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    Review: ‘We Live in Cairo’ Falls Short of Being Revolutionary

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    Egyptians stand up to their government in a play that excels in its design but rings hollow when its subtext and character development are scrutinized.Building a new world is just as difficult, maybe even more so, as tearing down an old one. Just ask the Arab Spring revolutionaries of “We Live in Cairo,” whose solidarity fractures after they get what they were fighting for.The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s show, which opened on Sunday at New York Theater Workshop, is divided into a before and after, with intermission sitting neatly in the middle: The leadup to the violent protests of January and February 2011, which prompted the resignation of the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, followed by the buildup of bitterness and strife. But while passions supposedly run high, the temperature of this new musical — which at best and at worst feels like “Rent” on the barricades — almost never rises above tepid.Like Mark Cohen, the aspiring filmmaker in “Rent,” Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer, takes on the responsibility of documenting the action, in this case the resistance of a handful of young Cairenes fighting government oppression.Layla meets them through her boyfriend, Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the lead in the recent revival of “The Who’s Tommy”). The group’s firebrand, Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni), who comes from an activist family, landed in jail for criticizing Mubarak on Facebook. Its levelheaded pillar is Amir’s brother, Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), who wants to attend law school in New York, and its party-loving jester is Fadwa’s wealthy cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), an artist who spray-paints caricatures of the country’s leaders.Those murals connect to some of the brightest elements of Taibi Magar’s production — the physical ones. Tilly Grimes’s set, with carpets in red tones and a place for the band at the back of the stage, has a lived-in quality that suggests the warmth of the friends’ relationship as well as the feeling of relative safety that prevails at their hangout. David Bengali’s video design does the heavy lifting when the outside world intrudes, and includes illustrations by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer that represent Karim’s work alongside projected news images, some of them appropriately brutal. (Raphael Mishler designed the papier-mâché head of Mubarak that Karim wears when we meet him.)Unfortunately, design alone does not a musical make, and piddly details like book and score must be taken into account. There is no questioning the Lazours’ passion for the project, which has been in the works for a decade and premiered at American Repertory Theater, in Massachusetts, in 2019 — the album “Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo)” was recorded remotely with various singers the following year. But the characters are never convincingly defined, except for Fadwa, who also benefits from Tarabzouni’s fiery performance.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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      ‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ Review: Basketball Under the Heavens

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      Borrowing its powers from Greek and Yoruba mythologies, Inua Ellams’s play tells the story of a demigod who becomes an N.B.A. superstar.Turning verse into action is tricky, especially with ideas as lofty as the ones in Inua Ellams’s epic poem “The Half-God of Rainfall,” now appearing in theatrical guise at New York Theater Workshop.The poem is a melodious, sky-high tale of a basketball superstar born as a result of a celestial contest between the Greek and Yoruba gods of thunder, Zeus and Sango. But the stage adaptation, which opened on Monday, runs into some flaws that, while not fatal, strand this Nigerian writer’s work in the mortal realm.A storm of plot and themes is squeezed into an intermission-less 90 minutes: After defeating Sango (Jason Bowen) in a race, Zeus (Michael Laurence) has his pick of Sango’s subjects. To Hera’s (Kelley Curran) defeated disdain, Zeus rapes Modúpé (Jennifer Mogbock), a Nigerian woman, and soon the mixed-race half-god Demi (Mister Fitzgerald) is born.Neighborhood boys ostracize Demi, who can turn the soil to swamp with his tears. But he gradually comes into his powers and makes his way to the Golden State Warriors, learning about other demigods who had to suppress their own supernatural talents on the court. Demi’s growing celebrity eventually lands him face to face with Zeus, providing a chance to avenge his mother.As the deities Elegba and Osún (Lizan Mitchell and Patrice Johnson Chevannes, fantastic as always) narrate Demi’s ascent to sports stardom, they intersperse meditations on the gendered violence that permeates Greek mythology, and later, on the imperialist violence the West perpetrated to obscure African traditions.Ellams’s scope is staggering, and he mostly pulls it off. Each line, heavy with information and emotion, is shot back and forth by the able actors, who turn Ellams’s vibrant, poetic flow into a nonstop athletic match.But there are few scenes of interactions between characters — instead presentational, narration-driven exposition makes up the bulk of the play. And Taibi Magar’s direction displays an uncertain grasp over whether the piece should play naturally or at a distance: There’s the work’s traditional methods of self-aware, oral storytelling — having the cast address the audience, and change into Linda Cho’s athleisure costumes onstage — and the production’s sumptuous, almost immersive elements, courtesy of Stacey Derosier’s lighting, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound and especially Tal Yarden’s gorgeous projections.Though Orlando Pabotoy’s fluid movement direction, along with Beatrice Capote’s Orisha choreography, strikes a powerful balance between the seamless and more Brechtian styles, the production finds itself stuck between them.I was reminded of Ellams’s “Icarus,” a short piece presented during the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in 2021. It transformed the parable into the heartbreaking tale of a young Nigerian refugee who, detained at an Italian entry point, takes to the sky. Recited by just two performers, the work, in its simplicity, soared. The poignancy and concision left me wanting a one-by-one re-envisioning of Greek mythology through a contemporary African diasporic lens.Ellams certainly has it in him to assemble a universe of distinctive characters connected by their shared humanity, as he proved in his globe-trotting play “Barber Shop Chronicles.” But here, his ideas, vast and evocative as they are on the page, overwhelm the story onstage, and the sheer amount of talking at the audience becomes draining. Ninety minutes becomes too long for one solidly conveyed story; too short for an entire pantheon of players.His interest in and approach to mixing and remixing Western and African traditions is fascinating, however. This is a writer whose intuitive understanding of the common threads of tradition, globalization and human instinct could very well create a new mythological tapestry for our interwoven times.The Half-God of RainfallThrough Aug. 20 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

