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    In ‘Pre-Existing Condition,’ a Character Isn’t Defined by Abuse, or One Actress

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    Stars like Edie Falco and Deirdre O’Connell bring a communal quality to Marin Ireland’s play about the aftermath of domestic violence.Most actors will tell you that when they take on a role, they want to own it. If it’s a classic or a play based on a movie, they like to say that they avoid watching earlier performances so they can go in free of preconceptions.The women taking turns playing A, the central character in Marin Ireland’s new play “Pre-Existing Condition,” went for a communal quality. “When you’re seeing a person perform, it has the DNA of all the other people because we’ve watched each other,” the director and actress Maria Dizzia said.Tavi Gevinson, who starts her stint as A on July 23, said, “I think it definitely helps eliminate this illusion that there is some ideal performance that you’re trying to unlock and do an imitation of — it’s something that you’re co-creating with the piece every night.”The show, whose run at the Connelly Theater Upstairs was just extended through Aug. 17, is structured as a series of brief vignettes involving A, who has endured domestic violence. In addition to Dizzia and Gevinson, the past, present and upcoming actresses playing A include Tatiana Maslany, Julia Chan, Deirdre O’Connell and Edie Falco, who recently joined the cast.In the aftermath of the breakup with the man who hit her, A is seen interacting with different people in her life: her mother, the leaders of a support group, a lawyer, prospective dates, friends — all played by Greg Keller, Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith, who appear at every show.Greg Keller and Julia Chan in the play, which has been in development for about 12 years. Emilio MadridWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Pre-Existing Condition’ Review: Recovering From a Traumatic Relationship

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      Marin Ireland’s play opens with Tatiana Maslany in a rotating cast of stars, and “What Became of Us” continues its own experiment with changing casts.Marin Ireland’s new play, “Pre-Existing Condition,” doesn’t come with trigger warnings; it barely even comes with a marketing description. The show’s website says that it’s about the aftermath of “a life-altering, harmful relationship,” but doesn’t explicitly mention domestic violence.Let’s state right up front, then, that physical abuse is this play’s catalyst. And that the Connelly Theater Upstairs in the East Village is a tiny space, where if the performance became overwhelming it would be difficult for an audience member to leave unobtrusively.Does it seem overly delicate to foreground that? For a less potent playwriting debut, in a less shattering production, it might not be necessary. But in Maria Dizzia’s quietly unadorned staging, and with a superb four-person cast that at the moment stars an emotionally translucent Tatiana Maslany, watching this play is like seeing its author open up her rib cage and show us everything.The central character, whom the script calls A, is struggling to put herself back together after a breakup with a man who hit her. The trauma has been consuming her, against her will and for longer than she would have thought.“I feel like I’m becoming the villain,” A tells her therapist. “I’m becoming this obsessive vengeful figure, because he said he’s sorry, so I’m the problem now.”The therapist (a sublimely comforting Dael Orlandersmith) points out, “His voice is still in your head.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Full Exposure? Four Solo Shows Ponder the Art of True Nature.

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      Lameece Issaq’s “A Good Day to Me Not to You” strives for intimacy, but that is not necessarily the aim of works by Alexandra Tatarsky, Milo Cramer and Ikechukwu Ufomadu.Two years of post-shutdown theater has brought to New York stages a slew of solo performers wrestling with subjects like grief, death and the apocalypse — and those are just the comedies. Solo shows are inexpensive to produce and relatively low-lift endeavors for an industry still on shaky ground.There has been no shortage this fall, and now four solo shows running Off Broadway demonstrate a range of approaches to the form, proving, at least for this round, that baring your inner thoughts and fears pays off. “A Good Day to Me Not to You,” at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, and “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, opt for all-out vulnerability, dissecting the psyche as if the stage were an operating table. “School Pictures” and “Amusements,” also at Playwrights Horizons, take the opposite tack, with performers who hold themselves at a distance to direct attention elsewhere, but with devices that can be distracting and evasive.The middle-aged narrator of “A Good Day to Me Not to You” divulges intimate details from the start: She is nursing a surprise case of genital warts, she tells the audience, that has been dormant for the decade since she last had sex.In this wryly candid confessional, presented by Waterwell, the writer and performer Lameece Issaq plays a New Yorker with a mordant sense of humor who is weathering a downswing: She was forced to to quit