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      ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Review: A Writer’s Origin Story Remixes Conventions

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      Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.The playwright Qui Nguyen has made a career of imagining marginalized people as heroic leads. That includes his parents, who emigrated from Vietnam and met in an Arkansas refugee camp, a story Nguyen chronicled in his raunchy rom-com-style play “Vietgone.”“Poor Yella Rednecks,” which opened Wednesday in a rollicking, comic book-inspired production at New York City Center, picks up five years later, in 1980, when their marriage hits the rocks and the playwright is a 5-year-old struggling to learn English.Commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and South Coast Repertory, where it premiered in 2019, “Poor Yella Rednecks” functions as the playwright’s own superhero origin story: Nguyen has become not only a wizard of language and form, but also an expert M.C., subverting and remixing conventions to confront abiding questions about displacement and assimilation. How can immigrants become legible to the American-born generations of their own families, and to audiences who are so white, the playwright’s mother says, that they resemble a Fleetwood Mac concert?Nguyen’s answer is an expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television. Under the wry and nimble direction of May Adrales, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a crowd-tickling comedy that squashes preconceptions in order to place hearts in a vise grip.Framed as recollections Nguyen gathered from his mother, Tong, in 2015, the show begins with the playwright (portrayed onstage as a middle-aged man by Jon Norman Schneider) interviewing Tong (a dynamite Maureen Sebastian), who speaks with a pinched face and a thick accent. But Tong soon demands to have her son’s “pot and a mouth” style of talking in the play he is writing, and for white characters to sound the way she hears them, as a garble of slang and empty signifiers (so he has them squawk exclamations like “Yeehaw!” or “Mitch McConnell!”). From then on, we hear Nguyen’s family talk in frank, and often crass, English when they are understood to be speaking Vietnamese. (Nguyen’s parents were heartbroken when they met, Tong says, “so we comforted each other with our crotches.”)Though his family’s history is rooted in upheaval and loss, Qui Nguyen presents it with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity, our critic writes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRewind 35 years, and Tong tears away her granny garb (thrifty southwestern costumes designed by Valérie Thérèse Bart) to play a younger version of herself. Tong and the playwright’s father, Quang (Ben Levin), who looks like a matinee idol but can’t find work, are nearly broke and are each being drawn back into previous relationships. Tong, a waitress at a diner, partly blames her mother, Huong (a dry-as-gin Samantha Quan), for the difficulty that her son, known as Little Man and represented by a wide-eyed puppet, faces fitting in at school. Huong, who only speaks Vietnamese, worries that learning to talk like his peers will turn Little Man (endearingly designed by David Valentine and maneuvered by Schneider) into a stranger.As in “Vietgone,” “Poor Yella Rednecks” shows Nguyen’s onstage parents expressing their most vehement feelings, and occasional exposition, in verse, rapping over uncomplicated beats composed here by Shane Rettig, who also designed the game show-like sound. (“Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty,” Tong raps. “Gimme one hot second Imma run this city.”) For the title song, Nguyen borrows a familiar declaration about the work ethic of immigrants from the musical “Hamilton,” though his own less sophisticated lyrics, which are better at illuminating conflict than romance, may not exactly hold up in comparison.Though rooted in upheaval and tragic loss, Nguyen’s family history is presented with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity. Jon Hoche, who plays Quang’s best friend Nhan, is a boisterous bro with a soft underbelly, while Paco Tolson is almost pitifully hapless as Bobby, Tong’s bumbling white ex. Tolson also plays the godfather of Marvel, Stan Lee, whose presence as a sporadic narrator adds to the show’s graphic-novel aesthetic; the set by Tim Mackabee spells out “yella” in big, rotating letters, lit in emphatic color by Lap Chi Chu.For all of its surprises, including action sequences I won’t spoil here, the play falters only when it tips into obviously earnest territory. Nguyen doesn’t need a surrogate to detail his intent; the story soars on its own.Poor Yella RednecksThrough Nov. 26 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ Review: A Shop Where Everybody Knows Your Mane

