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    Book Review: “Cocktails With George and Martha” by Philip Gefter

    COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center, Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”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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    At 91, Adrienne Kennedy Is Finally on Broadway. What Took So Long?

    THE PLAYWRIGHT ADRIENNE Kennedy will make her Broadway debut this month at the age of 91, with “Ohio State Murders” (1992), a play she tried for years to commit to paper. “I couldn’t do it,” she recalls. It was 1989, and she’d been commissioned by the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland, her hometown, to write about her experience as an undergraduate, decades ago, at Ohio State University. She was about to return her advance. And then, she says, “I just happened to be in the earthquake.”Small and unassuming — she’s 5 foot 1 — with a voice that evokes the singsong politesse of Hollywood’s golden age, Kennedy has a winking sense of humor that might seem incongruous with her body of work, which is often described as dark, difficult and abstract. (In 2018, the New Yorker critic Hilton Als called her oeuvre “a long and startling fugue, composed of language that is impactful and impacted but ever-moving, ever-shifting.”) Kennedy herself is a shape-shifter: In her 10th decade, she’s still full of giddy, nervous energy, her moods and memories changing as fast as the tonal jump-cuts in her plays. On this October morning, she delivers “I just happened to be in the earthquake” with the rhythm of “I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” A moment from now, she’ll recall the way Ginger Rogers wore her hair in “Kitty Foyle,” the 1940 melodrama that was one of her mother’s favorite films; earlier, she was mooning over Frank Sinatra in “Higher and Higher” (1944): “I still want to marry Frank Sinatra,” she says, sitting amid various curios — a bust of Caesar, a West African djembe drum — in her 61-year-old writer son Adam’s home in Williamsburg, Va., where she’s lived for the past decade, along with his wife, Renee, and their four children. “It doesn’t go away. Why? Why is that?” Since her theatrical debut with “Funnyhouse of a Negro” Off Broadway in 1964, at 32, Kennedy has addressed the heart- and head sickness of racism, the confusion of sex and gender and the illusion of the self with incantatory paradoxes, visceral symbols, sidelong pop-culture references and violent contradictions. “Funnyhouse,” the first of more than 20 plays she’s written over six decades, is set inside the collapsing consciousness of a young Black woman, Negro Sarah, struggling with self-division and battling self-destruction. She agonizes over her racially mixed parentage and finds herself split into dueling avatars: Sarah is also England’s Queen Victoria is also the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba is also Jesus (“a hunchback, yellow-skinned dwarf dressed in white rags,” as the script says) is also the Duchess of Hapsburg (perhaps with notes of Bette Davis playing the Empress Carlota of Mexico in 1939’s “Juarez”). All of them are losing their hair in clumps. Skin color and hair texture, perpetually racialized, are here deployed to evoke the horrors of the body, often to comedic effect: “I have something I must show you,” the jumpy duchess says to Jesus, closing the shutters before lifting her headpiece to reveal that, as the stage directions explain, “her baldness is identical to Jesus’s.’” Moments before, a severed head, also bald, plummeted from the rafters.A still from New York theater La MaMa’s 1976 production of “A Rat’s Mass,” featuring (from left) the actors Nancy Heikin and Lucille Johnson.Amnon Ben Nomis, courtesy of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private CollectionThis, in the midst of America’s civil rights movement, was Kennedy’s answer to the corrosion of racism: grotesquerie, absurdity, horror and heart, layered with rapid transitions and discursions. The play “was so controversial,” she says now. “Certain people thought it was just perfect: That’s what kept it alive. Other people thought that I took drugs, that I hated Black people, [that] I hated white people.” That slippery dramatic style made the playwright sui generis for over a half-century; her earthquake reference feels like the kind of dry joke you’d find in one of her plays. Except it’s not rhetorical: Kennedy really was in the deadly Loma Prieta earthquake, which destroyed part of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in 1989. Then 58, she was teaching playwriting at Stanford, where she hid in a closet and thought she was going to die. Over the days that