, after the theft of a U-haul truck in San Francisco holding props for the critically acclaimed Persian epic “Song of the North.” It was unclear if the show would go on.Inside the U-Haul were nearly 500 handmade shadow puppets and dozens of masks, costumes and backdrops — the culmination of three years of painstaking labor, which, on Sunday evening, came to life in a balletic performance before a crowd of hundreds at a theater in San Francisco.On Monday morning, the puppeteers awoke to find the truck gone.At first, they hoped the truck, parked at a Comfort Inn in the city’s northeast, had been mistakenly towed, said Hamid Rahmanian, 55, an Iranian American artist and the creator of the show “Song of the North,” an adaptation of the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s 10th-century epic “Shahnameh” that combines shadow puppetry, animation and music.But when hotel employees reviewed the security camera footage, it quickly became clear that the truck had been stolen. “My face dropped — my hands became cold,” Rahmanian said. Then, more than 48 hours later, on Wednesday morning, he received a call: A resident had spotted the truck in the city’s west, and notified the police. Rahmanian rushed to the scene to find years of careful work strewn about the truck in a “shamble.”The thieves appeared to have rifled through the boxes inside the truck, throwing some things away, and destroying others, he said, noting that while the full scale of the damage was unclear, at least 200 puppets were missing, and all of the costumes were gone.The next stop on the show’s global tour was Seattle, where a performance was scheduled for Friday. It was unclear whether the show would go on.The San Francisco Police Department said that it had received a call Wednesday morning from a resident in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, about a “possible recovered stolen vehicle.”The police confirmed it was the same U-Haul and were investigating. No arrests had been made. The department did not offer more information about the contents of the security camera footage.Rahmanian, who moved from Iran to New York three decades ago to pursue a career in graphic design, said he had created “Song of the North” over several years in an endeavor to adapt the “Shahnameh,” or “Book of Kings,” for a Western audience. “There is a misrepresentation of Iranian culture, and everything is very much politicized,” he said. “Iran is like a symphony. But we only hear one note.”His work has garnered glowing reviews and audiences in places including China, Poland and Iowa. The puppet performances can take years to lay out in storyboards and to design and choreograph, Rahmanian said, noting that “Song of the North” involves 352 frames and an ensemble of nine people whose actions must be precise to the inch. For the 83-minute duration of the show, he added, “they work like a Swiss watch.”The laborious, costly work has not been very lucrative, he said, noting that he preferred to keep ticket prices affordable so that families could attend the shows. “There is no sane person” who would do this kind of work, he said. “The math doesn’t work.” In part, that is why he and his team decided to rent their own U-Haul instead of hiring outside contractors, he added, saying, “We thought we’re going to save a little bit of money.”The puppets don’t “have any value for these thieves,” their creator, Hamid Rahmanian, said through tears.Richard Termine Just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, he and his team loaded their wares into the truck, which was parked near the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, where Sunday’s show was held. They drove it less than a mile to the Comfort Inn, where they arrived at 9:13 p.m., Rahmanian said, noting he had felt anxious, given San Francisco’s reputation for crime, but told himself it was going to be fine in a parking lot.The next morning, the truck had disappeared.U-Haul did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday evening, but Rahmanian said that after the truck was stolen, the company had told him that it was not fitted with a GPS device and that it could not be located. Choice Hotels, which manages the Comfort Inn, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University, said in an email that Rahmanian’s work offered an “antidote to the dangerous delusions of stereotypes” through an empathetic portrayal of Iranian culture. Rahmanian’s adaptations of the Shanameh, he added, “offered a rich tapestry of the joyous, even epicurean culture of Iran.”Rahmanian said he was particularly buoyed on Sunday evening, as the audience lingered in the lobby to discuss the show — which begins with a warrior imploring two armies to stop fighting. Two of the enemies then fall in love, he said, noting that “Song of the North” was ultimately a tale of forgiveness.It felt “cosmic,” he added, to wake up the next morning to find that even art didn’t appear to be safe from the ugliness of the world. “It doesn’t have any value for these thieves,” he said through tears on Tuesday evening, before the truck was located. “They’re going to open it up and realize, oh my god, it’s just puppets.”On Tuesday, Rahmanian said he would not press charges against those who stole the truck. He added, “I forgive you.” More

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      How ‘Sabbath’s Theater,’ Philip Roth’s Raunchiest Book, Made It to the Stage

