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      ‘Balkan Bordello’ Review: A Tragic Tale Reborn for a Time of War

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      In this international production, you can check into the Balkan Express Motel, if you dare, and fulfill an ancient generational curse.To Orestes, the discord between his parents is part of “the family dysfunction.” That’s true as far as it goes, but it does gloss over some gruesome details: his military commander father, Agamemnon, sacrificing Orestes’s sister, Iphigenia; and his mother, Clytemnestra, avenging her favorite child’s death by killing Agamemnon when he returns home from war.It’s the sort of history that might leave a person haunted, and so it does in the angry and eloquent “Balkan Bordello,” a contemporary retelling of Aeschylus’ “The Oresteia” by the Kosovan playwright Jeton Neziraj. When Agamemnon’s ghost steps out of the fog one night, like Hamlet’s restless father come to sic his son on the one who wronged him, more bloodshed quickly follows.Harm begets harm in this cursed cycle of violence and retribution, with one generation’s grievances handed down to the next in a society devastated by war and living in its long, ugly aftermath. In theory, then, “Balkan Bordello” is unusually well suited to this moment, when so many anxious eyes are on the myriad blossoming horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Directed by Blerta Neziraj, the playwright’s wife, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, this show does look splendid, on a set the color of blood and rage, lust and heat. The production’s very provenance — as a collaboration involving La MaMa; Qendra Multimedia in Pristina, Kosovo; Theater Atelje 212 in Belgrade, Serbia; and the international group My Balkans — is emblematic of hope.And its cast of 10 includes two Serbian actors who deliver performances of thrilling magnetism — Svetozar Cvetkovic as Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s pompous, prolific poet lover, and Ivan Mihailovic as a war veteran who returns alongside Agamemnon, with the captured Cassandra (Verona Koxha, a Kosovan actor) slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.But there is a chaos to the production that has nothing to do with the disorder of the little world it depicts, inside Clytemnestra’s Balkan Express Motel, where she and Agamemnon raised their children. On Thursday night, the show felt under-rehearsed and underconfident, with spotty sound and some American actors seemingly uncertain of their lines.The greater frustration, less likely to resolve itself, is that the set (by Marija Kalabic and Nico de Rooij), so flatteringly lit (by Yann Perregaux and de Rooij), is too far-flung for the play’s intimate, intricate machinations. In its vast space, the staging muddies the storytelling.Audience members sit at either end, a few at cafe tables — an unwise choice for people who don’t want to become part of the show, particularly those who would cringe at being urged to get up and dance. Wherever you sit, some of the action is likely to be lost on you because of sightlines and distance and occasional onstage tumult.Smoothly translated by Alexandra Channer and performed in English, with much of the dialogue projected (also in English) on an upstage backdrop, the play is nonetheless a smart and striking take on “The Oresteia.” Its surreal qualities are amped up by Gabriel Berry‘s madcap costumes — Aegisthus, in jacquard jacket and velvet pants, is an absolute dandy; Clytemnestra wears golden shoes — and Gjergj Prevazi’s choreography, into which characters erupt, sometimes while still seated at cafe tables.But there is a kind of abstraction to the performances by the members of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, in contrast to the immediacy of the Balkan actors’ work. George Drance’s Agamemnon exudes a hail-fellow-well-met energy, without any of the smoothed-over barbarity you might expect. Even with Cassandra, his human war prize, he lacks menace.Admittedly, the charismatic, fully realized performances by Cvetkovic and Mihailovic put the scales of the production out of whack. Kushtrim Hoxha, a Kosovan actor, is also strangely compelling as Pylades, Orestes’s choreographer friend from Berlin — a representative of the non-Balkan Western world and its condescension toward the region.While Clytemnestra (Onni Johnson) and Orestes (Eugene the Poogene) both end up with blood on their hands here, Mihailovic is the one who brings a sense of simmering violence and physical danger into the room. When he makes a furious, stomping exit up the risers on one end of the stage, the threat of savagery reverberates in his every footfall. When Pylades asks him about his experiences in the war, his answers are unnerving, but the slow smile on his face is even more so.It is left to Aegisthus, the poet, to rail against the war and what it has wrought. “Oh my people,” he writes. “Beware the warlords, my people.”Not that he is innocent, of course. Before Clytemnestra does away with Agamemnon, her lover has his own thirst for blood.“I like to imagine his body cut into pieces, his eyes staring out like a dead fish,” Aegisthus says, with an even-tempered hatred that makes him entirely terrifying. “But all that matters is that he’ll be over with. He’ll be done, and we’ll live happily ever after.”That’s the eternal fantasy, isn’t it — that just one more act of violence will even the score, and retribution will cease. Spoiler/not spoiler: Aegisthus ends up murdered, too.“They’ve sent me to hell by mistake,” his ghost says. “I have filed a complaint.” More

