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    Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting

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    A new play about a sisterhood of sorrows brings something scary to the stage, but is delivering shocks and icks enough?Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Don’t they always?Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. Of the small knife she occasionally brandishes, Marlow, who gives Wednesday Addams vibes, comfortingly says, “If I put it in your eye, it wouldn’t even hit your brain.”Good to know — and basically true of the play itself.“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is. Raleigh is not very maternal; Marlow says she is their mother “sometimes.” Other than feeding them and untangling their tresses as if weeding a garden, she generally leaves them to their own devices.At the start of the play, those devices include some kind of gas-mask contraption that an ethereal deaf girl named Bernie (Millicent Simmonds) is making. (Hint: It’s not a gas mask.) What Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse: a kind of tapestry of innards. (She is presumably called Squirrel because of her tendency to gnaw things like phone cords that if left un-gnawed would short-circuit the plot.)Luckily, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just making nice. She translates for Bernie and, when the outsiders arrive, calms them with good humor. Explaining her name, she admits that it may be unusual but “it’s no A1655.”The outsiders, a childless couple, need calming because they’ve just wrecked their car on a requisitely dark and snowy mountain road. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving; swerving to hit a deer, she hit it anyway. The accident has left Henry (Paul Sparks) with his ankle mangled, or maybe his leg or maybe his soul — it’s a restless manglement, moving through him as the play’s 95 minutes tick by. In any case, Raleigh splints him up, and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.Well, not really moonshine.“Grey House,” which comes to Broadway from Chicago, where it had its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theater in 2019, keeps its secrets as quiet as its shocks are conspicuous. Only gradually do we get any sense of how the marriage of Max and Henry was crashing even before the accident, or why the coven of girls, if not their minder, has such an interest in helping it come apart completely. By the time we do begin to put together a possible explanatory scheme, it’s too late to matter; the trappings of horror, if not any meaningful horror beneath, have scared the bejesus out of the psychological drama.From left, Sophia Anne Caruso, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Millicent Simmonds in “Grey House” at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least those trappings are superb. Though I’ve left undescribed the two other humans (at least I think they are humans) who fill out the cast, it gives nothing away to discuss the even-more-prominent title character. As designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz, and especially as given voice by the sound designer, Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be the repository of feelings and history that everyone else is mostly sidestepping. It moans while they tease.That teasing quality, though sometimes charming — and often, if you are a scaredy-cat, a relief from the hard-core jolts — is the giveaway that “Grey House” should not be taken too seriously, regardless of its allusions to real-world horror of the past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and staging will be manipulated to scare and delight us, to give much credence to anything deeper. In that way, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, squishing familiar arias — gore, ghosts, what have you — into a chic and enjoyable if mostly empty new container.Letting go of meaning in the theater in favor of sensation is a big ask today. The ambition of playwrights to speak directly to our times through emotional naturalism has largely wiped horror, mystery and their ilk from our stages. One of the last such plays to appear on Broadway was an adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” in 2015, starring Bruce Willis as an author of mystery novels and, as the psychotic fan who nearly nurses him to death, once again the great Laurie Metcalf.So another thing that has to be said for “Grey House” is that it has given artists who want to explore the opportunities and particular language of an unfashionable form a rare chance to do so. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn that opportunity into a meal; by investing in its clichés without condescension, they do much to de-cliché them.But what makes the effort meaningful to artists — Holloway began thinking about the story after a family tragedy — may not make it meaningful to us. And though the theater is already a kind of haunted house, filled with odd beings and strange noises, horror may simply work better in a less live medium. When Max and Henry show up at the cabin, unaware that anyone is there, they look around at the spooky surroundings, listen to the wind howling, and somehow find it all so familiar.“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. Which is the problem exactly.Grey HouseAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; greyhousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

