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      Avant-Garde Theater, or a Musical: Who Says You Need to Choose?

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      In Germany, a sonically daring Chekhov adaptation and a post-apocalyptic western “opera” are breaking down barriers between genres.FRANKFURT — Ever since Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill served up “The Threepenny Opera,” their “play with music,” in Berlin in 1928, the dividing line between spoken and musical theater in Germany has been remarkably porous.Music is everywhere in contemporary German theater, often used to heighten or subvert emotional effects. Some of the credit or blame goes to Frank Castorf, the influential East Berlin director, whose long, demanding productions at the Volksbühne owed much of their unique, frenetic energy to the eclectic soundtracks devised by the theater’s longtime music director, Sir Henry.The quota of live music on dramatic stages here also seems to be increasing. Recent memorable examples have included the furious drumming that provides a rhythmic backbone to the Trojan War segment of Christopher Rüping’s monumental “Dionysos Stadt” and the dronelike chanting in Ulrich Rasche’s takes on classic works.And two of last year’s most discussed shows — Bonn Park’s “Gymnasium” and Yael Ronen’s “Slippery Slope” — were bona fide musicals, with impressive scores and singing, although they were a far cry from your typical Broadway or West End fare. Watching both productions, I felt we might be on the cusp of a breakthrough, with serious theater makers here channeling the vulgar and gleeful tunefulness of “Avenue Q” or “The Book of Mormon.”Such thoughts swirled in my head as I sat down to watch “Burt Turrido. An Opera” in Frankfurt this month. A four-hour post-apocalyptic western, it will travel to Hamburg and Berlin in the coming weeks.Behind the show is Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an influential American avant-garde theater collective that was founded in New York in 2006 and has become increasingly prominent on European stages in the past decade. The troupe’s co-founders, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, are serious artists whose shrewd approach and mischievous creative drive combine elements of European and American avant-gardes. Formally daring, energetic and unpredictable, their work is hard to pin down precisely because it encompasses so many genres and styles.From left, Bence Mezei, Robert M. Johanson, Anne Gridley and Gabel Eiben in “Burt Turrido.”Jessica SchäferSadly, the theatrical exuberance and innovation that characterize Copper and Liska’s best efforts are in short supply in “Burt Turrido,” a loopy mock-opera whose silliness would be bearable if the meandering libretto had anything to say, or if the canned score was not a succession of immediately forgettable folk and country tunes.The title character (a bewildered-looking Gabel Eiben) is a red-bearded castaway with amnesia who washes ashore on a barren island. He is rescued by Queen Karen (a scene-chewing Anne Gridley) and King Bob (Robert M. Johanson, who also wrote the music), petty despots who seized control of the island after it was swept by waves of environmental catastrophe, war and genocide. Burt is pursued by Karen, who wants his child, and a lovesick ghost named Emily (Kadence Neill, the cast’s best singer). Oh, and there’s Joseph (Bence Mezei), Emily’s ex-husband and Karen’s ex-lover, who has more than a little in common with his biblical predecessor. (For starters, he’s thrown into a pit.)The characters circle one another in an endless dance of romantic intrigue, suspicion and shifting power dynamics. Copper and Liska keep the tone light, with some silly sci-fi and horror effects (ghosts in sheets; a chintzy U.F.O.) and only a handful of genuinely moving scenes.This is a show with legs: It has already been performed in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Greece. (So far, however, no U.S. dates have been announced.) And it does seem to have been devised and designed for maximum portability. Luka Curk’s set consists of little more than flat, hand-painted backdrops, cutout waves jerked back and forth by the performers, and a shimmering blue cloth to represent the sea.Of course, a certain level of flimsiness is precisely the point of this winking, knowing operatic sendup: It’s decidedly a bargain basement production, and Copper and Liska’s ability to create a convincing and clean theatrical aesthetic out of the bare-bones staging is their main achievement here. Yet at even half its current length, “Burt Turrido” would be excruciating. Its 14 scenes (and epilogue) feel like a goofy sketch that has metastasized to operatic proportions.I would have felt bad for the performers who needed to drawl, warble and dance their way through the overlong evening, except that they appeared to be having more fun than the audience, a large portion of which fled at intermission. Beyond the spirited performances, there’s little to recommend “Burt Turrido,” which mostly feels like a joke that goes on far too long. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is how little the music adds. Here, too, the constant singing registers mostly as a gimmick, and there is little flair to Johanson’s score. The result is an impoverished “opera” where neither the music nor the drama is enriched through their combination.The cast of “Waiting for Platonov,” directed by Thom Luz, at the Residenztheater.Sandra ThenFor a sly and haunting marriage of those two elements, turn to “Waiting for Platonov,” an arrestingly musical production by the Swiss director Thom Luz at the Residenztheater in Munich. The title character of Chekhov’s early play, a womanizing schoolteacher who broods on his life of failure, never materializes during the production’s two and a half hours. Instead, a troupe of 10 actors recite snippets of dialogue drawn from the Russian writer’s work and break out in song while performing an energetic choreography that is precisely timed to a witty, inventive sound design.The title, with its nod to Beckett, can be interpreted in several ways. First of all, it proposes the Russian dramatist as a sort of precursor to the Irish Nobel Prize winner in his examination of futility as an existential component of human life. Chekhov’s characters cavort in dachas, while Beckett’s take up residence in trash cans — but they all feel the stifling dread and purposelessness of existence. The title may also refer to the fact that it took over four decades for Chekhov’s 1878 work to be published. The actors’ excitement and increasing exasperation over Platonov’s impending arrival parallels the writer’s frustrations with the play, which was rejected by Maria Yermolova, the great Russian actress to whom he sent the manuscript.Luz, an in-house director at the Residenztheater, brings a compositional