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      Review: In ‘Misdemeanor Dream,’ Speaking to the Unseen

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      This experimental work, presented by La MaMa and the Indigenous theater ensemble Spiderwoman Theater, is full of enchanting stories but is missing a few threads.The fairies have stories to share. At least the ones in “Misdemeanor Dream,” who tell tales in English and Native languages, but also via movement and dance, of the births of constellations, the celestial romance that begets all sentient life. But the thicket of music, overlapping dialogue, sounds and projections in this experimental work, presented by La MaMa and the Indigenous feminist theater ensemble Spiderwoman Theater, doesn’t always come together to convey these enchanting stories; in fact, this patchwork often makes the show indecipherable.At that start of the play, a group of fairies from this realm and other realms emerge from the bowels of a large, multicolored cloth tunnel that leads from backstage to the front. They dance around a red cardboard tree that commands the center of the stage; it seems like an artifact of a mythical world, with multipatterned and brightly colored leaves that hang like shimmering Christmas ornaments. (The set and installation design is by Sherry Guppy, Penny Couchie, Sid Bobb and Mona Damian, in collaboration with Aanmitaagzi, an Indigenous company from Nipissing First Nation in northeastern Ontario, and in partnership with Loose Change Productions.)The fairies, dressed just as eclectically as the leaves, with red capes, feather boas, blue tutus, pink wings and light-up sneakers (costumes by Damian), go from recounting traditional Native creation myths, sometimes in the original languages of the cast’s nations (including Algonkian, Ilocano and Ojibwe), to personal stories. The ensemble members, who wrote the script together and are directed by Muriel Miguel, comprise 12 Indigenous actors of different ages, performing onstage and via projections. All the while they interrupt each other with fragmented thoughts and exclamations, that is, when the storytellers aren’t being interrupted by sudden blasts of pop music.This collage-style of storytelling is called “story weaving,” a method that Spiderwoman Theater developed in the 1970s. The technique is just one example of the influence of the company, which has been a pillar of New York’s experimental theater scene for decades. After all, attending a theatrical production whose cast members are of different ages and genders and are from Indigenous nations across the United States, Canada and the Philippines is, unfortunately, a novelty in a predominantly white art form.Clockwise, from bottom left, Matt C. Cross, Donna Couteau, Marjolaine Mckenzie, Henu Josephine Tarrant and  Gloria Miguel.Lou MontesanoHowever, the story weaving in this production leaves too many loosely tied or unconnected threads, and the heart of the show — accounts of communal traditions and personal experiences — ends up getting lost. This isn’t helped when the performance elements don’t readily cohere around a narrative structure. We aren’t grounded in specific settings, or much acquainted with particular characters; everything is so free-floating that there’s not much to hold onto.Some more structure would serve the production well in other areas too. The choreography, by Couchie, could be more fluid in its transitions from traditional dancing to the more contemporary, impressionistic gestures. The movement could also better suit the range of ages and abilities of the actors onstage; there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to a show whose performers represent several generations.The costumes, music and projections similarly seem to function more as pastiche than the means toward illuminating or furthering the story. That would explain the ungainly juxtaposition of, say, a mythic story about a lynx woman and a story about a woman’s love for the actress Julia Roberts, Native round dancing and air guitar, or a reflection on the sounds a decapitated body makes scored to Gene Autry’s performance of “Peter Cottontail.”From left, Tarrant, Mckenzie, Cross and Villalon.Richard TermineThe result is a show that undercuts itself, as in one of the final scenes, when Nisgwamala (Gloria Miguel) delivers a monologue that suddenly breaks from the show’s allegorical and abstract style and lands with an explicit plea for us to love each other in our troubled contemporary world. Any resonance the monologue may have is challenged by what comes next: lively pop songs by the Bee Gees and Cher.The costumes are showy, though if one of the performers could be voted Best Dressed it would be Gloria, Muriel Miguel’s sister and one of the co-founders of Spiderwoman. At a spry 95, she is a dazzling participant, wearing a cosmic star-spangled dress with sleeves adorned with what look like tiny wind chimes hanging from her wrists; every movement of her arms is accented with an airy tinkle and chime.