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      Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesn’t get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and more — tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.That will come in abundance, but don’t in the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, it’s telling you something too.What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late — almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A kind of “Cheers” or “Steel Magnolias” for today, “Jaja’s” is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the beauty shop’s interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, the director, Whitney White, keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.David Zinn’s beauty shop set receives applause as do the wigs designed by Nikiya Mathis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnlike the Ghanaian private school students in Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Dreams,” the stylists at Jaja’s are independent contractors. I don’t just mean financially, though they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping down to make room for the next.That’s fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shop’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. “When I get my shop, there won’t be any eating of smelly foods like this,” she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients. Meanwhile — and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salon’s television — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminata’s husband, the men we actually meet — all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos — are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.It’s her birthday: Kalyne Coleman as a customer who asks for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” braids at the salon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNever really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. Without White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t imagine this working. Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.If the entire play had been nothing but byplay — the women in one another’s hair both figuratively and literally — I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “School Girls” as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.But instead she has seen fit, again as in “School Girls,” to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Though abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the last of the play’s six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.“OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. “But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? ‘Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.Jaja’s African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Rachel McAdams to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Mary Jane’

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      The play, by Amy Herzog, is about a mother caring for a chronically ill child.The film star Rachel McAdams will make her Broadway debut next spring in an acclaimed and heart-wrenching play about a mother caring for a small child with a serious illness.McAdams will star in “Mary Jane,” a drama by Amy Herzog that debuted at Yale Repertory Theater in 2017 and was followed by an Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop that same year. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the play “a heartbreaker for anyone human” and “the most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.”McAdams, who became famous playing Regina George in the 2004 movie “Mean Girls,” performed regularly onstage while growing up in Canada and studied theater at York University in Ontario. But she has not performed onstage professionally since she was a student. In a telephone interview, she said her initial career aspirations were to perform as a theater actor.“I had dreams of going to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and hadn’t really entertained Broadway — that was so far off, and even now I’m pinching myself,” she said. “I’ve been looking for a play forever, but kind of casually — not fully committed to it — and this came along, I read it, and I just was so taken with it.”She said she found the play “beautifully written” and “couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was already inside of me.”“It’s shedding light on the difficulties, but also the resiliency, of families with children with special needs,” she added. “There’s actually a lot of comedy to the piece as well — she’s drawn an amazingly positive, resilient character in Mary Jane, and really well-drawn, supporting characters around her.”McAdams was nominated for an Academy Award for the 2015 film “Spotlight.” She also starred in the 2004 film adaptation of “The Notebook”; a musical adaptation of that same story is scheduled to open on Broadway in March.McAdams said her decision to come to Broadway was not related to the dual strikes by screenwriters and actors that have largely idled Hollywood. She said she had committed to “Mary Jane” before the strikes began. And though apprehensive about returning to the stage, McAdams is also looking forward to it.“There’s no editor — you’re really so naked and vulnerable,” she said. “I hope my training will support me, but it was such a long time ago.”“I think it might be like riding a bike,” she added. However, she said, “there’s a little bit of the unknown about it. And I think also just having emotional stamina — you really don’t know until you’re there if you’re going to be able to fill your vessel up enough to keep you going. So it’s just all those ‘I won’t know until I get there’ things, but I’m excited to do the work.”The Off Broadway production won three Obie Awards, for Herzog’s playwriting, for direction by Anne Kauffman, and for a lead performance by Carrie Coon. There have since been several productions at regional theaters; one is now running in Santa Rosa, Calif.The nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club will present the Broadway production, also directed by Kauffman, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Previews are scheduled to begin on April 2; an opening date and the names of the other cast members have not yet been announced.Herzog, whose play “4000 Miles” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, has recently turned her attention to revising classic works: She adapted Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” for a Broadway production starring Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed that ran earlier this year, and she is adapting Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” for a Broadway production planning to open next spring with Jeremy Strong in the title role. More

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      New Jason Robert Brown Musical Highlights MCC Theater Season

