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      How to Squeeze a Feminist Farce Into an English Country House

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      The new Broadway comedy “The Cottage” begins with a pair of lovers in an English country house in 1923, the morning after their annual illicit tryst. Sylvia, played by the “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy, is aflame with passion for her paramour, Beau, played by Eric McCormack of “Will & Grace.”On an afternoon in mid-June, the cast wore street clothes as they did a stumble-through of the show at a rehearsal studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. When Beau, in a fit of desire, sank his teeth into Sylvia’s foot, McCormack was in fact gamely biting into Bundy’s sneaker top.Ah, the glamour of acting!There is a certain borrowed elegance, though, to the play itself. Arguably a farce — though the playwright, Sandy Rustin, rejects that term, which to her suggests stock characters and clowning — “The Cottage” is a feminist twist on witty British comedies in the Noël Coward mold.“The Cottage” cast rehearsing, from left: Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy, Dana Steingold, Lilli Cooper and Alex Moffat.OK McCausland for The New York Times“I’m really a huge fan of that whole genre of upper-crust British style,” said Rustin, whose best known play is the murder-mystery comedy “Clue,” adapted from the 1985 movie. “But the female characters often leave much to be desired. They’re often just there to serve the men. I was interested in finding a way into that genre where the women ruled the roost.”It’s no accident that Rustin, an actor who learned sketch writing and improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, set “The Cottage” in the 1920s, as British women’s rights were gaining traction. But the feminism, for much of the play, is more insinuated than overt.Only gradually does it become apparent that Sylvia, Bundy’s character, is the heroine of this ensemble piece, which starts previews on July 7 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Cheating with Beau, Sylvia is married to Clarke, who, in turn, is deep into an affair with Marjorie, Beau’s wife. All of them, and a couple of other lovers besides, turn up at what is, by Act II, a very crowded cottage.The cast of six includes Lilli Cooper — a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie,” seen most recently on Broadway in last year’s feminist farce, “POTUS” — as the heavily pregnant Marjorie. Alex Moffat, late of “Saturday Night Live,” plays Clarke, a role that taps Moffat’s talent for falling down stairs. Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, directs.“Comedy’s hard,” Alexander said, though at rehearsal he was an exuberant presence, watching from behind his music stand. “To make something light is heavy lifting.”In the days after the stumble-through, he, Rustin and some of the actors spoke individually by phone about what it takes to pull off this nouveau-throwback play, in period style. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Alexander with the playwright Sandy Rustin on the play’s set at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesIt’s all about precision, darling.SANDY RUSTIN Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play, they’re in an Oscar Wilde play. And then it kind of comes off the rails. That reality sort of unravels.LAURA BELL BUNDY I’m in, like, 140 out of 147 pages [of the script]. And let me tell you, these words, they are not normal to my vernacular. Remembering where all the “rathers” and the “darlings” go, I swear that has been the most difficult thing. If you don’t get the exact wording, it’s like, that’s not the style. And also you have to speak it so quickly, because that’s the rhythm.‘Pace becomes a character.’ERIC McCORMACK As Jason has said many times, these are all great words, but without the pace, without the absolute synergy of the six of us, they’ll just sit there. This becomes its own thing when the six of us are firing on all cylinders, and the pace becomes a character, virtually. The urgency of the play isn’t just the jeopardy of “Oh my God, somebody’s coming to the door,” as much as it is, we’re all kind of running for our lives. We’re dancing for our lives.BUNDY There is a rhythm to comedy, especially stage comedy. The comedy is inside the way that some of those lines are being delivered, the pace in which they are, the volume in which they are. That is essentially the same as musical theater, or the same as multicamera comedy. Which is why I think Eric is nailing this. That’s also why Jason is nailing this.At a rehearsal last month, from left: Steingold, Alexander and Nehal Joshi. OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe play is like a musical. Or Whac-a-Mole.JASON ALEXANDER I call it the sort of nonmusical musical. With a musical number, everybody in it, even if they’re wildly separated from each other, they all understand the tempo, the intonation, the mood of the piece, the movement of the piece. This play and this cast require that in a very similar way, but there’s nobody keeping a drumbeat, and there’s nobody playing a melody. So they have to feel it internally with each other.LILLI COOPER We’re all kind of cogs in this wheel. And there are six of us onstage sometimes. But, you know, the focus has to be on something very specific. So we need to learn how to blend in with the scenery in moments and pop forward in moments. In rehearsal the other day, I compared this play to a Whac-a-Mole. We need to figure out which mole, and when, do we pop out of the hole.The script is a kind of score.BUNDY When I lost my voice the other day, it was hard for me to convey all the tonality that, when you shift the tone of voice, can hit a punchline. No matter what the format is, whether it’s musical theater comedy or whether it is absent of music, there’s still music to it.McCORMACK This role is literally a three-octave role. You need all of those notes to just sort of surf the wave of that very highfalutin English conversation.From left: Joshi, Bundy and Steingold. “Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play,” Rustin said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesPoses are drawn from the past.ALEXANDER Can we find a common language of behavior and action and movement and playing style that is clearly rooted in what we now think of as the over-the-top styles of acting from the ’30s and ’40s? There’s a sort of a posing there that is just behaviorally different. I’ve said to Eric once or twice, “Eric, that arm gesture that you just made is very 2023.”BUNDY The body language of [Sylvia] being this fairly well-to-do woman from the 1920s in Great Britain: How does that body hold itself? I’m figuring that out. Then as she begins to transform and become a more authentic version of herself that isn’t wrapped up in the niceties of the time and what a woman should be, how a woman should be behaving, how does the body language change? All of that is stuff that I’m having to be really calculated about.Bodies are comedy fodder.RUSTIN I tend to write really physical comedies, where it’s equal parts text and what’s happening to the bodies onstage. The two things for me are married. The humor comes from how these people are inhabiting their space.COOPER I was fairly recently pregnant, a year and a half ago. It is so crazy how putting that [costume pregnancy] belly on truly brings me back. It’s like this sense memory. When I was pregnant, I kind of couldn’t believe it; it’s pretty wild that we grow humans inside ourselves. So there’s this absurdist element to it. There’s comedy in spatial awareness. Like, I physically take up more space when I have this belly on.