followed, navigating the Palo Alto campus amid aftershocks, Kennedy passed sorority row and the university’s Lake Lagunita. They both reminded her of Ohio State. Suddenly, it was as if her alma mater had returned to her, with all the hidden traps and secret deadfalls it held for its few students of color. (When she matriculated in 1949, she says, fewer than 250 of the school’s 20,000 or so students were Black, which is consistent with other estimates from the time, although the school didn’t measure racial demographics back then.)She flew home from California to New York, to her West 89th Street apartment — dense with books, memorabilia, the chunky ’40s Philco radio she’d listened to with her family back in Ohio — and wrote a script that blended elements of film noir, meta-true crime, audience direct address and Surrealist misdirection: “The geography made me anxious,” says the narrator of “Ohio State Murders” as she wanders the campus. “The zigzagged streets beyond the Oval were regions of Law, Medicine, Mirror Lake, the Greek theater, the lawn behind the dorm where the white girls sunned. The ravine that would be the scene of the murder and Mrs. Tyler’s boardinghouse in the Negro district.” Many of Kennedy’s plays have been published and anthologized over the years, including “Funnyhouse of a Negro” (1969).Samuel French, Inc., Archives and Special Collections, Amherst CollegeThe story is about a bookish Black girl, in love with English literature (and the emotionally indecipherable white professor teaching it) at a predominantly white university in 1949, losing her childhood illusions — and then, in a gothic twist, losing much more. Like most of Kennedy’s work, the play is a kind of scrapbook, just like the one her mother, Etta Hawkins, kept, which she’d often show her daughter. Many nights, while washing the dishes, Kennedy’s mother would tell her daughter about her nightmares. Kennedy learned never to throw a violent dream away, to save everything, to draw primarily from herself. (She had a younger brother, Cornell Wallace — named after their father, Cornell Wallace “C.W.” Hawkins — who was seriously injured in a car accident in his 20s and died in 1972.) Remembering the process of writing the Ohio script, she says, “It just came out. In about two days. And I was very upset.“It wasn’t pleasant,” she adds. “And then I called up [Great Lakes] and said, ‘I have a play.’”THAT PLAY OPENS at the James Earl Jones Theater on Dec. 8, directed by one Tony winner, Kenny Leon, and starring another, Audra McDonald, as Kennedy’s avatar Suzanne Alexander. (The “Alexander Plays,” a four-work cycle within her larger corpus, track the life and letters of a middle-class Black writer-professor navigating racism, sexism and her own hallucinatory nostalgia.) Reviewing a 2007 Off Broadway production of it for The New York Times, the critic Charles Isherwood wrote that Kennedy “is surely one of the finest living American playwrights, and perhaps the most underappreciated.” It’s taken more than three decades to arrive on Broadway. But it’s taken its creator, who broke out amid (if not always within) the ’60s-era theater of revolution, much longer. She has a theory as to why: “It’s because I’m a Black woman.”Kennedy on her wedding day in 1953 at her Cleveland home. To the left are her then husband, Joseph Kennedy, and his parents, Leon and Cara Kennedy. To the right are her father, Cornell Wallace “C. W.” Hawkins; her brother, Cornell Wallace Hawkins Jr.; and her mother, Etta Hawkins.Courtesy of Adrienne KennedyKennedy’s journey began in wartime Cleveland, where she was raised by an exacting schoolteacher (Etta’s daily exhortation, Kennedy says, was “don’t you let those little white kids do better than you”) and C.W., a Morehouse man who headed the local branch of the Y.M.C.A. and became a fulcrum of the Black community. The Hawkins’ neighborhood, Glenville — full of ambitious European immigrants fleeing Hitler and middle-class Southern Blacks fleeing Jim Crow — produced the creators of the first “Superman” comic (1938), the “Inherit the Wind” (1955) co-writer Jerome Lawrence and the celebrated midcentury printmaker John Morning, among many others. At school, Kennedy won prizes, became class president — and at one point, she says, saved a white student’s life after he used a racial slur against a Black classmate. But she didn’t feel truly othered until she attended college in nearby Columbus, where the white girls in her dorm made their contempt for their Black classmates clear and the professors “didn’t see us as people,” she says. Once, after she’d turned in an essay on George Bernard Shaw, a professor kept her after class to accuse her of plagiarism: “It was inconceivable to him that this tiny [Black] girl in a pink sweater could