orthodontics school because of her bouts of vertigo, and then she was fired from a dental lab for filing away the imperfections in patients’ plaster molds. Now she is nursing HPV and moving into a convent boardinghouse named for St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins and sexual abuse survivors. (The weathered sanctuary set by Peiyi Wong shifts locales under Mextly Couzin’s dynamic lighting.)Directed with graceful sensitivity by Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of Waterwell, Issaq’s performance is both tender and frank, flipping with ease between directly addressing the audience as the narrator and voicing succinctly sketched characters (everyone’s teeth tell a story). Driven by her maternal impulse, first toward her nephew and then a potential child of her own, the narrator is betrayed by what she cannot control, but always returns, by some elliptical path, to the care she owes herself.Alexandra Tatarsky, a self-described “anxious clown,” inhabits a graduate seminar’s worth of German literary characters in “Sad Boys in Harpy Land.”Chelcie ParryIn “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” a thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown of a show, Alexandra Tatarsky, who uses they and them pronouns, inhabits a graduate seminar’s worth of German literary characters like kindergarten drag (the scenic, costume and especially inventive prop design is by Andreea Mincic). A self-described “anxious clown,” they so frequently disrupt their own act with reflexive interrogation that the interruptions become the point. With vibrating eyes, Tatarsky sips from proliferating coffee cups, and they appear locked in a discursive effort to come of age, create something new and reckon with their death drive. (No pressure.)Tatarsky continues circling back to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, an affluent boy toiling in his bedroom struggling to write a play about self-loathing and inaction. Occasionally, Tatarsky’s madness is expressed in deranged melodies (sound composition is by Shane Riley). How is anyone supposed to create art that makes their identity legible? And why be legible at all?Directed with bracing invention by Iris McCloughan, “Sad Boys” has the delirious effect of twisting you into communion with a live-wire artist, even if it is hard to tell whether they are laughing, crying or both. Tatarsky’s cumulative argument seems to be that, like the character of the Wandering Jew, whom she plays with a gray beard that trails on the floor, identity exists in process rather than as a fixed set of signifiers.Milo Cramer’s “School Pictures” is a mostly sung-through collage of impressions gathered from tutoring New York City students.Chelcie ParryFirst names scrawled on pieces of colored construction paper form a set list for “School Pictures,” a mostly sung-through collage, written and performed by Milo Cramer, of impressions gathered from tutoring New York City students. Cramer, who uses they and them pronouns, aims to assemble brief snapshots of the privileged youth: their naive clarity, rowdy insecurity and mandate to excel in a system rigged in their favor. (Cramer notes in the script that the subjects here are fictionalized.)These portraits of middle schoolers whose parents could afford the tutoring fees are presented, under the direction of Morgan Green, with the sonic equivalent of a crude crayon: a ukulele and atonal talk-singing. Twee? Yes. And grating once it becomes clear that this will be Cramer’s sustained mode of expression for most of the show’s 60 minutes. Sounding out syllables and striking chaotic notes invokes a youthful spirit, but makes a trying task out of tracing artistic intent in the lyrics. A lecture about systemic inequality in the city’s education system comes as a welcome recess, and finally allows Cramer to level with the audience as adults.In “Amusements,” Ikechukwu Ufomadu offers inoffensive punchlines while conveying an erudite exterior and simple-minded affect.Chelcie ParryThere is a childlike quality to the persona assumed by Ikechukwu Ufomadu in “Amusements,” despite the writer and performer’s shawl-collar tuxedo and gentleman’s demeanor. The humor in this stand-up set is, as the title suggests, airy and mild nearly to a fault. In the chasm between Ufomadu’s erudite exterior and simple-minded affect comes a steady breeze of inoffensive punchlines (“Happy Friday to all who celebrate!” “How many of you are alumni of school?”). The resulting eye-roll-to-chuckle ratio will come down to a matter of taste.As directed here by Nemuna Ceesay, Ufomadu has the gracious and charming sensibility of a spiffed-up Mr. Rogers, never more so than when he ventures into the audience to ask if anyone needs a volunteer and then offers his services. Ufomadu is suave, but also halting and unpolished; his set floats along on a stream of appealing humility.It’s an act, of course; how much performers reveal of their true nature onstage may be impossible to know. At its most profound, Ufomadu’s brand of literalism indicates the extent to which we all stand on common ground. Where would we be without clothes or shoes? At home, probably, not brave enough to show our naked selves.A Good Day to Me Not to YouThrough Dec. 16 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; waterwell.org.Sad Boys in Harpy Land; School Pictures; and AmusementsAll through Dec. 3 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. More