“I call it the sort of nonmusical musical,” Alexander said. It’s all about timing. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesPies, no. Stairs, yes.McCORMACK Besides just being a hundred years old and not really wanting to fall down stairs anymore — I’ll leave that to Alex — what’s hard about physical comedy, mostly, is doing something that feels in the moment. We’ve all seen pies in the face and all that stuff. But finding an original moment, particularly in a moment of high angst or high anxiety, is just a great reward.ALEX MOFFAT I’m interested to get into the theater and see what the stairs look like. Currently in our [rehearsal] space, it’s just a few stairs. I can [fall down them] six or seven times a day, as we have been doing. But if it’s like 12 stairs coming down from the upstairs of the cottage, we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do.The political message? Sneak it in.BUNDY I was very attracted to this play because of this epiphany this woman [Sylvia] begins to have — that her joy does not need to revolve around the love of a man. Women’s sexuality is so stigmatized. And the thing is, these truths about what it means to be a woman with sexual drive, that’s also making us laugh.MOFFAT Hopefully it’s just a barreling freight train of guffaws. But absolutely it might surprise people with how the play has such a great, strong, feminist point of view. Just doing a really funny thing and taking people along for that ride, it can work as long as people get swept along in the comedy of it, in the story of it. And then maybe at the end they go, “Oh! That made an interesting point.”COOPER One of my favorite lines in the show is [paraphrasing], “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a man.” It’s such a revelation to these people that they truly ponder it. That concept being so unfathomable to this generation is funny in itself. And feminist. More

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Paula Vogel Are Broadway Bound

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      Second Stage, a nonprofit with a focus on living American dramatists, said it will present works by the playwrights on Broadway this season.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that focuses on work by living American writers, said it will present a well-known piece by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a new work by Paula Vogel on Broadway this season.This fall, the company plans to stage “Appropriate,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s play about a family gathering in Arkansas disrupted by the discovery of a photo album filled with disturbing images.The play was staged in 2014 at the Signature Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Ben Brantley, then The Times’s chief theater critic, praised it as “remarkable and devious.”The new production, which is to begin performances in November and open in December at the Helen Hayes Theater, is to be directed by Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery”). Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2016 recipient of the so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, is a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for “Gloria” and “Everybody,” and is also the author of “The Comeuppance,” now running at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. “Appropriate” will be the first play he has written to be staged on Broadway, although he contributed material to a recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Next spring, Second Stage plans to present a new play, not yet titled, by Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “How I Learned to Drive.” That play, to begin performances in March and open in April at the Hayes, is to be directed by Tina Landau, and is a family drama set in suburban Washington in 1962. Vogel is also the author of “Indecent,” which was produced on Broadway in 2017.Second Stage said that this fall it would also present an Off Broadway production of Jen Silverman’s new play, “Spain,” which is set in 1936, and concerns two filmmakers making a K.G.B.-backed movie about the Spanish Civil War. The production is to be directed by Tyne Rafaeli and to run at the Tony Kiser Theater beginning in November. More

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      ‘Thanksgiving Play’ by Larissa FastHorse Comes to Broadway

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      As Larissa FastHorse worked with the Broadway cast of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which centers on four white people trying to put on a “culturally sensitive” holiday production, one of the actors, Katie Finneran, spoke up in a rehearsal with a suggestion: Perhaps she could drop a swear word during one of her more exasperated lines?“I’m the drama teacher!” Finneran’s character exclaims as her plan to make a socially progressive elementary school play begins to fall apart.FastHorse politely declined. From the work’s conception in 2015, she had intended it to be curse-free, in the hopes of finally having a widely produced play. Her other work — including the play “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” — involved Native American characters, leading producers to call them “uncastable.”So, FastHorse wrote one with white characters, while still focusing on contemporary Indigenous issues. If the play were littered with profanity, FastHorse decided, some theater producers or audiences might reject it.Larissa FastHorse instructs children dressed as turkeys on their choreography for the films, which were made at a school in Brooklyn. In the play, the films are shown between scenes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Being from the Midwest, there are people who won’t go to a play with swearing,” said FastHorse, who grew up in South Dakota. “And those are some of the people I want to reach.”Her gambit worked. After “The Thanksgiving Play” had its Off Broadway debut in 2018, it became one of the most produced plays in America, as it found homes at universities, community theaters and regional groups. In 2021, a streamed version starred Keanu Reeves, Bobby Cannavale, Alia Shawkat and Heidi Schreck as the quartet of bumbling thespians. FastHorse has even heard from people who have read the play aloud on Thanksgiving with their families, turning the activity into a yearly tradition.Now, “The Thanksgiving Play” has made it to Broadway, where it is in previews and is set to open on April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater. This production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, includes a multimedia element not seen in the Off Broadway version: a series of filmed scenes, featuring children who act out cutesy Thanksgiving pageantry — think feathers and pilgrim attire — while also giving voice to some of the casual brutality with which white American culture has long portrayed Native Americans.In one of the films, older children dressed as pilgrims pretend to shoot down younger children dressed as turkeys. (Lux Haac designed the costumes.) The adults instructed the turkeys to “take a nap” when it was their turn to fall.