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    In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

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    Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).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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      ‘Swing State’ Playwright Wants to Sound an Alarm for a World in Trouble

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      In her Off Broadway drama, which had an acclaimed run in Chicago, the playwright looks for hope to outweigh despair in a fractious, anxious time.The playwright Rebecca Gilman moved away from small-town Alabama long ago, but a soft Southern lilt still shapes her words. In all the years she lived and worked here in her adopted city of Chicago, she remained immune to its Bill Murray accent. The broad tones of nearby Wisconsin have likewise left no mark.Rural Wisconsin itself, though, has burrowed deep in her soul. After more than a decade of traveling back and forth from Chicago, Gilman relocated full-time to Green County, Wis., about four years ago. If you want to send her into a soliloquy, just ask what she loves about the prairie. She will talk about its colors and how they change throughout the year — from white to pink to purple to a wind-stirred sea of yellow — and then she will venture into its metaphors.“When you go to a prairie, it’s just teeming with life — butterflies, bugs, birds, everything,” she said on a stiflingly hot August afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the Goodman Theater, where her new play, “Swing State,” was in rehearsals for its New York run. “It’s an ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else. Some of the plants have to be pollinated by particular butterflies. Particular butterflies have to have lupine to lay their eggs. Monarchs have to have milkweed. And it is not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”Gilman, 58, worries about the prairie’s destruction, but she acts on that fear, volunteering with an endearingly named group, the Prairie Enthusiasts, to protect the land. She worries, too, about threats to wildlife — like white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats — so she recently trained as a “bat ambassador,” to raise awareness of their plight.And like so many inhabitants of this bellicose, burning planet, Gilman worries about its survival if people cannot find a way to coexist and cooperate, at the most intimate local level and beyond. In “Swing State,” which is scheduled to begin previews on Friday, at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan, she wrestles with that anxiety, and with the hopelessness that it can bring.The actors Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher rehearsing the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where “Swing State” had an acclaimed run last year.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesDirected by Gilman’s longtime collaborator Robert Falls, the play is set in what is known as the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, where the rolling landscape is untouched by glacial sediment, or drift. The principal characters are driftless, too — lacking the purpose that human beings require to thrive.Peg, a recent widow in her 60s, cherishes the acres of ancient prairie on her land, and takes crotchety good care of her 20-something neighbor Ryan, a recovering alcoholic who looks out for her, too, as he scrambles to get his life together. But with the natural world in escalating peril, and her husband now just ashes in a box, Peg cannot summon the will to go on.Set in 2021, “Swing State” is only subtly a play about the coronavirus pandemic, depicting the isolation that people felt in its early stages, and the knee-jerk, politicized hostility that arose around masks and vaccines. It is more interested in the ways that antagonism has replaced goodwill, and how lethal to community such hardheartedness can be.When the play had its premiere at the Goodman last October, the critic Chris Jones wrote, in a rave review in The Chicago Tribune, that Gilman had captured “the feeling that America has atrophied, the sense that once-shared values have swung so far to the extremes that the bones of a nation have crumbled.”Yet she frames it all in up-close, personal terms, using just four characters — all residents of the same tiny township. The story isn’t overtly about civic life; at the same time, it is hugely about civic life.“The play, for me,” Falls said, perched in a cushy chair a few feet from Gilman, “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing. One could say civility in politics. One could say very much the environment. One could say a democracy.”For all the rough-and-tumble raucousness of the national shouting match, though, “Swing State” takes a gentle tone.“In a way,” Falls said, “it becomes the quietest play, sitting in the middle of the biggest epic social circumstances.”The longtime collaborators at a rehearsal last month. Falls said the play “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesA TONY AWARD WINNER for his 1999 production of “Death of a Salesman,” Falls, 69, was nearing the end of his long tenure as the Goodman’s artistic director when he decided he wanted to stage one more Gilman play. It would be the sixth in a collaboration that began with her 2001 play “Blue Surge.”In late 2020, when the pandemic was keeping him at home in Evanston, Ill., wondering darkly if actors would ever act without masks on, Gilman was at home in southern Wisconsin, not knowing if she would ever write another play — because, she said, “everything just seemed sort of pointless.”But then he called her up and asked her to. Always, he said, he has felt a connection to her voice, and to the “moral sensibility” at the heart of her plays — a quality he ascribed to her deeply understanding “how the world truly works” yet rejecting “the cynicism of just throwing up your [expletive] hands.”“I really wanted to do a new play by Rebecca,” he said, “to the point where it didn’t really matter what Rebecca wanted to write about.”Gilman had two conditions, swiftly granted: that Falls would direct and that Mary Beth Fisher — who originated lead roles in two of Gilman’s best known plays, “Spinning Into Butter” (1999) and “Boy Gets Girl” (2000), both at the Goodman — would star.As Gilman wrote the role of Peg for Fisher, she poured into the play what was on her mind. Even in those dire days when theaters were shut down and the industry’s future was grim, Gilman’s eyes were on a more collective danger.“The world is in trouble,” she said. “It’s not just the theater that’s in trouble. The world is in trouble. And if the planet dies, all of our precious art is going to die with it. That was the urgency I was feeling. Like, can we create something that also communicates this?”In her swing-state township that Joe Biden won by two votes, where she and her husband joke that maybe they tilted the balance, Gilman doesn’t really talk politics with people anymore: too hazardous.“There’s so much potential for conflict and animosity,” she said, “that you kind of just don’t go down that road because you also have to live next to each other, where there aren’t very many people. You don’t want to make enemies of your neighbors. I don’t know my neighbors’ politics, and I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to know, because I need them if we get stuck in the snow, or they need me to come to their daughter’s high school graduation party.”Fisher, right, with Anne E. Thompson, left, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in the play.Liz LaurenThat polarity and interdependence are woven into “Swing State”; likewise what Gilman said was her fear of losing the people most precious to her, and her alarm at what was vanishing from her beloved outdoors.“Despair is a really strong word,” she said. “But when you do go out into the natural world regularly, it’s impossible not to see what’s dying. It’s impossible not to see what we’re losing.”When bird-watching became a popular pandemic activity, friends would ask her to take them. It gave them solace and gave her solace, too, but hers came with an asterisk.“I was so happy that they were discovering it,” she said. “But at the same time, I was thinking, there used to be so many more birds here. Every time we’d go out, I’d think, oh, gosh, I wish you had come out with me 10 years ago. I wish you’d come out with me five years ago. The birds that we used to see here are not here anymore.”Falls spent his first 13 years of life surrounded by cornfields in rural Illinois, where his mother’s side of the family were farmers. He has always preferred city to country, books to bird-watching. Yet when Gilman took him onto the prairie and handed him a pair of binoculars, he immediately made a rare sighting: a Henslow’s sparrow, a type of bird that figures poignantly in “Swing State.”Theater people in general being fond of superstition, he took that as a “great omen” for the play. Maybe it was, given the show’s success so far — the accolades in Chicago, then the transfer of the Goodman production to New York by Audible Theater, which will record an audio version for wide release.The play’s title, by the way, isn’t just about Wisconsin as a purple state. It’s about the characters’ emotional landscapes, Gilman said, “swinging between despair and hope.”She has no interest in providing false hope, preferring to acknowledge reality. But she doesn’t want to knuckle under to despair, not least because it’s unfair to abandon the world’s troubles to generations that didn’t cause them.So, she said, it’s a balancing act, one in which “meaningful work that makes the world better” — the kind her characters are in search of, and that she has discovered on the prairie — is part of finding a way to heal.“Put despair and hope on the scale,” she said. “You’re going to have to work to make hope outweigh despair, but I do think it’s possible. And I do think that the work is necessary in a way it never has been before.” More