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      Levi Holloway on his psychological thriller starring Laurie Metcalf: “It wears the jacket of horror. But I think it’s more heart than horror.”When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind. Martin McDonagh’s gruesome “The Pillowman” is one. Tracy Letts came up with two: the gleefully nasty thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoia tale “Bug.”This certainly makes Levi Holloway’s “Grey House,” now in previews at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, an oddity. The premise is classic horror: Stranded in a blizzard, a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) end up in an eerie house filled with rather unusual children and their minder (Laurie Metcalf).“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, which premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”Paul Sparks, center, as a stranded traveler who finds shelter in a house occupied by, clockwise from left: Colby Kipnes, Sophia Anne Caruso, Eamon Patrick O’Connell, Millicent Simmonds and Alyssa Emily Marvin in “Grey House.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe genre may be scarce onstage but none of the major players here are strangers to works investigating disturbing tensions or the boundaries of reality. Metcalf and Sparks share a Stephen King connection: she starred in “Misery” on Broadway, and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” which is set in King’s fictional universe. Maslany’s virtuosic portrayal of numerous clones in the series “Orphan Black” earned her an Emmy Award. Millicent Simmonds played Emily Blunt’s daughter, Regan, in “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part 2,” while Sophia Anne Caruso played Lydia in the “Beetlejuice” musical on Broadway and starred in the Netflix fantasy film “The School for Good and Evil.”Even the director, Joe Mantello, has partaken, putting on his actor’s cap to play a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”During a series of interviews that took place in the Lyceum’s appropriately atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and the particular challenges and rewards of “Grey House,” which opens on May 30. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Levi HollowayWhen Holloway was 5, his father took him to see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a movie theater. “The skin was taken off of me,” Holloway said, “I was so scared.”Undeterred, his father eventually bought him a subscription to the horror film magazine Fangoria, so young Levi could understand the mechanics of fear. To encourage his kid to read, Dad gave him books by Stephen King, starting with “The Stand.”As a playwright, he has embraced horror partly out of genuine love (he mentioned John Carpenter’s “The Thing” as a favorite, and don’t get him started on why “The Exorcist III” is the best of the series) but also as a way to process a major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was killed at the age of 35. “It was so meaningless and pointless, and such a baffling event that it got me thinking about the why of it,” he said.“I started thinking about predestination and fate and how no matter what direction we’re going, we’re going to end up where we have to be,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write about grief, where you put it and the house that holds it.”Caruso, left, and Metcalf, who plays a minder of a group of children, in the play, directed by Joe Mantello.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSophia Anne Caruso“Mind games, manipulation, psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genre of quote horror to me,” Caruso said. “And I think that this play definitely sits in the ‘psychological thriller’ section of horror.”The young actress has her issues with the genre, in which she sees women as often losing power. “But throughout this story, we are holding a lot of power without people directly realizing it,” she said of the play’s women. (Well, maybe not all of them.)“What I love about my character is I feel like she’s always one step ahead,” Caruso said of her role, which makes the most of the actress’s gift for sardonic delivery. “She knows exactly where we’re going but she doesn’t show it, and that’s a fun frustration to play with.”Joe MantelloBefore rehearsals began, Mantello watched “The Shining,” in which he saw parallels with Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller and, yes, there are elements of gore in it, but I think it was the isolation of that family in a very wintry landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And some presence that is altering the trajectory of their lives.”As one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, Mantello is used to figuring out exacting scripts, but he initially found the one for “Grey House” to be elusive. So he asked Holloway what animated the play’s inner logic. “I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”The “grey house” is not just a physical place, either: it seems to connect to a generalized anxiety that feels very modern, even though the show is set in 1977. “I feel that the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now, and I’m very connected to the idea of people in peril,” Mantello said. Laughing, he added, “In this particular case, the danger is seemingly benign children, mysterious children.”“Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take,” said Metcalf, above right, with Holloway at the Lyceum Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesLaurie Metcalf“The thing that shook me the most was ‘The Exorcist,’” Metcalf said of her earliest encounters with horror films. “I think I was in my early teens and that did me in for horror for the next 50-something years.”And now here she is, starring in “Grey House.” Metcalf was drawn by the prospect of working again with Mantello, her frequent collaborator, and she was curious as to how he would handle a script that, she admitted, she did not “completely understand” the first time she read it. “I knew that Joe saw something in it that I wanted to be in the room to discover also,” she said.The show has to balance a tricky combination of dark wit and unsettling atmosphere. “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalf said of how the comedy and horror genres thrive on viewers’ feedback. “We’ll learn how far we can go with the humor and the thrills.”She added, “I had the same feeling in ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ which is horrific and funny,” Metcalf said, referring to performing in the Steppenwolf production of Martin McDonagh’s play, back in 1999. “Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take.”Millicent SimmondsAs Caruso pointed out, genre cinema, especially horror, can be a fraught place for women. For Simmonds, who is deaf, there is an