rigor to his work that is occasionally reminiscent of the style of Christoph Marthaler and Herbert Fritsch, two influential older directors with keen musical sensibilities and a penchant for absurdity, but his enigmatic and astringent style is entirely his own. The show’s soundscape, devised by Luz, is full of popping mics, uncanny reverberations, sustained clusters of discordant notes and an out-of-tune mechanical piano. As the actors ascend and descend two large onstage staircases (also designed by Luz), their footfalls describe musical scales.Luz balances between the production’s abstract, aural elements and Chekhov’s decontextualized dialogue, which takes on a musical function as well through chanting. Although it is as far from traditional musical theater as “Burt Turrido. An Opera” is from “La Traviata,” “Waiting for Platonov” is a fusion of music, sound and text that is hypnotic, compelling and utterly fresh.Burt Turrido. An Opera. Directed by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska. Oct. 27-29 at Kampnagel, in Hamburg; Nov. 3-5 at HAU — Hebbel am Ufer, in Berlin; Nov. 11-13 at Espoo City Theater, in Espoo, Finland.Waiting for Platonov. Directed by Thom Luz. Through Dec. 7 at the Residenztheater, in Munich. More

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      ‘Seagull’ Review: Blurring the Lines of Fiction

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      Elevator Repair Service’s Chekhov revival has promising ideas about art, experimentation and truth, but the production inevitably falls flat, our critic writes.If only I could find someone who loves me enough to gift me a dead bird in a brown paper bag.I jest, of course. The wounded young protagonist who delivers this confounding gift in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” communicates his thoughts and feelings through wild symbols — “new forms” of art, he says — like this particular one of the avian variety. The theater troupe Elevator Repair Service — known for its ambitious, innovative takes on classics like “The Great Gatsby” (“Gatz”) — attempts to meet that challenge in its latest work, “Seagull.”But this highly stylized contemporary production, which recently opened at NYU Skirball in a nearly three-hour production, feels like a series of ideas that never quite cohere. The beginnings of those ideas are promising, though: the toppling of the fourth wall, the meta references to the original text, the vivid tonal changes and the comic recasting of the play’s characters, each of them living through their own sad, ironic farce of a life.Let’s begin with those clowns. Konstantin (a wooden Gavin Price) wants to be a great writer but is too busy producing incomprehensible symbolist plays, at least that’s what his mother, Irina (Kate Benson, a bluster of affected melodrama), thinks. A vain actress with a vicious streak toward her son, Irina has come to stay with her sick brother at his country estate, and she’s taken along her boy toy, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (a compellingly aloof Robert M. Johanson). From the other side of the property comes Nina (Maggie Hoffman, magnetic), a young woman who wants to escape her circumstances and become an actress.One may need a map for the various romantic entanglements: Semyon (Pete Simpson) loves the depressed, coke-snorting Masha (Susie Sokol), who loves Konstantin, who loves Nina, who is enamored with Trigorin, who is attached to Irina. And Masha’s mother, Paulina (Lindsay Hockaday), is married to Ilya (Julian Fleisher) but is having an affair with the former playboy doctor Gene (a delightfully quippy Vin Knight).“Seagull,” directed by the group’s founder, John Collins, opens with a meandering curtain speech, charismatically delivered by Simpson as his real-life self, and ends in the world of Chekhov, where Simpson is now Semyon, a poor lovesick teacher. Simpson cracks jokes and rattles off (real and fictional) information about the Skirball stage, letting the audience know that the line between reality and fiction is needlepoint thin, though to what end is unclear.Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” directed by John Collins, not only breaks the fourth wall but also has its characters break into dance.Ian DouglasThe breaking of the fourth wall happens mostly in the first several minutes, though this play is being marketed as interactive, part “chat with the audience,” as if the entirety of the show will be meta. The production seems to want to reach toward some message about art — particularly experimental art, especially experimental theater — as when the group cheekily pokes fun at itself in Simpson’s opening speech. “If ERS is known for anything,” Simpson says, “we’re known for our livestock, wallpaper and violent dance.”I’m sorry to report that there’s no livestock or wallpaper but there is a bit of dancing (whether you’d deem it violent depends on your particular disposition). And besides a few references to the actors — not as their characters, but the real actors themselves — the production’s self-aware spoofing unfortunately falls to the wayside.The attempts to deconstruct Chekhov’s work extends to the set by Dots, the design collective. Lined up folding chairs, sat on by the cast, and a table with tech equipment are juxtaposed with a piano, where Konstantin broods, and a fraction of an old Russian dining room, just two perpendicular walls, decorated with framed paintings, a table and chairs in the center, where the characters sit to eat and play cards.And then there’s that dead bird.Dead feathered fowl! Suicide! Ruination! Unhappy marriages! Unrequited love! Festering resentment! “The Seagull” doesn’t seem like the kind of play that would tickle your funny bone, and yet Chekhov himself considered it a comedy. Most productions cast it as a tragedy (especially after the seminal Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski reinterpreted it as such in one of its first productions).Collins opts for both, going all in on comedy in the first half and making a daring turn to tragedy in the second. So Masha isn’t the cool goth pining after the dejected artist but a mopey dork in knee-high compression socks who drags herself across the stage while the sad-sack Semyon shuffles along after her. Konstantin isn’t a misunderstood virtuoso but a solipsistic hipster of an artist with serious mommy issues. In the final scene of the first act, Gene, having comforted two distraught characters in a row, comically declares, “You’re so upset! You’re all so upset!”And yet, despite its playful humor and antics, the show often falls into lulls where it’s mostly just performing a rote version of Chekhov’s piece.It’s not until partway through the second act that the show’s unforgettable shift occurs. The actors freeze, posing in an almost suffocating silence for several minutes. The set darkens and fog unfurls across the top of the