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      A honky-tonk lesbian romance and a new musical by Gavin Creel are also slated for the Off Broadway theater’s 2023-24 lineup.A new musical about an aspiring writer by Jason Robert Brown, a honky-tonk lesbian romance and a musical inspired by the singer and songwriter Gavin Creel’s first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are on the roster for MCC Theater’s 2023-24 season.“Each of their shows asks a provocative question. What does art do for us? What is our responsibility to the truth? And what does family mean?” Bernie Telsey and Will Cantler, co-artistic directors at the theater, wrote in a statement announcing the season on Thursday.The season will begin in November with the new musical “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” a program of 17 original songs that Creel wrote after his first visit to the Met in 2019. (The title, he told The New York Times in 2021, stemmed from his discovery that if a work of art is lacking color, light, sex or story, “I usually just kind of walk on by.”) Creel, who won a Tony Award for his performance as Cornelius Hackl in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway and is currently playing Cinderella’s Prince in the national tour of “Into the Woods,” will also star in “Walk on Through,” which is his theatrical songwriting debut. Linda Goodrich will direct.It will be followed in January by the world premiere of “The Connector,” a musical that tells the story of an up-and-coming writer who gets his first article published in a prestigious magazine — and soon faces a test of his integrity. The music and lyrics are by Brown, the three-time Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist for “Parade” and “The Bridges of Madison County,” with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman. The show will be directed by Daisy Prince, who also helped conceive it, with casting to be announced.Finally, in April, comes the New York premiere of “The Lonely Few,” a rock concert-style show about two musicians who navigate being an interracial gay couple in the South. It was first produced at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles earlier this year in a production starring Lauren Patten, who won a Tony Award in 2021 for “Jagged Little Pill,” and Ciara Renée (“Waitress,” “Frozen”). The show, with music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak and a book by Rachel Bonds, received mixed reviews, with Charles McNulty, the theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, calling the performances universally “terrific” while noting that the production suffered from “choppy” storytelling and a “relationship between the drama and the music that’s off-kilter.” It will be directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, both of whom also helmed it at the Geffen, with casting to be announced.The season will also include the world premiere of “Mary Gets Hers,” a drama-comedy by Emma Horwitz set during a 10th-century plague in Germany and inspired by “Abraham, or the Rise and Repentance of Mary,” by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, an early European female poet and playwright (Sept. 11-Oct. 7). The production will be directed by Josiah Davis and produced by MCC Theater’s fall company-in-residence, The Playwrights Realm. More

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      ‘King James’ Review: We’ll Always Have LeBron

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      Two men’s kindred obsession with a basketball player is the scaffold for Rajiv Joseph’s examination of male friendship at the Manhattan Theater Club.It takes a while to figure out if Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, “King James” — centered on two fans of the N.B.A. legend LeBron James — is actually about basketball.This coproduction between Steppenwolf Theater, in Chicago, and Center Theater Group, in Los Angeles, arrives at the Manhattan Theater Club after runs in both of those cities. Similarly, like an imperfect play on the court, the plot travels quite a bit before making its shot. But with two emotionally precise performances agilely directed by Kenny Leon, Joseph’s latest rebounds from its initial inertia, revealing a touching examination of male friendship and the powerful social currents beneath it.In 2004, Matt (Chris Perfetti), a Cleveland bartender, is trying to unload his season tickets to the Cavaliers’ home games after a bad investment leaves him needing cash fast. Despite not knowing how to check for texts on his Motorola Razr — one of the production’s clever pleasures is the way Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s sound design and Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design trace time through evolving cellphones and ringtones — he manages to arrange a meet-up with Shawn (Glenn Davis), a fledgling writer who’s just sold his first story.Shawn offers Matt much less than the asking price, but, sensing a kindred devotion to the team’s then-rookie LeBron James, the two strike a deal and strike up a friendship — a wobbly one that the story checks in on over the course of James’ career. In 2010, when James left for the Miami Heat, a decision the friends see as treason, even as Shawn considers his own move. In 2014, with James’s prodigal return to the Cavs — news which Matt, now working at his family’s furniture store following another financial mistake, takes with more contempt than Shawn might like. And in 2016, with the team’s first championship win, worlds away from the friendship’s Bush-era beginnings.A two-hander will almost always let the meat (be it sports, play dates or Idina Menzel obsessions) fall off as its thematic bones reveal themselves and, across those four scenes, James eventually takes his place as the catalyst for the duo’s deeper bond. But, however well acted, the interactions Joseph creates for them during the first act (2004 and 2010) are just a little too slight in their significance, leaving most of the show’s heft to the sturdier second act.The inclusion of Khloe Janel as a D.J. — posted up by the audience, away from the stage — playing requisite jock jams and period-appropriate Usher hits during transitions, hypes up the love of the game but obscures the play’s core. Luckily, the perfectly cast Davis and Perfetti, whose physicality keenly conveys the toll of time passing, are intensely watchable, whether they’re discussing foul shots or failed ambitions.At first, it doesn’t seem relevant to mention that Shawn is Black and Matt is white, because Joseph excels at letting this distinction inform the characters in a play where race doesn’t factor much, until it does. For the most part, Matt’s casual use of Black lingo can be chalked up to awkward passes at the basketball culture to which he wants to belong. And his pontifications on what he views as “the problems with America” — which he proposes are not reflected in professional basketball — are mostly just the vaguely righteous rumblings of an angry young white guy.When tension does bubble up, during the play’s final encounter, it appears inevitable and is astutely observed without feeling writerly, showcasing Joseph’s mastery over the way everyday conversation can belie or reveal social realities. His work here is a strong analysis of friendship dynamics built along, but not hinged upon, the issues that divide them. King JamesThrough June 18 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      in Television

