Liberation (Play)

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    Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring

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    An actor, musician and writer, White is also now an in-demand stage director. “I am looking, I am hungry, I am searching,” she said.This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama “Liberation” Off Broadway, then the two-hander “The Last Five Years” on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing “Macbeth in Stride,” her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.During the song “Reach for It,” White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. “Power’s not supposed to look like me,” she sang into a microphone.Maybe it should.A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series “I’m a Virgo”) and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said.White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.“There’s nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,” she said.With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of “Macbeth in Stride” in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris.Elias Williams for The New York TimesWe 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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      Review: In ‘Liberation,’ the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

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      Bess Wohl’s moving new play, about a group of women in 1970s Ohio, explores the power of sisterhood and the limits of motherhood.How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?That’s one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in “Liberation,” her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play’s warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: “It’s almost impossible to have both.”At any rate, it hasn’t been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys’ teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats “are the same thing,” she says.) Denying that she is the group’s leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone’s contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.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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      ‘Urinetown’ and Other Plays and Musicals to See in February

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      Also onstage in February: Calista Flockhart in a Sam Shepard revival, boldface names in Joy Behar’s “My First Ex-Husband” and a marionette made of ice.Let some brilliant theater artists — like Jeff Hiller in “Urinetown,” Susannah Flood in “Liberation” and Tonya Pinkins in “My First Ex-Husband” — tell you a story this month. Here are 10 shows to tempt you, Off Broadway and beyond.‘Urinetown’If you are allergic to bathroom humor, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Tony Award-winning musical satire probably is not for you. Winkingly Brechtian, with echoes of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” it’s set in a dystopia where private toilets are illegal and public facilities charge for use — a situation ripe for rebellion. Directed by Teddy Bergman (“KPOP”) for New York City Center Encores!, this brief revival stars Jordan Fisher, Rainn Wilson, Keala Settle and Jeff Hiller. (Through Feb. 16, New York City Center)‘Anywhere’Ashwaty Chennatt as Antigone with a melting Oedipus in Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Anywhere” at Here.Richard TermineA marionette made of ice plays a wandering, melting, disappearing Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone in this puppet piece by the French company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, which uses bits of text from Henry Bauchau’s novel “Oedipus on the Road.” Conceived and directed by Élise Vigneron, whose interest in ephemerality has led her to work repeatedly with ice puppets, it is presented with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as part of Basil Twist’s Dream Music Puppetry program. Recommended for ages 11 and up. (Through March 2, Here)‘My Man Kono’The New York Times once described Charlie Chaplin’s longtime assistant, Toraichi Kono, as “the keeper of his privacy.” An immigrant from Japan who made fleeting appearances in Chaplin films, this “combination valet, bodyguard and chauffeur” is the title character of Philip W. Chung’s historically based play, which follows Kono’s fortunes as he is suspected of espionage and imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for Pan Asian Repertory Theater. (Through March 9, A.R.T./New York Theaters)‘Grangeville’This new two-hander by the Obie Award winner Samuel D. Hunter (“A Case for the Existence of God”) stars Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks as estranged brothers with different fathers, discrete wounds and far-flung lives — one in their Idaho hometown, the other in a city thousands of miles away. But they have a shared filial task: caring for their sick mother. Jack Serio (“Uncle Vanya”) directs for Signature Theater. (Through March 16, Signature Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More