stage. None of the actors speak, but we hear them reading their lines in voice-over. We see Nina slumped in a chair in the corner, Irina sitting in a commanding pose front and center, arms spread out on either side to rest on the chair backs, her legs brazenly crossed in front of her, and Ilya leaning against a pillar, head drooped to the side. The effect is haunting when paired with the disembodied voices. Instead of trying to seamlessly incorporate both the dark humor and the woe, the production calls attention to each individually.Chekhov’s play lends itself to dismantling and comic scrutiny. Take Aaron Posner’s postmodern remix, “Stupid _______ Bird,” which actually manages to pull off the balancing act that the Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull” struggles with, splitting the difference between a dutiful replication of the text (or at least parts of it) and an irreverent sendup of prevailing ideas, themes and executions of the beloved work. Posner’s ambitious, if pretentious, play manages it a bit better through an almost Spartan-level commitment to its conceit, from script to stage.“Seagull” is milder in its execution of its ideas, though it would benefit from committing more to its experimental aspirations and making its insights about art clearer. And it could further blur the line between performance and reality as it does in the opening scene, allowing the actors to speak more freely, to improvise, to share parts of themselves even as they inhabit their characters.This production may get its audience thinking about art, experimentation and truth but can’t quite see those thoughts through. In the play Konstantin declares that we need new forms. This production may have inadvertently provided the answer: Only if the artist is up to it.SeagullThrough July 31 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Putin, Chekhov and the Theater of Despair

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      In London, a new play about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a revival of “The Seagull” explore undercurrents of pain.LONDON — There’s a chill in the air at the Almeida Theater, notwithstanding the record-breaking heat here. That drop in temperature comes from the coolly unnerving “Patriots,” a new drama whose look at power politics in Russia over the last quarter-century induces a shiver at despotism’s rise.The gripping production, directed by Rupert Goold, runs through Aug. 20.Written by Peter Morgan (“The Crown,” “Frost/Nixon”), “Patriots” surveys the sad, shortened life of Boris Berezovsky, the brainiac billionaire who died in 2013, age 67, in political exile in London. An inquest into Berezovsky’s mysterious death returned an unusual “open verdict,” but on this occasion, it is unequivocally presented as a suicide: The play ends with this balding man, bereft of authority, preparing to end his life.An academic whiz-turned-oligarch who expedited the rise of the younger Vladimir V. Putin, Berezovsky later fell out with the onetime ally who enlarged his power base, according to the play, with promises of “liberalizing Russia,” yet proceeded to do anything but.Morgan introduces Berezovsky, age 9, as a math prodigy whose mother hoped he might become a doctor. (A gleaming-eyed Tom Hollander plays the role throughout.) From there, we move forward 40 years to find Berezovsky an integral member of Russia’s moneyed elite welcoming to his office an obsequious Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.“Respected Mr. Berezovsky,” says an initially indrawn, ferret-like Putin, “one would have to live on another planet not to know you!” But it isn’t long before Putin has changed his tune, and his tone, as he rises from prime minister to president and consolidates power around himself. In one notably effective wordless scene, Putin tries out poses in front of a mirror to see which makes him look most impressive. His earlier hesitancy has given way to a man in love with his own heroism.Berezovsky looks on at so dramatic a change in character appalled, urging the former K.G.B. operative to “know your place.” But Putin by this point simply won’t be sidelined. And besides, reasons Putin, why hold your enemies close when they can just as easily be destroyed?Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots.”Marc BrennerGoold, the director, dealt with a different headline-maker at the Old Vic this spring in “The 47th,” which imagined Donald J. Trump in the run-up to the next presidential election. Goold is in better company this time: “Patriots” is a richer, less fanciful play, with grim resonances for today. Although Morgan rightly leaves it to the audience to make the connection, you can draw a line between the glorious empire Putin yearns for in the play and his ongoing attack on Ukraine.In one of the performances of the year, Will Keen, as the Russian leader, astonishes throughout, bringing his character to agitated, unpredictable life. His early fawning in Berezovsky’s presence gives way to an icy rejection that finds its fullest expression when his onetime mentor writes as a fellow patriot requesting permission to come home to Russia. Putin dictates a reply, then tells his secretary to rip the letter up: Berezovsky, Putin concludes, “is not worth it.”Hollander impresses, too, as he did in a dazzling star turn in “Travesties,” which won the actor a 2018 Tony nomination — two talky plays requiring an actor at home with reams of language. His character is both a quick-tempered womanizer, and too naïve to realize the young Putin’s potential for authoritarian misrule.Widening the play’s scope yet further is the Russian president’s friend, the oligarch Roman Abramovich (the excellent Luke Thallon), who battles Berezovsky over ownership of the oil company Sibneft. That case, which came to trial in London in 2012, plays out here as a resounding defeat for Berezovsky that only amplifies his psychic distress. Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, a former leading man in “Hamilton”), the Putin critic who was poisoned in 2006, shows up, too, as the “most honorable” of dissidents (or so Morgan maintains): a political casualty wreathed in glory that the sorrowful Berezovsky never knew.There’s an aspect of bravery, you feel, in writing “Patriots” at all while Putin is on the march. (That said, like Trump with “The 47th,” it’s possible these men’s egos would thrive on the attention.) In the days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, orchestras, concert halls and opera houses pulled Russian works from their stages, and it looked as if it might no longer be allowable to perform the Russian repertory in the West; overseas trips by the Bolshoi Ballet, among other storied Russian arts companies, were canceled, as well.Emilia Clarke, second from right, in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc BrennerSo it’s a relief to welcome a Russian classic, “The Seagull,” first presented in 1896 by Anton Chekhov, who died nearly a half-century before Putin was even born. That this first of Chekhov’s four great plays ends, as does “Patriots,” with a suicide is an intriguing coincidence that also points to the undercurrents of pain that inform both plays.Performed barefoot and in modern dress, Jamie Lloyd’s enthralling production, at the Harold Pinter Theater through Sept. 10, furthers the stripped-back approach to the classics he brought to a recent “Cyrano de Bergerac” that was acclaimed in New York and London.Just as that play dispensed with a fake nose for its title character, this “Seagull,” seen here in Anya Reiss’s 2012 version, never features the wounded bird of the title onstage. Doing without props of any kind, the cast members, headed by the “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke in a terrific West End debut, deliver the play seated on green plastic chairs and boxed in by chipboard; they speak with a quiet intensity, as though we were eavesdropping on the characters’ innermost thoughts. Some will be exasperated by the approach, but I was riveted from the first hushed utterance to the last.Like “Patriots,” this “Seagull” draws from its own well of grief, even if the world of writers and actresses in Chekhov’s play is a long way from Morgan’s power-brokers and politicos. Lloyd’s ensemble communicates the shifting affections of a quietly devastating play that leaves you transfixed by the theatrical potency of despair.Patriots. Directed by Rupert Goold. Almeida Theater, through Aug. 20.The Seagull. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. Harold Pinter Theater, through Sept. 10; in cinemas Nov. 3. More

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      Review: In High-Tech ‘Orchard,’ It’s Hard to See the Forest for the Trees

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      Jessica Hecht, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Chekhov himself too often get overwhelmed by this ambitious Arlekin Players Theater adaptation.A black-clad figure shuffles a curving path through the cherry blossom petals carpeting the ground. Ancient, dignified, slightly stooped, he is searching for his cane in this strange and beautiful landscape where almost everything, including the cherry blossoms, is a shade of swimming-pool blue.The opening moments of “The Orchard,” Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” belong to Firs, the serf turned servant who has been attached for generations to the same house in the countryside, and devoted to the same frivolous family now in peril of losing their beloved home. It is Firs who reliably pierces our hearts at the end of “The Cherry Orchard,” so to start with him here is fitting — all the more so because he is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov with the ineffable magnetism and captivating grace that have always made him a riveting performer, and that now make him the quietly scene-stealing anchor of this ambitious and cluttered production.We don’t know it yet, but that brief interlude — with a single line of dialogue about the weather, and the pleasure of watching Baryshnikov whirl when a wind whips up — is the last we will have before this show starts obstructing our view of the actors with video frequently projected on its transparent downstage scrim.It is extraordinarily frustrating, like trying to watch a play through a black-and-white film: a film that is often showing a close-up of what is happening on one part of the stage while blocking something else — such as Baryshnikov making a choreographed movement that we can’t see clearly even though he’s right there in the room with us. And this theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center is a fairly intimate space; we are not in need of a zoom lens.Baryshnikov, as the servant Firs, and Hecht as Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house.Maria BaranovaA clue to the root of the chaos is the giant robotic arm sitting center stage in Golyak’s production for the Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theater, where he is artistic director, and its Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab. “The Orchard” is a hybrid, meant to provide one experience to in-person audiences and another, more interactive experience to online audiences. One of the show’s multiple cameras, none particularly well deployed, is on that robotic arm. There is also a robotic dog, who is surprisingly charming. (Robotics design is by Tom Sepe.)Experimenting with virtual theater is how Arlekin made a bigger name for itself during the industry shutdown; Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, the other star in this cast, first worked with the company online.But the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly, which hampers both incarnations. Seeing it in person is better, or certainly it was on Wednesday, when I caught the matinee at the theater and watched the virtual version — which is also live, and supplemented with activities like touring virtual rooms inhabited by Baryshnikov as Chekhov — from home at night. As intended, online viewers miss the beginning of the stage performance; why this would seem like a good idea I cannot fathom.It turns out that those close-ups on the scrim can be helpful if you’re watching the show on a laptop. On the other hand, the online video jerked and stopped so often on my screen, and for so long, that there were whole chunks of action I heard but didn’t see; the video feed cut out before the curtain call; and the scripted online ending mysteriously failed to appear. The ending I watched in person, though, didn’t entirely come off, either, because the final, vital projection never happened.A robotic arm gathers some of the video that is projected live onstage and shown online. In person, the images often prove distracting to a viewer captivated by the performers.Maria BaranovaWhat about the play, though? Well, that’s exactly the problem: You have to hack your way through an enormous amount of distraction merely to get to it, and even then the production doesn’t have the storytelling clarity the play needs to land. On the sidewalk after the matinee, I overheard some audience members who had never seen “The Cherry Orchard” and were left none the wiser, in terms of plot, after “The Orchard.”This disjointed production gives the impression of not being especially interested in comprehensibility. For all its projections (designed by Alex Basco Koch), significant passages of dialogue in American Sign Language, Russian and French go untranslated.Still, it is pretty to look at, with Anna Fedorova’s set ravishingly lit by Yuki Nakase Link, and the actors clad in Oana Botez’s elegantly contemporary take on period costumes. And Hecht is a gorgeously frothy Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house: sentimental and self-absorbed, with a decorative layer of ever-pleasant femininity and a spritz of teasing sexiness.During Wednesday night’s performance, when Hecht broke off to take a few live-chat questions from the virtual audience, she remained in character as a viewer reported a long-frozen computer screen.