write.”Ohio State was discouraging for the high-achieving student but perversely nourishing to the young artist. It’s also where she met her husband — Joseph Kennedy, five years her senior, who would later help establish the Africa development nonprofit Africare — with whom she moved to Manhattan a few years after graduation. There, she balanced writing and motherhood: She and Joseph had two sons, Adam and Joseph Jr., now a 68-year-old musician, and after they divorced in 1966, they remained close until her husband’s death two years ago. It was while accompanying him on a work trip to Ghana in 1960 that the fever dream of “Funnyhouse” came to her. When she returned to America, she used a draft of it to apply to Edward Albee’s playwriting workshop at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater and was accepted. Two years later, Albee produced the first staging of “Funnyhouse” himself at a small theater downtown.A program from La MaMa’s 1969 staging of “A Rat’s Mass.”Courtesy of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private CollectionWith Albee’s imprimatur, she became an immediate sensation. Kennedy was invited to join the Actors Studio, then run by Lee Strasberg, and she and John Lennon discussed collaborating on a stage adaptation of his 1964 nonsense book, “In His Own Write.” (The dissolution of their would-be partnership is chronicled in her 2008 bio-play, “Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles?,” co-written with Adam, who remembers meeting the rock star as a child.) She won her first Obie Award in 1964, for “Funnyhouse,” sharing the spotlight with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), author of the landmark play “Dutchman,” which also won an Obie that year, and the founding father of the Black Arts Movement, the famous organization comprising a polymathic group of politically motivated African American artists. The B.A.M. members, who were overwhelmingly male, were known for making confrontational work; they and their acolytes viewed hers — insistently introspective, often self-lacerating — with suspicion. To some, her output was “apparently less overtly connected to ‘the struggle,’ ” says Werner Sollors, an African American studies professor at Harvard. But Kennedy, who says, “It does not interest me to summarize the state of any of the arts,” has always drawn on influences less political and more personal, notably her own childhood memories and the treacherous persistence of the past. Her references and obsessions have been the same since the beginning: Old Hollywood, the Greek tragedies and the turn-of-the-20th-century Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whose “Blood Wedding,” a formative work for her, lasted less than a month on Broadway in 1935.It bothered some in the movement, Kennedy still suspects, that “this girl” — here, a quick cut to anger, as she channels the belittling voice of her detractors — was getting attention for writing ugly things that weren’t about pride or uplift or the politics of the moment. “A big tension that merits mention is her relationship to Blackness,” says the playwright and actor Eisa Davis, who studied under Kennedy in the early ’90s. “She’s very unsparing about revealing her own inner workings, and the illness of what racism does to a psyche.” This comes across intensely in “Funnyhouse,” particularly in a scene where the character Lumumba says: “It is also my [N-word] dream for my friends to eat their meals on white glass tables and to live in rooms with European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins. … My friends will be white. … My white friends, like myself, will be shrewd intellectuals and anxious for death.” He then adds: “Anyone’s death.” That last line, delivered by a Pan-African leader murdered by Western colonizers, is a dark joke rendered in an unexpected place: witty graffiti scrawled on a great ruin. “She’ll find a beautiful, humorous moment, and then a devastatingly evil, horrible moment. But they’re right next to each other,” says Leon, her Broadway director. “She’s like a drum major. We’re always chasing her.” Kennedy, photographed in 1970 with one of her two sons, Adam, with whom she currently lives.Jack Robinson (Tear Sheet), courtesy of Adrienne KennedyFor years, it seemed, no one could quite keep up. In 1969, after she had an Off Off Broadway hit at La MaMa called “A Rat’s Mass” — about two half-rodent siblings who long for a white baby — she began to feel misunderstood by the culture and its gatekeepers: “Adrienne Kennedy, she’s crazy,” was how she read the response to “Cities in Bezique,” a wild Surrealist diptych about sexual assault that was her second major production. Some “people walked out,” Kennedy says. “So I really didn’t like the