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      A Play Revisits the Making of ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Mandarin

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      A new Off Broadway production explores how Arthur Miller led a 1983 collaboration in Beijing that brought his work to a new audience.In 1983, Arthur Miller faced a herculean task: staging his 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Death of a Salesman,” in Chinese, with an all-Chinese cast and crew, in Beijing.But questions kept popping up: Would this drama about the American dream translate for a Chinese audience? Would concepts like “traveling salesman” or “life insurance” make sense to a people who had little exposure to either?Rehearsals became exercises in cross-cultural exchange. At one point, Miller instructed his cast to abandon the wigs — he didn’t need them to impersonate Americans.“The way to make this play most American is to make it most Chinese,” he told them, according to his 1984 book about the undertaking, “Salesman in Beijing.” He added, “One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is only one humanity.”The play eventually drew rapturous audiences to dozens of performances in Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, and was a watershed for U.S.-China cultural relations.Forty years later, the process of staging that production is the subject of the Off Broadway play “Salesman之死,” running through Oct. 28 at the Connelly Theater in the East Village. (The 之死 of the title, pronounced Zhisi, means “death of.”) Directed by Michael Leibenluft and written by Jeremy Tiang, the bilingual play centers on a young Chinese professor, Shen Huihui, who interprets for Miller during rehearsals, trying to translate for the cast ideas like “the American dream.”“What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?” said the playwright Jeremy Tiang, left, with the director Michael Leibenluft.Ye Fan for The New York TimesBy spotlighting the linguistic and cultural misunderstandings between the American playwright and his Chinese collaborators, the new play explores the challenging dynamics that arose when the two cultures converged.“This play is an example of international cross-cultural collaboration I fear we don’t see enough of,” Tiang said during a video call. “What would happen if we did try to find a way to work together, rather than just sticking to our own patch of language and culture?”Tiang drew on interviews with the original production’s cast and crew, as well as the book in which Miller recounts traveling to China at the invitation of Ying Ruocheng, one of China’s leading actors and directors, and the playwright Cao Yu.China had only recently emerged from its Cultural Revolution — the Maoist movement that targeted intellectuals and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — and its government had adopted a new foreign policy of openness to the West. Artistic projects once unthinkable under Mao Zedong suddenly become achievable.The playwright said he wrote the script based on interviews with the cast and crew of the original 1983 production as well as Miller’s memoir “Salesman in Beijing.” Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe real-life Shen Huihui was among the first group of students to attend graduate school after the Cultural Revolution. At Peking University, Shen wrote her dissertation about Miller’s books and plays and published one of the first journal articles about Miller in Chinese. When Miller arrived in China to direct “Salesman,” Ying, who translated the script and played the protagonist, Willy Loman, asked Shen to be the rehearsal interpreter.“I was shocked,” Shen said in a recent phone interview. “Why me? There were plenty of people who were professional interpreters, and I was not a professional interpreter.”Meeting Miller was both thrilling and intimidating, said Shen, who now lives and teaches writing in Canada. She recalled a tall, broad-shouldered man who seldom smiled.Rehearsals started in March and by opening night on May 7, Miller and his collaborators had worked through numerous adjustments (and endured many a misunderstanding) on the way to staging this tale about the perils of the American dream.The show is in English and Mandarin, with supertitles for both languages.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThose cross-cultural encounters are the core of “Salesman之死,” which is being produced by Yangtze Repertory Theater in association with Gung Ho Projects; much of the play’s plot centers on the bilingual and often chaotic exchanges within the 1983 rehearsal room.Leibenluft first read “Salesman in Beijing” as an undergraduate studying theater and Chinese at Yale University. He later moved to Shanghai and began directing adaptations of American plays in China.Sandia Ang, center, as the actor Zhu Lin, who played Linda Loman in the 1983 production.Ye Fan for The New York TimesIn 2017, he hosted a workshop to explore possibilities for turning “Salesman in Beijing” into a play. Tiang was among the writers and directors who attended, and he soon started writing a script.The show eventually opted for an all-female cast, which “highlights the women who are part of this history and who are often overlooked,” Leibenluft said on a video call. On a recent Thursday, cast members huddled around a table in a rehearsal room in Midtown Manhattan. (Five of the six actors are immigrants from China and Taiwan and are fluent in English and Chinese.) Sonnie Brown, a Korean American actor who plays Arthur Miller, barked out instructions, while Jo Mei, who plays Shen Huihui, translated them into Chinese. (The show, in English and Mandarin, has supertitles in both languages.)The play is “so hopeful,” Mei said, describing it as a reminder of people’s common humanity: Everyone, whether Willy Loman or a shopkeeper in China, suffers the same disappointments, shares the same dreams.