“Misdemeanor Dream,” which runs a brief 85 minutes, is supposedly inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” though the influence of Shakespeare seems to be another thread lost in this story weaving. The work attempts to use a fluid approach to storytelling to reflect stories that have transcendent themes: bodies change, spaces shift and we slip from one realm to the next like one slips from the waking world into the province of dreams. This kind of storytelling, and these Native stories, are essential in theater, but if you’re going to introduce the audience to the reports, fabrications and hearsay of the fairies and spirits of those alternate realms, make sure there’s some tether — even the faintest little thread — to keep us from getting lost in the magic.Misdemeanor DreamThrough March 27 at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      La MaMa Theater Reopens With Strange, Enchanting Puppetry

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      The daring Manhattan theater reopens this month with a gorgeous puppet festival, proving it has lost none of its nerve during the pandemic.Sonia enters naked, far upstage. Even from a distance, she is an imposing presence, taller than either of the men who are helping her walk.All right, making her walk. Sonia is a puppet, and she would be inert without them.Not for an instant does it feel that way, though, in “Lunch with Sonia,” an achingly beautiful entry in La MaMa’s annual puppet festival. These puppeteers are her caretakers, surely — because in this puppet-and-dance piece Sonia is ill, and her faltering body needs assistance as she puts on a gown and moves painstakingly downstage toward her grand, gilt-edged chair. Where, holding court, she proceeds to enchant us.The festival, now in its second week and continuing through Oct. 24, opens the venerable East Village theater’s post-shutdown season. I regret to inform you that “Lunch with Sonia” has finished its run. But of the four productions I have seen in this year’s lineup, it is one of two that made me feel intensely grateful that La MaMa is once again lending its stages to live performance that is strange, daring, gorgeous and far from the mainstream.More about “Sonia” in a moment, because there is still time to catch the other show that absolutely gripped me: Lone Wolf Tribe’s eerie, wistful “Body Concert,” running through Sunday upstairs in the cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater.Like “Sonia,” this is puppetry for adults — ideally the non-squeamish kind, given that a small herd of severed body parts is involved. They are made of foam rubber, but still.Kevin Augustine in “Body Concert.”Richard TermineKevin Augustine, who created this Butoh-inspired puppetry-and-movement piece, performs it clad in a dance belt, with his hands, feet and head colored greasepaint white. In mostly dim, hazy lighting, by Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa, Augustine animates an outsize skull; an enormous eye; and a giant, skin-stripped arm and leg, each a mass of muscles and veins. There’s a heart, too, and a jaw, and a semi-skeleton infant with an unclosed fontanel.I can’t tell you quite why it’s so fascinating to watch the leg use its knee and toes to inch across the floor, or just what makes it slightly poignant — though when Mark Bruckner’s music introduces piano, a note of longing enters. Comical as it is when the arm, with taloned fingers, tap-taps at the skull, there’s an element of yearning there, too. These disparate bits of body, little good on their own, want to be united. Want to be alive.Sonia, on the other hand, wants to be dead. That is the tension inside Loco7 Dance Puppet Theater Company’s celebratory “Lunch with Sonia,” whose matriarch heroine intends to end her life before debilitation takes that choice away. But first, we learn in voice-overs, she will have a month of goodbyes, some with family members who are still trying to talk her out of it.Created and directed by Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber — with choreography and puppet, lighting, video and set design by Restrepo — “Sonia” lifts a grief-tinged tale to a joyous realm, with Sonia at the center, eager to dance in hot pink Crocs. The piece is inspired by Restrepo’s experience with his own aunt Sonia, and it is understandably a bit longer than it needs to be: a result of the fond wish of the living to resurrect our lost beloveds and linger in their company.The other two festival shows I saw, both in the more intimate downstairs theater, were less successful. The first, Watoku Ueno’s shadow-puppet piece “The Tall Keyaki Tree” (whose run has ended), is visually and aurally alluring, with live music by Shu Odamura. But the story — inspired by the Koda Rohan novella “The Five-Storied Pagoda,” about a carpenter who builds a pagoda with wood from a tree he loved as a child — is soporific.Shoshana Bass in “When I Put On Your Glove,” which she created based on her father’s puppetry. Richard TermineSandglass Theater’s “When I Put On Your Glove,” which continues through Sunday, has an affecting premise. Created and performed by Shoshana Bass, it is a tribute to her puppeteer father, Eric Bass, and an exploration of artistic legacy. Using four of his puppets, she re-enacts some of his best known works, but she has not found a way to spark them with life.Directed by Gerard Stropnicky, with design and construction by