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      A Revival of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Seeks a New Generation of Followers

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      In staging the storied rock opera in Chicago, its creators argue that the show’s exploration of celebrity worship and childhood trauma is more relevant than ever.Thirty years ago, when the Who’s 1969 concept album “Tommy” was transformed into a rock opera for Broadway, it was hailed as a triumph of the form — a production that had finally managed to authentically marry theater and rock ’n’ roll.Fueled by the spiritual exploration of a 23-year-old Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist and songwriter, the original production of “Tommy” drew crowds of baby boomers primed with adolescent nostalgia for the story of a boy who discovers a superhuman aptitude for pinball despite not being able to see, hear or speak.The Broadway show raked in a record number of ticket sales the day after opening night, ran for nearly 900 performances and won five Tony Awards, including one for its director, Des McAnuff.With its depictions of rebellion against authority and analogies to spiritual enlightenment, the show was firmly rooted in the youth culture of the 1960s. So why would McAnuff, for whom “Tommy” was a career-defining success, take the risk of reimagining the work for today’s audiences?“Sometimes you just don’t get things out of your system,” McAnuff said in an interview shortly after his new production of “The Who’s Tommy” opened last month at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. “I felt like it was time to make it contemporary.”In resurrecting “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend, who wrote the book together, sought to prove that the work was not simply of an era, but carried the promise of timelessness.In 2023, McAnuff argues, Tommy’s transformation from catatonic schoolboy to a kind of charismatic cult leader resonates even more strongly when considering the modern-day culture of celebrity worship. And the show’s exploration of trauma — including post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse and bullying — is something that audiences now have a much deeper understanding of.The reimagining of “Tommy” is not so much in story but in style, with McAnuff opting for futuristic austerity over 1960s nostalgia. Tommy displays his skill not on a kitschy pinball machine but a spare set piece (designed by David Korins) in which the outline of a machine is represented by narrow panels of light. The personality cult that encircles Tommy feels more sinister than in the original production.A 1972 concert staging of “Tommy” at the Rainbow Theater in London brought together, from far left, Merry Clayton (whose back is to the camera), Peter Sellers, Sandy Denny, Graham Bell, Steve Winwood and Roger Daltrey.Getty ImagesThe production, which runs through Aug. 6, has received rave reviews in Chicago, with the critic Chris Jones of The Chicago Tribune calling it a “ready-for-prime-time stunner.” The Goodman says the show is on track to be its highest-grossing production ever, a boon for the organization during a time of high anxiety around regional theater’s post-pandemic return. The show’s commercial producer, Stephen Gabriel, said several options for the production’s future are being weighed, including a Broadway run.The story at the center of this production is much the same as the one the Who told when it played its new album at Woodstock in 1969.A 4-year-old Tommy watches as his father — a British Army captain believed to have died while on duty — shows up at the family’s home, ultimately killing the mother’s new lover during the ensuing fight. Tommy then loses his senses, becoming the victim of sexual abuse by his uncle, relentless bullying by his cousin and medical exploitation by an army of invasive doctors. After the world discovers his stunning talent for pinball, he becomes a messiah-like figure with a band of devoted followers.Whether “Tommy” can become a national phenomenon again, and not just a nostalgic tribute, depends, in part, on its ability to capture a new audience.McAnuff sees Ali Louis Bourzgui, the 23-year-old lead, as the show’s “doorway to Gen Z” — though not long out of college and largely unknown, he is viewed by the director as a natural star who will be appealing to a new generation of prospective “Tommy” fans.To Bourzgui, Tommy’s meteoric rise has parallels to the frenzy over certain social media influencers, artists or tech gurus.“He gets filled up by his followers,” Bourzgui said. “He keeps feeding off that, getting more gluttonous with power, until he realizes they’re following him because they want to feed off his trauma.”Bourzgui was born 30 years after the release of “Tommy” the album, but he has his own memory of his first listen — to the vinyl, in fact — in a friend’s apartment his freshman year. He remembers feeling moved by the music, if not a little bit befuddled by the plot. (McAnuff likes to call the story a “fable,” gesturing at the suspension of disbelief required to accept Tommy’s arc from silent child to pinball wizard to cult leader.)In preparation for the role, Bourzgui pored over performance videos of the Who on YouTube, finding himself in awe of the band’s magnetism. Wary of falling into mimicry, he hasn’t watched videos of the earlier production.“We’re not in the business of presenting museum pieces,” said Roche Schulfer, the Goodman’s executive director, who was approached about staging “Tommy” before the pandemic upended the theater world.Schulfer was persuaded by McAnuff and Townshend’s ideas for an update as well as their consideration of how certain themes and language might translate onstage today.The Who performing “Tommy” in Los Angeles in August 1989. Des McAnuff developed the show for the stage in the early 1990s.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe question is one that theater makers across the country are grappling with: Should revived works be altered to align with the worldviews and sensitivities of present-day audiences?In “Tommy,” McAnuff and Townshend’s answer was, largely, no.For example, the lyrics “deaf, dumb and blind” are central to some of the album’s hits, including its most famous: “Pinball Wizard.” When Townshend originally wrote “Tommy” in the 1960s, the word “dumb” was commonly used to refer to someone who was nonverbal, but it is now considered to be an offensive and archaic term. McAnuff said that he and Townshend did not seriously consider changing that language, viewing it as too much of a lyrical departure in foundational songs such as “Amazing Journey.”“‘Sensory impaired’ — I don’t think it would work,” McAnuff said. “I think it’s a song that has a certain amount of pedigree and dignity.”The story behind the concept, Townshend told an interviewer in the 1970s, came from his devotion in his early 20s to the writings of the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba — also an inspiration for one of the Who’s biggest hits, “Baba O’Riley” — who taught, as he put it, that as humans, “there are whole chunks of life, including the whole concept of reality, which escapes us.”Over the years, Townshend has described the character of Tommy as autistic, explaining that his condition was a metaphor for humanity’s limited view of reality.Revivals over the years, including one by McAnuff a decade ago in Ontario, Canada, have given the book writers the opportunity to re-examine the show’s handling of sensitive issues. Around that time, Townshend acknowledged in an interview that the rock opera does not allow for explanation or discussion around serious issues such as sexual abuse, but that audiences can consider those topics themselves in a modern context.“We have to live with the rock opera version that we did 20 years ago,” Townshend said at the time. “We also have to live with the fact that ‘Tommy’ started as a rock opera in 1968, ’69. And yet times have changed. Attitudes have changed.”In the 1990s, McAnuff, who first developed the show at La Jolla Playhouse in California, staged the sexual abuse scene in such a way that had little need for alterations today. A revolving bed suggests the violation without any significant physical touch — an approach the director views as key to protecting the child actors involved in the show.After the Broadway debut, there were some complaints that the scene was less daring than the one in Ken Russell’s provocative 1975 film, to which McAnuff responded, “That’s a real little boy up there. Does anyone actually need me to abuse that child to get the idea across?”The most significant change in the Chicago production on the issue of abuse is the removal of a short song, “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” that brings back the sexually abusive uncle in a way that no longer seemed necessary, McAnuff said. There is also some toned-down staging in “The Acid Queen,” the wailing barnburner — performed by Tina Turner in the film version — in which Tommy’s father takes him to a prostitute and con artist who promises to cure his condition with drugs.Without being too heavy handed in any moralistic messaging, McAnuff hopes the audience sees what the intent of the work has been since the beginning.“At the end of the day, we portray what happens to him not to condone it but to condemn it,” McAnuff said. “And I think that’s the point of view of the whole piece.” More

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      To Become Oscar Levant, Sean Hayes Revisited His First Role

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa OpaleskyAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      Frank Galati, Mainstay of Chicago Theater, Dies at 79