additional layer. “It’s rare to see Deaf people who actually have that kind of power and agency to navigate a world,” she said of her character, through an interpreter. “They’re often portrayed as victims, a pity creature, somebody to help. When I read the script,” she added, “it was about just a person, not necessarily that they’re a Deaf person.”Simmonds said that in general she has a hard time dealing with spiders and graphic violence in films, and cited Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as having affected her “because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not” — something that also applies to “Grey House.”Cagey, like her colleagues, about discussing the play in detail, Simmonds allowed that she sees it as a maternal story. “It investigates this question of what is a mother,” she said. “What does a mother mean to each of us? What do you need to sacrifice to be a mother? How do you raise a family?”Paul SparksLike Mantello, Sparks connected the show to a larger sense of dread that is haunting our society, a sense that our world is unsettled. “There’s a lot of things that we can’t control and things that we don’t understand, and things that aren’t what we think they are,” he said. “All that stuff is in this play.”The actor pointed out that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope, the cabin in the woods. But Holloway spins it in a novel way, inserting a cryptic side to the story that made Sparks want to pick it apart, and decode it.But he hopes audiences show some restraint in how much they share after seeing it. “I’ve been really going out of my way to not tell people anything about what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids — I think people are not going to know what to expect. And it’s not even going to be close to anything they can imagine.“I think you’re going to be shocked,” he added. “I really do.” More

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      Laurie Metcalf to Return to Broadway in a Horror Story, ‘Grey House’

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      The play, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring Tatiana Maslany, had a well-reviewed debut in Chicago. It begins performances in April.Horror films have become a rare bright spot for contemporary Hollywood. Now a group of theater artists is hoping the genre can work on Broadway, too.The producers Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) and Robert Ahrens (“Little Shop of Horrors”) said Tuesday that they are planning to bring an unsettling new play, “Grey House,” to Broadway this spring. The production will reunite the actress Laurie Metcalf and the director Joe Mantello, each of whom has won two Tony Awards. Their most recent collaboration, a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” never made it to opening night because of the coronavirus pandemic.Metcalf, a veteran stage actress also known for her work on television (“Roseanne”) and film (“Lady Bird”), will co-star with Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) and Paul Sparks (“House of Cards”). This will not be Metcalf’s first scary story on Broadway: In 2015 she starred in a stage production of “Misery,” based on the novel by Stephen King.Also in the cast: Sophia Anne Caruso (“Beetlejuice”) and Millicent Simmonds (“A Quiet Place”).“Grey House,” written by Levi Holloway, is about a couple (Maslany and Sparks) who, after crashing their car during a snowstorm, wind up taking shelter in a cabin occupied by a group of teenage girls and a woman who claims to be their mother (Metcalf). The play had a 2019 production at A Red Orchid Theater in Chicago, where the critic Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune hailed it as “a savvy, smart, self-aware new play,” and declared that “it just happens to be legitimately terrifying.”The Broadway production, scheduled to begin previews April 29 and to open May 30 at the Lyceum Theater, will not be eligible for this year’s Tony Awards, but instead will be considered part of the 2023-24 season.Holloway, a Florida native who spent much of his career in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles, has long worked on integrating deaf and hearing performers — he co-founded Neverbird Project, a theater company for deaf and hearing young people — and one of the characters in “Grey House” is deaf. That character will be played by Simmonds, who is deaf.Holloway said in an interview that the first movie he saw was “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” when he was 5 (his father was a horror buff), but that he has mixed feelings about his play being classified in the horror genre.“It’s a word I’m never quite comfortable with,” he said. “I think all good theater is horror. By my estimation horror asks our characters to change, and they must change in order to survive, and that change usually takes the form of the truth. I think that translates to most great stories.”He said the plot of the play “just comes from my nightmares.”“It’s about a lot of things, most of which I don’t know the words for — it’s about love and pain that we carry, and the shelter we build for them both, and about the way we protect the things that hurt us the most, because who are we without our wounds?” he said. “It’s a contemplation on grief and love and how we sometimes feel safe in our pain.” More

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      As ‘A Strange Loop’ Ends, Its Creator Looks Back on a ‘Supernova’