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      Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: Embodying Justice in ‘Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992’

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      Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play about the aftermath of the Rodney King case gets a cast of five in an updated Off Broadway revival.For Anna Deavere Smith, the transcript is the tool. A fine tool, certainly: Her brand of verbatim theater, perfected in a series of documentary plays since the early 1980s, duplicates the expressive peculiarities of real speech, making every defensive stammer and evasive curlicue count.But thrilling as it is, mere mimicry is never the point. In an essay Smith describes actors as “cultural workers” reaching out, through words, into “that which is different from themselves.” Her goal is ambitious: to undo tribalism by modeling the innately human ability to empathize even with enemies.This makes for some very complex drama when you don’t know who the enemy is. In “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” which opened in a watered-down yet still urgent revival by the Signature Theater Company on Monday evening, Smith juggles excerpts from 320 interviews with people on all sides of the riots that broke out in the city’s South Central neighborhood that year. Arranging them in kaleidoscopic patterns, she keeps your sympathies switching so fast you find yourself experiencing a kind of moral whiplash.Smith often plays every character in the first major productions of her plays. In “Twilight,” that means swiftly embodying some 40 people of various ages, genders and ethnicities. Talking about the uprising that followed the acquittal of the police officers who viciously beat King in 1991, they try to explain what happened, no two having the same point of view.Some see the events through a professional lens, whether as politicians, reporters, academics or activists. But most of the interviewees are emotional rather than analytical, as members of the Black, white, Hispanic and Asian American communities — whether they participated in the post-verdict mayhem or were beaten as bystanders or hid out in horror in Beverly Hills — poke through the rubble for clues to the cause. Is it to be found as far back as the Watts riots of 1965? Or as recently as the fatal shooting of a local 15-year-old Black girl by a Korean American store owner two weeks after King was beaten?When the store owner receives a sentence of five years’ probation, and then King’s attackers are likewise let off without prison sentences, justice seems like a zero-sum game to the play’s Black characters: What privileges one community is taken from another. Yet when everyone is embodied by one actor, as was the case when “Twilight” debuted in Los Angeles in 1993, followed by runs at the Public Theater and on Broadway in 1994, the audience is led to a different conclusion: Justice is all or nothing. It can’t exist anywhere if it doesn’t exist everywhere.Unfortunately, the power of that idea is attenuated in the Signature production, directed by Taibi Magar in the 294-seat Irene Diamond auditorium. As part of Smith’s multiyear residency at the theater, “Twilight” has been staged as an ensemble piece, the roles divvied among five actors. Smith has also revised the script heavily, mostly in ways that support the casting at the expense of the drama.This is less noticeable when, in the more substantial monologues, characters describe, with pathos and unintentional poetry, what they saw or what they felt. Among several others, King’s aunt (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart), a city clerk who witnessed the beating (Elena Hurst) and the wife of a Korean American shopkeeper shot during the unrest (Francis Jue) get enough time to create affecting portraits.But when the script calls for shorter snippets and quicker alternation, too much energy is dissipated in the handoffs, sometimes involving the donning or shedding of Linda Cho’s sociologically precise costumes. Even so, they remind you how Smith could switch sides in milliseconds, with the help of just a scarf or a tie or a cup of tea.From left, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, Francis Jue, Elena Hurst, Karl Kenzler and Jones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt is something of a paradox that the divided casting also results in caricature, as the actors overcompensate, in a way Smith never did, for the difficulty of achieving contrast. The story told in the published script by a juror in the federal trial of the King assailants is here reframed as a self-conscious scene involving the whole cast; it still has powerful elements, to be sure, yet unintentionally broad results. And in a passage called “A Dinner Party That Never Happened” — projections by David Bengali help keep the audience oriented on an otherwise neutral stage — the piercing opinions of characters at an imaginary soiree hosted by the chef Alice Waters now come off as bon mots.Also not helping: the appearance of a cheap-laugh Charlton Heston, twitting his liberal friends who suddenly want a gun.Experimentation in the production of classics is crucial, especially in that difficult passage after their debut when most new works disappear. Smith, who is 71, no doubt hopes to see her work performed in the future as much as possible and is exploring ways to ensure that.Still, I found myself wondering why she, and Magar, whose staging is caught between the simplicity of the original premise and an unachieved larger one, chose this form of experiment.In light of recent discussions about representation in the theater, perhaps it seemed wise to give actors whose identities in some ways match that of the characters the chance to portray them. This is handled well by being handled unstrictly: Jue, the great-grandson of Chinese immigrants, plays several Asian American characters, both male and female, but also (with great depth) the Black soprano Jessye Norman. Yet other times, the matchups feel too obvious or, as in the mostly similar roles performed by Karl Kenzler and Wesley T. Jones, too blurry.Jue plays several Asian American characters, both male and female, and also Jessye Norman.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd perhaps there was concern that the story itself, now nearly 30 years old, needed the punch of physical confrontation that more bodies allow. That too strikes me as a mistake. The Signature’s 2019 revival of Smith’s “Fires in the Mirror,” about the unrest between Blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, proved that her plays are vigorous enough to stand as written, and that one very flexible and compelling actor — in that case, Michael Benjamin Washington — could walk in Smith’s shoes as successfully as she walked in her characters’.Though I wish “Twilight” had taken the same approach, it nevertheless demands attention in any format. Its nuanced portrayal of the cycle of violence — and its exploration of the means of breaking it — are obviously just as necessary now as when Los Angeles was actively smoldering. If the production makes the play more of a lesson than it needs to be, Smith’s notion that history depends on individuals more than groups, a notion best dramatized with one body, still comes through with five.Or with 294; we are all, in a way — and whether we want to be or not — cultural workers. “Twilight” doesn’t just ask us to build empathy but also demonstrates how.Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992Through Nov. 14 at Signature Theater, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Cecily Strong to Make New York Theater Debut at the Shed

