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      Review: Learning ‘English,’ When Your Accent Is a ‘War Crime’

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      In a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi, four Iranians and their language teacher find second selves in a second tongue.If you’ve ever tried, as an adult, to learn a new language, you know how painful it can be; it’s bad enough to hear yourself mangling Italian, but worse to hear it mangling you. For those of us accustomed to sounding sharp with our words, it can come as quite a blow to discover the shabby figure we cut in the ill-fitting suit of someone else’s.How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.The play, a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, is after all set in Iran in 2008, against a backdrop of travel restrictions and family separations. Each of the four students prepping for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, at a storefront school in Karaj, a city of two million not far from Tehran, has a different reason for enrolling.For the cheerful 18-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the promise and pleasure of new opportunity is reason enough. “English is the rice,” she explains in the inadvertent poetry of the partially fluent. “You take some rice, and you make the rice whatever you want.”But the others are more ambivalent. Dignified Roya (Pooya Mohseni) is there only because her son, who lives in “the Canada” with his wife and daughter, has insisted she speak English if she wants to live with them. He will not have his daughter’s assimilation threatened, he has warned, by a grandmother cooing in Farsi.If Roya is angry about this situation, she mostly suppresses the feeling, leaving her son hilariously passive-aggressive voice mail messages in which she offers evidence of her growing fluency. “I know all the numbers now,” she tells him. “Forty-three. Five hundred and thirty-eight. And seven.”But for Elham (Tala Ashe), anxiety is upfront: Having failed the Toefl five times, she must pass it if she wants her provisional acceptance at an Australian medical school to become official. When the Toefl teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), tells her that “English isn’t your enemy,” she answers, “It is feeling like yes.” Her accent, she adds, is “a war crime.”Marjan learned English during nine years spent living in Manchester, England, gradually experiencing the way the fog of alienation can give way, through language, to the thrill of connection. Now that she is back in Iran, though, her English is eroding at the edges, at least in comparison to that of the fourth student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose accent is minimal and vocabulary exceptional. Playing a game in which everyone must name items of clothing as quickly as possible while tossing a ball, he wins handily, wowing the others with “windbreaker.”Tabbal, left, plays the standout student in the English class taught by Neshat’s character. We understand her fluency (nine years in Britain), but there’s a mystery behind his (where did he learn the word “windbreaker”?).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the course of 22 scenes representing lessons, office hours and smoke breaks during the six-week course, we get to know all five characters well, and yet they also remain as stubbornly enigmatic as people do in real life. Their progress, too, is unpredictable, their skills sometimes stalling, then bounding forward, with new words and seemingly new ideas emerging.Not that we are told this; we just see it happen, thanks to Toossi’s clever theatricalization of the process. (When the characters speak English, they do so haltingly and with an accent; when they speak Farsi, which we hear in English, it’s swift and unaccented.) Even Elham, her W’s no longer sounding like V’s, and her tempo improved from largo to allegretto, is eventually able to pose a challenge to Omid’s fluency.The mystery of that fluency (why does he know “windbreaker”?) is one of the more obvious tensioning devices in a play that, despite its pleasures — but also at the root of them — has a somewhat schematic structure. Like a lifeboat movie, it features the immediate and broad differentiation of characters, their shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.Nor are its themes entirely novel; the drama of superimposing one language on another is at the heart of works as widely varied as Brian Friel’s “Translations” (in which a 19th-century cartographer is charged with rendering Irish place names in English) and the hyper-asterisked Leo Rosten novel “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,” set among immigrants in a night school English class and turned into a musical in 1968.But the delicacy of Toossi’s development handily makes up for both problems, especially the hysteria of lifeboat melodrama; in a recent interview in The New York Times, she told my colleague Alexis Soloski that “writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave.”So in dealing with characters who could easily be exoticized in their chadors, Toossi has chosen instead to focus on their familiarity; like most of us, they deal less with the disaster of geopolitics than with an atmosphere of mild if daily discomfort. As such, the insights here are deep but never shattering, as when Roya perceives the crucial distinction between the verbs “visit” and “live” in one of her son’s messages. If the world’s happiness does not depend on it, a grandmother’s does.The director Knud Adams gently underlines the calm, almost classical rhythms of Toossi’s writing. Chopinesque piano solos play between scenes. As the play contemplates the question of language from several angles, the cube-like set, by Marsha Ginsberg, slowly rotates, offering in turn a street view of the building, the classroom interior and an entry portico. The cast is uniformly excellent, in a suitably unshowy but fully lived-in way.Too much delicacy has a way of wearing thin, though; with its refusal of trauma and even climax — the romance, if there is one, is buried — “English” begins to feel a bit overlong despite its moderate running time of an hour and 45 minutes.Still, the longueurs are worth it, forcing the audience into a useful position of slight non-fluency. We don’t always know what is going on in the play, as we don’t in the world either. And as each character struggles to decide whether to become another person by mastering another language, we are asked to consider whether we in the English-speaking West are not just cultural imperialists but linguistic ones as well. And whether, perhaps, those are really the same thing.EnglishThrough March 13 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

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      The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More

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      Review: In Clare Barron’s ‘Shhhh,’ Staging a Memoir of the Body

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      The playwright directs and stars in her new play for Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2. It’s less a traditional narrative and more of a series of flirtations with discomfort.To get to your seat, you walk past someone’s toilet, stationed next to their sink, above which their pill bottles sit on a shelf.It’s hard to get more intimate than that.And yet that’s exactly what “Shhhh” manages to do. The new play, written by, directed by and starring Clare Barron, is explicit and occasionally uncomfortable, but all for the right reasons.Arnulfo Maldonado’s exquisite set design for the show, which opened on Monday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, truly makes the space feel as if it were an apartment transformed into a theater rather than the reverse. There’s that bathroom stage left. And in a corner, partially obscured by a wall, a mattress lies on the floor, the sheets tousled on top. Candles and hanging string lights create a seductive atmosphere, but the industrial-looking metal rolling carts add a cool edge. And the audience members in the first few rows sit on cushions on the floor, extending the cozy vibe.“Shhhh” begins with Sally (named Witchy Witch in the program, and performed by Constance Shulman) recording an ASMR meditation. The sound of it is unsettling. Shulman’s signature rasp seems to envelop the space as she narrates what she’s doing — she talks about the Lysol wipe she’s using as we hear the sound of the cloth moving, amplified by a mic, and she taps her nails against a ceramic cup, telling us it’s full of lavender tea. She speaks slowly, stretching the syllables of each word so far they could reach from the theater, in Chelsea, to the East River. (The sharp sound design is by Sinan Refik Zafar.)Sally, a postal worker, says her job makes her feel close to people, even though that intimacy isn’t real. She goes on a so-so date with Penny (Janice Amaya), a nonbinary person who shares that they feel most comfortable and in control of their body during sex parties.Sally’s sister is Shareen (Barron), a playwright with a lot of “health stuff” who has a codependent and often consensually iffy sexual relationship with a male friend, Kyle (Greg Keller).And Francis (Nina Grollman) and Sandra (Annie Fang) are, well, two random young women who talk about body agency and consent in a pizza shop as Shareen, sitting at another table, silently listens.Barron and Greg Keller in the play. Arnulfo Maldonado did the set design.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Shhhh!” doesn’t have a traditional narrative; there’s no antagonist, and there’s not much of a sense of causality across scenes. The work itself has the feel of a series of flirtations: discomfort, assaults, insecurities and sorrows are spoken about and alluded to, but not detailed. We don’t get back stories or explainers. We just get the way these people speak and move and touch in relationship to one another. It’s telling that most of the sex acts mentioned are ones of penetration and discharge but much less often about the simple delicacies of a caress, or a kiss.The conversations these characters have are visceral: They talk of gushing wounds, feces-covered sheets, body fluids of all flavors. Though this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Barron’s works, which include “I’ll Never Love Again” and the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Dance Nation.” She’s made a specialty of writing what are essentially staged memoirs of the body. Barron rarely opts for the romantic idea of pleasure, instead examining pleasure tied to physical violence and emotional manipulation, shame, self-esteem and trauma. The whole production aches with an unspoken loneliness.That ache comes through in Barron’s direction, but also in the performances, led by Barron herself, who sheaths Shareen in a delicate melancholy. Her gaze seems to drift off into the distance serenely but without satisfaction. She seems unsteady. And yet her somberness also belies a ferocious hunger; throughout the show Shareen plays with her food, pressing her fingertips into the scraps, crumbs and flakes on her plate or table and bringing them to her mouth, almost compulsively. The characters move self-consciously — in the way they recline or cross their legs — and seem to traverse the distances that separate them cautiously, as if wading through a river to the other shore.Keller is believable as the guy friend who soon realizes he may have to hold himself accountable for some questionable bedroom behaviors, and Grollman, Fang and Amaya, who get to wear the show’s most eclectic fashions (the satisfyingly offbeat costume design is by Kaye Voyce), give top-tier performances in small roles. Shulman is less convincing as Shareen’s older sister, supposedly by only two years, despite the nearly 30-year age gap between the two actresses. Shulman’s monotone drawl is a comic novelty at first, helping many of the jokes land, but this delivery, dry as a dust storm in the desert, becomes tiresome.Nina Grollman, left, and Annie Fang in a powerful scene at a pizza shop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other issue is the show’s erratic pacing. A Looney Tunes-esque chase scene and a mystical ritual both feel interminable. While other scenes are too short, and characters lack depth. Amaya has a sparky energy, but their character is less developed in relation to the others. And the characters of Francis and Sandra speak in only one scene, in the pizza shop, though the dialogue is incredibly compelling: candid exchanges about what it’s like to be a woman in a world of modern dating, and romantic metaphors about isolation and desire. I could’ve watched an entire show of this conversation.I went into this show expecting the grotesque and perhaps even the gratuitous, especially once I passed a sign in the theater warning the audience about the nudity and the play’s content. Nothing triggered me or offended me, not even Shareen’s description of her diarrhea or the sight of a used DivaCup. (I can’t say the same for everyone else, particularly the three audience members who shuffled out early in the show, never to return.)But then there was one moment that got to me, when Francis and Sandra are talking about the ways the men they’ve dated have manipulated their way to getting what they want, like unprotected sex. As Francis recounted a drunken negotiation she had with a guy, my body stiffened. The exchange was so familiar; it made me recall my own sticky encounter with a date.While that moment in the show may have made me feel uncomfortable, I was also grateful for the scene, and even the thorny feeling it inspired — theater should sometimes cause us discomfort. After all, the greatest intimacies we can hope for, as audience members, are those we build between our seats and the stage.ShhhhThrough Feb. 20 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Skeleton Crew,’ Making Quick Work of Hard Labor

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      Dominique Morisseau’s 2016 play, now on Broadway, is a swift, well-crafted look at factory workers trapped in an economic “dumpster fire.”The construction of the joke is perfect: A 60-ish woman in the grungy break room of a metal stamping factory lights a cigarette beneath a sign that says “No Smoking Faye” — the “Faye” part added by hand in big, angry letters.Naturally, as we soon learn, she is Faye.So begins “Skeleton Crew,” a play by Dominique Morisseau that in considering the ways we must sometimes break rules, breaks none itself. It’s so adroitly built and written — and, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday, so beautifully staged and acted — that you hardly have time to decide, until its brisk two hours have passed, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.Start with Faye, who has worked at the factory for 29 years; she plans to hang on until, at year 30, her pension bumps up significantly. As played by Phylicia Rashad in a wonderfully ungrand performance, wearing flannel shirts, big jeans, work boots and a look of sour contentment, she would appear to have her life under firm control — and, as union rep and auntie of the break room, her co-workers’ lives as well. Dispensing wisdom and correcting their foolishness, she models candor and self-reliance, even when, as “Skeleton Crew” in good time reveals, the two come into conflict.You might call Faye’s specialty, like the play’s, clarity about moral ambiguity. And in Detroit in 2008, with the national economy a “dumpster fire” (as a TV news snippet tells us) and the auto industry in particular collapsing, there’s plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.For Reggie, the unit foreman and author of the no smoking sign, the pressure is almost too much to bear. Burdened with advance knowledge that the factory will shut down within the year, it falls to him to keep efficiency high as workers are let go. But despite his tie and white collar, his is a blue-collar soul, and the terrific Brandon J. Dirden shows just how close the contradictory pull of job and community comes to strangling him as he tries to protect the skeleton crew that remains.Boone and Adams in Dominique Morisseau’s play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAside from Faye, that crew includes Shanita (Chanté Adams) and Dez (Joshua Boone), both under 30 and thus with more (or is it less?) to lose than Faye. Theirs is a classic “B plot,” but the comic and romantic contrast their story provides is more complex than its bald structural purpose suggests.Yes, Dez has a longtime crush on Shanita, who is pregnant by a different man. Sweetly, he walks her to her car every day; tartly, she even lets him. But both have existential worries that interlock with and deepen the play’s larger issues. How can Shanita raise a child alone if the bedrock of her self-confidence — her job — crumbles beneath her? How will Dez survive in a world that sees his labor no less than his existence as expendable? (Though all four characters are Black, racism is more of a given than a theme.)These questions do not seem likely to be answered satisfactorily when, with perfect timing, a gun comes into the picture.In truth, some of the plot devices, the neat parallels and red herrings, are, like Faye, a bit creaky with use. But that doesn’t stop them from working; indeed, it’s a pleasure to surrender to classic craftsmanship. Though you can certainly sense Morisseau’s debt to August Wilson in her dramaturgy — “Skeleton Crew” is part of a trilogy of works set in Detroit, as Wilson had his Pittsburgh Cycle — you also sense the brute efficiency of problem plays by Ibsen and the best television procedurals.Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, improving in many ways on the one he directed for the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016, makes the most of the larger space and the excellent new cast. Michael Carnahan’s set, expanding in grunginess on his earlier version, turns grime into a kind of pulp poetry, from the peeling linoleum to the succulents striving to survive in a barely translucent window. The costumes, by Emilio Sosa, provide both psychology and sociology even in a limited range of sartorial gestures: a “Juicy” sweatshirt for Shanita, a fleece sweater-vest for Reggie.I was less convinced, as was also the case downtown, by the interludes of robotlike popping and waving (choreographed and performed by Adesola Osakalumi) that, along with Nicholas Hussong’s projections, suggest the harsh and repetitive labor taking place beyond the break room. Instead of enhancing our understanding of the characters, these dance moments, however astonishing, seem unrelated and unspecific, detracting from the play’s insistence on valuing workers, not just work.Dirden and Rashad use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt its considerable best, “Skeleton Crew” practices that preachment; its characters are not just building blocks in a moral tale but a pleasure for actors to perform and thus for audiences to experience. Especially in the scenes between Faye and Reggie, when Rashad and Dirden get to use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal, you can’t look away from the many things they’re doing at once. Collegiality, scorn, fear, affection — and a shared history saved for a late reveal — all come into it. What comes out of it is the richness of great performance.If the play itself is sometimes over-rich, it is not underfed. Real things are at stake for characters who expect a respectable reward for labor and loyalty. That their expectations are so rudely disappointed makes it harder to do the right thing in a world that doesn’t, and tragedy could easily ensue.Perhaps what ultimately tips “Skeleton Crew” in the other direction is the way it abjures cynicism in favor of connection. Though Faye at one point says “I don’t abide by no rules but necessity,” it turns out — in a perfectly turned final surprise — that necessity is sometimes a synonym for love.Skeleton CrewThrough Feb. 20 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Clare Barron on ‘Shhhh’ and How Playwriting Is Her ‘Kink of Exhibitionism’

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      The playwright says her semi-autobiographical works, including her new play for Atlantic Theater Company, help to provide a measure of clarity about painful experiences.In the early months of the pandemic, the playwright Clare Barron published an essay titled “Not Writing,” which she accompanied with photographs of her cats, empty La Croix cans and unwashed laundry. “I haven’t written a play in four years,” she wrote. “I don’t know if I’ll write a play ever again. Who cares.”On Friday, the Atlantic Theater Company will premiere Barron’s new play, “Shhhh,” which she also directs and stars in. It’s not new new — Barron, 35, wrote it in 2016. But like all of her work — which includes “Baby Screams Miracle,” “Dirty Crusty,” “I’ll Never Love Again,” the Obie-winning “You Got Older” and the Pulitzer-nominated “Dance Nation” — it feels new: vibrating, visceral, almost worryingly alive.Part drama, part confession, part incantation, “Shhhh” tells the story of Shareen (Barron), a writer with a mysterious illness, and her sister, Sally (Constance Shulman), a postal worker who also makes A.S.M.R. videos and hosts meditation rituals. (The play refers to this character as Witchy Witch.) It returns to the themes and ideas that fascinate Barron: power, pleasure, desire, pain and all of the very weird things that a body can do. “It’s probably why I’m a theater artist,” Barron said, “to get to keep playing with the body in public.”In a conference room at the Atlantic’s offices in Chelsea, Barron — masked, fleeced, unguarded — discussed writing, not writing and creating such passionately personal work. “It’s not like I love it,” she said. “It makes me sick to my stomach. But then I kind of want to do it anyway.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to publish “Not Writing”?I’ve always had a little bit of impostor syndrome and shame around not being a daily writer. My romantic image of a writer was like, they get up at 5 a.m., they put the coffee on, they work for three hours and take a break for breakfast — that kind of thing. I just have never wanted to write every day. I want to go out and do things and see people and have experiences. I’ve always felt like, “Oh, am I a fake writer? Am I not a real writer?” I have to wait for plays to incubate inside of me. Sometimes that means four come out in two years. Sometimes that means one comes out in seven years.I started to find success as a playwright in my late 20s, and my mental health was just completely plummeting. I got diagnosed as bipolar right before the 2016 election. And I just haven’t been able to write sometimes because of mental health. It is really freaky when everyone’s expecting you to function at a really high level. And you’re like, “I can’t feed myself right now. I can’t shower myself right now.” I’m not going to always be able to be functional, and I’m not going to always be able to be efficient, and I’m not going to always be able to be productive, and I’m just going to have to make peace with that.Barron at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. She is also directing and starring in her new play.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesDo you think you would have been diagnosed earlier if you weren’t working in theater?Being a theater artist delayed my diagnosis 100 percent, because it is such a weird lifestyle. You’re allowed to be really emotional. When you’re crying for no reason, theater people are great! And the schedule’s really off and on. So it actually works really well with a manic burst.Did you worry about what treatment would do to your process? I understand that even while you haven’t written plays, you have kept writing, mostly pilots for television.Limiting your creative ability or even your creative desire is a really common fear for anyone looking to go on psychiatric medication. I had that fear. And as years went by and I didn’t write new plays, it mounted. I was doing writing as a job. But what I wasn’t able to do was inspiration, personal revelation. I got a little freaked out, like, “Oh, did I lose it?” But being able to be in a TV writers’ room and still produce episodes was really helpful.How did you take care of yourself during the pandemic?Everyone had a different trial. I was single and lived alone. So what I was struggling with was no in-person social support, and just being really isolated. It just was incredibly lonely. I took a ton of baths. I drank a ton. I’d started doing craft projects. Everything from painting rocks to felting. I felted these little stuffed animal creatures.You wrote “Shhhh” in 2016. I remember you describing it in 2019 as a #MeToo play.I never knew how to talk about this play. So I would try out different tag lines. It’s a little bit of a collage play; it’s a little bit of a spell. It is a play about sexual assault, but very, very buried and strange. It’s a play about rape culture, but slightly more casually.When did you know that you wanted to direct it? And that you wanted to play Shareen?You’re talking to me right before we go into tech [rehearsals]. So I’m like, “What am I doing? This was a huge mistake.” I’ve been interested in directing for a while, and I’ve experimented with it a bit. The acting thing came separate. I wrote the play because I was sexually assaulted, but I was not able to say it. It was therapy for me to write this play. And that character, Shareen, is so me, everything that happens to her. It’s not autobiographical, but it’s in my skin and in my bones. We did this reading at my agent’s office where I just read it, and it just felt right and easy. Now it feels hard and scary. But in that moment, it felt like the right choice.“Shhhh” reminded me of one of your earliest plays, “Dirty Crusty,” and its fascination with the body as a site of both pleasure and disgust.I can’t quite get over that. Theater is the body; it is the body in front of other bodies. I like the body to be vulnerable onstage, present onstage, seen onstage, animal onstage — those are all things that turn me on. Growing up in a Christian community and feeling like I wanted to save my virginity until I was married, it took me forever to undo that knot and not feel like I was going to go to hell if I had sex. There’s something, like, compulsive in my theater work where I just keep trying to undo that knot and do things onstage that I never thought I would do. And when I finally did have sex, I just remember my utter shock when I realized that, like, sex was flesh and not magic.Like most of your plays, “Shhhh” has some intimate scenes. Has the pandemic influenced that staging?There’s also spitting and eating and sharing food. All of that feels really different now. In our rehearsal process, we’ve been doing sex scenes in masks. In some ways, it’s nice. There’s an added layer of care and sensitivity. It might feel a little wild to be doing it in front of an audience.There’s magic in this play — incantation, ritual. Is magic something you believe in?I think I believe in magic. I believe in things more than I can understand. Divine coincidence, chanting. Yeah, I do believe in magic. I play with that, too, because theater does feel like a ritual. It’s a little bit like, what can we conjure?You tend to write from a personal place. Where does autobiography end and art take over?Every single play that I’ve ever written starts with something that happened in my life that was super painful. Maybe this is my kink of exhibitionism: I get off on writing about these things super baldly. When a play goes well, I think of it almost as a yeast starter. When you work with the materials, it just changes. But I’m kind of shameless about it. “I’ll Never Love Again” is literally my diary. It’s not even hidden, which is why I don’t get upset when people are like, “Oh, I think this is autobiographical.” Because that’s not a bad word to me. I feel like I’m exposing myself over and over again, hoping to have some kind of like clarity.Is there a fear that you’ll run out of material?I don’t think I’m afraid of that. I just think I might have to wait for it. Life is just so painful and throws you so many curveballs, there always is another thing to write about. It’ll be a blessed thing if I have nothing to write about. More

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      Atlantic Theater Company Announces a Premiere-Packed Season

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      Five works will debut from August to April, including Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter” and an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo.”Atlantic Theater Company will spring back to life this summer with an ambitious five-premiere season. The theater’s Off Broadway productions, announced Tuesday, include Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter,” an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo” and a new play by Ngozi Anyanwu.Anyanwu, a playwright-actor whose work “The Homecoming Queen” was staged there in 2018, returns in August with “The Last of the Love Letters.” Patricia McGregor will direct. The play is about two people wrestling with “the thing they love most” and questioning “whether to stick it out or to leave it behind,” according to the theater.The musical adaptation of “Kimberly Akimbo,” with music by Jeanine Tesori, will debut 20 years after Lindsay-Abaire’s play was first produced at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. It tells the story of a teenage girl with a condition that has left her with the health and appearance of a 72-year-old. In his 2003 review of the Manhattan Theater Club production of the dark comedy, Ben Brantley called it “haunting and hilarious.”Silverman’s show, based on her 2010 memoir, will arrive in 2022, nearly two years after it had originally been scheduled to receive its world premiere. The company noted that Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the music and collaborated with Silverman on the lyrics, will not be present when the cast takes its first bows next April. He died in 2020 of Covid-19 complications.The second half of the season will also feature “SHHHHH,” a new play by Clare Barron, which she will direct and perform in, and Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” about four adult students in Iran preparing for a language test.More information about the season is available at atlantictheater.org. More