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      Michael R. Jackson discussed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical, which closed Sunday after a nine-month Broadway run.The musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize even before it got to Broadway, and then it won the Tony Award for best musical shortly after opening. But on Sunday, it closed after only a nine-month run.It has been a tough theater season all around — “A Strange Loop” was one of six shows that closed Sunday — as the industry continues to face audiences that are smaller than they were before the pandemic.But “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a gay, Black musical theater composer endeavors to write a show about a gay, Black musical theater composer, exited at a high point: During its final week, it pulled in $955,590 at the box office, which was the highest weekly gross of its run, and which set a new house record for the Lyceum Theater.The final night was a celebration: The playwright Michael R. Jackson, who began developing this show when he was 23 and who is now 41, got a standing ovation when he took his seat. There were more standing ovations for the show’s three Tony-nominated performers, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison.Minutes after the show ended, Jackson sat for an interview about the run, the closing and his next project, in a hideaway up a spiral staircase above the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Jackson and the director of “A Strange Loop,” Stephen Brackett, at the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThis show has been part of your life for 20 years. What was this night like for you?It was emotional, and it was a reminder of why I even began to write it. I wanted to fill an empty space that I saw, both in myself and in the world. And so to see that realized and to see everybody filling in that space in all these colorful ways that are even bolder and more beautiful than what I started with was so powerful and so affirming and so necessary.There’s so much anger and pain in the show. Was that anger and pain yours, and do you still feel it?I have access to it. It’s one of many of the colors in the crayon box. But it doesn’t motivate me. There was a time in my life where the anger was the thing that propelled me forward, but I think harnessing it and digging into it and questioning it and living with it and subverting it and making fun of it and then ultimately accepting it really helped me become the artist that was able to write it.The show won the Pulitzer and the Tony but is closing earlier than you would have wanted. Do you think of the show as successful or not?The more that I’ve reflected on it, it really makes sense to me that “A Strange Loop” would be a supernova that cuts across the firmament and then explodes. It’s not necessarily a piece of art that’s meant to fill a commercial need indefinitely, and I now can’t imagine how it would do that without compromising its artistic integrity. So I consider it to be a fantastic success because that’s how I define success. And I’ll always prioritize the artistic integrity over the commercial and the financial.Jackson embraces the actor Jason Veasey at the party after the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMany people imagine that your parents are like Usher’s parents, who can’t accept his homosexuality and are skeptical of his career ambitions. I gather that’s not the case.Everything in the show is a fiction, even if it’s drawn from life. Whatever experiences I had with my parents, I took them in as I saw them, and I remixed them into a story. That’s not my parents, which I think is one reason my parents are able to watch the show and see its success and cheer for me so loudly.Do your parents accept you both as gay and as a musical theater writer?They do.I gather the show has led you to meet some famous people.As a child, I adored Whoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple” and “Soapdish” and “Sarafina!” I thought, when I heard she was coming, that when I met her I would see that lady from “The View.” But the minute I saw her eyes, she was that wonderful performer from my childhood, and that brilliant artist, who loved my show, and it was such a beautiful moment to meet her and to talk with her about the show. And then there were people who didn’t see the show, but who I got to meet as a result of it. I got to spend time with my idol, Tori Amos, and that was a life-changing experience.One person who didn’t come is Tyler Perry, who is mentioned repeatedly in the show, often critically.The interesting thing there is that he and I have a phone relationship. He called me right after I won the Pulitzer, and we text every once in a while, and we spoke recently. He’s probably one of the most complex relationships in my life with someone who I’ve never met. He has a kind of phobia around “A Strange Loop,” without having ever seen it, whereas I’ve seen most of his work. We’ll see where that relationship goes. Maybe it’ll go nowhere. I told him we need to sit down and have dinner.In the last year and a half there have been a record number of shows by Black writers on Broadway. Many have struggled at the box office, but so have a lot of other shows. What’s happening?We need to look at the larger economic realities that are happening in the world more broadly, and the ways those trickle down. A lot of people get very confused in thinking that theater and Broadway live in their own separate economy, outside of everything else, and it doesn’t.Jackson onstage with cast members at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThroughout its run, the show faced a number of cast absences. What do you think was going on?Coming out of the pandemic, there’s been illness, there’s been all kinds of things going on, and people are taking care of themselves. And I think that’s going to be a new normal: People taking care of themselves, and shows will have to adapt to that.One of the adaptations was that the weekend before the closing, you went on as Usher for three concert-style performances. What was that like?It was really cathartic and terrifying and thrilling. I went from having to live the role to having to play the role, and bringing those two halves together gave me tremendous closure. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some daily self-loathings that come in and say “Maybe the show’s not that good,” but once I stepped into it, I was again reminded of its power and of its audacity and of its singularity, and I sent daily self-loathing packing.This show has a white director and a white lead producer, which I understand has led to some pushback.There’s this hunger to infantilize me, or any Black artist, for making the choice to collaborate with who they want to collaborate with, and always wanting to use race or gender or some identity marker as an assumed obstacle, when it may not be at all. I wish that people would respect the choices that artists make and not want to undermine them by assuming that there’s some sort of racial discord that is always waiting to tear people apart or animate their artistic decisions. I’m a grown man, and I stand behind my artistic choices.Your next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” starts previews Off Broadway in March. What is it about?It’s a soap opera fever dream about representation in storytelling.I know it’s prompted in part by your own affection for soap operas. If you were a soap opera character, who would it be?Sammy Jo Carrington. She was on “Dynasty,” played with great aplomb by Heather Locklear. She’s a troublemaker, but she always gets what she wants.Jaquel Spivey and John-Michael Lyles take their bows at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDo you see any thematic overlaps with “A Strange Loop”?In some ways I’ve been thinking of it as a companion piece. It’s not a sequel. It’s not direct. But there’s themes that I’ve been working through on “A Strange Loop” that I expound upon in a larger way in “White Girl in Danger,” if that makes any sense. You’ll have to see it.What’s next for “A Strange Loop”?I’m really hoping that people will pick it up and make their own interpretations of it. It’s a story that is like a jewel that has many facets, and you can hold it up to the light and you can see different things in it, depending on how you interpret it. So I really hope that regional theaters and colleges and universities and whoever else decide to take the risk on doing it, and really put their own stamp on it. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Review: A Dazzling Ride on a Mental Merry-Go-Round

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      Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta musical arrives on Broadway with its uproarious dialogue, complex psychology and eclectic score intact.When the homophobic, God-fearing, Tyler Perry-loving mother of Usher, the protagonist of the remarkable musical “A Strange Loop,” describes her son’s art, she uses the word “radical.” She doesn’t mean it as a compliment.But “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta musical about a Black queer man’s self-perception in relation to his art, is radical. And I definitely mean that as a compliment.This musical, a production of Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, forgoes the commercial niceties and digestible narratives of many Broadway shows, delivering a story that’s searing and softhearted, uproarious and disquieting.“A Strange Loop,” which opened Tuesday night, isn’t just the musical I saw in the packed Lyceum Theater a few evenings ago; it’s also the musical Usher (Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old usher at the Broadway production of “The Lion King,” is writing right in front of us.He’s facing a few hurdles, namely his intrusive thoughts, embodied by the same six actors who originated the roles in the 2019 Off Broadway premiere: L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper. They give voice to his anxieties of being a plus-size Black queer man, his alcoholic father’s constant denigration and his mother’s pleas to stop running “up there in the homosexsh’alities” and produce a wholesome gospel play instead.Through scenes that move between Usher’s interactions with the outside world, like a phone conversation with his mother or a hookup, and a constant congress with his most devastating notions of himself, “A Strange Loop” pulls off an amazing feat: condensing a complex idea, full of paradoxes and abstractions, into the form of a Broadway musical.Jackson’s script for what Usher calls a “big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway” show and Stephen Brackett’s lively direction both cleverly find comedy, critique and pathos in contradictions. “A Strange Loop” shrewdly negates itself at every turn: Usher may resent the shallow pageantry of commercial theater, poking fun at such tourist bait as “The Lion King,” but he also steals the names of Disney’s favorite wildcats for his family, calling his father Mufasa and his mother Sarabi. (It’s satisfying to note that “A Strange Loop” is playing just down the street from the Minskoff Theater, which has housed the Broadway goliath since 2006.)There’s something almost naughty about the show’s subversions. “I’m sorry, but you can’t say N-word in a musical,” says one of Usher’s thoughts, imagined as the “chair of the Second Coming of Sondheim Award.” But the 100-minute show is comfortably potty-mouthed, containing repeat utterances of that very N-word, as in the catchy yet malevolent chorus to “Tyler Perry Writes Real Life.”The six actors surrounding Spivey, seated in jeans, embody his competing thoughts, from left: James Jackson Jr., L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and John-Michael Lyles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe paradox at the center of it all, of course, is Usher himself, whose brazen theatricality and caustic wit lies beneath his meek exterior. Though a newcomer — this is not only his Broadway debut but also his first professional gig after graduating from college last May — Spivey gives an earnest, lived-in performance. He shrinks away, tucks his chin, rounds his back into the concave silhouette of a turtle shell and gives bashful sideways glances so tender they could melt an ice cream cone in winter.But there’s also a thorny underside to Spivey’s Usher; he spits out phrases, pops his hip and snaps his head in a scathing display of Black stereotypes. His most searing jokes leave a satisfyingly sour aftertaste, like the bitters at the bottom of an unmixed drink. When a cute guy on the train asks him, “Did you see ‘Hamilton’?” Usher responds with an offhand sneer, “I’m poor.”Usher’s thoughts are vibrant foils, each confidently strutting the stage in Montana Levi Blanco’s wide-ranging costume designs (coordinated ensembles in neutral colors, neon and glitter-speckled accessories, fishnets and latex fetish gear) and twerking and thrusting in Raja Feather Kelly’s uninhibited choreography.A whirligig of worries, memories and concerns, Usher’s thoughts spin daily in his head. Jackson nails his comic beats in a piquant performance, full of withering looks and haughty snickers, while Veasey is suitably horrifying when he embodies Usher’s father, drunkenly questioning his son about his sexuality.Hopper, who most recently appeared as the monstrous pimp in the New York City Center’s production of “The Life,” and has a bass voice with the richness of hot honey, is downright viperous in the musical’s most harrowing scene, set ironically to an upbeat country rhythm. It’s is one of the best examples of the score’s incongruous approach.From left: Jackson, Lyles, Veasey, Spivey, Hopper, Morrison and Lee in the show, with choreography by Raja Feather Kelly.