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      He brought his adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” to Broadway and won Tony Awards. He also directed the long-running hit “Ragtime.”Frank Galati, a writer, director and actor whose work in Chicago, especially his celebrated adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath,” furthered that city’s international reputation in theater, and whose long résumé included directing the Broadway hit “Ragtime,” died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 79.His husband, Peter Amster, said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Galati was a towering figure in Chicago-area theater for decades, working with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters and other houses there and teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He specialized in adaptations, and in 1988 his version of John Steinbeck’s dust-bowl epic, “The Grapes of Wrath,” was a hit for Steppenwolf.He both wrote and directed “The Grapes of Wrath,” though it took work to persuade Steinbeck’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck, to release the rights. She told The Chicago Tribune in 1988 that once she saw what Mr. Galati had done with the novel, she was glad she did.“I took the script to bed with me,” she said. “As soon as I started reading it, I sat bolt upright. I didn’t think it would be that good.”It was good enough to make the trip to Broadway, with Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and Lois Smith leading the cast. When it opened at the Cort Theater in March 1990, Frank Rich reviewed it for The New York Times.“The production at the Cort,” he wrote, “an epic achievement for the director, Frank Galati, and the Chicago theater ensemble at his disposal, makes Steinbeck live for a new generation not by updating his book but by digging into its timeless heart.”The production earned Mr. Galati two Tony Awards, for best direction of a play and best play.Gary Sinise, left, and Terry Kinney in Mr. Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The production’s run on Broadway in 1990 earned Mr. Galati Tony Awards for both writing and directing.Later in the 1990s Mr. Galati directed another high-profile show, the musical “Ragtime.” Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel and adapted by Terrence McNally, with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, it opened in Toronto in December 1996 to acclaim, and in January 1998 it settled in for a two-year run on Broadway. Mr. Galati received a Tony nomination for best direction of a musical.Those were just two highlights from a career that stretched back to his college days at Northwestern, where, at the School of Communication, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, a master’s in 1967 and a doctorate in 1971. For the Forum Theater in 1973, he adapted “Boss,” the Chicago columnist Mike Royko’s book about Richard J. Daley, the city’s longtime mayor, into a musical, for which he also wrote the lyrics; it won a Joseph Jefferson Award (Chicago’s version of the Tonys) for best new play. Other Jeffersons followed, with Mr. Galati winning for directing, writing and acting.Adaptations were a specialty — in addition to “The Grapes of Wrath,” the works he adapted included two books by Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore” and “after the quake” (Mr. Murakami’s only demand, Mr. Galati said, was that the title be rendered in lowercase letters), as well as William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and numerous others. He and Lawrence Kasdan even shared an Oscar nomination for adapting Anne Tyler’s novel “The Accidental Tourist” into the 1988 film of the same name.“Almost every novel conceals a drama,” Mr. Galati told Stay Thirsty magazine in 2014. “Some of those dramas are very hard to coax out, some jump out of the book and run up onto the stage. Of course, if the novelist creates scenes that play through brilliant dialogue, that’s half the battle. That’s very true of Steinbeck. The scenes in his books are completely stage worthy. Other writers, like Henry James, are much harder to adapt.”If he had success as an adapter, he told The New Haven Register in 2006, when “after the quake” was being staged at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., it was because he was “not afraid to keep much of the narrator’s voice.”“Long narrative passages don’t scare me in performance,” he said.Countless actors knew of Mr. Galati’s touch as a director, and many issued tributes on learning of his death.“Every actor will know what I mean when I say Frank waited for me,” Molly Regan, a member of Steppenwolf, said in a statement. “He waited for me. He cast you, and then he trusted you. Sometimes he knew me as an actor better than I knew myself.”Last year, when Mr. Galati was inducted in the Theater Hall of Fame, he returned those kinds of compliments.“I’m honored, I’m humbled, I’m grateful,” he said in his acceptance speech, “but I cannot accept this honor for myself. Rather, I dedicate this honor to my students, and to every single actor I have been inspired by and learned from. The rehearsal hall is where I have spent the happiest hours of my life.”A scene from the Broadway production of “Ragtime.” Mr. Galati’s direction of the show earned him a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrank Joseph Galati was born on Nov. 29, 1943, in Highland Park, Ill., north of Chicago. His father, also named Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a saleswoman with Marshall Field, the department store.He grew up in Northbrook, Ill., and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest notices resulted from his appearance in a faculty and student talent show in 1964.“A born comic, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, made eight appearances,” The Chicago Tribune wrote. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind it was that he never caught up with the class schedule.”Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theatrical life beginning in the mid-1970s, when he directed a reading of some of her works called “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled.” — a title borrowed from a Stein work. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed “The Mother of Us All,” the Virgil Thomson opera for which Ms. Stein wrote the libretto.In 1987, at the Goodman, he staged perhaps his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” featuring Ms. Stein’s words and Pablo Picasso’s works — the one a writer who expanded our view of language, the other an artist who changed our way of seeing. Richard Christiansen, reviewing it for The Tribune, called it “a high point of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist.” The production was later seen at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Galati said he found Ms. Stein’s texts mesmerizing.“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, leap, jump and tinkle in our ears.”Mr. Galati and Mr. Amster, who had been together for 52 years and married in 2017, relocated to Florida in the mid-2000s, about the time Mr. Galati took emeritus status at Northwestern. At his death they were dividing their time between homes in Sarasota and on Beaver Island in Michigan.Both have been active in the Asolo Repertory Theater of Sarasota. Mr. Amster is directing its production of “Ken Ludwig’s The Three Musketeers,” which opens Jan. 11. Last year Mr. Galati, reuniting with Ms. Ahrens and Mr. Flaherty, directed the premiere of a new musical there called “Knoxville,” based on James Agee’s autobiographical novel, “A Death in the Family.” Mr. Galati, of course, did the adaptation.In addition to Mr. Amster, he is survived by a sister, Franny Clarkson.At the Theater Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Galati was introduced by B.J. Jones, artistic director of Northlight, a Chicago-area theater for which Mr. Galati directed the inaugural production in 1975 when it was known as the Evanston Theater Company. Mr. Jones singled out a moment in Mr. Galati’s long career that, he said, showed “the depth of his humanity”: his insistence that Susan Nussbaum, a young actress who was in a wheelchair since being hit by a car a few years earlier, be cast in the role of Gertrude Stein in the premiere of “She Always Said, Pablo.”Ms. Nussbaum, who became a disabilities-rights advocate and died last year, often cited Mr. Galati’s support as pivotal to her post-accident life. In an interview in 1994, when she was playing the Stein role at the Kennedy Center, she credited him with “always going beyond the vision that other people have seen.” More

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      Goodman Theater Names Susan V. Booth as Artistic Director