“I am so sorry,” she said, noting that a solution would require someone versed in such things. “I can only speak of matters of the heart.”One would think that this production might speak eloquently of matters of the heart — not only because Chekhov’s play does, but also because the Kyiv-born Golyak and his Arlekin, with its immigrant origins, are no strangers to the reality of having to leave a beloved home and build a life elsewhere.Aside from Madame Ranevskaya’s less-favored daughter Varya, played by Elise Kibler with a touching hopefulness, there’s not much in this production beyond sweet, funny, delicate Firs to suggest a heart at all.But, ah, Firs — so certain all his life that if he looked after this family, they would do the same for him. When the truth dawns at last, with the shock of disillusion, he collapses into human wreckage. Even in utter stillness, he is fascinating.The OrchardThrough July 3 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan, and online; theorchardoffbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      One Indelible Scene: When the Show Must Go on in ‘Drive My Car’

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      Through a staging of “Uncle Vanya,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi creates an intimacy for his characters that lets the artifice of cinema fall away.I’m going to talk about how the movie ends, but I’m not going to spoil it.The plot of “Drive My Car” doesn’t really work that way in any case. Adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (working with Takamasa Oe) from a novella by Haruki Murakami, the film is an adventure of gentle turns and an occasional swerve, with big surprises and small revelations scattered like scenery on a long road trip. You may be startled at how quickly it all goes by; the movie lasts almost three hours, but the time passes easily.A brief, tactful summary may be in order, a kind of Google Maps précis of the route. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director and actor, is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress, who is having an affair with a younger colleague. The couple had a young daughter who died some years before, and when Oto dies suddenly, she leaves Yusuke paralyzed with grief. Or so we surmise. He has a tendency to camouflage his feelings behind a facade of calm, punctuating his habitual reticence with an occasional flash of irritation or sardonic humor.He keeps working, taking up a residency at a Hiroshima arts center, where he will direct an experimental production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” I don’t think I can spoil that one either. The great works are like that, and one of the marvels of “Drive My Car” is the way it illuminates and refreshes a sturdy old classic, deriving some of its own power, novelty and mystery from Chekhov’s well-thumbed text.A little bit more about “Drive My Car,” though. In Hiroshima, Yusuke is assigned a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who shuttles him to rehearsals, errands and social engagements in his beloved red Saab. Like Yusuke, she has suffered a terrible loss, and their shared grief — or rather, their common state of raw, lonely, unacknowledged anguish — becomes the foundation of a delicate and improbable friendship.Unacknowledged anguish underlies the relationship between the characters played by Nishijima and Toko Miura.Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe story of that bond culminates in an intensely emotional scene in a snowy field — tears are shed, and Yusuke at last gives voice to his hitherto unarticulated pain — that would surely be an Oscar-night showstopper. (And if the academy has the good sense to nominate “Drive My Car” for best picture and Nishijima and Miura for acting, maybe it will be). But what I want to talk about is what happens next.Which is that the show goes on. As the “Uncle Vanya” opening night approaches, we have been privy to some backstage intrigue and immersed in Yusuke’s unusual approach to the play. The cast includes actors from various countries, all of them speaking Chekhov’s dialogue in their native languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Once an audience is present, supertitles are projected on a screen behind the stage. The English-language viewer, already reading subtitles, learns to listen for the tones and rhythms of the different languages, including the swish and tap of signing hands.That may sound forbiddingly cerebral, like the kind of high-concept aesthetic undertaking that tends to be more interesting in theory than in practice. It turns out to be the opposite. “Uncle Vanya,” a play about how hard it is to hold onto a sense of what matters in life, has rarely felt more vital or immediate, as if it had not been written in the 1890s but rather lived in front of our eyes.Yusuke, white powder sprinkled in his hair and a mustache pasted to his lip, is playing the title role, a 47-year-old man driven almost to madness — almost to murder — by unrequited yearning and existential disappointment. His appearance onstage is an unexpected development, the payoff of a subplot that I will leave to you to discover.“Uncle Vanya” being performed in a scene from “Drive My Car.” Sideshow and Janus FilmsYusuke has stayed away from acting since Oto’s death, and as “Uncle Vanya” unfolds, the shock to his system seems apparent. After Vanya’s Act III rant about his squandered prospects and bitter regrets — “If I’d lived normally, I might have been another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky!” — he steadies himself against a table in the wings, seeming to struggle for breath and composure.Perhaps Vanya’s plight reminds him of his own, or perhaps the demands of acting are too much to bear. The first Russian production of “Uncle Vanya” was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the progenitor of Method acting, in which the actor plumbs his own experience to locate the emotional truth of the character. Knowing what we know about Yusuke — having seen him weeping in the snow in the previous scene — it’s easy to grasp why he would be overcome by Vanya’s torment.But he’s also a professional, and the scene proceeds briskly through a montage of the performance. We see the onstage action from the side, then on a video monitor in the green room, observing the movement of props and bodies rather than absorbing the movement of Chekhov’s drama. The film seems to be settling into a muted denouement.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Tomfoolery With the Classics? Play It Straight, Please.