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Exile in Gayville,” in which Usher hesitantly logs into a flurry of dating apps only to be flooded with rejections, is buoyant pop-rock. And when Usher encounters a slew of disapproving Black ancestors like James Baldwin and Harriet Tubman, the song (“Tyler Perry Writes Real Life”) is a slow, steady creep. The whimsical woodwinds and skippy beat of “Second Wave” undercut its lyrics about loneliness and, well, ejaculation.In one instance, however, the production strikes a simple note. In one scene, Lee portrays a “Wicked”-loving tourist who gives Usher a pep talk, urging him to tell his truth in a sincere, optimistic song that recalls that show’s “Defying Gravity.” Given the calculated sharpness of the rest of the musical, especially regarding the commercialism of Broadway, such a carpe diem song feels out of place. The balance is sometimes off in other respects too: On the night I attended, the cast was ever so slightly off-tempo, and some lyrics were muffled by the bombast of the orchestra.Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design aptly captures the many entryways “A Strange Loop” opens into its protagonist’s — and playwright’s — mind. Throughout most of the show Usher stands before a simple brick backdrop with six doorways through which his thoughts pass in and out. That is, until the stage transforms speedily into a grim spectacle of neon lights and exaggerated embellishments, reflecting everything Usher refuses to produce in his own art. The lighting (design by Jen Schriever) — which frames the stage in concentric rectangles — is a nod toward the show’s nested conceit, and the gradual fade-outs and the blitz of radiant hues complement the sections.The tricky task I face as a critic is figuring out how to write about a work whose brilliance has already been noted. The New York Times named the show a critic’s pick in 2019, and I wrote briefly about the show’s Broadway tryout in Washington, D.C., this fall. It’s already won the Pulitzer.And yet, it seems as if there is no measure of praise that could be too much; after all, this is a show that allows a Black gay man to be vulnerable onstage without dismissing or fetishizing his trauma, desires and creative ambitions. Now that’s some radical theater.A Strange LoopAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; strangeloopmusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Won the Pulitzer. Now It’s Coming to Broadway.

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      The playwright Michael R. Jackson describes his musical as “a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show.”“A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta-musical, is coming to Broadway this spring.The show’s producers announced on Monday that the musical would run at the Lyceum Theater; they did not announce specific dates, but it is planning to open before the eligibility deadline for this season’s Tony Awards, which is expected to be in late April.The show is a self-referential musical comedy about a Black gay musical theater writer trying to write a musical about a Black gay musical theater writer. Unsparingly introspective and sexually straightforward, it was staged Off Broadway in 2019 at Playwrights Horizons in a collaboration with Page 73 Productions. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “jubilantly anguished” and said it featured “an assortment of the kind of infectious, richly harmonic melodies that would have your grandparents leaving the theater humming. That is, if they hadn’t walked out before.”The musical went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and was described by the Pulitzers as “a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.”Since November, “A Strange Loop” has been running at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, where it received a rave review from The Washington Post. The critic Peter Marks called it “marvelously inventive” and “exhilarating.”Jackson said he was delighted to see the musical find a home on Broadway. “I think it’s significant because this show is one that made its way out of nowhere, and stuck to its guns and to itself,” he said. “That doesn’t happen often with new musicals.”And does he believe the musical can succeed in a Broadway dominated by jukebox musicals and adaptations of movies? “The challenge I laid out for myself is that ‘A Strange Loop’ is a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show,” he said. “I believe we can entice audiences from all over to come take part.”The musical is directed by Stephen Brackett and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly; the Broadway cast has not yet been announced. The Broadway run will be produced by Barbara Whitman. More

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      Broadway’s ‘Is This a Room’ and ‘Dana H.’ to Close Early