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      For their adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater,” John Turturro and Ariel Levy sought to preserve “the nasty side of existence” evoked in the book.For John Turturro, it was time to honor Philip Roth. Turturro, the veteran actor, had been friends with the novelist for nearly a quarter-century when Roth died in 2018 at 85. They first met, Turturro recalled, after Roth saw his performance in the 1994 film “Quiz Show” and picked him to star in a one-man stage adaptation of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s 1969 best seller about a young man with a penchant for self-pleasure.That play never got beyond readings. Plans for other works had similar fates. Two years after Roth’s death, Turturro appeared in the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America,” David Simon and Ed Burns’s adaptation of Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel.Still, Turturro said, he felt he wanted to “complete the conversation.” Now he’s starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth’s 1995 novel about a lascivious 64-year-old ex-puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath, which is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Theater. The book, a National Book Award winner regarded both as maybe Roth’s greatest novel and his black sheep, is certainly his raunchiest and most transgressive. (What Alexander Portnoy does with a piece of liver, Sabbath does at his lover’s grave.)Those familiar with the story might reasonably wonder: Why, out of all of Roth’s nearly 30 works of fiction, has John Turturro elected to embody the most estranging, the most irredeemable, the quite simply filthiest character in Roth’s canon?Turturro is also starring as the title character. “I was not afraid of it,” he said of the divisive protagonist. “I don’t have to be the hero.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“He’s like a stand-up comedian. That lends itself to the theater,” Turturro, 66, said of the Roth who wrote “Sabbath’s Theater.” “When he’s on a rant you go from Lorena Bobbitt to Mussolini to Ibsen to Macbeth, all in the same breath.”There were other reasons, too. Turturro was attracted to the novel’s house style: Its manic, sarcastic, abasing observations, largely written in the third person but never far from Sabbath’s perspective, seemed made for the theater.As Sabbath, Turturro is onstage virtually the entire play, speaking for much of that time and cycling through emotions like excitement and pity, desire and tenderness, depression and optimism.“You let the whole creature out,” Ariel Levy, the New Yorker staff writer with whom Turturro adapted the script, told Turturro during a joint interview, quoting from “Sabbath’s Theater.” She added: “And that’s what [Roth] sensed about you.”Turturro replied: “I was not afraid of it. I don’t have to be the hero.”Not having to be the hero is an important qualification for the actor playing Mickey Sabbath. His exploits include an obscenity arrest, a phone-sex scandal and compulsive lecherousness — up to and including stealing his friend’s college-aged daughter’s underwear from her childhood bedroom. Judith Thurman, the New Yorker staff writer and close friend of Roth’s, said “Sabbath’s Theater” was Roth’s favorite of his own books, the one he chose to read from at his 80th birthday celebration.“It is his most impious book, in a lifetime of impiety,” said Thurman, adding: “I think he would have been delighted that Ari and John had the nerve to do this. Nerve was one of the qualities in an artist that he most admired.”Roth at home in New York City, a few months before he died in 2018.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe 1995 novel is a National Book Award winner and regarded as one of Roth’s greatest.For both Turturro and Levy, Sabbath’s offensiveness, his audacity, his utter lack of embarrassment alchemized into Roth’s most life-affirming book, one that finds the protagonist recalling all the people and things he has loved and lost — his brother, his mother, his first wife, his vocation (his fingers are now arthritic), his longtime mistress. As Sabbath puts it in the play (in one of many lines of third-person narration transposed to Sabbath’s voice): “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”The production, directed by Jo Bonney, leans into the novel’s frank depictions of unbounded lust, gleeful disloyalty and bodily functions. It is, at times, almost a gross-out comedy. Yet the story’s undertones of grief also attracted Turturro and Levy. Turturro read Roth’s memoir of his father’s death, “Patrimony: A True Story,” after his own father died and identified profoundly with it. Levy’s 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” recounted a miscarriage, and she said that while working on the play she thought of her husband’s having lost a brother while a young man, as Sabbath does.“We did this workshop in London at the National Theater, and somebody there asked, ‘Why now?’” Levy said. “And John said, ‘Because we’re all going to die.’ And that’s it. The depth and the death, grief and being haunted and sometimes feeling the dead are as real to you as the living.”The conventions of theater permit Sabbath’s many ghosts to haunt him not just in his mind’s eye but physically on the stage. In one scene, a nightgown represents the corpse of a mother mourned by her daughter, Sabbath’s first wife, Nikki; Sabbath, feet away, is simultaneously in the present tense with another character and conjuring the memory of Nikki, who herself disappeared decades earlier.