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      Two London productions that play fast and loose with their literary sources lack the theatrical magic of another show that gives viewers the original, unadorned.LONDON — If you’re going to revisit a classic novel by a woman, you should probably give that task to women. That’s the conceit behind “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of),” a play that’s now at the Criterion Theater here for an open-ended run. The production, a success at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018, will most likely appeal to those with no time to actually read Jane Austen: Let the five gifted performers of the all-female cast relay the novel in their own larky, irrepressible way.The parenthetical in the title sets the cheeky tone. Written by Isobel McArthur “after Jane Austen,” as the playbill puts it, the show gives us all the time-honored characters, from the self-dramatizing Mrs. Bennet to her five matrimonially challenged daughters. Nor are the men excluded: McArthur, the author, doing triple duty as the play’s co-director (with Simon Harvey) and as one of the hard-working cast, drops her voice as required to play Fitzwilliam Darcy, the book’s abiding heartthrob.Putting a contemporary spin on a Regency-era tale, the play co-opts music to make a point: Barely has the bride-to-be, Elizabeth Bennet (a gleaming-eyed Meghan Tyler), fallen under the sway of Mr. Darcy before she launches into the Carly Simon standard “You’re So Vain.” In the let’s-try-everything spirit of the venture, the cast members also play musical instruments, and there’s a reference to “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is playing around the corner, in an opening sight gag involving a falling chandelier.The intention is to play fast and loose with the source while honoring its spirit, which for the most part succeeds. Mr. Darcy’s eventual confession of his desire for Elizabeth is accompanied by the swelling sounds of the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.” The overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Christina Gordon) enters to the music of the sound-alike Chris de Burgh, and we hear expletives that would surely have made Austen herself blush.The all-female cast brings a party vibe to Jane Austen’s iconic love story.Matt CrockettI wish more had been made of the suggestion at the outset that we will be viewing these characters from the perspective of the servants, whose employment enables the Bennets’s leisurely lives. At the beginning, the performer Hannah Jarrett-Scott galumphs about in Doc Martens, busy with her cleaning chores and not quite ready for the show to begin. (“We haven’t started yet,” she exclaims.)But any sort of class commentary soon disappears. This is “Pride and Prejudice” with a party vibe. “Are you having a good time?” we’re asked late on, to which the audience members at a recent matinee responded at the curtain call by leaping to their feet.Playfulness with a resilient source also informs “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a play by Christopher Durang that draws three of its title characters from Chekhov. A hit on Broadway, where it won the 2013 Tony for Best Play, the comedy is at the Charing Cross Theater through Jan. 8. The production, originally scheduled just as the pandemic took hold, is directed by Walter Bobbie, whose Broadway staging of “Chicago” recently marked its 25th anniversary.In Durang’s telling, Vanya and Sonia are no longer the uncle and niece of Chekhovian renown. Instead, they are siblings sharing discontented lives in rural Pennsylvania while their more glamorous sister Masha (Janie Dee), an actress, is off gathering toy boys like Spike (Charlie Maher).The cast of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” from left: Charlie Maher, Rebecca Lacey, Lukwesa Mwamba, Janie Dee and Michael Maloney.Marc Brenner The first half consists largely of extended chat about what costumes this trio should wear to a party: The spinsterish Sonia (Rebecca Lacey) isn’t sure whether to go as Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich, though we soon discover that she can do a spot-on vocal impersonation of Maggie Smith. The tone darkens, somewhat, after the intermission, with a series of monologues in which, as in “Uncle Vanya,” the characters address their psychic turmoil. “I’m worried about the future, and I miss the past,” says this play’s Vanya (a morose Michael Maloney), who turns out to be gay and is given to adoring the toned Spike in various states of undress.Dee’s feisty Masha has been married five times but isn’t beyond fretting about an outfit that doesn’t go down well with the locals: At such moments, the play lapses into the comparatively cheesy realm of sitcom (a genre unknown to Chekhov). Additional characters include Nina (Lukwesa Mwamba), the name referencing someone from another Chekhov play, “The Seagull,” and an emphatic seer named — you got it — Cassandra (Sara Powell). The literary forebears may be there, but the play doesn’t so much pay tribute to Chekhov as leave you pining for his wit and wisdom.After two shows that riff on (and in the case of the Durang, sometimes cheapen) an illustrious source or two, along comes Ralph Fiennes to give us the real thing, unadorned and unedited. The protean actor, rarely long absent from the stage, is directing himself in a theatrical performance of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” at the Harold Pinter Theater through Dec. 18. The production, lasting 75 minutes with no intermission, represents a decidedly highbrow alternative to the japery on view nearby.Ralph Fiennes in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Matt HumphreyEliot’s masterwork was written in four parts while the poet was also evolving as a playwright, and Fiennes treats this writer’s often abstruse language as the stuff of drama, as potent in its way as the Shakespeare texts to which this actor regularly returns. I doubt I’m alone in not knowing what Eliot meant by the words “deliberate hebetude” from “East Coker,” the second of the quartets. But there’s no denying the mesmeric spell of a performer who can make even the opaque sound immediate. (I looked it up later: “Hebetude” means lethargy, or dullness.)Appearing barefoot, pausing to sip water or move the gray slabs that make up the designer Hildegard Bechtler’s elegantly austere set, the actor guides us through Eliot’s extended meditation on consciousness and hope, exploration and loss. Fiennes commits himself physically to an agile performance in which his body often writhes in response to Eliot’s images. And at a time when other London stages are filtering great work through a revisionist lens, here is the thing itself, ceaselessly and restlessly alive.Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of). Directed by Isobel McArthur and Simon Harvey. Criterion Theater, open-ended run.Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Directed by Walter Bobbie. Charing Cross Theater, through Jan. 8.Four Quartets. Directed by Ralph Fiennes. Harold Pinter Theater, through Dec. 18. More