      ‘Like a Romance’: Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht’s Spring Fling Onstage

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      In David Auburn’s new play, “Summer, 1976,” the actresses play unlikely friends whose relationship has the intensity of a love affair.Alice and Diana don’t like each other very much. Not at first. Diana, a teacher at the University of Ohio, considers Alice an intellectual lightweight and flaky. Alice, a faculty wife, finds Diana condescending.“They are unlikely friends,” Laura Linney, who plays Diana, said with understatement.And yet forced together for a few sticky Midwestern months by their young daughters, a relationship burgeons over kiddie pools and popsicles. Their friendship, which will eventually burn with the blue-flame intensity of a love affair, will profoundly alter each woman’s life.This is the substance of David Auburn’s memory play “Summer, 1976,” a febrile two-hander directed by Daniel Sullivan and starring Linney and Jessica Hecht (Alice) as women in their 50s recalling a pivotal time in their 20s. The Manhattan Theater Club production, mostly composed of daisy-chained monologues, is scheduled to open April 25 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Linney, left, and Hecht in David Auburn’s new play, “Summer, 1976,” at Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan. The two-hander opens on April 25.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesOn a recent weekday morning, the two women met in an otherwise empty rehearsal room at M.T.C.’s Midtown offices. This was a fraught moment in the process. “Week three in rehearsal for me is always a disaster, I’m so frustrated,” Linney said. And Hecht was still starring in another show, Sarah Ruhl’s “Letters From Max” at the Signature Theater. But the co-stars, dressed in drapey clothing, seemed relaxed enough.Both are stage and screen veterans who have worked with Sullivan — Hecht long ago in “The Heidi Chronicles,” Linney most recently in “The Little Foxes” — but never together. They were learning the play by listening, raptly, to each other.“It’s like being in a romance of sorts,” Hecht said.Over midmorning coffee — “Sometimes there’s god, so quickly,” Linney said, quoting Tennessee Williams, when the drinks arrived — the two women discussed the play, the process and why they keep returning to the theater. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s always exciting to see where the intersection is between the actor and the character,” Linney said of watching other actors and their process. “Like, where do they find their way in?”Thea Traff for The New York TimesWhat do you remember about 1976?JESSICA HECHT My mother’s divorce and her consciousness raising group.LAURA LINNEY I can remember wearing Corkys and feeling very cool with my Lip Smackers and my shampoo that smelled like wheat germ.What attracted you to these characters?LINNEY I wasn’t attracted to the character at first. I have no idea of who a character is until I’ve been working for several weeks. So for me, it was really the combination of people. If Dan Sullivan whispers my name, I’ll show up. Honestly, I will do anything that man wants me to do. And I so wanted to do it with Jess, because she is so amazing. Also, hurray for a new play!HECHT I never told you, but before they had officially asked me to do the play, I saw Dan on the corner of 93rd and Broadway. And he said, “Have you worked with Laura?” And I said, “No, I haven’t worked with her.” And he said, “She’s the real deal.” And it is true, because you have a clarity of purpose. We share that. For me, I’m interested in plays that talk about intimacy.LINNEY This was a time before cellphones, before the internet. Friendships were very deep. The effort that you would happily make to continue a relationship or a friendship! And the romance that went with not being able to have access to someone immediately.So once you’d signed on, what work has gone into building these characters?HECHT My approach is kind of internal. It’s really based on the language and how the story is working. It’s quite annoying.LINNEY No, not at all.HECHT I always worry that my technique annoys the other actors. Do you ever get that feeling? That this must be frustrating to the other person?LINNEY I love watching someone else’s process. How do you do this crazy thing that we do? Because we are all so different, it’s always exciting to see where the intersection is between the actor and the character. What is it that’s letting them in, bringing blood to the character? Like, where do they find their way in?I’m the daughter of a playwright. So I tend to be text-based. I try to listen to what the play is telling me to do. I work on it and work on it and work on it. Then there comes a period of time where it literally lifts up off the page and it becomes a three-dimensional living thing. Then it starts to work on me. It doesn’t always happen. But it’s exciting when it does.So who are these women? Who is Alice?HECHT Alice has a kind of impulsivity about relating to people and an attraction to different people. That excites me. I definitely was that person.And who’s Diana?HECHT She’s such a mystery. She’s so complicated.LINNEY There’s the question of who is she really and who does she think she is. There’s a big difference between the two. She wants to be an artist. It’s important to her. It’s more than a vocation. It’s a sacred pact. And she suffers terribly for it. She is uncompromising, she is opinionated. She is astute and perceptive and diagnostic. She also doesn’t really know who she is or what she needs or what she wants.Why is this friendship so intense?HECHT They both really feel that need to have somebody as a partner. With Alice, Diana teaches her so much.LINNEY They’re attracted to the qualities that they don’t have, but that the other person has in abundance. And there’s a sense of belonging to each other. There’s a sense of family, there’s a sense of chemistry. When you click with someone, it’s really powerful.HECHT Being friends with Diana is almost like having an affair, it changes Alice’s whole metabolism.LINNEY You’re chemically altered. And you’re spiritually rearranged.You’re about four weeks into rehearsal, what have you learned about the play?HECHT Yesterday we did our first run of the play without our books in hand. And it was so scary, but we got through.LINNEY We’re learning a lot. I don’t think any of us have pretensions that we have all the answers. Maybe that’s the one thing that shows how long we’ve been doing this. If you’re too knowing, there’s no room for growth.What’s the joy and terror of a two-hander, of having to rely so much on each other?LINNEY The joy is the intimacy and the bond and that you’re not alone up there. There’s a total interdependence. The biggest fear is that I won’t be able to help her if she gets into trouble.HECHT Yeah, that we would let the other person down.LINNEY The language is very difficult. We never stop talking. We’re going to mess up. We’re human beings. There’s just the fear that we will mess up in a way that derails the show.You both have spent a lot of your career on television. What keeps you returning to the theater?HECHT I feel very, very committed to our community. Being part of this community is definitely the biggest accomplishment of my professional life. I feel a tremendous amount of energy and human connection to the people I act with and the people I act for. Nothing else replicates that.LINNEY It’s a family profession. I have a history with it that goes beyond me. I also strongly believe that it is a part of public good. Theater provides a nourishment, intellectually and emotionally and spiritually, to audiences. And I love the ritual. There is a connection to the work that’s much deeper than anything you can do on television and film. Because we are doing it from beginning to end, eight shows a week.HECHT It is a religion. Someone said to me the other day, “Oh, that is my religion. Being in the theater.”LINNEY People ask me, “What church did you grow up in?” I’m like, “The theater.” Everything that’s important about life I’ve learned in the theater. More