“It says so much about how as different as you think you are, the themes and humanity are so similar and universal,” she said. “The more different or specific, the more universal is what I think Miller and Ying were trying to get at.” More

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      ‘Demons’ Review: Grief Is the Thing with Red Fur

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      A family processes its bereavement in the midst of a demonic haunting in Keelay Gipson’s new play for Bushwick Starr.When Danily, a red-furred, purple-lipped beast, appears onstage, his giant eyelids fluttering and huge maw flapping, he is irresistibly adorable, like something from Jim Henson’s dreams.And did I mention he’s a demon?In “Demons,” presented by Bushwick Starr at the Connelly Theater, a family grieving the recent death of its complicated patriarch becomes the target of a haunting by a puppet ghoul, the unexpected star of an otherwise disorderly production.The story begins when a family gathers for a funeral. The loud, combative Sissy (Paige Gilbert) and her brother, the reserved Bubba (Donell James Foreman), are home, their respective partners in tow, to tend to their God-fearing mother (Gayle Samuels) and to mourn their late father. Mama and Sissy are always fighting, and Bubba is forced to swallow his mother’s homophobia, even in front of his partner (Ashton Muñiz). To top it off, Bubba must also contend with the death of a father who never recognized his son’s queer identity.The play, written by Keelay Gipson, who also directs, is divided into five parts, based on the stages of grief. Each section consists of three scenes, showing the relatives chatting, watching TV, playing spades, all while struggling to communicate their real feelings to one another. When the family’s unspoken secrets come out into the open, our demon appears to exacerbate the conflicts, watching with a pair of glowing eyes in the dark, or pulling poltergeist-like shenanigans during a late-night TV session.You could say Danily is more human than the human characters around him (the fantastic puppet design is by Cedwan Hooks, and Jon Riddleberger directs the puppetry). Because otherwise, Gipson’s two-dimensional direction leaves the cast’s performances transparent. Mama, as the stern but loving matriarch, is a stock character, and Sissy is written unsympathetically and almost exclusively speaks in the tenor of a whine. Sissy and Bubba’s partners aren’t even named.Minjoo Kim’s lighting design, however, is impressive, from the angular splash of light strewn over white roses in a vase to the hazy spotlight over a character’s face replicating the glow of a TV set.But other production elements muddle rather than clarify the storytelling. The set design, by Yu Shibagaki, with its black-and-white floral couches and slate-gray textured walls, works for a funeral parlor, but it can’t pull off doubling as Mama’s home. And the television switches between channels depicting “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Labyrinth,” a trailer for the 2001 movie “Kingdom Come” and then later a “Real Housewives” special, seeming to intentionally nod to several different decades and making the setting unclear.By the end, at least one character has faced his demons, literal and figurative. As for the play, much still bedevils it.DemonsThrough June 3 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Good John Proctor’ Imagines Girlhood BFFs

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      The play, directed by Caitlin Sullivan at the Connelly Theater, focuses on two girls in the year leading up to the action depicted in “The Crucible.”Abigail Williams is described by Arthur Miller in “The Crucible” as a “strikingly beautiful girl” of 17 with “an endless capacity for dissembling.” Lusty and conniving, Miller’s Abigail has an affair with her former boss, John Proctor, and after she gets fired, tries to hex his wife out of jealousy by drinking blood and dancing naked with other girls in the woods. Her lies about that night serve as the catalyst for Miller’s 1953 dramatization of the Salem witch trials, which casts John as its tragic hero.Williams was, in fact, only 11 or 12 years old in 1692, when she and her 9-year-old cousin, Betty Parris, made their first accusations. “The Good John Proctor,” a dark comedy by the playwright Talene Monahon, imagines Abigail (Susannah Perkins) and Betty (Sharlene Cruz) as girlhood BFFs and bedfellows in the year leading up to the action depicted in Miller’s play. Speaking in modern vernacular, but wearing Puritan-style bonnets and white nightdresses (in costumes by Phuong Nguyen), the girls whisper about dreams of flying, playact as a king and a peasant maiden and recoil in paranoia as if they were under