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    Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

    Theater about current events — both literally and abstractly — is changing the conversation between playwrights, directors and their audiences.IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.What’s jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we’ve had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog’s reconception of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 “An Enemy of the People” as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction “Show/Boat: A River,” which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We’ve had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we’ve had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!”? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical “Cabaret” (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall’s immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even “Wicked,” 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that’s your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” — no, wait, damn it, there’s that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical “Real Women Have Curves,” which … nope, that won’t work either. It’s hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we’ve all become hammers.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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    In ‘Eureka Day,’ a Scene About Vaccines Devolves, Hilariously

    In “Eureka Day,” changes were made to a scene because “the laughter was so robust backstage, they couldn’t hear the cues.”The third scene of the new Broadway production of “Eureka Day” could be titled The Way We Discourse Now. As written by the playwright Jonathan Spector, the scene reliably has audiences laughing so loudly that the actors are drowned out.The situation is this: It is 2018. The principal of the progressive private school Eureka Day in Berkeley, Calif., and the four members of its executive committee must inform the other parents that a student has mumps, and therefore by law any students who have not been vaccinated must stay home to avoid exposure. (Vaccine skepticism was not uncommon in this milieu, particularly pre-pandemic.)The school leaders, an optimistic bunch dedicated to diversity and inclusion, hold a town hall-style meeting “to see,” says the principal, Don, “how we can come together as a community and exchange ideas around a difficult issue.”At the meeting, which is being held remotely, Don speaks while sitting in front of a laptop in the school library, addressing parents on a Zoom-like video app. The executive committee members are behind him. The rest of the school’s parents weigh in on a chat-like function. Their messages — 144 of them — are projected above the actors for the audience to read.The online conversation quickly descends into vicious attacks. “Typical behavior from the Executive Committee of FASCISM.” “Sorry, chiropractors are not doctors.” “That’s child abuse!!!”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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    28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

    New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)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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    ‘Eureka Day’ and Sondheim Revue Join Broadway’s Next Season

    Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will star in Sondheim’s “Old Friends” in Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway season, which also includes “Eureka Day.”Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofit organizations that operate houses on Broadway, is planning to stage a vaccination comedy called “Eureka Day” and the Sondheim revue “Old Friends” at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater next season.“Eureka Day” predates the pandemic — it was first staged in 2018 in Berkeley, Calif., where it takes place, and the disease at issue is mumps, not Covid. The play, by Jonathan Spector, is set at an exuberantly left-leaning private day school; the characters are school board members who find their tolerance tested by the anti-vaxxers among them.The initial production was at the Aurora Theater Company; in 2019, there was an Off Off Broadway production presented by Colt Coeur that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised, saying it “is not only one of the funniest plays to open this year, it is one of the saddest.” There have been several other productions since; most prominently, in 2022, the show was staged at the Old Vic in London, with Helen Hunt starring.The M.T.C. run, which is to begin performances on Nov. 25, will be a new production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. (She won a Tony for directing “August: Osage County.”) Casting has not yet been announced.“Old Friends” is a posthumous tribute to the acclaimed composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021. (“Old Friends” is the title of a song in the Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”) The revue, a passion project for the megaproducer Cameron Mackintosh, was first performed for one night in 2022, and then had a 16-week West End run that ended earlier this year.The New York production, like the London production, will star the Tony winners Bernadette Peters (“Song and Dance”; “Annie Get Your Gun”) and Lea Salonga (“Miss Saigon”) and will be directed by Matthew Bourne (who won two Tonys for “Swan Lake”) in collaboration with Julia McKenzie, an English actress and frequent Sondheim performer. The New York production is to begin March 25, 2025, following a run at Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles.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