Shoshana Bass’s mother, Ines Zeller Bass, the piece makes striking metaphoric use of falling sand. It also shows us clips of an Eric Bass performance, which are more magnetic than any live element of this show.Also notable is the festival’s exhibition of Richard Termine’s puppet photography, running through Sunday at La MaMa’s gallery space. It’s a lovely survey of the form as seen on New York stages; there is even a brief but robust section on puppetry during the pandemic.For people who experienced any performances on those walls, the images will be particularly vivid. As a line in “When I Put On Your Glove” says: “What animates the puppet is not the puppeteer, but the breath of memory with which we all fill it.” So it goes, too, with puppets caught on camera.La MaMa Puppet SeriesThrough Oct. 24 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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      George Ferencz, Innovative Theater Director, Dies at 74

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      He directed works by Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and others at La MaMa and similar theaters known for experimentation.George Ferencz, a director who was a fixture at theaters known for experimental work like La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan, died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His family said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Ferencz (pronounced FAIR-ents) directed pieces by unknowns as well as name writers like Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and Mac Wellman. One specialty was giving startling new interpretations to previously staged works, both classic and contemporary. Another was infusing productions with music in unusual ways; he collaborated a number of times with the jazz drummer Max Roach.Mr. Ferencz first drew attention in the New York theater world as a founder and co-artistic director of the Impossible Ragtime Theater, known as I.R.T., which presented a wide range of productions in small spaces beginning in the mid-1970s. His 1976 staging of “The Hairy Ape,” a 1922 Eugene O’Neill play, gave that work a visceral immediacy.“The main reason one attends off-off-Broadway shows is in the one chance in a thousand of finding a production as good as the Impossible Ragtime Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’” Glenne Currie of United Press International wrote.Mr. Ferencz scored another success soon after with a more obscure O’Neill play, “Dynamo.”“If lesser plays by great playwrights are to be seen,” Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “then Mr. Ferencz’s productions could serve as models.”Mr. Ferencz left the I.R.T. in 1977 but continued to direct Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, including a mini-festival of Shepard plays at Columbia University in 1979, shortly after Mr. Shepard had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child.”Two years later Mr. Ferencz mounted a full production of one of those pieces under the title “Cowboy Mouth (in Concert).” Here he revisited “Cowboy Mouth,” which Mr. Shepard and Patti Smith had written and first performed in 1971. Mr. Ferencz’s production, with Brooks McKay and Annette Kurek in the roles originated by Mr. Shepard and Ms. Smith, imagined their back-and-forth exchanges as a rock concert.“The result,” Mr. Gussow wrote in The Times, “is a sizzling, surrealistic 70 minutes that in its own stark way comes closer to the anarchic spirit of Shepard than some elaborate productions of more complete plays.”Mr. Ferencz’s collaborations Mr. Baraka included directing his “Boy and Tarzan Appear in Clearing” at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater in 1981.The next year Mr. Ferencz began a long association with Ellen Stewart and her influential experimental theater, La MaMa, in Lower Manhattan, directing a portion of “Money, a Jazz Opera,” composed by George Gruntz with a book by Mr. Baraka. He founded La MaMa’s Experiments reading series for experimental works in 1998 and ran it for 16 years.Mr. Ferencz in 1982 with Ellen Stewart, the founder of the experimental theater La MaMa in Lower Manhattan. They had a long artistic association. Courtesy of La MaMa ArchiveMr. Ferencz directed well beyond New York’s downtown scene, staging productions at Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theater and numerous other venues.“I look at the theater as a hammer,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 1979, when he was guest director for a production of Donald Freed’s “Inquest” at the University of Maine, “aggressive and highly theatrical, something you can’t get by flicking on the television switch. It has got to have spectacle and shock value.”George Michael Ferencz was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in a Hungarian Catholic neighborhood of Cleveland. His father, George John Ferencz, owned an auto-parts store, and his mother, Anne (Haydu) Ferencz, was a homemaker and a former beauty queen.He studied journalism at the University of Detroit but transferred to Kent State University in Ohio, where he pursued theater, directing plays by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and others. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and settled in New York soon after.In 1969 he married Pam Mitchell, who became a founder of I.R.T. along with him, Ted Story and Cynthia Crane. The couple divorced in 1978, and in 1986 he married Sally Lesser, a noted costume designer he had worked with for years; they collaborated on some 65 productions.She survives him, as does their son, Jack.In addition to his La MaMa work, Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field, the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.“He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity for socially relevant theater,” she said in a statement. “He was a Brechtian director whose mission was not only to engage you emotionally, but also to make you think and think hard about the world in which the story lives.”Among Mr. Ferencz’s frequent collaborators was Mr. Roach, whom he met at a party at Mr. Baraka’s house; they joined forces in 1984 for a staging of three Shepard plays performed in repertory, with Mr. Roach providing original music. Among their later efforts was a jazz-infused version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged at San Diego Rep in 1987.“George loves jazz and directs like that,” Mr. Roach, who died in 2007, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “He kind of lets things unfold the way folks like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington would do. He knows where he wants to go, but he gives everybody a chance to make a contribution.” More

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      Jean-Claude van Itallie, ‘America Hurrah’ Playwright, Dies at 85

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      He was a central figure in the experimental theater movement for decades. His best-known work, a trilogy of one-acts, opened in 1966 and ran for more than 630 performances.Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright, director and performer who was a mainstay of the experimental theater world and who was especially known for “America Hurrah,” a form-bending trio of one-acts that opened in 1966 in the East Village and ran for more than 630 performances, died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother, Michael, said the cause was pneumonia.Beginning in the late 1950s, Mr. van Itallie immersed himself in the vibrant Off Off Broadway scene, where playwrights and performers were challenging theatrical conventions. He joined Joseph Chaikin’s newly formed Open Theater in 1963, and his first produced play, “War,” was staged in the West Village. He was a favorite of Ellen Stewart, who had founded La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1961.Mr. van Itallie’s early works, including components of what became “America Hurrah,” were generally performed in lofts and other small spaces, but for the full-fledged production of “America Hurrah,” in November 1966, he moved up to the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue. The work caused a sensation.“I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on ‘America Hurrah,’” Walter Kerr began his rave review in The New York Times. “There’s something afoot here.”The first play in the trilogy, “Interview,” looked at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. In the second, “TV,” a commentary on mass media’s ability to trivialize, three people in a television ratings company watch a variety of shows; gradually the ones they’re watching take over the stage, and the three “real” people are absorbed into them.The third piece was “Motel,” which was first performed in 1965 at La MaMa E.T.C. and which the script describes as “a masque for three dolls.” (Robert Wilson, still early in his groundbreaking career, designed the original set.) Writing about a London production of “America Hurrah” for The Times in 1967, Charles Marowitz called it “a short but stunning masterpiece.”In it, a monstrous doll, the “Motel-keeper,” presides over a motel room and emits a stream of increasingly arcane patter. Two other dolls arrive at the room and proceed to trash it, scrawling vulgar graffiti on the wall and eventually dismantling the Motel-keeper.In 1993, when the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, mounted a revival of “America Hurrah,” Marianne Evett, theater critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, reflected on its original impact.“When it opened,” she wrote, “it rocketed to fame, announcing that a new kind of American theater had arrived — deliberately experimental, savagely funny, politically aware and critical of standard American life, its institutions and values.”Mr. van Itallie continued making new work for more than half a century, and also founded Shantigar, a retreat in western Massachusetts, where he nurtured aspiring theater artists. Just two years ago, La MaMa staged the premiere of his new play, “The Fat Lady Sings,” about an evangelical family.“Jean-Claude van Itallie was an artist who was constantly questioning and digging into the deeper realms of our human existence and spirit,” Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa, said by email. “In this moment of change it is artists like Jean-Claude whom we must look to.”Mr. van Itallie in 1999 in his one-man show, “War, Sex and Dreams,” at La Mama E.T.C. It related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. Peter MacDonald/La MamaJean-Claude van Itallie was born on May 25, 1936, in Brussels to Hugo and Marthe (Levy) van Itallie. The family left Belgium as the Nazis advanced on the country in 1940, and by the end of the year they had reached the United States. They settled in Great Neck, on Long Island. Hugo van Itallie had been a stockbroker in Brussels and resumed that career on Wall Street.Jean-Claude’s parents spoke French at home, something that influenced his later approach to theater, he said.