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesFastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, will be among the first Native American artists to have their work on Broadway. It’s the kind of achievement that the theater world likes to applaud, while perhaps also cringing at the fact that it has taken this long.The play’s skewering of the performative progressivism of the white theater world adds another layer. Its central characters tie themselves in knots trying to stage a play for Native American Heritage Month without actually including any Native Americans. They fret over fulfilling the requirements of a grant, sweat over gender stereotypes, debate the merits of colorblind casting and employ terminology like “white allies” and “emotional space.” To make this production even more of the moment, FastHorse added an exchange about pronoun sharing and references to the “post-B.L.M.” world.“Even though it does openly poke fun at a lot of the folks that I work with who are more on the liberal side,” FastHorse said, “I was really trying to make it so everybody can kind of see each other.”The play’s avatar for the more conservative audience members is a newcomer named Alicia (played by D’Arcy Carden), a hired actress who is unfamiliar with the language of social progressivism.What distinguishes Alicia is a complete lack of concern about so-called political correctness. The others are eager to prove themselves as “enlightened white allies,” including the loudly vegan drama teacher (Finneran), her yoga-loving boyfriend (Scott Foley) and a know-it-all history teacher (Chris Sullivan) who likes to preface his insights with, “Actually …”Rachel Chavkin, the director of the Broadway production, with some of her young actors ahead of filming. Chavkin envisioned this video as embodying the “colonialist narrative” that many American students are taught.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn Broadway, as in many industries, the anxiety around screwing up was magnified three years ago, after the murder of George Floyd prompted a wider reflection on racism and inequity in myriad industries and fields. In the theater world, that re-evaluation led to the publication of “We See You, White American Theater,” a document calling for an elevation of works by playwrights of color and more people of color in leadership positions, among other demands.So when FastHorse asked Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown,” to oversee the Broadway run of “The Thanksgiving Play,” Chavkin first wanted to make sure that the playwright wouldn’t prefer a person of color to direct.FastHorse said she wanted someone on the creative team — otherwise made up of people of color — who understood what it was like to be a “well-meaning liberal white person.” In other words, someone who has felt the urge to say all the right things and appear as progressive as possible.“She said, ‘I need your expertise,’” Chavkin recalled.FASTHORSE, 51, has had a winding path to Broadway. She started out as a professional ballet dancer, before an injury led her toward film and television. After she became exhausted by that industry’s handling of Native American issues, she switched to theater, where she observed that people tended to be more open to doing the work necessary for sensitive and accurate portrayals, she said.Around the same time that she started writing “The Thanksgiving Play,” she co-founded a consulting firm called Indigenous Direction that began advising arts groups on Indigenous issues.From left, Henrik Carlson, Ruhaan Gokhale and Christopher Szabo prepare for their scene. The adults directing them explained that they were demonstrating the troubling way that Thanksgiving has been discussed in schools.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAlong with Ty Defoe, an artist from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, FastHorse began working with an important company in Thanksgiving — Macy’s — on a question not unlike the one at the center of her play: How could they make it so the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a celebration of colonialism to many Native Americans, was not causing continued harm?Under FastHorse and Defoe’s counsel, the 2020 parade included a Wampanoag blessing and a land acknowledgment recognizing that Manhattan is part of Lenapehoking, or the land of the Lenape people. Last year’s parade added a float designed in consultation with Wampanoag artists and clan mothers.Macy’s also agreed to make a cosmetic — but, to the consultants, important — change: Tom Turkey lost his belt-buckle hat, and in its place appeared a top hat. He is no longer portrayed as a pilgrim, Defoe said, but a “show turkey.” A Macy’s spokeswoman said the change was part of their “re-evaluation of potentially upsetting symbolism.”On Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of staging a play about white people discussing Native American representation can start to mimic the script itself.“We’ve had a lot of questions: a lot of questions about Larissa’s life experiences, a lot of questions about what she wants to accomplish,” said Sullivan, who portrays the history teacher. “I’m coming awake to all of the things I didn’t even realize I needed to be thinking about.”There tends to be some guilt, FastHorse said, in the rehearsal room over a lack of knowledge of the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans, including the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which figures prominently in the show.Though it is first and foremost a comedy, the play does not shy away from violent imagery and rhetoric, even when the actors involved are children.TO FILM THE VIDEOS, which are shown between the live scenes, Chavkin and FastHorse gathered two dozen children and teenagers in February inside the auditorium of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn. Some were dressed as flamboyant turkeys and others wore stereotypical pilgrim costumes, with belt-buckle hats and wooden guns.For the New York City-based elementary and middle school students dressed as pilgrims for the video, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe vision, Chavkin said, was to chart the course of how young people are taught to understand Thanksgiving, from 5- and 6-year-olds singing a silly song involving pumpkin patches and teepees, to high schoolers discussing the 1997 police crackdown on a march of Native Americans in Plymouth, Mass.