constant surveillance.There is a threat lurking in the rustling darkness that surrounds them in this Bedlam production, which runs through April 1 at the Connelly Theater, but it’s not the supernatural kind (the stunning chiaroscuro lighting is by Isabella Byrd, and arboreal sound design by Lee Kinney). Mercy (Tavi Gevinson), a seasoned housemaid of 14, calls it the devil, but what she really means is the power and whims of men. “There’s evil everywhere,” Mercy mordantly insists. Is it any wonder the girls assume Satan is to blame for the bloody parts of womanhood that no one else has explained?The Salem witch trials have been endlessly rehashed and reclaimed in pop culture, including onstage; Bedlam presented a stripped-down and pointedly political take on “The Crucible” in this theater in 2019, and Gevinson played Mary Warren in a stylized and bombastic Broadway revival in 2016. “The Good John Proctor” isn’t even the only Salem-inspired dark comedy to play Off Broadway this season; Sarah Ruhl’s “Becky Nurse of Salem” brought a descendant of the accused to Lincoln Center in the fall.So why take audiences to Salem again? Monahon’s playful and precise ear for the rhythms of adolescent dialogue is among the chief pleasures of “The Good John Proctor,” which draws a bit too heavily on its source material (a brief refresher on “The Crucible” and its creepy poppet would be advisable preshow reading). Beautifully staged by the director Caitlin Sullivan, the play is most engaging and provocative when at its most original — mining its characters’ messy, developing psyches, with contemporary and sometimes profane language, rather than placing them within existing narratives.The cast, including a doe-eyed Brittany K. Allen as Mary Warren, nimbly inhabit characters on the edge of innocence, or just beyond it, who belong not entirely to the past or the present. That shadowy ‌in between space opens up fertile ground for investigation, where the only ones who have any basis to be afraid are the girls who’ve been left in the dark.The Good John ProctorThrough April 1 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Kate,’ Tracing the Tears of a Clown

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      The comedian Kate Berlant’s latest experiment, directed by Bo Burnham at the Connelly Theater, positions her as an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story.There are more than 40 individual muscles in the human face, and when Kate Berlant tries to cry, she gives all of them a workout. An open-mouthed frown suggests the mask of Greek tragedy; a pout transforms her into a gargoyle. Her brow furrows and smooths. Eyes squint, widen and cross. Lips quiver. Nostrils flare. A camera captures each shift, and a projector then throws the image onto a giant screen. Still, the tears don’t come. Some people in the audience will laugh at this. Some won’t. Some will be too busy wondering if this bit is ha-ha funny or cringe funny or merely mortifying, a convergence of pleasure, perplexity and embarrassment that is, I would hazard, exactly where Berlant and her 15-foot-face face want us.A grande dame of experimental comedy, Berlant is a thinking woman’s comic. To put it a little more precisely, she is a comic for all the girls out there who think too much. Her latest experiment, at the Connelly Theater, is “Kate,” directed by Bo Burnham, a brainy, busy, dizzy, prankish one-woman show. The confessional solo is a hallowed form downtown; Berlant desecrates it from every side. She plays with its creeds the way that a cat might toy with a mouse — teasing, batting, swiping, mauling.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work. “Kate” is structured — loosely, like drawstring pants — around Kate’s failed attempts, from childhood onward, to cry on camera. Crying functions here as the high-water mark (salt water, presumably) of actorly truth and authenticity. But what is authenticity anyway? And why would you go looking for it at a theater-comedy hybrid like this one? Sincerity doesn’t live here anymore. Joke’s on you.Impatient, stylized, cerebral, Berlant’s comedy has never been for all markets. (Or maybe she’s not for … men?) Nearly a decade ago, my colleague, Jason Zinoman, described her as “not to everyone’s taste.” Marc Maron, on a recent episode of the WTF podcast, introduced her this way: “She’s an odd presence. But funny.” Her comedy resembles an infinite recursion, a hall of mirrors in which the reflections rarely flatter.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, the auto-fictional games begin as soon as you enter the lobby of the Connelly, a dainty theater folded into an East Village side street. Berlant is already everywhere, in a way that suggests both formal daring and pathological narcissism. Her stage outfit is on display behind a glass vitrine, as though borrowed from the Met’s Costume Institute. Her notebook is on exhibit, too. You can buy a beer at the “Katecessions” stand, pose with black-and-white photos of Berlant, visit a reproduction of her childhood living room, view the lunar phase at the moment of her birth. And there in the middle of it all is Berlant herself, in dark glasses and with luxuriant curls, wearing a sign that says, “Ignore Me.”If her previous projects — her film and television cameos; her sketch show with John Early; her podcast with Jacqueline Novak, Poog — have not yet won you over, how you respond to “Kate” may have to do with how much you enjoy seeing theatrical tropes savaged. (Me, I enjoy that a lot.) The accents, the miming, the assumption of multiple characters, the buildup to some terrible trauma, all are satirized here. Berlant is very much in on each joke. But Kate, her serious and self-possessed character, is not.