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      The two experimental works will end their runs on Nov. 14. They had been scheduled to close Jan. 16.A pair of short experimental dramas that made an unlikely journey to Broadway this fall will close early, reflecting a tough climate for new plays as the industry seeks to recover from the lengthy pandemic shutdown.“Is This a Room” and “Dana H.” will end their runs on Nov. 14. They had been scheduled to close Jan. 16.“While we would’ve loved to run through our original end date, we recognize that we are in a challenging landscape for live performance and we’re grateful to have had a chance to share this work,” the producers, Dori Berinstein, Sally Horchow and Matt Ross, said in a statement Monday.The plays were jointly capitalized for up to $3.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped by investors.The reviews were strong for both works. “Is This a Room,” which is a verbatim re-enactment of the F.B.I. interrogation of Reality Winner, began previews Sept. 24 and opened Oct. 11. The play was conceived and directed by Tina Satter and stars Emily Davis.Deirdre O’Connell in Lucas Hnath’s play “Dana H.” at the Lyceum Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Dana H.,” in which an actress, Deirdre O’Connell, lip-syncs a series of audio interviews in which the playwright’s mother describes being abducted by a man she had been counseling, began previews Oct. 1 and opened Oct. 17. The author is Lucas Hnath, and the play is directed by Les Waters.The plays, which are running at the Lyceum Theater, are the first casualties of the uncertain climate on Broadway this fall. The industry is concerned enough about its economic state that it is not disclosing box-office grosses — a break with decades of practice — so it is hard to know how shows are doing. Producers say that several big musicals, and even some plays, are doing well, but that new plays, long a challenge on Broadway, are struggling. More

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      Review: In the Disturbing ‘Dana H.,’ Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

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      Deirdre O’Connell brilliantly lip-syncs the testimony of a woman abducted by a white supremacist in a play by Lucas Hnath.Dana Higginbotham had recently lost her job as a chaplain in the psychiatric unit of a Florida hospital when, in 1997, she was abducted by one of her former patients, a methed-up ex-con named Jim.For the next five months she lived in captivity, in a blur of hide-outs and motel rooms, as Jim, called Cowboy by his associates in a white supremacist crime syndicate, dragged her along on his “jobs,” sometimes by the hair.Though she was “never not covered with bruises,” and often signaled her distress nonverbally, almost no one tried to help her; eventually, in a kind of transference or Stockholm syndrome, or what she calls adaptation to maladaptation, she came to see Jim as her “protector” because certainly “the cops weren’t.” Indeed, the police had little power, and thus little interest in, the world beneath our own she had somehow fallen into, a world where “everything that was suppose to be right was not.”I’m quoting Higginbotham verbatim, dropped d and all, because that’s the way her words come to us in “Dana H.,” the profoundly disturbing new play by Lucas Hnath that opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. It’s her voice, recorded over a period of several days in 2015, we hear on tape, telling the story of those five months in Jim’s thrall — and the two-and-a-half years hiding from him on a construction gang afterward.Yet this is not simply verbatim theater of the kind the Civilians, the “investigative” company that commissioned and developed “Dana H.,” has pioneered in works like “Gone Missing” and “This Beautiful City.” Nor is it like “Is This a Room,” the verbatim drama by Tina Satter that opened on the same stage last week and will now alternate performances with “Dana H.,” each playing four performances a week.In Hnath’s play, the transcript is not dramatized as it is in those others, with actors speaking and performing each role. Rather, just one actor, Deirdre O’Connell, embodying Higginbotham, lip-syncs the entire 75-minute text, brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling. You worry that O’Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins. Gradually, though, as her inerrancy becomes clear, you let go of that concern and switch to related ones: Why tell the story this way in the first place? What do you get from the astonishing feat, besides astonishment, that you wouldn’t get if the same material had been acted out as it might be in a typically effective television procedural?One thing you get, or rather don’t, is the violent imagery that in a literal representation can short circuit other values. Higginbotham’s tale is so brutal that, were it visualized, you would spend the entire play worrying about her survival.Instead, the director Les Waters, in his nerves-of-steel staging, offers just one spot of blood to stand for the rest. The story is still plenty savage, but by placing O’Connell, a beloved New York theater veteran, in a comfortable-looking club chair, in the middle of a generic motel room, he in some way abstracts and domesticates it. (The diorama-style set design is by Andrew Boyce, the shadowy-then-glary lighting by Paul Toben.) You are implicitly asked to focus not on the terror of her experience but on the terror of her survival.O’Connell lip-syncs most of the show nonstop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd your own: While mimicking Higginbotham’s mental dissociation, the uncanniness of the lip-sync destabilizes most other notions of normalcy in the world as well. It suggests an underlife, parallel to the comfortable, familiar one, that threatens at any moment to erupt through the rather thin barrier of routine, just as Higginbotham’s voice seems to erupt through O’Connell’s body in the process of possessing it.The question of voice is obviously central to Hnath’s concern here, only in part because Higginbotham — it’s no spoiler to say — is his mother. At the time of the abduction, he was a thousand miles away, a freshman at New York University, apparently knowing nothing of what was going on in Florida. She did not want him to know: Jim held her son’s safety over her head, she says, to enforce compliance. “Everything I ever did was all based on what was for Lucas, you know?”In the silence that follows that line, you can almost hear the eternal maternal follow-up plaint: “But what has he done for me?”To say he has honored her story, though that’s true, is the skimpiest possible