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    Review: A New Lens on Auschwitz in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

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    Archivists are the heroes of a documentary play about a photograph album depicting daily life among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.You do not expect a camera to be the first thing you see in a play about the Holocaust. Yet even before “Here There Are Blueberries” begins, a spotlight illuminates a Leica on a pedestal. A period advertisement projected behind it promotes it as “the camera of modern times.”That’s apt for a dramatized documentary that looks at its subject from an unusual angle: the discovery of photographs taken at Auschwitz and the archivists who brought them to light.“Blueberries,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, focuses on the so-called Höcker album, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired from an anonymous donor in 2007. Uniquely, none of the album’s 116 photographs depict victims of the Nazis — only the Nazis themselves, going about the banal daily business of living and enjoying their lives at the camp.That the play takes a similar approach, keeping the victims mostly out of frame, is a blessing and a problem. A blessing because in so doing it avoids both active horror and the cynicism of Holokitsch, in which the murder of six million Jews is appropriated to zhuzh some emotion that might otherwise be absent.But in backgrounding the tragedy, even with the noblest intentions, “Blueberries” (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman; written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich) gets caught in a different dramatic problem: a problem of moral scale. What it’s about, however worthy, is so much smaller than what it insistently isn’t.It’s not just that the album at the center of the story, being the keepsake of an assistant to the commandant of Auschwitz in 1944, makes no reference to major atrocities in its portrayal of minor pleasures like the title blueberries. We do not see — as we do in the film “The Zone of Interest,” which features some of the same characters and locations — smoke from crematories or glowing evil light at night. In keeping with the museum’s efforts to “avoid undue attention to the perpetrators,” the play’s Nazis are characterized almost as little as their victims.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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      New York Theater Workshop Announces New Artistic Director’s First Season

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      The Off Broadway nonprofit will embrace risk, said Patricia McGregor, its leader, favoring fresh over established works.For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime artistic director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to produce an intergenerational saga centered on a Black family in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a story about a mysterious album of Nazi-era photographs, and a play with an unusual star: a Microsoft text-to-speech tool.The slate of shows, announced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who replaced James C. Nicola as artistic director last year. The organization has a track record of producing influential work, including its biggest hit, “Rent,” as well as celebrated productions such as “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”The 2023-24 season includes three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring fresh over recognizable work. (The most recent season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor said that while there is certainly a place for those kinds of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is focused on embracing risk and supporting artists whose work could be lost if the theater world becomes overly focused on name recognition, trusted forms and trying to ensure commercial success.“We’re more of a laboratory than a factory,” McGregor said. “Part of what the workshop wants to be is a testing ground.”This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about four generations of a Black family who live in a home that they built themselves in a forest. An earlier version of the production was scheduled to start rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.Later in the year, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which will be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed last year’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a restless lieutenant seeks to pleasure other women on the base — including the general’s wife — during a blackout.“I love you so much I could die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is funny and strange, McGregor said, but it also comes off as surprisingly human.)Next spring, the company will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich about a collection of Nazi-era photographs that is delivered to the desk of an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the news and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his family. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” will also direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is currently onstage at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. More