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      Three Stars, Three Ways, Three Classic Plays

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      On British stages, Saoirse Ronan, Cush Jumbo and Ian McKellen present contrasting approaches to Shakespeare and Chekhov. LONDON — Saoirse Ronan may be the main attraction of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” as Shakespeare’s play is billed at the Almeida Theater, where it will run through Nov. 27. Yet, not for the first time in the director Yaël Farber’s career, Farber rules every minute of this attenuated account of the famously short work. Running nearly an hour longer than many “Macbeths,” the production conjoins sound, lighting and design to conjure a haunting mood that does more for the play than any individual’s performance. The menace and foreboding are palpable before the three witches have spoken a word.Where, then, does this leave Ronan, the superb Irish film actress and four-time Oscar nominee, in her British stage debut? She sometimes seems a decorative accessory to an exercise in total theater in which Tim Lutkin’s scalding lighting design, for instance, shines as bright as any Hollywood star.Yes, Ronan is given more to do than many Lady Macbeths, to foreground the actress most audience members have come to see. She’s there for the slaughter of Lady Macduff (Akiya Henry) and her children, which in turn reduces Ronan’s initially demure purveyor of evil to an anxious, hysterical wreck.But even as James McArdle in the title role builds to a vocal frenzy, we’re drawn to the hazily lit stage, which fills with water at the end, so the play’s combatants can splash about. (Those seated near the front might want to bring ponchos just in case.) Farber’s actors work hard, and often well, but they’re subsidiary to the atmosphere of gloom and dread she creates. That stays with you long after the thrill of celebrity has worn off.There’s never any doubting the intense stage presence of Cush Jumbo, the blazing talent known to TV audiences from “The Good Fight” and “The Good Wife” and who, unlike Ronan, cut her teeth in the theater. Some years back, she played Mark Antony in an all-female London production of “Julius Caesar” that was later seen in New York.Cush Jumbo in “Hamlet,” directed by Greg Hersov at the Young Vic theater.Helen MurrayHer return to the stage here as Hamlet, at the Young Vic through Nov. 13, constitutes an event. It’s just a shame that the director Greg Hersov’s modern-dress production doesn’t more frequently rise to the level of a star who is also the rare Black British actress to take this iconic role.Now and again, you sense inspiration. I liked the idea of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as selfie-taking hipsters who try their best to engage with the prickly Danish prince. Tara Fitzgerald’s Gertrude is an emotionally reined-in fashionista who may never have had an honest emotion in her life — until it’s too late.Elsewhere, Adrian Dunbar is a surprisingly dull Claudius; Joseph Marcell’s twinkly Polonius plays to the house, as if milking the character’s self-satisfaction for laughs. (His murder is bewilderingly staged to minimal impact, which seems odd given its importance as an early indicator of Hamlet’s building rage.)Throughout an unevenly paced evening, the androgynous Jumbo sets Hamlet apart as surely the smartest person in the room, and also the most furious. “To be or not to be?” feels less like an existential rumination than like the angry outburst of someone who’s had enough. I’ve seen more moving Hamlets, yet Jumbo fully catches the edgy restlessness of a protean character. Purring “this likes me well” of the knife he will use in combat, Jumbo’s Hamlet separately refers to “the very witching time of night.” This got me thinking: If Jumbo is looking for more Shakespearean roles, as I hope she is, what about having a go at Macbeth or his lady — or both?It’s not long ago that I caught another unusual choice for Hamlet in the age-inappropriate Ian McKellen. At 82, the acting veteran is still onstage in Britain, this time in the starry company of Francesca Annis and Martin Shaw in “The Cherry Orchard.” This Chekhov revival, directed, as was McKellen’s “Hamlet,” by his longtime friend and colleague Sean Mathias, is on view through Nov. 13 in the riverside town of Windsor, and is worth the trip.Ian McKellen in Windsor, England, in July. He’s now appearing there in “The Cherry Orchard.”  Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesUnlike the two Shakespeares, Chekhov’s 1904 play is kept in period and brings to mind the name-heavy productions of the classics that used to be mainstays of the West End but aren’t so much anymore. In a vital new adaptation by the American playwright Martin Sherman (“Bent”), this “Cherry Orchard” even indulges in a little gender-bending, with the eccentric uncle, Gaev, played by a tearful Jenny Seagrove — last seen as Gertrude to McKellen’s Hamlet.The focus of the play remains Madame Ranevskaya, the financially heedless aristocrat newly returned from Paris to the ancestral Russian estate that will soon be sold out from under her. Annis, a onetime Juliet to McKellen’s Romeo, is perfectly cast in a role that capitalizes on her natural elegance and luxuriant voice. Shaw, too, is in terrific form as the wealthy Lopakhin, the peasant’s son made good whose warnings about the fate of the orchard go unheeded.Shuffling about with a cane, a long beard tumbling from his chin, McKellen seizes the role of the aging manservant, Firs, without stealing focus from his colleagues. “I’ve lived a long time,” Firs says at one point, to an appreciative chuckle from the audience.Like Hamlet, McKellen knows the play’s the thing. Sometimes a classic text, simply and clearly told, is all you want, or need.The Tragedy of Macbeth. Directed by Yaël Farber. Almeida Theater, to Nov. 27.Hamlet. Directed by Greg Hersov. Young Vic theater, to Nov. 13.The Cherry Orchard. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, to Nov. 13. More

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      At the Avignon Festival, a Bleak Start