“You watch young people move through the educational system,” Chavkin said. “What we’re trying to do over the course of these four films is make that arc really palpable, starting with sort of obediently following a very nationalist, colonialist narrative.”In one scene, four Indigenous children, some flown in from across the country, perform a punk rock version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” complete with a dummy of Theodore Roosevelt with a plastic saber stuck in him.Of course, if you’re asking 12-year-olds to sing part of “Ten Little Indians,” a 19th-century nursery rhyme that includes disturbing lyrics involving the death of Native Americans, you need to explain why.FastHorse told the children before filming that she had found these lyrics (including the couplet, “Two little Indians foolin’ with a gun …. One shot t’other and then there was one”) in a student activity posted online for teachers.“We want adults to be aware that this isn’t OK,” FastHorse told them. “The song actually exists and is still being put out into the world.”The young actors nodded that they understood. For them, as elementary and middle school students in New York City, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history. These days, they said, their teachers mostly avoid the subject. More

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      The Riverside Drive Apartment Where a Broadway Play Was Born

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      “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, is set in a rent-controlled apartment that was inspired by the playwright’s own.The world of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the Stephen Adly Guirgis play that opened on Broadway last month, is confined to a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment building, where the dark comedy spools out over kitchen table bickering and rooftop joint passing.It’s the kind of New York City apartment that has stayed in the family despite rising rents and a landlord bent on eviction — the kind of apartment that Guirgis himself inherited from his father, an Egyptian immigrant who managed a restaurant at Grand Central and had little else to pass on when he died.Like the one in the play, the real Riverside Drive apartment is a “grand old railroad flat with chandeliers and a river view,” as Guirgis’s introduction to the play reads, with “beautiful fixtures, family mementos and antique furniture competing for survival with dust, stains, garbage, leaks and unattended junk.”About a decade ago, Guirgis started gathering actors there to read his developing play, about a Black New York City police officer who was shot while off duty at a bar by a white officer and has been seeking justice ever since.A fixture of the living room readings was Stephen McKinley Henderson, a friend and frequent visitor whom Guirgis had imagined in the lead role from the beginning. A parade of well-known actors participated in the readings on Riverside Drive along the West 80s, including John Leguizamo, Ellen Burstyn and Chris Rock, whose Broadway debut was in a Guirgis play.“The first time I read it, it was 15 pages,” Henderson said. “And as it grew, it grew on me.”Colón-Zayas and the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis at his Riverside Drive apartment in 2014, the year the play premiered Off Broadway.Monique Carboni The play that developed from those readings became a patchwork of autobiography and fiction, organized around an idea based on a local news story from the 1990s. Directed by Austin Pendleton, “Between Riverside and Crazy” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama after premiering at Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and running Off Broadway for a second time in 2015. (In that production, Ron Cephas Jones, a friend of Guirgis’s who once lived at the four-bedroom Riverside Drive apartment, played the lead character’s son, Junior.)Eight years after its premiere, the play has landed on Broadway — the Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater still stars Henderson, with Common now playing Junior — in a radically altered landscape.Since the actors first gathered at Guirgis’s apartment, police shootings of Black men have fueled waves of protest. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020 reignited the movement, with myriad industries, including theater, facing calls for large-scale racial justice efforts. In addition, rent rates in New York City have been soaring, boxing out lower-income residents from once-affordable neighborhoods, and evictions have picked back up after a pandemic lull.The actors who have inhabited their characters for years say they approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding, but the dialogue remains almost entirely the same. One short line was added, from Junior, a parolee who struggles to get the kind of love from his father that he received from his recently deceased mother.“Pops, it’s 2014,” Junior says, situating the audience in time. Guirgis said he asked that the line be added to prevent references to Donald J. Trump and Rudy Giuliani from sounding outdated.The actress Liza Colón-Zayas, who has been involved since early script readings as a character called the Church Lady, said people who have seen this production and previous ones (including her mother) are convinced that the play has been significantly altered over the years.In the play, a widower fights to keep his home and win a long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, as messy relationships and messier politics surface among his housemates and guests.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the writing is largely unchanged, the actors approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding in light of the cultural conversation surrounding police shootings since the play’s premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The writing didn’t change,” Colón-Zayas said. “The pain, and the years, and what we’ve survived has changed this play in ways that I can’t exactly articulate.”The seed for the story came in 1994, when a white off-duty New York City police officer opened fire on a Black undercover transit officer on a Manhattan subway platform, seriously injuring him. The white officer, Peter Del-Debbio, said he was responding to a shotgun that had discharged and had fired when he saw the plainclothes transit officer, Desmond Robinson, running with a gun.Part of the white officer’s defense was that the Black officer wasn’t wearing his badge or the color that would identify him as a plainclothes officer, so Guirgis remembered the story as the “color of the day” case. Del-Debbio was convicted of second-degree assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.“It always stayed with me,” Guirgis said.Years later, the playwright said, he was visiting Henderson when the veteran actor, having health troubles, remarked that his career would be slowing down.