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      ‘Paradise Square’ Faces New Complaints Over Payments

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      The shuttered show is facing legal action from the actors, stage managers and designers who worked on the production.A union representing the director and choreographers who worked on the recently closed Broadway musical “Paradise Square” is asking a federal court to enforce an arbitration award that was agreed upon in May, according to a lawsuit filed late last month.The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society asked the Federal District Court in Manhattan to confirm and compel payment of nearly $150,000 that is owed to the union; the show’s director, Moisés Kaufman; the choreographer Bill T. Jones; and a few others who worked on the production.The suit, filed on July 22, said the production company still had not “satisfied its obligations under the award.”The lawsuit names as defendants the limited partnership that produced “Paradise Square,” a musical set amid the racial strife of Civil War-era New York City, as well as Bernard Abrams, a producer who is a member of the Broadway League.The show, however, has been most closely associated with the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who had a successful run as a theatrical impresario in the 1990s until he was charged with misconduct and fraud in the United States and in his native Canada, where he eventually served prison time.Drabinsky had hoped that “Paradise Square,” which ran at the Ethel Barrymore Theater from mid-March until July 17, would be his comeback. The show originated a decade ago as a musical called “Hard Times,” written by Larry Kirwan of the band Black 47 and leaning on the music of Stephen Foster, who wrote “Oh! Susanna” among other American standards. Delayed two years because of the coronavirus pandemic, it made its way to Broadway after out-of-town productions in Berkeley, Calif., and Chicago. The show received 10 Tony nominations but took home only one award, for the actress Joaquina Kalukango, whose performance was a signature of this year’s Tony Awards ceremony. The show struggled at the box office throughout its run, and it did not recover the $15 million for which it was capitalized.Richard Roth, a lawyer for the “Paradise Square” partnership, said on Monday, “My understanding is that everyone is going to be fully paid.”Abrams did not respond to requests for comment Monday.Through Roth — who pointed out that Drabinsky is not a member of the limited partnership — Drabinsky released a lengthy statement arguing that Covid had proved an insurmountable roadblock to the show’s sales and finances. He added that bonds worth nearly $450,000 that were put up by the producers should cover most of what the actors were owed.“Equity holds this bond security,” Drabinsky said, and “the lawsuits that have been filed by unions are simply to evidence the collection of amounts for which the partnership has previously consented. In this regard, I have never been a signing officer of the production, nor do I have any authority with respect to the signing of any bank instruments. Any delay in benefit payments was simply a function of available cash flow.”The Hollywood Reporter first reported the existence of the legal filing Monday.The unions representing actors and designers who appeared in or worked on the musical have also received arbitration awards for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In July, the United Scenic Artists’ local also went to federal court to seek confirmation and enforcement of its award. In the spring, the Actors’ Equity fund trustees went to court to enforce an arbitration award.The unions have also placed Drabinsky on their “do not work” lists. The directors and choreographers union automatically placed the producers on a similar list until the outstanding arbitration award is paid, according to a union official.The president of the local union of the American Federation of Musicians, Tino Gagliardi, said through a spokesman that “Local 802 and the musicians’ benefit funds are taking every legal action needed to recover wages and benefits that are due to the musicians.”Al Vincent Jr., the executive director of Equity, added in an email statement that the dispute was not over, saying, “Our process of getting our members appropriately paid for ‘Paradise Square’ continues with a number of outstanding grievances moving into arbitration.”Local 829, the scenic artists’ union, put Drabinsky on its “boycott list” because of “continued inaction and lack of communication regarding the significant payments and benefits,” said Carl Mulert, the local’s national business agent. “It is unfortunate that the legacy of this Broadway production, which includes the indelible contributions of our colleagues and kin on and off the stage, has been marred by a story of exploitation of and injustice for the many artists that have brought ‘Paradise Square’ to life.” More

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      Review: In ‘Paradise Square,’ Racial Harmony Turns to Discord