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      Booth, who currently leads the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, will succeed Robert Falls, who is retiring after 35 years leading the Chicago mainstay.Susan V. Booth, the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofits in the country.Booth, 59, who will assume the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm.The Goodman, which has an annual budget of $22 million and a staff of roughly 200, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it staged more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene known primarily for actors to one recognized as a seedbed for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be contained in a storefront theater,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.The move will be something of a homecoming for Booth, who went to graduate school at Northwestern University, directed at theaters across the city and served as the Goodman’s director of new play development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even proposed to her on the catwalk over the Goodman’s main stage on her last day on the job.In a telephone interview, Booth said she looked forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as marked by a muscular, democratic and “radically diverse aesthetic.”“It was always a really fluid ecosystem, where artists would bounce between punky first-year start-ups in the backs of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread turnover in leadership in Chicago theater, because of retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to figure out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and civically, to determine how best to reach the widest audiences possible.She said she also wanted to work with the theater’s artistic collective to continue the Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving prominent placement to challenging new works.“I love me a classic, and I have no interest in relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the level playing field that’s created when you produce new work.”Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled the operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowment, and led it to a 2007 Tony Award for regional excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights, while cultivating new voices through programs like the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership.Asked about a signature project, she cited a staging of “Native Guard,” the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s poem cycle exploring both her family history and the history of Black Civil War troops, which was staged originally at the Alliance and then later at the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience engaged with the work as about the source narrative,” she said. “It was a community event.”It was “theater designed to catalyze dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That mattered to me a lot.”The Goodman’s 2022-23 season, programmed by Falls, includes the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community split by political polarization (one of two productions to be directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30th-anniversary production of “The Who’s Tommy,” directed by Des McAnuff.As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the ripe political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the pure pleasure of theater.“I don’t know a theater community in the country that isn’t creating the odd joy-bomb,” she said. More

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      Theater to Stream: 'Notes on Grief' and Russell Brand's Take on Shakespeare

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      An adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Notes on Grief,” Russell Brand’s take on Shakespeare and a two-day event anchored by a Milo Rau film are among the highlights.Productions from the multidisciplinary Manchester International Festival often end up traveling around the world, making pit stops at well-heeled performing arts centers. This year, we don’t have to wait, as the festival is making some of its offerings available online — an approach we hope will become commonplace among international gatherings.Of particular interest to theater audiences is “Notes on Grief,” Rae McKen’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay-turned-book about her father’s sudden death. The show is bound to be compared to the Joan Didion memoir-turned-play “The Year of Magical Thinking.”One day in June 2020, Adichie learned that her father — with whom she had chatted just a day earlier — died. “My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone,” she wrote in an essay that The New Yorker published in September. McKen’s show stars Uche Abuah, Michelle Asante and Itoya Osagiede. Audience members lucky enough to be in Manchester can see it in real life through July 17, and the rest of us can watch from home from July 15-18. mif.co.uk.‘Our Little Lives: Shakespeare and Me’Those who associate Russell Brand only with his excesses and shock tactics may be surprised by his quieter mien these days — he’s become the kind of guy who occasionally finds life lessons in sonnets. He is now reprising a one-man show he conceived with the director Ian Rickson and developed in 2018, in which he uses Shakespeare’s writings to illuminate his own story. Brand promises an appearance by his dog, Bear (perhaps timed to his exit, so he can be pursued by Bear). Through July 14; live-now.com‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder’CollaborAzian is streaming an abridged version of this Tony Award-winning musical from 2013 with an all-Asian American cast and production team. Karl Josef Co takes on Monty Navarro, who sets out to kill multiple members of the D’Ysquith family, all of them to be portrayed — often in lightning-fast succession — by Thom Sesma. It should be interesting to see how the director Alan Muraoka and his actors handle the show’s high-farcical style online. Look also for a special appearance by Lea Salonga. July 15-22; collaborazian.com‘I Hate It Here’Last year, Studio Theater presented the Chicago playwright Ike Holter’s anthology of vignettes as an audio drama; now the Goodman Theater is producing it as a fully staged livestream, directed by Lili-Anne Brown. The stories cover various aspects of life during the peak of the pandemic year, touching on Covid-19, racism and activism, and possibly even hope. July 15-18; goodmantheatre.orgThe New Solidarity: Art, Organizing and Radical PoliticsPresented by various institutions and organizations across the country, including the Foundry Theater in New York, this two-day event is anchored by a streaming presentation of the Milo Rau film “The New Gospel.” Rau, an audacious Swiss director whose production company “for theater, film and social sculpture” is called the International Institute of Political Murder, set the Passion of Christ in the context of 21st-century conflicts about migration; the Jesus character is played by the activist and writer Yvan Sagnet, who was born in Cameroon and then later moved to Italy to study. Rau will also participate in a couple of panels: “How are artists seizing power today?” and “How are artists and organizers building solidarity between art and movements?” (Sagnet will participate in the latter one as well). July 9-10; howlround.com‘Lines in the Dust’Nikkole Salter emerged in 2005 with the play “In the Continuum,” which she and Danai Gurira wrote and starred in. Since then, Salter continues to make theater that inspires and engages, stirs and advocates. The New Normal Rep company is reviving her 2014 play “Lines in the Dust,” in which a working-class New Jersey mother alters her residency paperwork so her daughter can attend a good school. July 8-Aug. 8; https://www.newnormalrep.org/next-up‘Silent’Pat Kinevane in “Silent.” Ste MurrayThe respected Dublin company Fishamble celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of its biggest hits, “Silent,” from the writer-performer Pat Kinevane, with a virtual American mini-tour of a filmed version: It’s presented first by Odyssey Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles (July 9-11) then by Solas Nua in Washington (July 11-18). Kinevane portrays a mentally ill homeless man who emulates the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. Praising “Silent” in The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that “there is breath and blood to spare in this carefully wrought production.” fishamble.comDiscover Imitating the DogThe explosion of streaming theater last year allowed us to discover many artists doing stellar work in their corners of the world. One such outfit is Britain’s Imitating the Dog, whose shows make inventive use of multimedia techniques and translate remarkably well online. Luckily the company remains proactive in making its catalog available. Check out, for example, “Dr Blood’s Old Travelling Show,” from October 2020, or the collection of shorts “Street,” which smartly spruces up the aesthetics of documentary theater. http://www.imitatingthedog.co.uk/at-home/2021 Short New Play Festival: RestorationRed Bull Theater, in New York, has made a name with such zippy revivals as “The Government Inspector,” which gave Michael Urie a golden opportunity to display his comic timing, but the company is not stuck in the past. For this year’s edition of its festival dedicated to short new plays, Red Bull commissioned a work from José Rivera (“Cloud Tectonics” and the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries”) and selected six entries from hundreds of open submissions. The winning playwrights are Constance Congdon, Rosslyn Cornejo, George LaVigne, David Lefkowitz, Abigail C. Onwunali and Charlotte Rahn-Lee, and their pieces should be in good hands with the directors Margot Bordelon and Timothy Douglas. July 12-16; redbulltheater.com‘Possible’The Welsh writer and performer Shôn Dale-Jones’s new solo show has been compared to Bo Burnham’s Netflix special “Inside”: both are autobiographical works that explore lockdown life while occasionally reaching further back in time. Dale-Jones refers to digital interactions he’s had in the past year, including WhatsApp group chats and Zoom calls, and includes tough discussions about his mother’s mental well-being. After a livestreamed run, the National Theater Wales production is available on-demand. Through July 13; nationaltheatrewales.orgEast to Edinburgh Goes VirtualEvery year, 59E59 Theaters in New York presents a showcase of productions headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. While the United States have made great steps toward a return to a theatrical normal (whatever that might be), the new edition of East to Edinburgh is still virtual, with nine shows you can watch from home. Among the titles that caught my eye is Priyanka Shetty’s docu-theater solo “#Charlottesville,” about the events that roiled the Virginia city in August 2017. Borrowing from Anna Deavere Smith, Shetty built her text from interviews. Other intriguing entries in the showcase include “Testament,” in which Tristan Bernays (“Frankenstein”) imagines what would happen if four biblical characters lived now; and Somebody Jones’s “Black Women Dating White Men,” whose title is an apt description of the show. July 15-July 25; 59e59.org More