“I just lied and I was like, ‘Oh I started writing two plays for you: one where you’re the lead and one where you’re the supporting,’” Guirgis said. “When I went home I was like, OK, now I’ve got to come up with something.”By the time he started holding script readings, Colón-Zayas, who met Guirgis when they were students at State University of New York at Albany, had been visiting the Riverside Drive apartment for decades. When Guirgis’s mother died in 2006, he recalled, his family returned to the apartment to find Colón-Zayas and other friends cleaning it.After his mother’s death, Guirgis moved into the apartment, getting his father a dog, Papi, for additional companionship. The apartment became a haven for friends who needed one, Guirgis said, including a recovering addict who started to see Guirgis’s father like he was his own.“Anybody who walked into my apartment with me or with my sister was automatically given a blank check of love and acceptance,” he said.Common, right, is making his Broadway debut as Junior. He said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesThe unconventional household is intimately depicted in the play. The ex-cop, Walter Washington, welcomes his son’s sweet but clueless girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón), and his friend Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), who spent time in prison and is trying to stay sober.Like Guirgis did for his father, Junior brings a dog into the household to keep him company; Walter calls the dog by a choice curse word instead of his name, but the emotional attachment is apparent underneath the derision. (Papi, the fox-like mutt that Guirgis had adopted for his father, died recently, and the cast has mourned the loss of an original attendee of those early script readings.)A stubborn and ailing alcoholic, Walter gripes about his housemates and expresses love begrudgingly, but the core of the play is his inclination to welcome them into his home no matter their mistakes.“As with all of his characters, it’s a lesson in, ‘Who are we to judge anybody, really?’” Colón said.Common, who is making his Broadway debut as Junior and has done advocacy work within the prison system, said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.When he entered the cast as the only newcomer in a tight-knit group of actors, he received a welcome not unlike the kind Walter tends to give: matter of fact but unconditional.“One day Liza came up to me,” he recalled, referring to Colón-Zayas, “and she said, ‘You aight, you aight. You can roll with us.’”(Colón-Zayas was replaced in the role this month by Maria-Christina Oliveras because of a scheduling conflict.)In the play, as Walter fights to hold on to his home and win his long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, a series of characters passes through the apartment — ostensibly there to help a solitary widower. Two police colleagues gather for dinner and a serving of nostalgia; the Church Lady comes to chat and give communion.But in “Riverside,” the intentions of the houseguests are never clear-cut. The relationships get messy, and the underlying politics of the story even messier.Henderson’s character is portrayed as both noble and, at times, misguided. He maintains both a righteous grudge against the New York Police Department and a fierce pride for it. His children, biological and not, are both trying to change their lives for the better and backsliding into old ways.Guirgis is well aware that the persistent character flaws have the tendency to rankle some audience members who would have preferred to see their worldviews affirmed more emphatically. But he’s interested in telling a more complicated story, and says he thinks present-day audiences will see that, just as they did in 2014.“If the characters all just have white hats and black hats, then we’re watching a cartoon, and there’s nothing to learn from it,” he said. “I try to make it messy but I try to lead with love.” More

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      Review: ‘The Kite Runner’ Trips From Page to Stage

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      Amir Arison stars as a guilt-ridden Afghan refugee brooding over a childhood friendship in a stiff adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel.Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in “The Kite Runner,” which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Thursday night, is of the kites. They’re miniature, attached to thin poles that several actors wave, white tissue-paper flitting, birdlike, over their heads. The paper crinkles as the kites part the air with a soft swish.If only the rest of this stiff production, adapted by Matthew Spangler from the popular 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini, exuded such elegance.A redemption story about an unlikable — sometimes downright despicable — protagonist, “The Kite Runner” opens in 2001, with Amir (Amir Arison), a Pashtun Afghan who explains that a cowardly decision he made at 12 years old shaped the person he is today.He doesn’t tell us what it was immediately; he steps back in time to show us scenes of his life in Kabul, with his single father, Baba (Faran Tahir); their servant Ali (Evan Zes), a member of the oppressed and harassed Hazara minority group; and Ali’s son, Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The rest of the cast of 13 fills in as other figures in Amir’s life, including his future wife, Russian soldiers, and various nameless characters from the Afghan community on both sides of the world.Arison (who plays the preteen Amir as well throughout) reads to the illiterate Hassan, though not without mocking him for it. He lets Hassan take the fall when they get in trouble. Yet Hassan faithfully partners with Amir in a competitive game where kite owners maneuver and use coated or sharpened strings to cut their competitors out of the sky; runners chase and catch the fallen kites as a prize.Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.When Amir fails to stop an act of violence against Hassan, the boys’ friendship is irreparably damaged. Hassan never truly leaves Amir, though; he carries the guilt to America, to which he and Baba escape after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan ushers in the vicious regime of the Taliban. After finding love and a successful career, Amir eventually returns to his homeland to redeem himself from his past transgressions.