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      In a new musical starring Joaquina Kalukango, the love between Black and Irish New Yorkers in a Manhattan bar is threatened by Civil War riots.Everything in “Paradise Square” is true. Nothing in “Paradise Square” is true.Yes, history shows that in 1863, after Abraham Lincoln extended the Civil War draft to include all white men between the ages of 25 and 45 — Black men being excepted because they were not considered citizens — mobs of disgruntled Irish Americans rose up against Black people in New York, burning buildings and killing many in their path.And it’s true that in the impoverished, piano-shaped district of downtown Manhattan called Five Points, some Black and Irish neighbors who had been living together in relative harmony joined forces to resist the mobs.But in hammering these large-scale events into individual stories, and in manipulating them so performers have reason to sing at top volume and dance nearly nonstop, the uplifting, star-making, overwrought new musical, which opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, turns history on its head. Racism becomes an individual character flaw instead of a systemic evil; resistance, the solitary moral genius of a hero.Chloe Davis, foreground center left, and Sidney DuPont in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn this case, the hero is Nelly O’Brien, or really Joaquina Kalukango, who plays her with enough guts, stamina and vocal bravura to make you believe in a character glued together from the shavings of history. Nelly is the proprietor of a (fictional) Five Points bar and brothel called Paradise Square: “a little Eden” where, as one of the bald lyrics by Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare puts it in the title song, “We love who we want to love/with no apology.”Indeed, Nelly is married to the Irish American Willie O’Brien (Matt Bogart, suitably strapping). His sister (and Nelly’s best friend), Annie Lewis (Chilina Kennedy, absurdly fierce), is married to a Black minister, the Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis (Nathaniel Stampley). When Annie’s nephew Owen (A.J. Shively) arrives from Ireland, around the same time that Samuel, a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, brings Washington Henry (Sidney DuPont) to Paradise Square en route from Tennessee to Canada, the joint begins to seem like a rooming house for incendiary plot points.The cast of “Paradise Square” includes, foreground from left: Gabrielle McClinton, DuPont, Kalukango, Chilina Kennedy, Nathaniel Stampley and Davis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost of the characters — and there are 10 major roles — seem less like people than ideas with human masks. Willie’s war buddy Mike Quinlan (Kevin Dennis) represents the unemployed Irish workers easily swayed by demagogic politicians. A white pianist and composer who turns plantation tunes into uptown hits (Jacob Fishel) represents, somewhat anachronistically, the problem of cultural appropriation — though it’s a nice touch that some Stephen Foster songs, like “Camptown Races,” are reappropriated in Jason Howland’s music.Another Foster song — “Oh! Susanna” — gets an even more interesting overhaul, insidiously connecting the show’s all-purpose villain, Frederic Tiggens, as he fans the Irish rebellion, to racist Southern tropes. (Foster’s melody is reset with the lyric “You were true to a country that wasn’t true to you.”) Alas, none of Tiggens’s dialogue is as subtle; a vaguely defined “uptown party boss” set on shutting down the “depravity” of places like Paradise Square, he leaves the performer John Dossett little to do but metaphorically twirl his mustaches.If most of the score suffers from a mild case of overstatement — whipping up a series of generic rock ballads and throat-shredding anthems — the book and staging suffer from full-blown emphasitis. The book, credited to Christina Anderson, Craig Lucas and Larry Kirwan, is especially problematic. Based on Kirwan’s musical play “Hard Times,” and apparently rewritten heavily in nine years of development, it strips everything down to the naked basics as it tries to accommodate so many characters along with a checklist of sensitivities.Kevin Dennis, far left, and A.J. Shively, top right, rise up against the draft in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’m a sucker as much as the next critic for liberal pieties, and I appreciate the stance of a musical centered on Black lives that has its heroine say, near the end, “We pass on to you this story on our own terms.” But strong stances do not make up for weak characterization or suggest why such strength is necessary. That the position of the Irish and other white immigrants is not nearly as effectively dramatized as that of the Black characters is morally good but theatrically dull.In that combination, I feel the meaty hand of the producer Garth H. Drabinsky, who seems to have used his influence to shape “Paradise Square” into a likeness of his previous hits. Like “Ragtime” in 1998 and the 1994 revival of “Show Boat,” it frames social unrest as the product of a few representative individuals and tries to fill the inevitable gaps with big sound and stagecraft. It also borrows a famous plot device