“I’m going to be talking about something I’ve never talked about,” she says in an early scene, in the sleek, practiced rhythms of someone who has spent too long in the rehearsal room. “See, I have this secret? The show is a mess. It’s about me, so of course it is.”Berlant can run hot, like a Cassavetes heroine with big theater kid energy, tumultuous, but bright with it. Burnham’s more detached style, most conspicuous in the filmed segments, cools her down, further levering open the gap between performer and character. The Kate of the show insists that everything depends on whether or not she can cry on camera. (Part of the show’s schtick is that there’s a Disney+ executive whom she wants to impress.) But Berlant and Burnham seem up to something more destabilizing, the suggestion that authenticity is just one more act, that truth is, at best, contingent and transitory. Although “Kate” borrows elements of Berlant’s biography, it’s fiction through and through, which means that it withholds the very thing the lobby teases: knowledge of Berlant herself.It’s a great joke, if a nihilistic one. And here’s one more, a swipe at the theater itself. Because if you really were going to reveal your terrible secret, unpacking your heart with words, why would you do it for 150 people on the Lower East Side? Wouldn’t you just put that mess online?Here is how Kate, in a moment of outrage explains it: “Do you realize that if I posted a video to Instagram and it got 150 likes, I would kill myself?”KateThrough Oct. 8 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; kateshow.net. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Kate Berlant Can’t Hide Any Longer

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      The experimental comic is known for freewheeling sets. Then Bo Burnham asked, “What if you actually tried to make something?” The transition has been hard.As soon as Kate Berlant walked offstage at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles in May, she started spiraling. After months of workshop performances, her new solo show felt like a mess. The comic Tim Heidecker came backstage and told her he loved it. She didn’t look like she believed him.Over the next few minutes, Berlant, 35, speculated about what went wrong. Lack of focus? Not funny enough? Her sensibility not coming through? Her director, the comic Bo Burnham, had been emphasizing the same point: clarity, structure, clarity, structure. “I operate more with fragments,” she said, before her expressive face flattened: “I just don’t know what the show is.”Such anxiety is a normal part of the artistic process, but perhaps especially so for Berlant, whose show, titled “Kate,” is now in previews at the Connelly Theater in New York. After more than 15 years of improvisational, experimental stand-up, this is a departure: a play with a beginning, middle and end that tells a satirically formulaic story of a starry-eyed actress who moves to New York to make it big. This is real theater stuff, with props and multimedia and even a plot in which personal secrets are revealed.You may not know her name, but Berlant is influential in comedy circles, and her digressive style stands for everything that a scripted autobiographical play doesn’t. And she is having trouble wrapping her head around it. “It would be funny if this show is so bad,” Berlant said three days earlier in her Silver Lake apartment, her eyes lighting up, head swiveling, curls swinging, before pivoting into a parody of her rationalizing the flop. In the overly enunciated voice of the pretentious intellectual she had perfected in her stand-up, she said with a dismissive flip of her hand: “I don’t participate in the economy of distinction.” Then she cackled.In more than two decades as a critic of live performance, only a handful of times have I stumbled upon an artist so radically different, so thrillingly alien, that it scrambled my sense of the possible. Kate Berlant was one. It was at a sparsely attended stand-up show in 2013. Following a couple of setup-and-punchline craftsmen, her entrance felt less like the next act than an interruption. The first thing that stood out was her singularly silly physicality, herky-jerky, gesticulating clownishly, a parade of buffoonish confidence. Flamboyance baked into every gesture, her hyperarticulate monologues, which could also spiral, delivered stream of consciousness nonsense with the gravity of a religious epiphany.Berlant workshopped the show in Los Angeles, where she lives.