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      Review: In ‘The Best We Could,’ the Players Follow Directions

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      The playwright Emily Feldman structures this work like a personal GPS that plots the course of a family.A bare stage is like a blank canvas; it’s all potential until the artists begin to shape their work. Life can follow a similar logic, in that every move is a foreclosure of possibility, narrowing both the focus and the way forward.Ella (Aya Cash), the drifting Millennial daughter in “The Best We Could (a family tragedy),” which opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, has cycled in and out of enough careers (modern dance, a museum gift shop) that she’s written a children’s book about giving up on your dreams. (She also teaches chair yoga.)We learn all this from a narrator called Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who welcomes the audience to the Manhattan Theater Club production, introduces each character in bitingly specific detail and dictates plot and dialogue before it happens.It’s an apt mode of giving directions, as the play’s nominal throughline is a cross-country road trip that Ella takes with her father, Lou (Frank Wood), to pick up a rescue dog. At the time of their drive, Ella has just broken up with her girlfriend, while Lou, who is nearing retirement age, is angling for a research job. On the way, they visit Lou’s closest friend and former colleague Marc (Brian D. Coats), and Lou appeals to him for help in landing the gig. His wife, Peg (Constance Shulman), chimes in through phone calls to Ella and Lou and appears in revelatory flashbacks.The actors are impeccably cast and deliver unaffected and subtly astonishing performances. Their characters form a kind of Ur-family, their dynamics both convincingly particular and broadly representative of relationships connecting husbands, wives and generations.The playwright Emily Feldman achieves a captivating depth of field beyond her characters’ surface actions, and even their mordant, often bleak powers of observation. (Tragedy seems like a misnomer through most of the show’s 90 minutes, which are shot through with easy but deceptively dark humor.) Cosmic questions that lurk beneath everyday routines seem to creep in from the periphery of the director Daniel Aukin’s minimal but imaginative staging — the loudest being, is this really all there is to life?There is more to Feldman’s layered investigation of consumer capitalism, kinship and gendered power imbalances, which she brings to light throughout “The Best We Could” in the manner of family secrets: There’s no escaping the ones you love, or the truth. Though it also may be no surprise to learn that like the sort of men he represents, Lou is in a crisis of his own making.For Ella, aimlessness itself is a kind of privilege. As her father points out, there’s a reason she was able to take ballet lessons, buy whatever she wanted from the mall and drive her own car. If there’s an element of myopia to Feldman’s otherwise searingly insightful play, it’s the cultural specificity of someone with the luxury of blowing in the breeze, trying out this or that, with a safety net to catch them when they fall.The Best We Could (a family tragedy)Through March 26 at the New York City Center, Stage I; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More