from “Show Boat” — which is effective here even if the debt goes otherwise unpaid.But unlike those musicals, which were built on the frames of strongly written novels by authors with singular voices, “Paradise Square” feels almost authorless despite its many contributors, and the direction of Moisés Kaufman, known for a strong hand and conceptual coherence, does little to erase the impression of anonymity. (The design elements are likewise merely efficient.) Contingent and anxious, the show seems more interested in saying the right things than in telling a coherent story.DuPont, left, and Shively in the show, which has choreography by Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWait — I take that back: It does tell a coherent story, in two ways. One is in the dancing, which employs a kaleidoscopic crash of contextual styles, including step dance for the Irish characters and Juba for the Black ones, to explore, far more subtly than the book, the place where appropriation and joyful sharing meet. (If unlikely as a plot point, the dance-off between Owen and Washington is a high point emotionally.) Again, many hands are at work here, with Bill T. Jones heading a musical staging team of at least five other choreographers, but the result scores its points effectively.The other source of coherence in “Paradise Square” is Kalukango, who somehow alchemizes the remarkable difficulties of the role into her characterization, making it incredible in the good way instead of the bad. Having seen her previously as Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Nettie in “The Color Purple” and Kaneisha in “Slave Play,” I am not exactly surprised, but they were more successful pieces of writing. Nothing really prepares you for the moment when an actor brings everything she has to the stage and essentially writes what needs to be said while you watch. It makes you believe in making history.Paradise SquareAt the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; paradisesquaremusical.com. Running time: 2 hours and 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ Review: Pride and Pole Dancing Behind Glass

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      This array of short plays has viewers in headphones wandering the meatpacking district for stylish, but shallow, theatrical thrills.Sex and spectacle are on the menu in “Seven Deadly Sins,” a sumptuously staged, deliciously outfitted exploration of vice performed in the meatpacking district, once home to slaughterhouses and sex clubs, though now more about trendy dining and swanky shopping.Yet this feast for the eyes — bringing to life seven short plays performed in storefronts to audiences who mostly watch through glass but listen on headphones — turns out to be more about appearances than anything else.Originally conceived by Michel Hausmann for a theater in Miami Beach and directed by Moisés Kaufman, this iteration of “Seven Deadly Sins” features work by its director (covering greed) as well as by the notable playwrights Ngozi Anyanwu (gluttony), Thomas Bradshaw (sloth), MJ Kaufman (pride), Jeffrey LaHoste (envy), Ming Peiffer (wrath) and Bess Wohl (lust).But we begin in Purgatory (a blue neon sign makes that clear) greeted by Shuga Cain from Season 11 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who arrives like a beautiful, lip-syncing hurricane of gloss and glitter in the first of Dede Ayite’s many stunning costumes.“What better place to look at human nature than the stage,” she purrs, setting in motion how the show will work: Each of three groups will maneuver through the circuit of plays in a different order over a three-block radius, sitting to watch each roughly 10-minute performance before rising and walking to the next.My first sin of the night was gluttony, for which Anyanwu presents an alternative Garden of Eden story with “Tell Me Everything You Know”: Here it’s just Eve, here called “Naked” (a timid Morgan McGhee) and mostly covered in knee-length dreadlocks, and the snake, called “Clothed” (a sultry Shavanna Calder), in a sleek black bodysuit and a ponytail of hair styled into giant interconnected chain links. The snake’s temptation becomes queer in this context, and Anyanwu has linguistic fun with her Eve’s awakening, which comes in a verbal cascade.Sex, queerness and body positivity are central themes of most of the plays. In LaHoste’s envy play, “Naples,” set not in a storefront but in a shipping container on a cobblestone street, a manipulative 18th century French noblewoman (Caitlin O’Connell, stately yet cunning) has a less than friendly exchange with her husband’s not-so-secret boy toy (Andrew Keenan-Bolger).Bradshaw’s “Hard,” about a schlubby, unmotivated gamer (Brandon J. Ellis) whose wife (Shamika Cotton) tries to convince him to have sex, struggles to hit its comedic beats. The slovenly man-child paired with the attractive partner is old hat, and the sitcom dynamic between sad-sack husband and nagging wife feels unintentionally regressive.Cody Sloan in MJ Kaufman’s play “Wild Pride,” which looks at the commercialization of gay rights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMJ Kaufman’s “Wild Pride” is the most politically conscious play of the batch, a pointed critique of the commercialization