“I had the good fortune to grow up in a couple of languages,” he said, “and I think that makes you realize that no single language contains reality, that words are always an approximation of reality, that language and even thought are perspectives on reality, not reality itself.”He was active in the drama club at Great Neck High School and in student productions at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he spent his senior year. In 1954, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he continued to study theater and wrote his first one-act plays before graduating in 1958. His honors thesis was titled “The Pessimism of Jean Anouilh,” the French dramatist.Mr. van Itallie settled in Greenwich Village. He worked for several years adapting and writing scripts for television, particularly for “Look Up and Live,” a Sunday morning anthology program on religious themes broadcast on CBS. It was a period when many TV shows had corporate sponsors that had to be appeased, but his wasn’t one of them; “Look Up and Live” gave the writers a measure of freedom.“All you had to do was please God and CBS,” he said.He was continuing to write plays on his own. “Motel,” the third piece of the “America Hurrah” trilogy, was actually the first to be written, in 1961 or ’62.“I was about three years out of Harvard, living in Greenwich Village and knocking on the door of Broadway theater,” he told The Plain Dealer decades later. “And I wasn’t getting in. I think that ‘Motel’ grew out of my anger — partly at that situation, but probably a much deeper anger at the way my mind had been conventionalized and conditioned. It just rose up out of me.”The success of “America Hurrah” in New York spawned other productions, though they sometimes ran into resistance, including in London, where the graffiti scrawled in “Motel” offended censors. In Mobile, Ala., a production by the University of South Alabama at a city-owned theater in 1968 was shut down by the mayor, Lambert C. Mims, after two performances.“It is filth, pure and simple,” the mayor said, “and I think it is a crying shame that Alabama taxpayers’ money has been used to produce such degrading trash.”Among Mr. van Itallie’s other works with Open Theater was “The Serpent,” a collaborative piece inspired by the book of Genesis that he shaped into a script. It was first performed in Rome during a European tour in 1968 and later staged in New York.In the 1970s Mr. van Itallie became known for translations.“I did my work as a playwright backwards,” he once said, “creating new theatrical forms in the ’60s, and in the ’70s going back to study masters like Chekhov.”Later still he did some acting, including performing a one-man autobiographical play called “War, Sex and Dreams,” which related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. D.J.R. Bruckner reviewed a performance of the work at the Cafe at La MaMa in 1999 for The Times, calling it the “often amusing and often sad confession of a man in his 60s whose heart is lonely and who teases one into wondering what, despite his remarkable candor, he is leaving out.”Mr. van Itallie split his time between a home in Manhattan and the farm in Rowe, Mass., which is home to his Shantigar Foundation. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his stepmother, Christine van Itallie.In remembering Mr. van Itallie, Ms. Yoo called to mind her predecessor, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2011.“I think of Ellen Stewart and him looking down at us and insisting that we move and make change,” she said. More

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      La MaMa’s Season Includes an Indigenous Take on Shakespeare

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      A version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is planned, along with the company’s puppet series, an examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and more.In a season that is expected to include the reopening of its flagship theater after a three-year, $24 million renovation, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present an Indigenous take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a vaudeville concert that explores the history of cannabis.