theater, not at all.” It was even worse after the American playwright Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” made it to Broadway in 1976, when Kennedy’s own work was hardly being produced. “I felt left behind,” she wrote in an email. “I knew my time had passed.” She’s had just one major New York production in the past decade: “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” a well-reviewed play about an interracial relationship in the South that she completed at 86, which premiered in 2018 at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center.But, as audiences drifted, the era’s progressive academics increasingly responded to her fractal approach. After being studied, interpreted and decrypted, “I came to see myself differently,” she says, which fueled both her writing and academic career for subsequent decades. “Adrienne was embraced by scholars,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian and literary critic, “almost exactly [at the time] when feminist and post-structural writers and critics were turning to [Zora Neale] Hurston’s rich experiments in Black Modernism to explore the contours of Black postmodernism.” Universities began offering her jobs; after some four decades teaching playwriting at Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Berkeley, she’s remained close with dozens of her former students (myself included). “She’s just such a writer, in any form,” says the actor Natalie Portman. Even Kennedy’s emails are disobedient. A restless correspondent, she’s known to send early morning messages with punctuation that conjure a voice and style unambiguously her own:I.  Used yellow pads. For. Years.  And yearsI like IPAD because it reminds me ofMy. Old typewriterBut honest ScottAll the dots are errorsScript for Kennedy’s “Ohio State Murders” (1998).Samuel French, Inc., Archives and Special Collections, Amherst CollegeSUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS OF playwrights — particularly Black ones — have picked up on that unique, uncompromising voice. The actor and stage docudramatist Anna Deavere Smith, 72, says she was forever changed by Kennedy’s 1976 anti-pastiche “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White” — in which white Hollywood icons channel a Black woman’s family trauma — directed by Joseph Chaikin at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. “In those personae of white movie stars, she’s injecting a Black narrative,” she says. “What’s important there is how she handled identity: It’s not all meshed together. That was, for me, a groundbreaking thing to witness.” She credits the playwright with freeing her from the constraints of naturalism and linearity: “The world is a fragmented place … it’s not beginning, middle, end. I was so happy to have that verified for me.” While Smith was able to see a live production, many others encountered Kennedy’s work mostly on the page. That’s how she became a “waymaker,” says Suzan-Lori Parks, 59, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” (2001) is also being revived by Leon on Broadway this season. “This world wants certain kinds of folk spoken about in certain ways,” she says. “The marketplace doesn’t want us getting too deep.” And yet Kennedy remains a lodestar for a rising generation of Black absurdists — among them 33-year-old Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play,” 2018), 37-year-old Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins (“An Octoroon,” 2014) and Jackie Sibblies Drury (whose 2018 “Fairview” won a Pulitzer) — all of whose work seems more influenced by her anarchic collages and genre mash-ups than by, say, Lorraine Hansberry’s realism or August Wilson’s expressionism. Harris first read “Funnyhouse” in his Virginia high school’s rehearsal room. He remembers thinking: “ ‘A play can look like this? A play can sound like this?’ I’d seen Buñuel, I’d read Beckett, but I’d never seen those influences applied to a Black person [in a play].” A few years later, he mounted a production of “Movie Star” in his college dorm room. “Her great champions were always there,” he says, “but not in the seats of power.” KENNEDY’S ARRIVAL ON Broadway began with a reading. In June 2021, the producer Jeffrey Richards developed a streaming event to aid the Actors Fund, a New York nonprofit. Performance spaces were all but closed, and theater artists were looking for opportunities, so Leon agreed to direct over Zoom, and McDonald signed on to play Suzanne Alexander. McDonald, who had trained as an opera singer, hadn’t read Kennedy’s work in school, and found herself enraptured by the script. (“Abyss, bespattered, cureless, misfortune, enemy, alien host, battle groups fated to fall on the field today,” chants Suzanne, close to madness near