“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, and went on to play throughout England, eventually on the West End. For the Broadway engagement, producers turned to Arison, an Off Broadway regular who had a supporting role for nearly a decade on NBC’s “The Blacklist.”Under Giles Croft’s direction, Arison’s Broadway debut proves spotty. He recites his opening lines with the stiffness of a child delivering a book report, and never totally eases into the role.The part would be tough work for any actor; Amir is onstage for the entire show, and the transitions between his middle-aged and younger selves, some three decades apart, require the kind of gymnastics that not every performer can stick.Not to mention the challenge of the character himself: a cowardly, insecure boy who becomes a cowardly, insecure man despite a childhood bolstered by the unfaltering love and loyalty of his friend Hassan, played with heartbreaking innocence by Sirakian.Eric Sirakian (in red) is heartbreaking as the childhood friend of Arison’s Amir in the play, which Matthew Spangler adapted from the novel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt’s easier in the novel to ride the twists and turns of Amir’s journey, even as he leaves Hassan behind in the first third of the story. Onstage the play shuffles along, and it’s hard to stay invested in this unpalatable hero with Hassan in the rearview mirror.For those who haven’t read “The Kite Runner” or seen the 2007 film, I won’t spoil the violent scene that causes the rift between the two friends, but it’s one that feels jarring in what otherwise reads like a tidy parable. Gasps of surprise from the audience signaled the sudden shock of real-world horror.Again, part of that isn’t negotiable, since the emotionally pandering novel is the show’s DNA. But Croft’s mechanical direction often plays up the pathos, as when a character dies too dramatically, or in a scene where Amir prays for a loved one to be spared. Then there’s the phlegm-inducing serving of cheese, when Amir finds himself in 1981 San Francisco: Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays as characters in gaudy ’80s duds traipse across the stage throwing out random decade-appropriate nouns like “Prince,” “Pac-Man” and “Darth Vader.”For “The Kite Runner” to work, the boys’ nemesis needs to be formidable, but Spangler’s script diminishes Assef (Amir Malaklou), the childhood bully. He is no longer the novel’s sociopathic neo-Nazi, but more of an antagonist from an after-school special — with a shaky accent.Speaking of shaky, Barney George’s set design — which includes a stage-length vert ramp seemingly borrowed from a skate park and jagged rectangular panels lined up along the back wall — is frustratingly ambiguous. Two giant fabric sails occasionally descend from on high, resembling wings of a kite, but they are mostly distracting.William Simpson’s projection design provides a dose of whimsy, however, the watercolor renderings of a kite-filled sky or a pomegranate tree lending a fanciful storybook quality to the script.Legitimacy is always a tricky question when it comes to productions about people of color. That a story about the struggles of Afghans over the course of nearly three decades is on Broadway is a feat in itself, as is the cast of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent.Chunks of dialogue are spoken in a Farsi dialect (all credit to the cultural adviser and script consultant Humaira Ghilzai) and much of the underscoring features the tuneful plinks and thumps of the tabla player Salar Nader, a steady presence on one side of the stage and one of the production’s gems. (Jonathan Girling wrote the evocative music.)Still, “The Kite Runner” is not nearly as rich as the spate of Off Broadway plays that have recently explored the individual and national losses faced by Iran and Afghanistan, including Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul” and Sanaz Toossi’s “English” and “Wish You Were Here.” As Off Broadway has often proved, there are more compelling ways to tell a story.The Kite Runner Through Oct. 30 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thekiterunnerbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Chameleon Flies From ‘The Blacklist’ to ‘The Kite Runner’

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      After nine seasons on the NBC series, Amir Arison is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel.An early scene in the new Broadway play “The Kite Runner” is mostly spoken in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, though the action depicts a distinctly American art form.“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!,” the 12-year-old Amir exclaims to his best friend, Hassan. The two boys, pretending to be cowboys, love American westerns, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After a standoff, Hassan charges at Amir, but Amir trips him and Hassan stumbles and falls. They wrestle, tumbling and giggling — blissfully unaware of the dark forces that will soon tear them apart.The place is Kabul, the year is 1973 and the two actors playing the boys are actually adults. One of them, Amir Arison, 44, the veteran stage actor who recently left NBC’s hit series “The Blacklist” after nine seasons, portrays Amir as a young boy and an adult.The show, which is scheduled to begin previews on July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It tells the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy growing up alongside Hassan, the Hazara son of his father’s servant. After a childhood act of cowardice, Amir spends most of the play reflecting on and trying to atone for his failure to come to the aid of his best friend.Arison, center, during rehearsals. He plays the protagonist, Amir, as both a child and an adult. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Arison jumps between acting out his childhood memories and narrating them from the present. He doesn’t leave the stage once.It may be a daunting part, but Arison, who cut his teeth on Off Broadway stages before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in some 190 episodes of “The Blacklist,” is up for it.Over the years, he’s played a flashy Iraqi dermatologist in the documentary drama “Aftermath”; a mysterious newlywed in Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”; and a government accountant in Stephen Belber’s “The Muscles in Our Toes,”Still, he said over lunch recently, this role is the biggest challenge of his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein open,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your mind and your soul.”Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story for the stage, said of the role: “It does raise the bar for that actor quite a bit, but then it becomes something truly virtuosic.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.While the casting director Laura Stanczyk and the cultural consultant Humaira Ghilzai ensured that Afghan actors auditioned (and that it was easy for them to do so), the role of Amir ultimately went to Arison, who is Israeli American. He grew up in Florida the son of Israeli immigrants; his mother was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors.In March, when Arison landed the audition for Amir, his first call was to Ghilzai, whose family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know of her affiliation with the show, but he had worked with her twice before — once for his role as a colonel in the Pakistani army in a West Coast production of J.T. Rogers’s “Blood and Gifts” — and asked for advice on his accent.Arison is a chameleon, Ghilzai said: He’s played Afghans, Arabs, Americans and “metamorphosizes into whatever you need him to be.”