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWhat she did was not a performance of comedy so much as a narration of the experience of someone performing comedy. And while her cerebral-minded material had the sound of coherence, the music of a mind at work, its meaning fell apart upon scrutiny, which was part of the joke. Every time she began to tell you about herself, she either changed the subject, contradicted herself or, most often, criticized her own act, as if the commentary track infiltrated the show itself. The result had the ineffability of experimental theater yet the ingratiating gusto of showbiz, full of cross-eyed expressions and flirtations with the audience. Was it a satire of a certain brand of charismatic egghead? Maybe.She made me laugh hard, but it was difficult to figure out why. She resisted categorization, which made me try harder, perhaps an occupational hazard. The more I saw her, including the first time she did a half-hour set, I started noticing common themes: The performance in everyday life, the space between reality and artifice, confession and disguise. Even though she had no special or show, I wrote a column arguing that her elusiveness went against the grain of the dominant culture of prestige stand-up. Berlant seemed to be making a mockery of confessional comedy, emphasizing the artifice of her own performance, talking about herself but revealing nothing. Its title was “Keeping It Fake.”In fact, Berlant’s comedy grew organically, a product of studying experimental performance at New York University, improvising at open mics at night and bringing the academic language from one into the other. “I started taking these big ideas but abandoning them midsentence,” she told me. And when people laughed, she kept doing it.Offstage, warm and eager to joke, she really does speak with a certain academic cocktail-party flair. The more time spent with her, the less her stand-up seems like a character or a parody than a heightened version of herself. She says she might have been influenced by the language of the internet or her dad, an artist known for his mixed-media collages, but quickly contradicts herself: “It wasn’t a decision. It just happened.”Upon meeting a decade later, she recalled my review with a shudder. “It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m doing,’” she said, before explaining: “Stand-up is a person up there baring all, a direct channel to who I am. Authenticity. What I’m doing is devising this persona that’s hard to pin down. Resisting legibility.”Her comedy reflects her background studying experimental performance at New York University by day and performing at open mics by night. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAvoiding the legible (not to mention listening to critics) can be risky. Over the next few years, Berlant’s reputation grew; she became especially beloved in comedy circles though never quite found a breakout vehicle. She did an episode of Netflix’s comedy show “The Characters,” made sketch series with her friend and frequent collaborator, John Early, and got cast in cameo roles in movies by Boots Riley and Quentin Tarantino.She became a cult comic, both in the sense of the level of her popularity, but also the intensity of her fans. Many younger comics seemed to borrow her mannerisms and style. One night in 2018, after seeing a bunch of comics doing that flamboyant Berlant-style narration, I wondered on Twitter about her impact, and Bo Burnham responded by calling her the “most influential/imitated comedian of a generation,” saying that even he “slipped into stealing Kate’s vibes without trying.”The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end.Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of Monowi, Neb., where she operates a tavern that serves as one of the last gathering places for the remaining residents of the county. What will happen once she’s gone?TikTok is flooded with health misinformation. Meet the medical experts fighting bogus science, one “stitch” at a time.Viewers of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” know the Upper West Side apartment building as the Arconia. But it has a name — and a dramatic story — all its own.But her act could be rarefied. The comic Jacqueline Novak, a friend, recalls going to the Stand comedy club and watching Berlant’s act bomb but impress the club comic Rich Vos, who was hosting the show. “Rich is laughing and looking around at me with delight, astonishment and wonder,” Novak said. “He gets up there and says he’s never met her before, then scolds the crowd and says, ‘She’s a star.’”Another time, a show-business manager called Berlant, who grew up in Los Angeles with dreams of movie stardom, and said, “Have you ever thought of being more normal and doing jokes?” She didn’t know how to respond.Asked if she would be happy as an experimental artist, a niche star, she adopted the glamorous hard-boiled voice of the Hollywood studio era: “I want to be on billboards, baby.”She had a running joke with Early that her greatest fear was a documentary in which more famous people talk about how influential she is. She was starting to feel trapped by her act. And her confidence had faded after she shot a special in 2019, filmed in black and white by Burnham and produced by Jerrod Carmichael, that was shelved. (FX just announced it will air in the fall.)In the pandemic, Berlant stopped performing for the longest stretch of her career. She filmed the series reboot of “A League of Their Own” and started a podcast with Novak. But she felt the pull of stand-up and in December returned to the stage. Burnham attended the show and afterward administered some tough love. “He said, ‘This is great and you could do that forever, but what if you actually tried to make something?’” she said he told her.Berlant, third from left, in the new series “A League of Their Own.”Anne Marie Fox/Amazon PrimeThe comic, playing a character called