of queer advocacy. In a storefront set full of TVs, rainbow streamers and balloons that read “Queer AF,” a trans social media star called the “Guru” (Cody Sloan) believes he’s providing affirmation for his fan base (Bianca “B” Norwood, voicing comments from followers and other influencers) but finds the tide turn against him and is confronted with the shallowness of his brand.It’s a bold and welcome pick for Pride month, sharply underlining the limits of performative advocacy, especially online.Moisés Kaufman’s purely comic greed play, which premiered as part of the original Miami Beach production of the show, reappears here. “Watch,” in which siblings (a comic Tricia Alexandro and Eric Ulloa) fight about their freshly deceased father’s pricey Rolex, feels like the odd man out of this otherwise pretty horny bunch, which include the two most explicitly sex-themed — and powerful — plays in the mix, Wohl’s “Lust” and Peiffer’s “Longhorn.”Donna Carnow pole dances while Cynthia Nixon voices her thoughts in Bess Wohl’s play “Lust.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn “Lust,” a pole dancer (Donna Carnow) does her usual routine as we hear, via voice-over, her internal monologue, performed by Cynthia Nixon in her best matter-of-fact Miranda Hobbes. The mix of mundane thoughts (“Refill prescription for eczema cream”), casually withering judgment (“Oh, sweetheart, do you think I don’t know a toupee when I see one?”) and hefty declarations (“There is no God.”) showcase Wohl’s talent for capturing the quirky ways people think and move through their everyday lives.Carnow’s dancing, however, is the production’s true showstopper. She does splits and body rolls, windmills herself around the pole and performs aerial contortions that look utterly unreal — all with perfect nonchalance. And did I mention the platform stripper heels? When she’s upset, her heels violently stomp down to the floor, and when she’s caught in an anxious spiral her body likewise spins around the pole.Her facial expressions, however, can veer into exaggeration, revealing how Wohl’s otherwise clever script becomes didactic when it comes to the topic of sexual assault. Similarly, Peiffer’s “Longhorn” — tracing the troubling and fascinating power dynamics between a white man (Brad Fleischer) and an Asian dominatrix (Kahyun Kim) — ends on a gratuitously violent note. It’s a painfully explicit political parable that, while valid, banks too much on shock value.It’s a problem throughout “Seven Deadly Sins,” a presentation of Tectonic Theater Project and Madison Wells Live. That’s not to say their money isn’t well spent, both in Ayite’s costumes and David Rockwell’s remarkable scenic and site design.Shavanna Calder, left, and Morgan McGhee in Ngozi Anyanwu’s gluttony-themed “Tell Me Everything You Know.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe gives Eden dimension with bright flowers and layered panels painted in lush greens in Anyanwu’s “Tell Me Everything You Know.” And the cascade of gilded roses and baroque accents in “Naples,” as well as the sex dungeon props in “Longhorn,” show extraordinary attention to detail.Yet perhaps my favorite of the sets was Christopher and Justin Swader’s clever scenic design for “Watch” — the contemporary, lifeless room of what appears to be a funeral home, bisected by a grave with a coffin in the center, which we see as if from overhead.“Seven Deadly Sins” is eye candy, no doubt, and a fun interactive experience for those who crave a lively outdoor performance with a few raunchy surprises. But given the emphasis on sexuality, and nods to the meatpacking district’s transgressive history, I expected a more exacting sociopolitical statement. There should be more than meets the eye.Seven Deadly SinsThrough July 18 at 94 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; sevendeadlysinsnyc.com More

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      Storefronts Turned Stages for ‘Seven Deadly Sins’

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      A live theatrical event in the Meatpacking district, featuring several playwrights and sets by David Rockwell, “turns New York itself into the playhouse.”On a balmy weekday afternoon in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, a small crowd gathered around a storefront window where a neon-lit pole dancer in purple platform stilettos performed an alluring routine. Passers-by stopped to gawk at the silent spectacle. Some took out their camera phones.There was no way for them to know that this was a rehearsal of a short play called “Lust,” or that soon the dancer would be performing it nine times a night. On the sidewalk, the director Moisés Kaufman sat in a bistro chair, surrounded by members of his Tectonic Theater Project. Through their headsets they heard what the pedestrians could not: pulsing music and the character’s narrated thoughts.Across the street, sleek installations in other vacant storefronts — a grave site, a dominatrix’s dungeon — were also sets for plays, one about greed, the other wrath. And that open storage container parked at the curb? It would become the stage for a piece about envy. Riffs on gluttony, pride and sloth would have wide windows in a disused space two blocks away.Ngozi Anyanwu’s play, inspired by gluttony, follows two women in a garden and explores the pitfalls of being overly curious.