“We’re in a revolutionary time right now,” Mia Yoo, the artistic director of the theater, on the Lower East Side, said in an interview, “and we need to think about who the voices are that we need to look to to guide us.”The original home of La MaMa, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is at 74A East Fourth Street. It is slated to reopen in January with two flexible, acoustically separated theaters; green rooms; a cafe; and an open-air roof terrace. All of the shows this season will take place at two of the company’s other spaces — the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs, both at 66 East Fourth Street. When 74A is reopened there will be an additional slate of productions announced.The season will kick off with the La MaMa Puppet Series (Sept. 27-Oct. 24), a biannual festival of new contemporary puppet theater. It will be followed by in-person and online performances of “A Few Deep Breaths” (Oct. 27-30), a collaboration among seven writers, including Adrienne Kennedy, Chuck Mee and Robert Patrick, that premiered online at La MaMa in June and is a co-presentation with CultureHub, La MaMa’s digital arts division.The world premiere of James E. Reynolds’s “History/Our Story: The Trail to Tulsa” will run Dec. 9 through Dec. 12. Dance, music and spoken word performances will examine the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of America’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence. There will be a post-performance audience discussion following the show.In January, La MaMa, HERE Arts Center and the Prototype Festival will present the world premiere of Talvin Wilks and Baba Israel’s “Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville,” exploring the history of the plant through music, dance and spoken word. Also in January, the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s “God’s Fool,” an interpretation of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, will have its world premiere.The world premiere of “Misdemeanor Dream,” a Native American adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will open in March. The production, which has a cast of 20 Indigenous actors, will be performed by Spiderwoman Theater, an all-women Native American company, and directed by Muriel Miguel, the company’s founder and artistic director.Later in the spring, Qendra Multimedia, a Kosovo-based cultural organization that focuses on contemporary theater and literature, and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company will present the U.S. premiere of “Balkan Bordello,” a play aiming to expose the fragility of democracy within the framework of Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia. And concluding the season, in May, will be the New York premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s reimagined musical composition “The Beautiful Lady,” which adapts the words of Russian poets who lived and performed in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It will be directed by Anne Bogart, one of the founders of SITI Company, which will take its final bow in 2022.Audience members must show proof of vaccination to attend performances, and masks are required at all times. Children under the age of 12 are welcome, but must be masked. For more information, visit lamama.org. More

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      New York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in April

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew York to Allow Limited Live Performances to Resume in AprilThe state will allow plays, concerts and other performances to start again April 2 for audiences of up to 100 people indoors, or 200 outdoors.New York State is relaxing coronavirus restrictions and allowing venues to reopen next month to limited audiences. The musicians Jon Batiste and Endea Owens performed at a pop-up concert last month at the Javits Center.Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMarch 3, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETPlays, concerts and other performances can resume in New York starting next month — but with sharply reduced capacity limits — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Wednesday.Mr. Cuomo, speaking at a news conference in Albany, said that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and a requirement that all attendees wear masks and be socially distanced. Those limits would be increased — to 150 people indoors or 500 people outdoors — if all attendees test negative before entering.A handful of venues immediately said they would begin holding live performances, which, with a handful of exceptions, have not taken place in New York since Broadway shut down last March 12.The producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal said they expected some of the earliest performances would take place with pop-up programs inside Broadway theaters, as well as with programming at nonprofit venues that have flexible spaces, including the Apollo Theater, the Park Avenue Armory, St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Shed, Harlem Stage, La MaMa and the National Black Theater.“That communion of audience and performer, which we’ve craved for a year, we can finally realize,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, which plans to begin indoor performances for limited-capacity audiences in early April.The new rules will not affect commercial productions of Broadway plays and musicals, which are still most likely to open after Labor Day, according to Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League.