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      Barry Grove to Depart Manhattan Theater Club After 48 Years

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      During his tenure, the nonprofit supported works that have gone on to earn seven Pulitzer Prizes and nearly 30 Tony Awards.Barry Grove was 23 years old when, in 1975, he started work as the managing director at Manhattan Theater Club, then a fledging nonprofit producing Off Off Broadway shows in space rented from a Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association on the Upper East Side.Over nearly half a century, as the organization, the art form and the industry have expanded and transformed, he has become a familiar figure both on Broadway, where M.T.C., which primarily presents new plays, now operates the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, and Off Broadway, where the company presents work at New York City Center in Midtown. The company’s annual budget has grown from $172,000 to about $27 million.Grove’s longtime partnership with the company’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who is celebrating her 50th anniversary at the nonprofit, has supported work that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes (for “Cost of Living,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Doubt,” “The Piano Lesson,” “Proof,” “Rabbit Hole” and “Ruined”) and 28 Tony Awards. At the same time, he has taught (most recently at Columbia and Yale) and served on the industry’s most powerful boards (including for the Tony Awards, the Broadway League and the League of Resident Theaters).Now M.T.C.’s executive producer, Grove, 71, is ready to leave. He announced Wednesday that his last day will be June 30. His final shows include two plays on Broadway, “The Collaboration,” which opened in December and runs through Feb. 5, and “Summer, 1976,” which begins performances April 4, as well as two Off Broadway plays, “The Best We Could” and “King James.”“We’ve had an incredible run and an incredible relationship, and have done amazing things,” Meadow said. “I will miss him terribly, and we’re going to continue to try to be great.”As Grove prepares to depart the company, he reflected on his tenure, and the state of the industry. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why are you leaving?Very recently it became clear to me that it was time for me to do this and have some time while I’m still healthy with my wife and extended family, to maybe go back to teaching and some consulting work. I started in the professional theater when I was 19. I don’t know that I’m ready to get into a rocking chair, but I do want to be able to pursue small projects, a lifelong commitment to teaching, service to the community, that kind of stuff.Why did you stay for so long?If I had just landed in a finished theater — big and mature — I might well have gotten tired or burned out much earlier. But from the beginning, I was able to adopt a strategy of “learn it, do it, teach it, monitor it, and then get out of the way.” And so we were able to grow a staff and to grow the institution. With each new idea Lynne had, or new opportunity that the work demanded, there was a new challenge, and it kept me interested, it kept me motivated, and it kept me moved by the power of the work.What is your favorite show that you’ve worked on?This is a question over the years I’ve been asked a lot, and my answer is always the same: The next one.What is the future of the Manhattan Theater Club?I think it’s yet to be charted, but I hope that it will continue to be involved in important new work, and that it can remain a viable not-for-profit that will allow a next generation to do the work they feel needs to be and wants to be done. I’m not looking to tower over the future. I full well expect they’ll take the place beyond where we have and to places I haven’t even maybe dreamed of.What is the state of the play on Broadway?It’s now clear that we’re still not out of the woods on the pandemic aftereffects. The numbers are just down. In addition, there are for the first time in a while, a number of play revivals on Broadway, with very expensive capitalizations and stars, and between them they are seating a lot of people, but many of them are going to close at a loss. And in the meantime it makes for trying to keep the audience at the same size here hard, because the commercial world is spending a lot of money advertising. And beyond that, people are still slow to come back a lot — they’re buying single tickets to shows they want to see, but they’re not buying large subscription packages. We’re not out of the hole.How are nonprofit theaters doing?Everywhere, sales have been disrupted. I’d make a plea to the general public that cares about the theater: If ever there was a time to support your local theater, whichever one that is, now is the time to do that.Will you keep seeing theater?Of course. I need to see the final act of “Julius Caesar” to know how it comes out, because when my mom started taking me to theater in Stratford, Connecticut, she had an appendicitis attack in the fourth act so I never got to see how it ended. More