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      The “S.N.L.” star steps into a role originated by Lily Tomlin, and Claudia Rankine’s “Help” gets its pandemic-delayed world premiere in the new Shed season.Cecily Strong has twice been nominated for an Emmy Award for her standout “Saturday Night Live” impressions that have included Melania Trump, Ariana Grande and Lin-Manuel Miranda.Now she will be playing 12 characters, with no costume changes or props, in her New York theatrical debut — in a role made famous by Lily Tomlin.Strong, who recently won acclaim for her portrayal of a musical-loving backpacker in the Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” will star in a new production at the Shed of Jane Wagner’s one-woman comedy “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” The production, starting Dec. 21, will be the show’s first New York staging in two decades. It will run through Feb. 6, 2022; Leigh Silverman (“The Lifespan of a Fact,” “Violet”) will direct.In a review of the original 1985 Broadway production, The New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that the second act — a compressed history of the feminist movement — was “the most genuinely subversive comedy to be produced on Broadway in years,” and praised Tomlin’s “chameleon-like ability to inhabit a wide range of personalities.” The show was adapted into a film, also starring Tomlin, in 1991.The Shed’s 2021-22 season also includes several postponed commissions from 2020, including the world premiere of the author and poet Claudia Rankine’s “Help,” an examination of white male privilege partly based on questions Rankine, who is Black, asked her white male seatmates on airplanes for a New York Times Magazine article. Taibi Magar will direct the production (Mar. 15-Apr. 10, 2022), which follows a middle-aged Black female air traveler on a plane alongside a dozen or so white male characters. Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), who starred in two preview performances of the show, is no longer available, so the role will be recast in the coming weeks, said Alex Poots, the artistic director and chief executive of the Shed, at Hudson Yards.“It’s a terrific and shattering piece that I think could not be more relevant now,” he said of the show, which had just two performances before theaters shut down on March 12, 2020.Other highlights of the season include the Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition “Particular Matter(s),” a large-scale sensory experience that explores climate change and climate inequity (Feb. 9-April 17, 2022); and a new work by the visual artist, filmmaker and MacArthur fellow Wu Tsang (Apr. 15-17, 2022). Anonymous Club, the creative studio led by the fashion designer Shayne Oliver, will also host three nights of events, titled “Headless: The Glass Ceiling,” with a theme of over-the-top extravagance, or “headlessness,” during New York Fashion Week (Feb. 10-12, 2022).Proof of vaccination will be required for everyone 12 and older for all performances, and everyone age 2 and older must wear a mask.A full season lineup is available at TheShed.org. More