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesMing Peiffer’s play, a riff on wrath, imagines an encounter between an Asian dominatrix and her white client.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesAs New York embarks on its hot vax summer, Kaufman and Tectonic Theater are bringing “Seven Deadly Sins” to the streets. A carnal, high-gloss evening of short plays performed largely in storefronts to peripatetic audiences supplied with headphones to hear the dialogue, it started previews on Tuesday, part of the restless, exuberant rebirth of live theater — experimental and open-air.“The urgency that I feel about making these plays is something that I have not felt in years,” Kaufman said in an interview. “Because we — the artist, the actor, the playwright — we are needing it. We have this hunger. But I also profoundly believe that the audiences share that hunger.”Probably best known for the Matthew Shepard play “The Laramie Project,” Kaufman imported the concept for this show wholesale from Miami Beach, where Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, staged the first version of “Seven Deadly Sins” last fall.In the Florida iteration, Kaufman wrote and directed just one piece, “All I Want Is Everything,” about greed. For New York, he is directing the whole 90-minute evening, surrounded by a fresh crop of playwrights: Ngozi Anyanwu (gluttony), Thomas Bradshaw (sloth), MJ Kaufman (pride), Jeffrey LaHoste (envy), Ming Peiffer (wrath) and Bess Wohl (lust).With the eye of the Tony Award-winning set designer David Rockwell, the show has suited its aesthetic to the neighborhood, past and present. Once notorious for gritty sex clubs and streets puddled with animal blood, the Meatpacking district has evolved into a chic backdrop for modeling shoots and the home of the High Line and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Jeffrey LaHoste inside the set for “Naples,” about bisexuality in the French aristocracy, inspired by envy.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThe plays of “Seven Deadly Sins” tend toward the political, which is in keeping with Tectonic’s tradition. And as a note on the show’s website warns, some of the content may be upsetting, such as a venomous confrontation between the two characters in Peiffer’s play. Children under 13 are not allowed.When Kaufman contacted Peiffer about “Seven Deadly Sins” — at what she called “the height of the Asian hate,” right after the Atlanta shootings left six women of Asian descent dead — she knew that she would choose to write about wrath. In “Longhorn,” she imagines an encounter between an Asian dominatrix and her client, a white man.“The thing that I kind of wanted to get at with my play is the ways in which different people, depending on their identity — their cultural identity, their racial identity, their gender identity — are allowed to express their rage in different ways,” Peiffer said.Or in the case of women, she added, not allowed, “because, you know, you’re called crazy or you’re emotional or you’re on your period or whatever the hell.”Wohl, who wrote the pole-dancing play and is a Tony nominee for “Grand Horizons,” said she picked her sin because “you can’t turn down lust when it’s on the table.” She, too, has used the project to examine sexual politics and violence, as well as the voyeuristic element of storefront performance.“There was something really evocative to me about creating these little spaces and trapping performers in them and asking them to repeat the action over and over for different audiences,” she said.“You can’t turn down lust when it’s on the table,” Bess Wohl said about the sin she picked for her play.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesThomas Bradshaw’s play, about a couple working through their sexual slump, deals with sloth.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesKaufman’s own play occupies the same city block as “Lust” and “Longhorn.” Given where it falls in the rhythm of the evening, he decided he needed to reshape his script from what it had been in Miami Beach.“The playwright Moisés Kaufman had to talk to the artistic director Moisés Kaufman,” he said, deadpan, “and the artistic director said to the playwright, ‘I love your play, but all the other plays that are here are very dark and very difficult. You have to make your play a comedy.’”But his play’s set has the same designers that it had in Florida: the brothers Christopher and Justin Swader. Rockwell did all the others — his first collaboration with Kaufman, though they had been talking about working together for more than 16 years, ever since Rockwell saw Kaufman’s Broadway production of “I Am My Own Wife.”Rockwell, an architect who spent a chunk of the pandemic immersed in outdoor dining design and navigating New York City rules about it, said he was drawn to the logistical design challenges of “Seven Deadly Sins.” He used his bureaucratic know-how to get clearance for audiences to be seated in the same curbside zone where restaurant sheds tend to be.The return of live theater to the city is a “collective healing process,” Rockwell said, one that, in getting people into public spaces this summer, “turns New York itself into the playhouse.”Each of the three nightly showings will accommodate 66 ticketed audience members, split into three smaller groups that watch the plays in a different order, with 22 spectators per storefront. Gigi Pritzker, whose entertainment company Madison Wells is producing the show with Tectonic, envisions its format as “something that could be done all over the world.”“The urgency that I feel about making these plays is something that I have not felt in years,” Moisés Kaufman. His short play was inspired by greed.Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesTo Kaufman, who said that “Seven Deadly Sins” has gone “a bit over” its $500,000 budget, the project is also a way “to jump-start our community” post-shutdown.“To be able to hire 100 theater makers for these plays is one of the greatest joys of my life,” he said. “After the year that theater makers have had? It’s been horrific, horrific, horrific.”A publicist later updated the number of theater makers to 123.Wohl, for one, said she blinked back tears as she headed to a rehearsal of “Lust.” But she also spoke of the poignancy of seeing how the pandemic has changed the city: all the places that used to be and no longer are.“It’s just one heartbreak after another walking through the streets of Manhattan right now,” she said. “So something about animating those empty spaces feels really meaningful. It kind of breathes some life back into those spaces, or allows them to have potential rather than just loss.”The Meatpacking district is of course pocked with dormant real estate. On the other hand, when Kaufman and I popped into a restaurant in the neighborhood to talk over a drink on a recent Friday evening, the place was humming with activity.Kaufman, too, was practically vibrating — delighted to be throwing himself into a big production again, eager to unleash his show on audiences and unsuspecting pedestrians.“My husband keeps telling me, ‘Temper your excitement,’ but I am Latino, Jewish and gay,” he said. “It’s very hard to temper my excitement.”He finished his gin on the rocks. Then he headed out the door, back to his colleagues, back to work.Seven Deadly SinsThrough July 18; sevendeadlysinsnyc.com. More

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      Miami Outdoor Theater Hit Announces a New York Arrival

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      “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a theatrical anthology series, will start off on June 23 at a series of storefront windows in the Meatpacking District.After enjoying a successful run in Miami Beach from late November through January, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an outdoor theatrical anthology series that explores humanity’s basest impulses, will come to New York. Performances are scheduled to begin on June 23 and will take place in storefront windows in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.“I think it was important for us to do it in this moment of transition,” said Moisés Kaufman, the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, which is producing the show with Madison Wells Live in association with Miami New Drama. “We wanted to be able to create something while the pandemic is still with us because it feels more like an act of defiance.”The New York version of “The Seven Deadly Sins” will feature short new plays by Ngozi Anyanwu, Thomas Bradshaw, MJ Kaufman, Jeffrey LaHoste, Ming Peiffer and Bess Wohl. Moisés Kaufman will also contribute a piece to the anthology and direct the production. Each playwright’s work will address a particular “sin”: pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth or lust.“We really wanted the event to not be a revival of an existing play,” Kaufman said in an interview on Wednesday. After having been through a pandemic, “the idea that new art can be born on the streets of Manhattan is something that excites us.”The 10-minute-long plays will be viewable from the street — by a masked, socially distanced audience, who will be provided with disposable earbuds to hear the actors in the storefronts. Escorted by a guide, they will watch the seven pieces in different orders. Before viewing the artistically rendered debauchery, ticket holders will have the opportunity to grab a drink at a pop-up bar called Purgatory.The Meatpacking District Business Improvement District is pitching in to identify performance venues and manage the production’s use of public space.Dael Orlandersmith and Nilo Cruz were among the writers who contributed plays to the twice-extended inaugural production, which was conceived of by Michel Hausmann, a co-founder of Miami New Drama with Moisés Kaufman.Storefront performances have cropped up in New York periodically since the pandemic began, but none so far have matched the scale or complexity of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” In March, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that live indoor and outdoor shows could resume in the state at limited capacity beginning April 2, paving the way for more ambitious projects to take root in the city this spring and summer.Tickets go on sale May 14. Casting information will be released soon. More