“For a traditional Broadway show, the financial model just doesn’t work,” she said. “How do we know that? Because shows that get that kind of attendance close.”Mr. Cuomo announced his plan to ease restrictions as New York, along with New Jersey, has been adding new coronavirus cases at the highest rates in the country over the last week: both reported 38 new cases per 100,000 people. (The nation as a whole is averaging 20 per 100,000 people.) And New York City is currently adding cases at a per capita rate roughly three times higher than that of Los Angeles County.The labor union Actors’ Equity responded by calling on Mr. Cuomo to “prioritize getting members of the arts sector vaccinated.”Many nonprofit leaders welcomed the new rules as a sign of hope and a first step toward recovery. “We have suffered immense loss and there’s a way to go,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, “but this policy change signals that we are turning a corner on the worst crisis the American theater has ever experienced.”Lincoln Center and the Glimmerglass Festival have already announced plans to perform outdoors this year, and the new rules clarify how many people can attend.“We welcome the new guidelines and want to serve as many people on our campus as is safe,” said Isabel Sinistore, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, which is planning to open 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces on April 7.For many New York music venues, operating at 33 percent capacity still may not be enough to make reopening economically feasible, give the costs of running the venues and paying performers.“It doesn’t make financial sense for the Blue Note to open with only 66 seats for shows,” said Steven Bensusan, the president of the Blue Note Entertainment Group, whose flagship jazz club is in Greenwich Village.Smaller music venues, which are among the eligible recipients of $15 billion in federal aid, have been anxiously awaiting permission to reopen. But even with growing vaccination numbers and New York’s latest rule change, it may still take months for the touring industry to resume, and even then venues say they will need help.The Blue Note, along with some other jazz spots that serve food, had reopened last fall for dinner performances, allowing them to put on some shows without running afoul of state regulations that had banned anything but “incidental” music. (Some venues, and musicians, had filed lawsuits challenging those rules.) Then the city shut down indoor dining again, and some clubs did not reopen when it was allowed to resume last month.Michael Swier, the owner of the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge, two of New York’s best-known rock clubs, said that the state’s order that venues require social distancing and mask-wearing means that the true capacity at many spaces may be much lower.“Given that social distancing is still part of the metric, it brings us back down to an approximate 20 percent capacity, which is untenable,” Mr. Swier said.Several promoters and venue operators said they were holding out to reopen at 100 percent capacity, which many hope can happen this summer.But some small nonprofits immediately expressed interest. At the Tank, a Midtown Manhattan arts venue with a 98-seat theater, Meghan Finn, its artistic director, said that within hours of the governor’s announcement she started hearing from comedians eager to resume indoor performance.“Having the ability to use our space is not something we will pass up,” Ms. Finn said.The Joyce Theater in Manhattan had been expecting to bring audiences back to see live dance in September, but Linda Shelton, its executive director, said that she and her team had “hard work” to do in the coming days, as they assess whether staging a performance in the near term makes financial sense and can be done safely.“We’ve got a few things that we could present pretty quickly,” she said.Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, home to the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, the site of a respected music festival each summer, called the moves a “welcome first step.”“One hundred is a good beginning number,” Mr. Botstein said. “That’s April’s number. Let’s hope June’s number is larger.”A variety of nonprofit theaters said they found the news encouraging.Paige Evans, the artistic director of Signature Theater, said that she had already commissioned the playwright Lynn Nottage and the director Miranda Haymon to create a multimedia performance installation in the theater’s capacious lobby this summer, and that the new rules should allow for audiences to attend.Rebecca Robertson, the founding president and executive producer of the Park Avenue Armory, said she, too, is eager to welcome people back. “To have live audiences responding to the work is going to be thrilling,” she said.Other organizations said the relaxed rules would allow them to imagine new programming. El Museo del Barrio said it would seek to develop outdoor work for parks, on streets, or in borrowed spaces.“Finally,” said Leonard Jacobs, interim executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in southeast Queens, “we have good guidance from the state to help us take the first steps back to normal life.”Ben Sisario and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Theater Duo’s ‘Last Gasp’ Doesn’t Look Like the End

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best TV ShowsBest DanceBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Theater Duo’s ‘Last Gasp’ Doesn’t Look Like the EndAs Split Britches, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver have made off-kilter theater for 40 years. Memory loss, and a pandemic, haven’t stopped their creating.Peggy Shaw, left, and Lois Weaver near their Catskills home. They are on-and-off personal partners, but a professional pair for decades.Credit…Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesBy More