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    Adam Driver in ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ a Satire of Sincerity

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    A country music star embodies the clichés of celebrity in an Off Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 comedy.Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket there.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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      Adam Driver Is to Star Off Broadway as a Country-Western Singer

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      The actor will return to the stage this fall in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.”Adam Driver, a Broadway alumnus and prolific film and television actor best known for “Girls” and “Star Wars,” will return to the stage this fall to portray a narcissistic country-western singer in a limited-run Off Broadway comedy.The play, “Hold On to Me Darling,” was written by Kenneth Lonergan, an accomplished playwright (“The Waverly Gallery”), screenwriter and film director. (He won an Oscar for the “Manchester by the Sea” screenplay.)In “Hold On to Me Darling,” the main character decides to move home to Tennessee after his mother dies. The collision of a big star and a small town fuel the comedy of the play, which was first staged in 2016 at Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit.The new production, a commercial endeavor, is to begin previews Sept. 24 and open Oct. 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. The run is scheduled to last just 13 weeks, although sometimes limited-run plays are extended.The production will be directed by Neil Pepe, who also directed the 2016 version. Pepe is the Atlantic’s artistic director.The producers of this fall’s run are Seaview, Sue Wagner, and John Johnson, who were among the producers of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” which starred Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott and had a run at the Lortel that began last fall. That show’s success helped draw the attention of producers to commercial Off Broadway, a sector of the theater business that had atrophied over time, but is now attracting more interest because the producing costs are far lower than on Broadway.Driver, 40, is no stranger to the stage. A graduate of Juilliard’s acting program, he has appeared on Broadway three times, most recently starring in a 2019 revival of “Burn This,” and he has also performed in several previous Off Broadway productions.Ben Brantley, then the Times’s chief theater critic, named “Hold On to Me Darling” among the best shows of 2016, and praised the play as “a tragicomic commentary on a culture ruled by the religion of fame.” More

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      in Television

      How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards

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      The screenwriters’ strike threatened next month’s broadcast, a key marketing moment for the fragile theater industry. That’s when leading dramatists sprang into action.Martyna Majok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was revising her musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” after a long day in a developmental workshop when she heard the news: The union representing striking screenwriters was not going to grant a waiver for the Tony Awards, imperiling this year’s telecast.So at three in the morning, she set aside her script to join a group of playwrights frantically writing emails and making phone calls to leaders of the Writers Guild of America, urging the union not to make the pandemic-hobbled theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood dispute. “I had to try,” she said.Surprising even themselves, the army of artists succeeded. The screenwriters’ union agreed to a compromise: it said it would not picket the ceremony as long as the show does not rely on a written script.“Theater is having a very hard time coming back from the devastating effects of the pandemic — shows are struggling and nonprofit theaters are struggling terribly,” said Tony Kushner, who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest living playwrights, and is, like many of his peers, also a screenwriter. “Ethically and morally, this felt like a recognition of the particular vulnerability of the theater industry. It’s the right thing to do, and costs us nothing.”Kushner, who is best known for the Pulitzer-winning play “Angels in America,” is a fiery supporter of the strike who freely denounces the “unconscionable greed” of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began. But he spent a weekend calling and writing union leaders in both New York and Los Angeles, urging them to find a way to let the Tony Awards happen, arguing that canceling them would have been far more damaging to theater artists than to CBS, which broadcasts the event.He was among a number of acclaimed dramatists — including David Henry Hwang and Jeremy O. Harris — who spent a weekend phoning and emailing union leaders. At least a half-dozen Pulitzer winners joined the cause, including Lynn Nottage (“Sweat” and “Ruined”), Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful”), David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) and Majok (“Cost of Living”).“Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, is nominated for best new play. Majok joined other playwrights lobbying the writers’ union to allow the Tonys telecast to proceed. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMajok, who is a first-time Tony nominee herself this year for “Cost of Living,” said, “I approached them with respect and gratitude for all they have done for me,” she said, “but this decision was impacting so many of my colleagues and friends deeply, in an industry that is still financially struggling.”Writers are never the main attraction at the Tony Awards. The annual ceremony centers musical theater, hoping that razzle-dazzle song and dance numbers will inspire viewers to get up off their couches and come visit Broadway. The telecast often struggles with how to represent serious drama.But playwrights say they treasure the Tonys, because the ceremony introduces new audiences to theater. “In one way or another, it’s all connected,” Kushner said.And for once playwrights actually had power, because in recent years, as the number of scripted series on television and streaming services has exploded, many of them have also taken jobs working in film and television, which pays much better than the theater industry. Many of the playwrights concerned about the Tony Awards were also members of the Writers Guild — some quite successful, like Kushner, who wrote the scripts for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “Lincoln,” “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans,” and Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote “The Waverly Gallery” for the stage and “Manchester by the Sea” for the screen.“Most playwrights are W.G.A. members, because they have to make a living and get health insurance,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, which is a trade association of theater writers. “And yes, there was a great deal of lobbying of the W.G.A. by many of them to find a way to get the broadcast on.”The screenwriters’ union was torn over whether to assist the Tony Awards, with its eastern branch, filled with playwright members more sympathetic than the affiliated western branch, which is more Hollywood-oriented. It did not go unnoticed that many theatrical workers have been vocally supporting the writers’ strike, including Kate Shindle, the president of the Actors’ Equity Association, who has brought members of her union to the picket lines and who spoke with the heads of both branches of the screenwriters’ guild.“There was no master strategy involved — we were just standing up for the writers,” Shindle said. “But I’m happy with the way that it seems like a decision came about: writers talking to and debating with each other, which feels like the right thing.”The Tonys seem likely to be a rare exception. In the days following the greenlighting of the theatrical awards, this year’s Peabody Awards, which honor storytelling in electronic media, were canceled, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor work on television, were postponed.Asked about the decision, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the screenwriters’ guild’s eastern branch, offered an emailed statement that said, in part, “we recognize the devastating impact the absence of a Tonys would have on our New York theater community. Here in W.G.A. East, we have many, many members who are playwrights, and we are deeply intertwined with our sister unions whose members work in the theater.”Playwrights were not actually the first choice of Broadway boosters strategizing about how to save the Tonys — at first, industry leaders thought they might look to prominent politicians and famous actors to make their case. But they quickly realized that playwrights, because of their ties to the W.G.A., were better positioned to influence the discussion. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” and Gina Gionfriddo (“Rapture, Blister, Burn”) rallied writers to the cause, along with the agent Joe Machota, who is the head of theater for Creative Artists Agency.This year, they argued, would be an especially unfortunate time to downgrade the Tony Awards.Ariana DeBose, who hosted last year’s Tony Awards, is expected back this year, but it’s unclear what a ceremony without a script will look like.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway attendance and overall grosses remain well below prepandemic levels, and new musicals are struggling — four of the five nominated shows are losing money most weeks.Unlike the Oscars, which generally take place after the theatrical runs of nominated films, the Tonys take place early in the run of most nominated musicals, so they can translate into ticket sales. The Tonys matter for plays in a different way: nominations and wins have an enormous impact on how often those works are staged, read and taught.“People that don’t work in playwriting don’t always have a meaningful understanding of how important Broadway is to Off Broadway and to regional theaters — they’re really a beacon for the community at large, and even if you don’t care about the glitz and the glamour, if they start to lose money, it has impacts all over the country,” said Tanya Barfield, a playwright and television writer who is the co-director of the playwriting program at Juilliard.After she heard her union had denied a waiver for the Tony Awards, a “heartbroken” Barfield joined a picket line with a homemade “I ❤️ the Tony Awards” sticker on her WGA sign. And she wrote union leaders. “We wanted to make sure theaters did not become a casualty,” she said.Another concern: this year’s Tony Awards feature an unusually diverse group of nominees, reflecting the increasingly diverse array of shows staged on Broadway since 2020. Five of this year’s nominated new plays and play revivals are by Black writers; four of the five nominees for best actor in a play are Black; the best score category for the first time includes an Asian American woman; and the acting nominees include two gender nonconforming performers as well as a woman who is a double amputee.“We need to showcase what we’ve been seeing with the diverse talent and rich storytelling of the past few years,” Majok said.The Tonys will be different this year. The event will take place, as planned, at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, with a live audience, live performances of musical numbers from nominated shows, and the presentation and acceptance of awards. But there will be no scripted material (a draft script had been submitted, but will not be used) and no scripted opening number (Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to write one). Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress who had been named its host for the second year in a row, is still expected to take part, but it is not clear what role she will play.One new element that is expected at this year’s ceremony? Shout-outs to the striking screenwriters. Hwang, a W.G.A. member who called and emailed union leaders asking them to rethink their position on the Tonys, said, “I anticipate that there will be a lot of speeches that express our appreciation and support for the guild on Tony night.” More

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      in Television

      The Key to Gerri on ‘Succession’? ‘Inside She’s a Nervous Wreck’

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      For decades the New York theater world paid homage to J. Smith-Cameron, a veteran stage actress who has often been compared to Carole Lombard for her precise timing and comic verve. When she wasn’t doing Molière or Shakespeare, she was impressing critics and her fellow actors with her performances in plays by Paul Rudnick, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley.Now her hard-won local fame has been eclipsed by her breakout role on “Succession,” the HBO drama about a venal Murdoch-like family locked in a “King Lear”-like power struggle. As Gerri Kellman, the long-suffering general counsel and consigliere to Logan Roy, the vicious, vacillating patriarch played by Brian Cox, Ms. Smith-Cameron has turned an ancillary player into a surprisingly complex character. It’s a grown-up role for a grown-up woman.Gerri’s cool gaze, raised eyebrows and clipped interjections, along with her shrewd analyses of corporate shenanigans, have made her an avatar of female power for women of all ages, especially young professionals who find that attaining success in their fields may require them to tiptoe around monstrous male egos. As a result, Ms. Smith-Cameron has gone from a darling of the stage to social media star, with memes galore and Twitter accounts dedicated to Gerri’s every eye roll.“Characters like hers are often written as these barracuda businesswomen or hard-boiled lady detectives, people who are impenetrable or invincible,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “What I like about Gerri is she’s very powerful, but inside she’s a nervous wreck. She’s not impervious to things. That’s why I think she strikes a note. There’s a vulnerability to her and a jittery, thinking-on-her-feet quality. She’s not just coming in and blasting people.”On a brisk March afternoon, Ms. Smith-Cameron, who goes by “J.,” settled in with a cup of coffee onto a squashy blue velvet sofa in her living room. Brownie, a grizzled and wary 12-year-old terrier mix, was napping, fitfully, among the pillows, occasionally rousing herself to bark at a guest.For the last eight years, Ms. Smith-Cameron and her husband, Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright, screenwriter and director, have rented this cozy, two-story apartment in a Federal-style townhouse in downtown Manhattan from the actor Matthew Broderick. Mr. Broderick and Mr. Lonergan have been pals since high school, and they and Ms. Smith-Cameron have worked together, on and off, for decades.Ms. Smith-Cameron with Mr. Broderick in a 1999 production of Emlyn Williams’s “Night Must Fall” at the Lyceum Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s been thrilling to watch J. cross over from a fixture on the New York stage into the collective consciousness,” Mr. Broderick said in a phone interview. “She’s so smart and her humor is so slyly funny. She doesn’t miss a joke.”There are a few Broderick touches in the apartment, notably paintings by Mr. Broderick’s mother, Patricia. “This one is called something like, ‘No matter how old or sick they are, no one likes to look a wreck,’” Ms. Smith-Cameron said, pointing out a piece above the fireplace, an expressionist image of a stately woman in disarray. “Isn’t it great? It’s so thought through.”Gerri has been good to the Smith-Cameron-Lonergan household.“She’s been supporting us for the last six years,” said Mr. Lonergan, who is known for the films “Manchester by the Sea” and “You Can Count On Me.” “No qualms with her whatsoever. Whatever she needs to get done it’s fine with me.”He mused about what, if anything, the character has in common with his wife.“J. has pointed out that Gerri is very anxious,” he said. “J. is sometimes anxious but not in a maneuvering way — she just gets anxious and overwhelmed. Her wheels are always turning. When you hug her, she’s very nicely hugging you back, but you get the sense she’s thinking of other things.”“I’m sorry,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said.It was Ms. Smith-Cameron’s rapport with Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, the youngest, sassiest Roy, that inspired a “Succession” subplot that completely unhinged the internet. Gerri and Roman were in a jousting and affectionate mentor-mentee relationship as she took him under her wing. But the show’s writers, noting the actors’ off-camera banter, pushed the relationship further. (Off the set, the prankish Mr. Culkin teases Ms. Smith-Cameron as relentlessly as Roman does Gerri. This summer, during a cast dinner, she said, she was so exasperated with him she threw a drink in his face.)Ms. Smith-Cameron, with Kieran Culkin, in a scene from Season 3 of “Succession.” She went off script to call his character a “little slime puppy” in one episode.HBOMidway through the second season, Roman’s Gerri-baiting and his off-color jokes, and Gerri’s snappy retorts, had morphed into a queasy dominatrix-submissive scenario. During a phone call with Roman, Gerri realizes, to her horror, that her tart insults are turning the conversation into phone sex, at least on his end. Ms. Smith-Cameron found herself improvising, which was how the phrase “little slime puppy,” a put-down she coined on the spot, entered the popular lexicon. Or at least the vernacular of “Succession” fanatics.By the end of Season 3, things had gone completely off the rails. Roman tried to text Gerri a close-up of his anatomy, only to misfire, sending the photo to his father. For the first time in her career, Gerri found herself in a vulnerable position. That precariousness, and her response to it, will define her path in the show’s fourth and final season, which has its first episode Sunday.“Gerri is in a restless, insecure place through the whole season, but also, I feel, getting wise to her heft,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “I always felt like there was something kind of on the boil with her. I can say that it’s the first time in her career that she’s not felt on solid ground — and she’s angry about it. She’s angry with both Roman and Logan. She’s of an age and has accrued money and could easily retire, but she’s not the type. She’s a workaholic and I think she feels like she’s in her prime. People are always asking me, ‘Why does she take it?’ I think it’s thrilling for her, it’s a high, like surfing in a dangerous sea.“I don’t know that I could be Gerri in real life, and yet acting is very insecure,” she continued. “You have to go out and kill for food every time.”Ms. Smith-Cameron started acting in plays in New York in the 1980s. “I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show,” she said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMs. Smith-Cameron, 65, was born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Ky., the youngest of three children, and grew up in Greenville, S.C. Her father was an architect and engineer; her mother worked at Head Start and as an assistant librarian. Ms. Smith-Cameron studied at the Florida State University School of Theater in Tallahassee but dropped out, because she was working so much in regional theater and small films.She changed her name in stages: First to J. Smith, because Jeannie, as she was known, seemed too flimsy for an actor. She then exchanged Smith for Cameron, a family name, for additional heft. The hyphenate Smith-Cameron came a bit later, and by accident, after a director printed her name on a film poster that way.In the early 80s, Ms. Smith-Cameron moved to Manhattan and has worked to growing acclaim ever since. In the 1997 Off Broadway production of Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” she played an irresistible con artist, delivering a manic mash-up of Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly in a role that won her an Obie. Ben Brantley called her performance “deliriously pleasurable” in his review for The New York Times.“In my 60s, to have this attention, it’s just weird,” she said. “It’s not like I didn’t have notice before, but I always did these off-the-beaten track things. I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show.”Ms. Smith-Cameron has long been a booster of independent film. You can see her right now in “The Year Between,” by Alex Heller, a comedic drama based on the filmmaker’s own experience with bipolar disorder, which caused her to drop out of college and move back home with her parents. Ms. Smith-Cameron plays the tart Midwestern mother, and Steve Buscemi is her kindly husband. It’s not the first time they have been married onscreen. “He’s so great,” she said of Mr. Buscemi. “We both love to champion independent movies because they’re not built on the premise of making money. They’re exhausting, you have to work really hard fast, but when it fits, it’s a joy.”The actress in an ensemble scene from the 2022 film “The Year Between.”Gravitas Ventures“J. lifts people up,” said Zoe Winters, another fine stage actor scooped up by the “Succession” team who plays Kerry, Logan Roy’s immaculate assistant. “I’ll get texts from her that say, ‘You’re quite something. You’re dazzling.’ She has an endless capacity for that. Ultimately, I think what she’s always trying to do is make people feel good and make really good art.”Ms. Smith-Cameron and Mr. Lonergan met cute, as she put it, while working on a series of one-act plays in the mid-90s. She said she found him appealingly grumpy and quietly hilarious.As she recalled, “I was like, ‘Why have I never met this actor? He’s of an age, he’s really good, he’s really smart! Is he gay? Is he married?’ I began to do a little research.”She learned he was a playwright, acting in another’s scene, who had also written what she thought was the best play of the program. When they collided one night on the stairs of the theater, she complimented his work, comparing it to a William Inge play. When he looked blank, she challenged him, saying, “Don’t you know who William Inge is?”“I had been married and divorced in my 20s,” she said, “and I was going through a chilly spell. I didn’t think I’d fall in love or get married or have kids. So I was a little bitter and a little saucy. But I had never been this brazen.”The couple married in 2000; their daughter, Nellie, is 21.Ms. Cameron-Smith and Mr. Lonergan at the Season 4 premiere of “Succession” at Lincoln Center this month.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“There’s something conspiratorial about J., as if she can’t wait to let the world in on the most delicious secret,” said Mr. Rudnick, who cast her in his 1994 Off Broadway comedy, “The Naked Truth.”“She was helplessly, magnetically funny,” Mr. Rudnick continued. “I kept making this one speech longer, just so I could watch J. perform it. She developed a brilliant set of almost balletic gestures, which she informed me were called ‘puppet hands.’ And over the course of an especially long rehearsal, we developed a system where if J. performed her monologue flawlessly, I’d give her a chocolate chip cookie. She of course ended up with an entire bag of Chips Ahoy!”Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and an executive producer of “Succession,” said he had taken delight in Ms. Smith-Cameron’s stage work for years. Even though she has often been known for playing more flamboyant characters, he is not surprised by the nuanced quality she has brought to her character.“For Gerri, J. found this astringent comic tone that suggests she’s in on the joke of working for these entitled jerks who think they know what they’re doing but often have no idea,” he said. “She’s their corporate babysitter even as she has to be subordinate to them. There’s a tragicomedy to her situation, and J. is an actor who can deliver on that.”Ms. Smith-Cameron at home.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMr. Lonergan, who had been puttering in the kitchen, wandered back into the living room, still mulling over the question of whether his wife has anything in common with the Waystar Royco general counsel.“The other thing I was going to say is, J. doesn’t take full command of things but they kind of go the way she wants them to go, sooner or later,” he said. “She’s very strong-willed. At first I would have said there wasn’t any similarity between J. and Gerri, but they both have their eyes on the main point. Both are extremely observant and notice shifts in what’s going on around them. They’re both interested in substance, and neither of them needs to be the center of attention in a room — and nobody is smarter than either of them in a room.”Ms. Smith-Cameron was beaming. “Thank you,” she said. More