the play’s end, transforming her English literature lessons into a kind of funeral rite.) Once the event was over, the actor says, “I turned off my computer, I couldn’t move. Gutted. Like a fish.” Not long after, Richards planned a Broadway run.For McDonald, the production has been its own kind of education. “Adrienne is forever and always a teacher,” the actor says. “I’ll get an email that says, ‘Audra, you need to read this book,’ or, ‘I want you to watch this particular interpretation of “Jane Eyre.” ’” These lessons have influenced McDonald to the point that she doesn’t just want to bring Kennedy’s work to Broadway; she wants to conjure the playwright herself in her portrayal of Suzanne Alexander. “She has her own rhythm,” McDonald tells me over the phone, and suddenly it’s like I’m talking to Kennedy — that trademark lilt. “Even where her voice sits, you know, and then she gets a little — not lost in the thought,” McDonald continues, “but she’s still emotionally tied to all of it, which I find so moving. I want to be able to capture that. I want to be able to bring Adrienne.” But the question remains: Will she come? At 91, Kennedy’s not sure she can travel to New York for the opening. Perhaps the next generation will take it from here. In recent years, she’s corresponded with Harris; when he got engaged in October, his fiancé, the television executive Arvand Khosravi, asked Kennedy to write a surprise inscription on the inside of his ring: “Happiness. Is. To Me. Greatest Thing,” it says, her syntax intact. Throughout the pandemic, the two writers had discussed a co-production — a double billing of one of her plays, and a new play from Harris about her influence on him, his grief over his grandmother’s death and his suspicion of the theater industrial complex.Who knows when that might happen. Kennedy mostly stays at home these days and, this late in life, doesn’t expect the recognition she’s been denied. (She won’t even allow herself to be photographed.) “I’ve been around a long time,” she tells me. “Playwrights aren’t icons.” It makes me think of some advice she’d sent me years ago, after I’d had a little success in the theater:You. Have. Done.   The work.Pull.  Away. From the scene.                  Assoon as youCan.Crowds of people can. Kill you. More

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    Theater’s New Glass Menageries

    Some of the most innovative set designers and directors are placing actors within transparent boxes, posing novel aesthetic questions in the process.IN A WORLD filtered through screens, a condition made even more acute during pandemic lockdown, the theater’s most anachronistic thrill would seem to be watching lives unfold before us. The actors may not literally be within our grasp, but the lack of a barrier between them and us, the illusion that we are, for once, actually in the room — the sound of the human voice in anguish or joy, a carafe of water crashing to the floor — has never seemed more stirring and essential.Or perhaps not. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place not in the three-sided black boxes that defined the experimental zest and emerging punk of the late 1970s, or the crowd-pleasing theater-in-the-round pioneered in ancient Greece and Rome and revitalized in the mid-20th century, but in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke the International Style’s high Modernism and the minimalist penthouses of the contemporary metropolis. There would not seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeAnd yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous. After a long Broadway hiatus, “The Lehman Trilogy,” directed by Sam Mendes, opens next month at the Nederlander Theater; during its nearly three-and-a-half-hour duration, three actors play a cavalcade of characters from the more than 160-year history of Lehman Brothers, the infamous investment house, encased in a revolving transparent box conceived by the British designer Es Devlin. The 2016 Young Vic production of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma” (1934), directed by the then-31-year-old Australian Simon Stone, was restaged in 2018 at New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory in what was essentially a giant terrarium. That same year, the German designer Miriam Buether built a glassed-in room with a huge tilting mirror as the back wall for a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” (1991), directed by Joe Mantello on Broadway. And for his 2017 National Theater adaptation of the film “Network” (1976), which came to Broadway the following year, the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove put his stage manager in a large glass box, casting him as a character who ran both the actual play and the mythical television broadcast at the center of the plot.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeA thoroughly contemporary material, glass creates what Buether calls “an ultimate filmic quality, like looking through a lens.” Even before fear of infection drove us behind protective plexiglass shields and reduced most human interaction to Zoom, theater audiences had come to appreciate the trippy perceptual effects of multimedia innovations — video projections have become commonplace onstage, particularly as pioneered by van Hove and others. Such effects are now part of the theatrical experience, a way to warp audience expectations. Once, updating a classic with, say, modern dress or gender-blind casting was provocative and transformational, allowing us to see the text anew; now, the stage itself has become the terra nova that jolts us, a glass cage making literal these works’ themes of isolation and vulnerability.FOR THE VIEWER looking at something through it, glass offers both a subtle shift and a seismic one; it alters everything while visually changing very little. “You know that what you’re watching is different, but you can’t quite tell why,” says Buether, 52, who, for the second act of “Three Tall Women,” created two rooms — mirror images of each other — separated by a wall of plexiglass, and then placed a mirrored wall behind them, creating multiple images of the characters and echoing the play’s notions of identity and time. “It’s like making the fourth wall tangible, as though peering into a display case. You adjust to it quickly — I mean, it’s transparent — but it never really disappears.”For Stone, who has set shows behind glass a half dozen times, beginning with his 2011 production of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” (1885) at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, the conceit works best with a particular part of the canon: intimate plays “that plumb the dark night of the soul,” he says. A specialist in reviving the works of domestic naturalism that distinguished European theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he believes that using glass, often in near-bare environments, has enabled him to reinvent these plays for a new generation. Back when Ibsen was writing, Stone notes, it was radical to set works in bourgeois living rooms instead of castles and fields, but such environments now seem banal. “I thought to myself: ‘What would happen if you actually put the glass between the action and audience?’” he says. “‘What if you make it an obstacle that has to be overcome, that the audience has to lean into?’” A production of “The Wild Duck” from Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, at the Barbican Theater’s International Ibsen Festival, 2014.Theatrepix/Alamy For “Yerma,” he wanted the title character’s descent into madness after she’s unable to bear a child to seem inescapable; for “The Wild Duck,” he was seeking to add a clinical aspect to a plot that culminates in a young girl unexpectedly shooting herself in the chest: “I was very conscious of not turning it into suicide porn,” he says. He used a series of revolving stacked glass boxes — roughly evocative of a Modernist chalet — for his 2017 Theater Basel production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” published in 1901, “because it made the realities of their lives even more brutal and confined.” Paradoxically, actors thrive in the glass box, he adds: “Sometimes being fully exposed can inhibit them. You have too close a connection to the audience; you are too aware. The illusion that they are in a private room makes them feel safe.”The Young Vic’s production of “Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2018.Stephanie BergerStill, working behind glass is not without its unique technical challenges. If you put your cast in a box, especially one with a lid, you cut off all possibility of acoustical naturalism. Many plays these days are miked, but the amplification is designed to be undetectable, creating the illusion of proximity; once there is a closed cube, verisimilitude becomes more complex. “Yes, you lose the sound of the natural voice,” says Stone, “but you gain extreme aural intimacy.”Devlin, 50, who has designed tour sets for Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, as well as for operas, is also accustomed to the trade-offs of a glass box. For her and Mendes, who began as a theater director before moving to film, this kind of spare set provides a juxtaposition to an epic historical work like “Lehman.” The boardroom, as well as the other office spaces in which the play unspools, “conveys both claustrophobia and expanse, intruding on the audience’s domain,” she says, and winks at the glassed-in conference spaces that have become corporate America’s heavy-handed attempt at conveying “transparency.” Inside, the box is divided into three chambers with internal glass partitions on which the actors scrawl the names of the Civil War dead and the price of commodities. The rectangle’s perimeter is formed by glass panels between which are open gaps, which improve the acoustics and act like apertures, allowing the action to move from wide screen to close up. That the box also revolves creates the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot: “Sam loves that, of course,” Devlin says.A revolving glass box returns to Broadway in “The Lehman Trilogy.”By Nicholas CalcottBut cramming the action into a single room also has a deeper significance. When Devlin worked with the director Trevor Nunn on the 1998 London revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” (1978), which took place in a deconstructed facsimile of a domicile in which the windows were mere outlines on the walls, she referenced the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a ghostly, solid cast-concrete replica of a rowhouse, which stood on an East London street for three months. Together, the sculpture and the production reminded viewers how the confines of home can be both solid and ephemeral. For “Lehman,” Devlin was also inspired by “Tango,” a semi-animated eight-minute 1981 short by the Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski, in which dozens of people seem to simultaneously inhabit a small front parlor, their elaborate dance compacting time and space. “There’s a message embedded in a single room,” says Devlin, “that architecture itself is the vessel through which history — whether intimate or monumental — is enacted. Glass helps you make that message explicit: A room is more than just a passive container. It remembers life.”Set design: Todd Knopke More

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    Elizabeth McCann, 90, Dies; Broadway Producer With a Formidable Track Record

    In a career that began in 1976, she won nine Tony Awards and helped bring “Equus,” “Amadeus” and the work of Edward Albee to the New York stage.The veteran Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann with Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theaters and Producers, in 2001.Gabe Palacio/Getty ImagesElizabeth McCann, a theater producer known for what one journalist called her “steel and wit” who in a dizzying four-decade career won nine Tony Awards, many of them as half of McCann & Nugent Productions, and gave New York audiences more than 60 Broadway productions, including such hits as “Equus,” “Amadeus” and “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” died on Wednesday in the Bronx. She was 90.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her longtime associate and friend Kristen Luciani, who said Ms. McCann had cancer.McCann & Nugent, which Ms. McCann formed in 1976 with Nelle Nugent, had a remarkable five-year winning streak, taking the Tony for either best play or best revival every year from 1978 to 1982. The first was for “Dracula,” a sexy variation on the classic vampire story; the rest were for dramas or satires.These included “The Elephant Man” (1979), the story of a physically disfigured man in Victorian England; “Amadeus” (1981), about the composer Antonio Salieri’s bitter musical rivalry with Mozart in 18th-century Vienna; and “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” (1982), an eight-and-a-half-hour adaptation, imported from London, of Charles Dickens’s 19th-century social satire.After her partnership with Ms. Nugent ended in the mid-1980s, Ms. McCann won four more Tonys: best revival for productions of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” (1998) and “Hair” (2009), one of the few musicals she produced, and best play for Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” (2000) and Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” (2002).Her producing relationship with Mr. Albee also included Off Broadway productions of “Three Tall Women,” “Painting Churches” and “The Play About the Baby.”“Getting ahead in business means having an ability to compromise your conscience, and you get better at it the older you get,” Ms. McCann told the business newspaper Crain’s, at least partly tongue in cheek, in 2007. At the same time, she said in several interviews, she still felt a childlike thrill in being able to walk into theaters without a ticket.Ms. McCann was honored by the Tony Awards as part of a “60 Years of Excellence” celebration in 2006. She won nine Tonys in her career, many of them as half of McCann & Nugent Productions.G. Gershoff/WireImageElizabeth Ireland McCann was born on March 29, 1931, in Manhattan, the only child of Patrick and Rebecca (Henry) McCann. Her father was a subway motorman, her mother a homemaker. Both her parents were born in Scotland.Though the McCanns lived in Midtown Manhattan — Elizabeth recalled roller-skating throughout the garment district as a child — they were not a theatergoing family. Elizabeth was 14 when she saw her first Broadway show, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” starring José Ferrer; she went only because a cousin from New Jersey had an extra ticket and her mother insisted that she go. Luckily and fatefully, she said decades later, the play, for which Mr. Ferrer won a Tony, “blew me away.”Giving some thought to teaching drama, she graduated from Manhattanville College in 1952 and earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University two years later. She worked in theater for about 10 years, beginning as an unpaid intern for Proscenium Productions, a company based at the Cherry Lane Theater in Lower Manhattan. (“Eventually they paid me $25 a week,” she recalled.) Frustrated with her lack of advancement, she decided that practicing theatrical law might be a way to go.“By the time I got out of law school, I was 35,” she recalled in 2002 in a CUNY-TV interview. After receiving her law degree from Fordham University in 1966 and passing the New York bar, she briefly worked for a Manhattan law firm and took some jobs in theater management.Her big break was not a legal job: In 1967, she was hired by James Nederlander as managing director of the Nederlander Organization. Ms. Nugent was a co-worker there.After teaming up to found their own firm, Ms. McCann and Ms. Nugent became general managers of six productions in their first two years together, including the original Broadway staging of “The Gin Game.” They then tried their hand at producing.Ms. McCann with, from left, the television journalist Pia Lindstrom, former Mayor David N. Dinkins and Woodie King Jr., the founding director of the New Federal Theater, at a benefit for the theater in New York in 2011.Walter McBride/Corbis via Getty ImagesTheir first show, “Dracula” (1977), starring Frank Langella, ran two and a half years and won two Tonys, one for costume design and one for best revival. (The category was called “most innovative revival” that year.) Ms. McCann considered it a sign of good luck when she learned that her mother, who had immigrated from Glasgow in her youth, had sailed on the passenger liner Transylvania.Another notable Broadway hit was “Morning’s at Seven” (1981), about four elderly sisters in the Midwest. Though seemingly bucolic, the production had its dark side. As Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, the play might have looked like a Norman Rockwell painting, but its soul was Edward Hopper’s.When Ms. McCann and Ms. Nugent began their business, they were casually referred to in the industry as “the girls.” After their successes started rolling in, that changed to “the ladies.” But Ms. McCann saw gender as just one facet of a complicated picture.“Sure, we’re women. But you could look at it another way,” she said in an interview with The Times in 1981. “Most of the men in the theater business are Jewish, and I’m Irish Catholic. You could say, ‘How the hell did an Irish Catholic — or a New Jersey Protestant like Nelle — ever get in?’”In an industry “desperate for success and product and ideas,” she concluded, “I don’t think anybody cares as much where those things come from as they think they care.”There were bumps along the way. Investors sued Ms. McCann and Ms. Nugent for fraud after their 1985 show “Leader of the Pack” failed to recoup its investment (the fate of some 80 percent of Broadway productions). A federal jury found the producers not guilty, and a relieved Ms. McCann told the news media afterward: “Nobody’s out to cheat investors. God knows it’s hard enough to find them.”After the partners went their own ways — Ms. Nugent pursued a solo career as well and went on to produce many shows on Broadway — they had a brief reunion in 2002, jointly producing the dark comedy “The Smell of the Kill” at the Helen Hayes Theater. It was not a success and closed after 60 performances.In the early 2000s, Ms. McCann also produced six Tony Awards telecasts, three of which won Emmys.She never married and leaves no immediate survivors.Her last producing credit was Martin McDonagh’s “Hangmen,” which had been scheduled to open on Broadway on March 19, 2020, but closed after 13 previews, along with every other Broadway production, because of the Covid-19 pandemic.Ms. McCann’s producing philosophy was simple. “Producing is really about insisting that everybody pay attention to detail,” she told The Times in 1981. “The Titanic probably sank because nobody ordered binoculars for the crow’s nest.” More