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      Taking Over Victory Gardens to Make a ‘Theater for All’

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      CHICAGO — Ken-Matt Martin, the incoming artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater here, said he never has revealed this publicly before, but he has a Sankofa bird tattooed on his back.This mythical creature, with a name that means “return to retrieve” in Ghana’s Akan language, is depicted with its feet pointing forward and its head turned backward — a reminder, Martin said, of “making sure you have a reverence and understanding of the past so that as you move into the future, you know what the hell you’ve come from. That’s key to how I move, how I operate in the world.”And that’s the delicate balance Martin, at 32, intends to strike as he takes the reins of this 47-year-old Tony Award-winning institution that had an even more tumultuous 2020 than most theater companies.Between late May and early June, a key group of affiliated playwrights quit en masse, protesters demonstrated outside the boarded-up Lincoln Park theater, and its white executive director, who recently had been named artistic director as well, and board president resigned.Victory Gardens has a new board president, Charles E. Harris II, and a new acting managing director, Roxanna Conner, and on March 17 it announced that Martin would become its third artistic director since its 1974 founding. He begins April 19.That this new leadership triumvirate is entirely Black represents a first for Victory Gardens, a theater that has championed diversity while sometimes struggling to live up to those ideals. And this shift is being echoed throughout the Chicago arts scene, where Black leaders have secured the top jobs at House Theater, Sideshow Theater Company, Hubbard Street Dance and the Second City.These moves came in the wake of the social-justice movement spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and fueled by the demands of the “We See You, White American Theater” national coalition of theater artists of color.“I would not be in the position I’m in if we had not had that collective awakening this past year,” said Lanise Antoine Shelley, the House Theater’s new artistic director.“Sure, something is shifting,” Martin said, “but you’re also talking about highly qualified people getting jobs that they’re more than qualified for.”The cast of “Prowess,” a play by Ike Holter that Martin directed at the Pyramid Theater Company, which he co-founded in Des Moines, Iowa.Mark TurekPunctuating his assertions with laughter while sitting outside a South Loop cafe blocks from his apartment, the Little Rock, Ark., native was casual and comfortable as he discussed the weighty issues facing theater and the larger culture.“I woke up this morning and was like: You know? I’m not going to be cagey today. I’m just going to tell it straight,” he said.He wore a baseball cap from Brown University, where he received his M.F.A. in directing, and a black mask from Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where he was serving as associate producer alongside the longtime artistic director Robert Falls when he landed the Victory Gardens job.He was introduced to the entertainment world at age 12, when his mother drove him to Atlanta to audition for the Nickelodeon series “All That.” He landed a bit part and when that contract later prohibited him from taking a role on another network, he said he became determined to learn the business side of entertainment.In Little Rock, Martin said, the majority of his classmates — as well as teachers, principals, and doctors — were Black. Moving to predominantly white Des Moines, Iowa, where he earned degrees in musical theater and public relations at Drake University, and encountered racism on the street, was a shock to the system.Yet he remained in the city to pull off what he said will remain his crowning achievement: He co-founded the Pyramid Theater Company, which has thrived connecting the work of Black playwrights and artists to majority-Black audiences.Martin said it took “chutzpah” to make that happen in such an environment: “There were people saying, ‘We don’t need another theater. You all need to be working to make the theaters we already have more diverse.’ ”Antonio Woodard, left, and Tiffany Johnson in the Pyramid production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner,” which Martin directed.Andrea MarkowskiIn 2015 Martin began a yearlong Goodman Theater apprenticeship. Afterward, as he pursued his M.F.A. at Brown University, he did work at the affiliated Trinity Repertory Company, where he recalled being asked at a meeting: “Hey, can you help us figure out how to better market this show to Black audiences?”“Mind you, I’m a student.” He laughed. “What does that say that you have to come to me to figure that thing out?”As producing director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, he spent the non-summer months in New York City negotiating contracts and transfer deals while having such random encounters as passing Adam Driver in a stairwell while the “Star Wars” actor practiced lines for a play.“I’m the only person of color, period, in 90 percent of the conversations that I’m having,” Martin recalled, “and yet here I am, just this kid from Little Rock, and I can run into Kylo Ren on the way to my office.”The Goodman enticed Martin to return to Chicago in November 2019 to take the No. 2 artistic position to Falls. Martin did hands-on work with such productions as Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of all Black women.“None of us had been in a room like that before,” the show’s director, Lili-Anne Brown, said. “He understood how significant that was, and he worked to uplift it and protect it.”Ciera Dawn in the Goodman Theater production of “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of Black women.Liz LaurenThen the pandemic hit, live performances were suspended, and the team had to navigate a new path through the shutdown and ensuing social unrest.Martin stressed the need for “nuance” as he discussed the Goodman. He referred to Falls and the Goodman executive director Roche Schulfer each as a “mentor” and “dear, dear friend” yet said his experiences there and at Williamstown and Trinity Rep solidified his determination to pursue a leadership position.“What I wasn’t interested in doing any longer was being the Black or brown shield and token within some of these larger institutions that had snatched me up,” he said.“The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” Martin says.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesA few miles north of the Goodman, Victory Gardens had its own problems.Founded in 1974 and now based in the historic Biograph Theater in upscale Lincoln Park, the theater has traditionally focused on a diverse range of new work by Chicago writers. The theater’s first official playwrights’ ensemble included Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and Charles Smith, as well as John Logan, Jeffrey Sweet and Claudia Allen, who wrote extensively about L.G.B.T.Q. characters. The Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz joined later.In 2001, Victory Gardens became the third Chicago recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. When Dennis Zacek, the first artistic director, announced his retirement in 2010 after 34 years, the board named the acclaimed director and playwright Chay Yew as his successor, making Yew a rare artistic director of color at a major American theater.Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had its premiere at Victory Gardens and later was presented on Broadway, starring John Lithgow, left, and Laurie Metcalf.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYew shook things up over his nine years in the top job, bringing in his own ensemble of playwrights while aiming for a younger, more diverse audience and tallying his share of successes. (Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had a Broadway production in 2019.) After Yew announced his departure, the board in May 2020 named Erica Daniels, already its executive director, as its new executive artistic director. In response the playwrights’ group resigned, blasting the board for not communicating with the theater’s artists or for conducting a national search.The administration’s decision in early June to board up the theater’s frontage — at a time when other theaters in Chicago and New York were opening their doors to protesters decrying racial injustice — inflamed tensions. About 100 activists assembled outside the Biograph on June 6 and posted messages such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER. But do they matter to this theater?”Two days later, Daniels resigned, as did Steve Miller, the board chair. A more inclusive, transparent search process followed.“I was one of the loudmouths yelling at them, and months later they asked me, ‘Do you want to be one of the people who helps us chose our next artistic director?’” said Brown, the “School Girls” director. “Victory Gardens’ board has done more work at transformation than anyone else I’ve seen.”She was pleased with the choice of Martin, saying, “I think this is an opportunity to show everyone in the national theater forum what it really can look like to gut rehab a historically white institution.”Falls said seeing Martin leave the Goodman was “bittersweet,” but “it’s a fantastic moment for him and the city of Chicago and nationally. He’s an extraordinary person and a wonderful artist who brings a plethora of skills that most people do not have in running a theater.”Like just about every theater company, Victory Gardens is trying to figure out when and how it will welcome live audiences back into the building.Martin said he also intends to use the connections he made at Williamstown to give more Victory Gardens productions an afterlife in New York and elsewhere. And he expressed interest in bringing back older Victory Gardens playwrights to foster “larger intergenerational conversations.”“But at the same time, yeah, I’m going to have some new writers,” he said, “because I know a lot of dope writers.”He spoke most energetically about the need for Victory Gardens, onstage and off, to reflect and engage with the city’s broad range of communities. “The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” he said.He hopes to draw on the wisdom of an emerging “cohort” of fellow artistic directors of color in theater — not to mention the inspiration of that Sankofa bird — to pull it off.He’s not worried.“If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines,” he said, “I can probably figure out how to get all peoples within this larger beautiful city to come out as well.” More

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      Theater to Stream: Lincoln Center Theater Joins the Fray

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      Presentations include a star-studded reading of “The Thanksgiving Play,” musicals crossing the Atlantic and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.Theater has faced many battles in the past year, and one of them has been the hurdles in streaming archived productions online. Now, two major American institutions have joined the fray, and are sharing some of their stash.The first offering in Lincoln Center Theater’s Private Reels series is the Off Broadway production of Christopher Durang’s comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which went on to win a Tony Award for its Broadway run. Led by David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen and Sigourney Weaver, the cast is firing on all cylinders and makes the most of Durang’s riff on Chekhov transplanted to Bucks County, Pa. March 18-April 11; lct.orgIn Chicago, the Goodman Theater’s archival streaming program, called Encore, kicks off with Christina Anderson’s “How to Catch Creation,” which toggles between decades as it looks at the elusive, fraught and, in this case, broadly defined creative process (through March 28). That will be followed by a stage adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s magical-realist novel “Pedro Páramo” by the playwright Raquel Carrió and the director Flora Lauten, of the Cuban company Teatro Buendía. March 29-April 11; goodmantheatre.org‘The Thanksgiving Play’Dream cast alert! As part of the Spotlight on Plays series, Keanu Reeves, Heidi Schreck, Bobby Cannavale and Alia Shawkat have signed up for a livestreamed reading of Larissa FastHorse’s satire, in which a well-meaning drama teacher decides to put on a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving pageant — except she can’t seem to find any Native Americans to participate. March 25-29; broadwaysbestshows.comDerbhle Crotty, left, and Garrett Lombard in the Druid Theater Company’s production of “The Cherry Orchard.”Photo credit: Robbie Jack, via Druid TheaterClassics RevisitedThe Irish director Garry Hynes is particularly at ease with quietly insightful productions of classics. Her take on “The Cherry Orchard,” for the Druid Theater Company in Galway, Ireland, and adapted by the playwright Tom Murphy, is boosted by a sterling company that includes Derbhle Crotty as Madame Ranevskaya. It’s part of Culture Ireland’s online festival. March 19-21; druid.ieAnother formidable European actor is Hans Kesting, a regular in productions by Ivo van Hove. Thanks to the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s putting some of its shows online, we can watch him as the title character in Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” — here a 21st-century politician on election night. In Dutch with subtitles. March 21; ita.nl.enFrom left, Kevin Anderson, Eden Espinosa and Ramona Keller in “Brooklyn the Musical” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmerican Musicals Across the AtlanticSome of us remember the olden days of 2004, when Mark Schoenfeld and Barri McPherson’s “BKLYN the Musical” was known as “Brooklyn the Musical” during its Broadway run. Does everything need a cool abbreviation? NVM. Still, it’s hard not to root for a show that ends in a sing-off pitting someone named Brooklyn (Emma Kingston) against someone named Paradice (Marisha Wallace). This new production was recorded in London. March 22-April 4; stream.theatreIn a completely different vein, the staging of John Caird and Paul Gordon’s lovely musical “Daddy Long Legs” by Boulevard Productions is now streaming, and it’s a low-key charmer. The story is told in letters between an orphan (Roisin Sullivan) and her benefactor (Eoin Cannon), and it’s a testament to Gordon’s catchy score (just try getting “Like Other Girls” out of your head) that this potentially stilted format actually works. Through March 21; stream.theatre‘Protec/Attac’A few years ago, Julia Mounsey and Peter Mills Weiss created waves with their brilliant and deeply unsettling “[50/50] old school animation.” So expectations are high for the duo’s new piece, “Protec/Attac,” which is getting a developmental stream as part of a mini-festival of four new works presented on consecutive evenings by the experiment-happy Brick Theater in Brooklyn. From March 26; bricktheater.com‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’Before writing the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice,” Scott Brown and Anthony King created this very wacky and very funny musical about two writers who perform their show about the inventor of the printing press in a backers’ audition. Now, Bobby Conte Thornton and Alex Prakken take on this rollicking goofball comedy in a benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. March 18-21; broadwaycares.orgFrom left, Elizabeth Chinn Molloy, A.J. Baldwin and Nathan Tubbs in “Theater: A Love Story.”via The Know Theater‘Theater: A Love Story’Know Theater in Cincinnati did not take the easy way with a new effort from the playwright Caridad Svich, which interrogates the nature of theater and what makes a play a play. Theater about theater can get precious and self-congratulatory, but this show, which mixes drama and movement, avoids that trap. While it is admittedly a little long, the production rewards attention. Through March 27; knowtheatre.comStephen Michael Spencer, center, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.”Jenny Graham, via Oregon Shakespeare FestivalOregon Shakespeare FestivalThis beloved company in Ashland, Ore., has kept busy during the past year with streams that currently include its 2017 production of “Julius Caesar” (through March 27). But it is also a longtime champion of new American plays, such as Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Manahatta,” a drama that juxtaposes the cutthroat world of New York City finance in the 21st century with the Dutch acquisition (to put it politely) of Manhattan from the Lenape nation 400 years earlier. March 29-April 24; osfashland.orgWomen’s Solo TurnsFrank Kuhn’s play “Let It Shine: A Visit with Fannie Lou Hamer,” about the Mississippi voting rights activist, is straightforward and educational — and that is its strength. Sharon Miles stars in this production from the New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss., and it’s easy to see how Hamer paved the way for the likes of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Through March 21; newstagetheatre.comThe tone is lighter in two solo comedies from Latinas, courtesy of the IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles. Sheila Carrasco portrays a gallery of characters in “Anyone But Me,” while Anna LaMadrid’s “The Oxy Complex” checks in on a certain Viviana during a pandemic that just keeps going and going. (The title refers to oxytocin, a hormone released during childbirth, so there might be hope.) March 21-April 18; iamatheatre.com More