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      Grief. Rising fascism. Utopias gone wrong. The plays were grim in the early days of the annual theater event in France.AVIGNON, France — The Avignon Festival couldn’t have set the stage any better for Tiago Rodrigues. On Monday, the director from Portugal was announced as the next director of the event, one of the most important on the European theater calendar. The same night, his new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” starring Isabelle Huppert, opened the 2021 edition, which runs through July 25.Excitement was high, despite the enormous line to enter the Cour d’honneur, an open-air stage installed on the grounds of Avignon’s Papal Palace. The French government requires proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for all events with more than 1,000 audience members, and the checks led to a 40-minute delay and grateful applause when the preshow announcements finally started.Two hours later, the reception was noticeably less warm. While Rodrigues has brought well-liked productions of “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Sopro” to Avignon in recent years, his “Cherry Orchard” is an oddly amorphous proposition, built around actors who often seem worlds apart onstage.It doesn’t help that Huppert plays Lyubov, the aristocratic landowner who remains blind to her family’s financial plight, like a close cousin of Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” which she just performed in Paris. She brings the same diction and the same childlike, brittle energy to both characters, down to her trembling lips.Alex Descas, left, and Huppert with other members of the ensemble in “The Cherry Orchard.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonThe production accommodates Huppert rather than the other way around, and doesn’t require her stage partners to blend in, either. Rodrigues hasn’t enforced a specific acting style, and the community at the heart of “The Cherry Orchard” never really coheres.A few performers make the most of it. In a welcome departure from French habits, Rodrigues opted for colorblind casting: Lyubov’s relatives are all played by Black actors, as is Lopakhin, the self-made man who ultimately buys Lyubov’s estate. In that role, Adama Diop is by turns forceful and sympathetic. The role of the aging Firs, who yearns for the glory days of the aristocracy, is taken with lovely lightness by a veteran of the French stage, Marcel Bozonnet.In lieu of Lyubov’s beloved trees, the stage is filled with the Cour d’honneur’s old seats, which this year were replaced with new wooden ones. There is even a heavy-handed number about the renovation — one of several interpolations to Chekhov’s text — from Manuela Azevedo and Helder Gonçalves, who provide live music throughout.“Things will change,” Azevedo sings. “Even these chairs changed places.” It’s a nice touch, but here as elsewhere, this “Cherry Orchard” is too anecdotal to say much about the world. Rodrigues will presumably return to Avignon in 2023, the first edition he is scheduled to oversee. Let’s hope for a little more insight then.“The Cherry Orchard” aside, this year’s lineup finally gives women some prime spots, after years of male-skewed programming under the current director, Olivier Py. The premiere of “Kingdom,” by the Belgian director Anne-Cécile Vandalem, suffered its own delay because of heavy rain, but those who waited were rewarded with the festival’s finest new work up to that point.“Kingdom” is the conclusion of a trilogy Vandalem started in Avignon with “Tristesses” in 2016, followed by “Arctique.” The overall theme of the three plays is “the end of humanity,” according to the playbill, and after tackling far-right extremism and global warming in the first two, Vandalem offers a bleak tale of utopia gone wrong in “Kingdom.”Members of the cast on the set of “Kingdom,” the last play of a trilogy created by Anne-Cécile Vandalem.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonIn it, two families have opted to forgo the modern world and return to nature. Yet they come to resent one another because of land disputes and perceived slights, and their sustainable way of living becomes untenable.Vandalem is fond of weaving video into her work, here by way of cameramen ostensibly filming a documentary about one of the families. They follow the central characters into their small cabins, which are visible and surrounded with trees and water onstage, yet closed to the audience.Intimate moments are seen only on a large screen, and this setup draws the audience into the characters’ lives with greater realism than is achieved by many plays. The cast sustains the narrative tension with understated force — all the way to the unraveling of their small world.“Kingdom” was far from the only bleak offering of the festival’s early days. The Brazilian theatermaker Christiane Jatahy also returned, with “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Nicole Kidman’s role onscreen as an outsider mistreated by the community in which she seeks refuge is taken here by the actress Julia Bernat, also of Brazil.Christiane Jatahy’s production “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Magali DougadosThe cast is constantly filmed, with less precise editing than in “Kingdom,” and most of “Dogville’s” twists and turns are recreated, but Jatahy also finds some distance from her source material. Bernat and others address the audience directly at several points, and they break character to explain the movie’s ending. After that, they elaborate on what they see as the rise of fascism in Brazil and elsewhere.There is dark subject matter, and then there is “Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.” “Fraternity’s” supernatural premise is similar to that of the HBO series “The Leftovers”: a portion of humanity (in “Fraternity,” 50 percent) has simply vanished, leaving their loved ones reeling.Unlike “The Leftovers,” however, “Fraternity” is in no way subtle in exploring grief. Over three and a half hours, it drains and badgers viewers emotionally: Many around me cried at least once. After so many people have died of Covid-19 in the past year and a half, this is dangerous territory, and Guiela Nguyen addresses people’s sense of loss like a bull in a china shop.The action takes place in a “Center for Care and Consolation,” designed for survivors to process grief by leaving video messages for the departed. These are performed by a laudably diverse group made up of professional and nonprofessional actors from around the world. (Multiple languages are spoken in “Fraternity,” with rather clumsy live translations by other performers.)Perhaps because the amateurs are still finding their feet, the acting often feels one-note, with much yelling and little in the way of emotional arcs. The plot revolves around the idea that people’s hearts slowed almost to a halt after the Great Eclipse, as the disappearance is known, which in turn slowed down the universe. Some related sci-fi developments soon grow silly, especially when an oversize plastic heart is brought in to absorb the survivors’ memories of their lost partners and relatives, in a bid to keep the planets moving.“Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonAt least Guiela Nguyen didn’t hold back on what was an ambitious, humanist project, and it’s a treat to again see Anh Tran Nghia, the star of “Saigon,” even though she’s underused. But theatermakers also have a duty to take care following a real-life tragedy. Bombarding the audience with relentless pain doesn’t necessarily lead to catharsis, and we’ve all been through enough.Avignon FestivalVarious venues in Avignon, France, through July 25; festival-avignon.com. More