way to look at the achievement of “Dana H.” When the play ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020, after productions in Los Angeles and Chicago, I was electrified by the way O’Connell turned herself into a kind of musical instrument, letting the recording of Higginbotham “play” her. With her own voice shut off, she emphasized the other tools at her disposal, so that even the smallest shifts of posture and expression became immensely expressive.Those effects have grown more complex in the Broadway production, shifting its weight in the process. More often now, O’Connell seems to work against the apparent veracity of the text: miming Higginbotham’s odd laughter a little more vividly, underlining moments in which she doubts her memory. Though I never previously questioned any aspect of the story, I now found myself wondering whether a woman so traumatized could be a reliable narrator and whether a play is “true” just because its words are.Hnath is at pains to signal that it is, in part by exposing his technique at every turn. We see O’Connell put on her earpieces at the beginning of the play and take them off at the end. Beeps indicate spots where the transcript has been edited. (The sound design and skin-crawly music are by Mikhail Fiksel.) The interview was conducted by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, rather than by Hnath because, as he explained to The Times, he wanted his mother to tell the story “to someone who knew nothing.” That way there would be no shortcuts that might introduce doubt.And yet it is the introduction of doubt, despite all those dams put in place to block it, that I find so wonderfully complicating now. Tiny strange moments Hnath chose to leave in the transcript — references to Higginbotham’s having “played around in” Satanism when she was young, or to her fantasy that converting Jim “would be a great addition” to her “ministry” — make you wonder about her reliability, and what even stranger material was cut.Through such holes in the storytelling, the play’s richest emotions seep. Near the end, when Higginbotham is contacted by Jim’s father, apologizing for what his son did to her, Cosson, on tape, asks if that “helped in any way.” She says it did: “It kinda felt almost like a family. The way a family should have reacted — if I had one.”You may well gasp louder than at the reveal of a corpse.That’s when I realized that “Dana H.” is not just the story of a woman brutalized by a psychopath; it is also the story of a mother abandoned by a son. What else would a playwright do to make reparations but write a play about just that, in the process returning to her what the world had stolen: her voice.Dana H.Through Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga Will Star in 'Macbeth' on Broadway

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      Ruth Negga will co-star as Lady Macbeth in a production directed by Sam Gold and scheduled to open next April.Daniel Craig is veering from James Bond to Shakespeare.The 53-year-old actor, who has said that his tenure as Bond will come to an end with the release of “No Time to Die,” on Oct. 8, plans to return to Broadway next spring to star in the title role of “Macbeth.”Famous for his film career, especially as the rakish spy, Craig is also an accomplished stage actor.He has starred in two previous Broadway plays, the 2009 production of “A Steady Rain” and a 2013 revival of “Betrayal.” And he played the villainous Iago in a 2016 Off Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, opposite David Oyelowo in the title role. (“Gritty brilliance,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote of Craig’s performance.)In the “Macbeth” production, Ruth Negga will play his wife, Lady Macbeth. Negga, known for the TV show “Preacher” and the film “Loving,” last year played the title role in “Hamlet” (yes, a woman played Hamlet; Negga had also previously played Ophelia) in an Off Broadway production at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Ruth Negga will play Lady Macbeth.Nina Prommer/EPA, via ShutterstockThe lead producer for the Broadway production will be Barbara Broccoli, who has a long collaboration with Craig: She and her brother produce the Bond films, and they also co-produced “A Steady Rain” and supported the nonprofit “Othello” production.Broccoli said she had been talking with Craig about Macbeth for several years, ever since he expressed an interest in playing the role.“I’m thrilled that it’s coming after Bond, because, obviously, after 16 years of working with this man, the thought of it all coming to an end has been really difficult to take,” she said. “And so it’s really heartwarming for me that we’re going to be working on something else so soon after the wrapping up of his James Bond cycle.”Broccoli said that she and Craig also thought it was important to stage the play this season, as Broadway seeks to recover after a long shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.“It’s been a horrendous 18 months for everyone, and live theater has been damaged tremendously,” she said. “He really wants to come back and be on the stage and encourage people to come back to Broadway — it’s important to all of us from a cultural point of view and from a social point of view.”“Macbeth” is scheduled to run for 15 weeks, beginning previews March 29 and opening April 28 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater. The production is to be directed by Sam Gold, who also directed the Off Broadway “Othello” in which Craig appeared, and who in 2019 directed a Broadway revival of “King Lear.” The production will feature original music by Gaelynn Lea.There have been 47 previous Broadway productions of “Macbeth,” according to the Internet Broadway Database; the most recent was in 2013, starring Ethan Hawke and Anne-Marie Duff.Broccoli is also the lead producer of “Sing Street,” a musical that was scheduled to begin performances on Broadway in March 2020, but never did because of the pandemic. She said she still plans to bring the show to Broadway, but was not ready to say when. “We love the show,” she said, “and we’re trying to figure out the best way to bring it back.” More