“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. Its first professional production took place in 2009, and it has since been staged in multiple countries. The Broadway production, directed by Giles Croft, is based on the version that ran at Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (The play “mostly works on the level of childlike fable, satisfyingly schematic but frustratingly simplistic,” Stephen Dalton wrote in a Hollywood Reporter review.)The book — published two years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban — has captivated millions of readers around the world. Now the play arrives on Broadway almost a year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban seized power again.Hosseini’s tale gave readers a rare inside perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but it also has, as Arison pointed out, universal themes of immigration, power, redemption, and father and son relationships.Azita Ghanizada, who plays Amir’s wife, Soraya, with Arison.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“The immigrant story never goes away,” Croft, the director, said in an interview. “Most of us have it in us somewhere. Even if we didn’t experience it ourselves, somewhere in our background, somebody will have traveled to get somewhere that they think will be better or safer. So we carry it with us.”As does Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after the Soviet army invaded the country, and told The Times last year that he still has “a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan.” (In “The Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also escape Afghanistan — first to Pakistan, then to the United States.)Along with Arison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Azita Ghanizada, who portrays Amir’s wife, Soraya, and Salar Nader, who plays the tabla onstage throughout the show, are both Afghan.“It’s been really heartening for me to see how devoted they are to representation,” Ghilzai, the cultural consultant, said of the cast members. “I think because their culture has been misrepresented so much that they really, really, really want to get it right.”Still, placing a non-Afghan in the central role was not a choice made lightly.“The thing that swung it for me,” Croft said of Arison’s casting, “was that he has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.”The director Giles Croft, left, said he cast Arison as Amir because he “has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.” Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn coaching the cast and creative team, Ghilzai guided actors through Dari pronunciations — including the names of characters and towns. The dialect is sprinkled throughout the script.One actor recently asked Ghilzai about Afghan body language: What should he do if he loses in a competition? She advised making a thumbs up motion, a Middle Eastern insult. (They later replaced it with a different gesture, so the meaning wouldn’t get lost in translation.)This production is Ghilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to re-evaluate the text. In a pivotal scene in the second act, Assef (Amir Malaklou), the neighborhood bully turned-Taliban member, taunts Amir, who has returned to Afghanistan from America.“But America’s not all bad,” Assef tells him. “You know who taught me how to use a Stinger missile? Your C.I.A.”The line emerged from conversations between Ghilzai, Spangler and Croft and was added for this production. It recognizes the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.Arison, third from left, played an F.B.I. special agent on the NBC series “The Blacklist.”David Giesbrecht/NBCIn his last episode of “The Blacklist,” Arison’s quirky character Aram Mojtabai told his colleagues that he’s leaving the FBI and plans to move to New York, where among other things, he’d likely see “a Broadway show.” (The episode left open room for him to return.)On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novel, had done his first play in second grade, and couldn’t pass up the lifetime dream to be on Broadway himself.While his part there is “the most unheroic hero you’ll ever see,” he said in the interview, he has come to see it as personally meaningful in ways he didn’t expect.At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father are hidden inside a fuel truck, fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son don’t know if they’ll live or die.“The other day I just lost it because I thought of my grandparents — that’s what happened to them,” Arison said. “That’s another way I connect, even though I’m not Afghan.“So I’m hoping — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added, that “through an individual story, we do not forget that history is repeating itself.” More

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      in Television

      Review: In ‘Take Me Out,’ Whose Team Are You On?

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      Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play about baseball and homophobia gets a fine revival starring Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.Not for nothing is Darren Lemming, the fictional center fielder of a team called the Empires, also at the center of “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s gay fantasia on the national pastime.Said to be a “five-tool player of such incredible grace he made you suspect there was a sixth tool,” Lemming surpasses even Derek Jeter — on whom he is to some degree modeled — in versatility, steadiness and the kind of arrogance that, arising from excellence, adds up to charisma. He’s a natural star for baseball and, when he decides to come out as gay, a natural irritant for drama.At its best, “Take Me Out,” which opened on Monday in a fine revival at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a five-tool play. It’s (1) funny, with an unusually high density of laughs for a yarn that is (2) quite serious, and (3) cerebral without undermining its (4) emotion. I’m not sure whether (5) counts as one tool or many, but “Take Me Out” gives meaty roles to a team of actors, led in this Second Stage Theater production by Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fanboy business manager.True, dropping a few flies along the way and throwing some wild pitches — forgive the baseball metaphors, which the play indulges with the zeal of a convert — makes “Take Me Out” a bit baffling in parts. It’s not the kind of work that benefits much from postgame analysis, which reveals flaws in construction and logic. But in performance, now no less than in 2002, when it had its New York debut at the Public Theater, it is mostly delightful and provocative. Perhaps especially for gay men, it is also a useful corrective to the feeling of banishment from a necessary sport.Jesse Tyler Ferguson, center, as a business manager overjoyed with his new superstar client who awakens in him a love of the game.