“The ghosts of Mickey’s loved ones are more real to him than the living,” Bonney said. Enacting the novel’s fragmented nature by jumping back and forth in time was crucial to its dramatic success, she added. “We’re taking people on this ride of the mind as opposed to a regularly plotted story.”Such staging was revelatory to Levy, 49, who had never worked professionally in theater. “When you’re just writing, all you have is words, words, words, words, words,” Levy said. By contrast, she added, in theater, “you have other things going into the storytelling, like the way a person’s body is or their voice.”PERHAPS THE GHOST foremost summoned by the production is Roth’s. Turturro’s lanky frame is the opposite of Sabbath’s, but it echoes Roth’s, and the actor acknowledged that his Sabbath is partly a gloss on the novelist.“He definitely has a Philip-like quality — dark, antic, hectic, comic at the same time,” said Thurman, who saw a reading of the play in 2021 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Turturro with Jason Kravits, left, and Elizabeth Marvel in the show, scheduled to run through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhen it came time to seek a writing partner for the script, Turturro said it was important to find someone who would be faithful to Roth’s language.“I was thinking about playwrights,” Turturro said, “but then I was thinking, ‘Would they want to come in and rewrite Philip’s work?’”Instead Turturro pitched Hilton Als, a longtime theater critic who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Als suggested Levy. By then it was the spring of 2020, so Levy and Turturro met over Skype and got to work.“We didn’t write anything,” Levy said. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”During rehearsals last month, Levy, considering how a scene should be blocked, grabbed her pummeled copy of the novel, found the original rendering and consulted it like scripture.One challenge was turning the novel’s stream of consciousness into scenes with characters, along with soliloquy-like asides from Sabbath.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTheir script stipulates that the 16 characters besides Sabbath be played by just two actors. In this production, Jason Kravits portrays Sabbath’s put-together, respectable friend Norman Cowan as well as his 100-year-old cousin, Fish; Elizabeth Marvel plays his mistress, his wives and his mother.Turturro said the decision was inspired by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” in which Deborah Kerr plays three characters. “You know that thing in life where people seem like iterations of each other?” Levy said. “One actress being all these women makes so much sense.”Alongside Turturro’s Sabbath, the signature performance might be Marvel’s turn as Drenka Balich, Sabbath’s 52-year-old Croatian mistress. A mother and a lover, a force of life and sex, Drenka has long been Exhibit A for those defending Roth from charges of misogyny in his depictions of women.“Drenka is such a heroine on so many levels,” Levy said, “so interesting and complicated and older, just a combination of traits you don’t see flipped together. You see it in life, but you don’t get to see it onstage, on the screen.”Is 2023 ready for Mickey Sabbath? If so-called cancel culture — which Roth forecast in “Sabbath’s Theater” and, more directly, in “The Human Stain” (2000) — were to come for any Roth novel, it would surely be this one.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”In a Yale Review essay published this year and partly titled “in praise of filth,” the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote that he “can’t imagine a book like ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature.” Yet to Greenwell it is precisely the novel’s depiction of various repellent activities that lends the novel its moral force. “By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath,” Greenwell added, “Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts.”Turturro wants theatergoers to make their own judgments. “My job is to keep the audience awake,” he said. “Whatever you think, you think.”Levy added: “It’s not a good play to bring your grandma to. Although, it depends on your grandma. My grandma would have loved it. She was dirty. She was really dirty.” More

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      ‘Partnership’ Review: A Lost Tale of Ambition That Resonates

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      The Mint Theater revives Elizabeth Baker’s charming 1917 comedy, which offers a gentle reminder about work-life balance.Find a job that you love and you’ll work every day of your life. So warns “Partnership,” the third Elizabeth Baker play to be staged by the Mint Theater Company, which has long nurtured the works of forgotten playwrights. Baker’s play premiered in 1917 in London, but the way it tackles the issue of work-life balance seems to speak more to the Great Resignation than to the Great War.The owner of a successful boutique in the south of England, Kate (Sara Haider) is focused on the needs of her distinguished clients. When George Pillatt (Gene Gillette), a potential rival, instead proposes a merger, marriage is part of the deal. The union, Kate understands, would be purely professional.As another character remarks, in one of the play’s most impressively undated lines, “Men are a lot, aren’t they?”Kate takes more of a shine to Pillatt’s companion Lawrence Fawcett (Joshua Echebiri), a gadabout investor with mud on his boots and a glint in his eye. Fawcett inspires Kate to contemplate a new way of life, including the exquisite novelty of a day off. In the show’s