Kate, tries to cry on cue in her new stage show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis comment stung. But Burnham — coming off the success of “Inside,” an acclaimed special that leveraged themes he had worked on for years in an ambitious new form — pushed her out of her comfort zone to craft something structured, narrative-driven, a little less elusive. “Story,” she said, “is not where I live.” (Burnham turned down interview requests.)What she came up with centered on a struggling, self-involved actress, Kate, putting on an autobiographical solo show, a vanity project. The character is trying to mine her personal pain for entertainment. Burnham and Berlant started watching solo shows and working with those tropes. At first, she was making fun of this form and imagining the unraveling of her show with a multitude of technical problems, including fights with a production guy rooted in real issues she once had.Like her previous work, it’s about the embarrassment of performing. But she isn’t narrating a character so much as playing one and digging into her own insecurities to do so. “I am realizing there is a larger joke about my anxiety about not having anything to say,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say. It’s the semiotics of theater without the content.”Since I saw her performance three months ago, she has added several monologues in which she breaks character and talks directly to the audience as she criticizes and apologizes for her own show. It more closely resembled her old standup but also the spiraling that she did in May. “I’ve allowed myself to have moments in my familiar language,” she said in July. “It needs to be fun for me.”She also added a scene about her character’s childhood trauma that clarified the central challenge that repeats itself in the show several times: her inability to cry on cue. After failing to do so in a high-stakes audition, she ends up trying to cry in a small theater show, like, well, the one Berlant is doing now. If that sounds as meta as a Charlie Kaufman script, she did watch “Adaptation” on the flight back from London, where she performed the show to sold-out crowds. The part in “Adaptation” that stood out to her was the advice from a screenwriting guru: “Wow them in the end and you got a hit.”The climax of Berlant’s show — her trying to cry for a camera on command one last time and telling the crowd out of desperation that no one is leaving until she does — had always played well. But the structure has been streamlined to more clearly build up to it. She fails to cry, again and again and again, a close-up on her face projected on the wall showcases her clownish expressions. It’s oddly suspenseful, a sequence that builds like a joke but isn’t merely played for laughs. Even though this is a moment marked by artifice and absurdity, Berlant really commits to the emotional performance in a way that’s different from anything she’s done before.Crying can be something of a trick for an actor. But the way it operates in this show now is also more fundamental. “I’m realizing that this has to change her,” Berlant told me, speaking of the character. The change is not in finding a trauma, but in her relationship to the show she is putting on. She discovers that making the audience happy, the audience in the room, is enough.Scenes in which she criticizes and apologizes for the show have been added to “Kate.” As she explained, “It needs to be fun for me.”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“For me, Kate Berlant,” she said, shifting to talking about herself, “to have a show in New York that works and people like, that is enough.”In an East Village coffee shop a few days before previews start, Berlant sounded more confident than ever, assured of the intent of her show if still uneasy, especially about finding ways to stay present and alive as she says the same lines over and over. In the Connelly Theater, the show now cleverly introduces itself like a parody of a pretentious art installation, with a lobby decked out in comically self-serious photos of Berlant, including several paragraphs of a mission statement that gives cult-leader vibes. In the theater, a vast video screen shows a film that positions her in a long line of great acting gurus (Meisner, Strasberg, Berlant) after lovingly scrolling through her IMDb page. You can sense the slickly ironic Burnham touch in the framing of the play.Berlant said the show had the silly comedy of her standup but was more emotional, adding that audience members have told her they’ve cried watching her try to.As much as this new show is about making something with a clear narrative, she still clings to the power of obliqueness. “This is the question I’m still facing: How much clarity does there need to be?” she said. “My character is doing a vanity project. It’s convoluted and half-baked. Does it really matter how clear it is?”The transition from comic to scripted actor is tricky, especially for an improvisational artist who has always poked fun at and reveled in the embarrassment of being a performer. She describes this is as being much more vulnerable. “I created a style of performing to avoid work,” she said of her comedy career, in what may or may not be a joke. “But there’s effort all over this show.”She paused dramatically, with just enough self-consciousness to wink at her own actorly flourish: “I can’t hide.” More