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy that I don’t mean baseball itself but the examination of masculinity through its lens. In “Take Me Out,” Lemming’s announcement that he’s gay, prompted by no scandal and involving no lover, is essentially a pretext for a disquisition on maleness. What it finds in the locker room, where the Empires change, shower, snap towels and squabble, is as despairing as what it finds on the field is still hopeful and good.Connecting them, Lemming is a figure of godlike mystery. Aside from his purely technical skills, he is the kind of person, as his teammate Kippy Sunderstrom (Patrick J. Adams) floridly describes him, from whom mess does not “flow forth.” Lemming assumes that whatever he does will redound to his benefit, and that unlike most people for whom coming out is momentous, his gayness will be just another of “the irrelevancies” in his life, like being handsome and biracial.What he hasn’t counted on is the way, for his teammates, the revelation dims his aura of perfection while exposing cracks in their less perfectly airtight psyches. Their nudity now feels different to them, which is why the audience is asked to consider it as well. (But not the wider world; patrons are required to put their phones in Yondr pouches to prevent photography.) However well built he is, a man wearing nothing is inherently undefended.As a result, the Empires, formerly on track for the World Series, begin to lose cohesion and, soon thereafter, games. Homophobia bubbles up from the dark places of other men’s souls; even Lemming’s closest friend, Davey Battle, a religious man who plays for an opposing team in more ways than one, comes unglued by it. And, with the arrival of Shane Mungitt, a pitcher called up from the minor leagues, the confusion erupts in a shockingly violent act.Adams, left, as the veteran player Kippy Sunderstrom, and Michael Oberholtzer as Shane Mungitt, a talented pitcher carrying a ton of baggage. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet “Take Me Out” is not only about that descent into chaos on the playing field; it is also, in the story of the business manager, Mason Marzac, about the elevation of the spirit in the same locale. Marzac, the kind of gay man who feels he has no place in the heterosexual world or even the gay community — “I’m outside them. Possibly beneath them,” he says — is overjoyed when Lemming, his new client, comes out. In that act he sees the possibility of a reintegration into the mainstream of Americanness, and soon develops a maniacal interest in the game.That his newfound fandom is mostly a way of redirecting an impossible crush does not make it any less meaningful; that kind of sublimation may indeed be an unspoken aspect of many sports manias. Ferguson makes that feeling legible in a softer, less biting take on Marzac than the one originated by the brilliant Denis O’Hare, who won a Tony Award for the 2003 Broadway production. Ferguson brings out Marzac’s woundedness in a wonderfully detailed comic performance that is nevertheless full of yearning and unexpected elation.But if Lemming and baseball take Marzac out of his shell of protective pessimism — one of the many meanings packed into the grand-slam pun of the title — Marzac also takes Lemming out of his shell of aloofness. Oddly it is this element, the most fantastical in real life, that feels most believable onstage, and only in part because the locker-room drama, which involves too many obvious tensioning devices as well as too many morons, slightly collapses as the story develops. A late scene added for this production, between Lemming and two policemen, doubles down on that problem.Williams, left, and Brandon J. Dirden in the first Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, a Second Stage production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as Lemming and Marzac form a bond — not romantic but not untender, either — the ideas that Greenberg is juggling, about integration on the ball field and integration of the psyche, fully pay off. Williams, a stage novice but a longtime star of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy,” nails the way the glamour of the gifted can keep them from full lives; perhaps the seeming effortlessness of his own career gives him insight into the downside of too much ease.Under Scott Ellis’s assured and sprightly if visually underpowered direction, the other cast members make excellent utility players, moving swiftly between spotlight moments and background work as members of the team. In particular, Michael Oberholtzer, as Mungitt, seems to disappear into his damaged self when he isn’t spewing bizarre biographical tidbits or hatred. And as Battle, Brandon J. Dirden, just off a stellar turn as a factory foreman in “Skeleton Crew,” gives a perfectly etched performance at the other end of the spectrum, finding in his faith a sanctimony that supersedes even love.It is in fact Battle who unintentionally sets the plot in motion, telling Lemming that to be a full human he should want his “whole self known.” Ultimately, “Take Me Out” is about the danger that challenge poses to some people — a danger others may know nothing about. Still, Greenberg shows us, it is crucial to happiness, and not just for gay men, even if it introduces immense difficulties. A game needn’t be perfect to be won.Take Me OutThrough May 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘The Kite Runner’ Is Coming to Broadway

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      The 2007 play based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel has been widely produced, including on the West End in London. It will come to Broadway in July.A stage adaptation of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner” will be presented on Broadway in July.The play, which began its life in California in 2007 and has been widely produced since, is planning a limited run, from July 6 to Oct. 30.The announcement is encouraging news for Broadway, which has been clobbered by closings as the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil the industry. But there remain many producers with the appetite and the financing to bring new shows to Broadway as others end their runs.The “Kite Runner” novel, written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2003, is a coming-of-age story about a man born in Afghanistan whose life is haunted by his failure to protect a childhood friend. The novel, a surprise hit, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted into a film in 2007.The theatrical adaptation was written by Matthew Spangler, and was first staged in 2007 at San José State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. It had an initial professional production in 2009 at the San Jose Repertory Theater, which no longer exists, and has since been staged in multiple countries around the world.The Broadway version will be directed by Giles Croft, who has been directing productions of the play since 2013, when he oversaw a run for the Nottingham Playhouse in Britain; he has since directed productions in the West End and on tour in Britain.The play is slated to run at the Hayes Theater, which, with 600 seats, is the smallest on Broadway. The theater is owned by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, which will rent the space to “The Kite Runner.”The lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner; Daryl Roth will serve as executive producer. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the producers are seeking to raise up to $5.75 million, but a spokesman said that the actual Broadway capitalization is likely to be closer to $4.6 million. More