breeziest scene, the pair behold the Downs, an expanse of land and sky expressed in a breathtaking backdrop: The characters effectively step into a landscape painting (adapted from an artwork by James Hart Dyke) within the gilded frame provided by the scenic designer Alexander Woodward. It’s a testament to the production that it conjures the sense of a shimmering vista in a tiny theater.If the director Jackson Grace Gay tries a little too hard to coax out new laughs, the cast handles Baker’s gentle comedy with evident affection. Echebiri’s Fawcett comes alive in his natural habitat, while Gillette’s Pillatt has the constrained movements of one who thinks a leisurely walk is a waste of time. As Kate’s friend and associate Maisie, Olivia Gilliatt is having nearly as much fun as the costume designer (Kindall Almond) is having dressing her. Her ready energy and comical, gale force yawp could command a larger theater.Written during the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, this English playwright’s portrait of a driven businesswoman — two driven businesswomen, actually — feels boldly up-to-date. Refreshingly, by contrast, it treats some of the male characters as more or less incidental.The suggestion of farce never materializes, but there is class critique in the play’s portrayal of characters’ couture concerns and their endless talking shop.The plot itself — Kate’s transformation from workaholic to not-so-quiet quitter — barely rattles a teacup. But “Partnership” charms regardless, offering a gentle reminder about not letting work overtake your life. Some notions should never fall out of fashion.PartnershipThrough Nov. 12 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Daphne,’ Remaking a Myth, With Mixed Results

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      The playwright Renae Simone Jarrett makes her professional stage debut with a surreal reworking of a Greek myth about a river nymph.A crying baby pulled from a kitchen cabinet, a woman abruptly exiting a house via a window and a banged-up finger that turns into bark: The new play “Daphne” is chock-full of magical surprises and mystical transformations, but its surreal elements leave the audience with too many unanswered questions.In the play, which opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor) has recently moved in with her girlfriend, Winona (Keilly McQuail) — an abrupt change that has Daphne’s friends concerned. And with good cause: Daphne is living in a big, mysterious house in the middle of big, mysterious woods with a controlling partner who disapproves of her leaving or receiving guests. After an accident leaves Daphne with an injured finger, she begins a botanical transformation like that of her mythological namesake.Daphne and Winona’s toxic relationship seems to be the trigger for Daphne’s transformation, as is the case in the Greek myth, when Daphne, a river nymph, prays for help escaping the predatory god Phoebus Apollo and is turned into a tree. If “Daphne” is trying to create a sort of mythological fairy tale, then the play’s other fantastical details only introduce more confusion: Winona’s peculiar, unseen bird named Phoebus; the neighbor (Denise Burse) whom Winona warns that Daphne is a home-invading witch; a human face found in a cabinet door.Scenes with Daphne’s visiting friends (played by Naomi Lorrain and Jeena Yi with a delightful, though out-of-place, sitcom-style humor) seem meant to provide some context about Daphne’s world and life outside her new home, but they do neither.Presented by LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s programming initiative for new artists, “Daphne” is the professional stage debut of Renae Simone Jarrett, a member of E.S.T.’s Youngblood collective for early-career playwrights. Jarrett’s script is spare, and the setup is initially intriguing, but ultimately too obtuse. The direction, by Sarah Hughes in her Lincoln Center Theater debut, accentuates the dark whimsy of the script but doesn’t provide insight into what those whimsical elements are meant to express. The same for the cast: Though they dutifully inhabit their characters, they cannot make them feel more than ephemeral.McQuail is especially captivating as Winona. Her languid way of moving, her dreamy delivery of quixotic musings and her aloofness — with a sharp edge of intention underneath — draw the spotlight from Batchelor’s steady, though flatter, Daphne. Is Winona the big bad of the story, or just the relationship? Is there some greater evil? Is Daphne losing her sense of reality, or is this a manipulation caused by Winona, or by the suspicious neighbor next door? Without clear stakes, it’s difficult to invest more deeply in the story.The production also withholds any specifics that would ground viewers in a particular setting. Scenes begin and end with snappy lighting transitions (by Stacey Derosier) between a cool daytime light and a warm nighttime glow, so Daphne’s world feels as if it exists in a timeless bubble. Maruti Evans’s rustic set design, a living room and kitchen of a home lined with wallpaper consisting of giant fall-colored leaves, also feels hemmed in, though the couple are meant to be living in a large, haunting abode.“Daphne” is so good at creating a sense of its main characters’ insularity that the production also feels confining, stuck within a set of indecipherable metaphors. But unlike Daphne, who is transformed by the end of this 90-minute contemporary myth, we’re left exactly as we arrived.DaphneThrough Nov. 19 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More