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    In ‘The Other Black Girl,’ the Call Is Coming From Inside the Cubicle

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    This satirical workplace thriller tracks the plight of an assistant as she endures terrors both mysterious and banal.The loneliness, anxiety and discomfort that often comes with being the only Black person in a predominantly white space can turn any office into a mental and emotional minefield. But what if finally gaining a new Black co-worker only made matters worse?“The Other Black Girl,” a satirical workplace thriller premiering Wednesday on Hulu, poses just such a quandary. The 10-episode series, developed for the streamer by Onyx Collective, is based on Zakiya Dalila Harris’s best-selling 2021 novel of the same name and follows Nella Rogers (Sinclair Daniel), a put-upon editorial assistant, as the rat race leads her down unexpected paths.Nella spends her days wilting under an ever-critical white gaze, enduring performative wokeness and passive-aggressive supervisors at the literary publishing company where she works. Her joy at discovering that a newly hired assistant is also a Black woman is short-lived when that employee, Hazel-May McCall (Ashleigh Murray), quickly becomes her adversary.There is also a parallel plot tying Nella’s present-day woes to a mysterious incident between two Black women at the same company nearly four decades earlier, as well as increasingly sinister occurrences in the office: flickering lights, threatening notes, glitchy computers depicting unnerving scenes, shadowy figures darting down the halls.Sinclair Daniel, left, and Ashleigh Murray in “The Other Black Girl,” debuting Wednesday on Hulu.HuluThe show prompts viewers to wonder: What’s more chilling? The uncanny notion of a supernatural office-wide conspiracy? Or the very real knowledge that you can never know whom to trust because racism, either casual or systemic, could be lurking around the next cubicle corner?“We really wanted for it to be unclear what is the actual scary part,” Harris said in a late-August phone interview. “Obviously, there’s the twist that’s happening, but also, it’s being gaslit in your office!”A lifelong fan of true-crime and horror, the novelist was eager to make her first foray into TV writing (she co-wrote the pilot and wrote the penultimate episode) by channeling some of her eerie faves, including “The Twilight Zone” and “Black Mirror.” She and Rashida Jones — the pilot co-writer and an executive producer — also took cues from their mutual must-watch, “Severance.”“The way that they nailed office life — the mundane parts of it, but also the quirky parts of it — that was something that excited me,” Harris said of the Apple TV+ drama. She said she prefers creepiness that “starts off in a very everyday kind of place, but then slowly, it becomes more and more clear that there’s something off.”Harris, like her main character, hails from a mostly white Connecticut town and was the only Black woman in her department at Penguin Random House before quitting in 2019 to write full time. She said the show’s writers — most are Black women — bonded by sharing past experiences of being overstressed and undervalued as an “only.”“Having those conversations really early on allowed us as a room to start from this place of our own relationships with the material,” Harris said. She added, “I really felt like we were trust-falling, to where I got to feel comfortable giving my baby over. At that point, I was like, ‘This is so much bigger than me now.’”Nella is plagued by workplace microaggressions as well as flickering lights, threatening notes and other sinister occurrences in the office.HuluNella’s plight will feel familiar to any viewer who’s ever been blindsided by a tone-deaf “Heyyy, gurrrl!” in the office kitchen. You can practically see her ulcer forming as she fends off her wannabe ally co-worker, Sophie (Kate Owens), while contending with the canine commands — “Nella, come! Sit!” — of her boss, Vera (Bellamy Young).When she learns about the new hire, the perpetually uneasy Nella gets a visible serotonin boost from the chance to gab about natural hair care products and H.B.C.U. homecoming parties. But soon the effortlessly cool Hazel seems to have the higher-ups, particularly the company founder, Richard Wagner (Eric McCormack), eating out of one hand while she is holding Nella back with the other.Amid all the mind games and crabs-in-a-barrel machinations, the show also mocks modern “diversity matters” pageantry while suggesting with its earlier subplot that for all of the rhetoric, the 21st-century office environment isn’t too terribly different from that of the 1980s.“I felt like every Black woman I know could identify with some aspect of the book,” said Jordan Reddout, who is the series’s showrunner along with her longtime creative partner, Gus Hickey. Reddout said she “made every woman in my family read it — my dad, too.”“I am a Black woman who was a very serious classical musician for a long time and then went to Harvard and then went into sitcom writing,” she said. “So I really identified with Nella’s journey of being ‘the only one.’”(The phone interview with Reddout and Hickey was coordinated through their personal representation, not Hulu. The Writers Guild strike rules prohibit members from promoting shows at the behest of the studios and their subsidiaries.)For Nella, the arrival of Hazel is first a source of relief, then concern.HuluFrom Hickey’s perspective, there’s also a “universality to the story in terms of posing this question of: How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to succeed in a competitive environment?”“And for marginalized people,” he continued, “it’s in a competitive environment that is set up for people who don’t look like you to win.”The duo leaned on their sitcom background (“Mixed-ish,” “Grown-ish”) in order to inject some levity into their cultural critique. (Having written for “Will & Grace,” this is their second time working with McCormack.)“Our style has always been: The world is sad enough as it is, you have to laugh at it or you will not survive,” Hickey said. “I think with this show, as serious a subject matter as it has, it almost necessitates having a point of view that has some humor. So we were really conscious of that with Nella; we wanted her to be a funny audience surrogate who could see how ridiculous both the reality and the fantasy of this world was.”Reddout said they stayed true to the spirit of the novel and even pulled certain scenes directly from the page. “I think the places where we do stray from the book are only deepening the characters and rounding out their stories,” she said.Harris supports that approach. She admitted the Nella-Hazel dynamic could have been more nuanced in her novel. For the series, she was keen to flesh out the book’s antagonist and chip away at the “good vs. bad” dichotomy between the two women.“We really wanted for it to be unclear what is the actual scary part,” Harris said of the series.Mark Elzey for The New York Times“It’s more rounded out in the show than it was in the book, to be honest,” she said. “With Hazel, writing her in the book, I just thought of her as more of a robot that’s been conditioned by the world to be this way but not necessarily still holding onto humanity. In the show Hazel has a soul, and Ashleigh had a huge hand in shaping what that soul would look and feel like.”Another key difference between the series and the book is their divergent endings — without giving them away, each leaves you wondering what happens next, though for very different reasons. Neither the author nor the showrunners would speculate on the likelihood of a second season, though all three acknowledged that enough unexplored original material and potential new story lines exist to sustain one.In the meantime, Harris is busy writing her second book, which she says is not a sequel but is “still horror, still Black people.” She believes the genre is well-suited to telling Black stories, so much so that she used a quote from the author and horror noir expert Tananarive Due as the epigraph for “The Other Black Girl”: “Black history is Black horror.” But her attraction to the otherworldly runs deeper than just that.“I joke that I’ve always been drawn to horror because I’ve always been the kind of person who imagines all the ways things can go wrong,” she said. “For me, watching and writing horror is the perfect place to put my own personal anxieties and insecurities.” More

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      Review: The Cocktail Wit Is Watered Down in a Rickety New ‘Cottage’

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      Jason Alexander directs a Broadway farce that aims for the high style of Noël Coward but falls on its face instead.Farce is the emergency that keeps emerging. That’s why it depends so much on doors: to admit fresh trouble and lock it in.Alas, the door in “The Cottage,” a mild farce by Sandy Rustin, works only partway. It lets people enter, yet doesn’t trap them; they can leave at any time — and never do. Even when a killer is coming, the characters merely dawdle.Dawdling is the play’s difficulty as well; everyone talks in pseudofancy circles. The stunts and capers likewise have no danger in them. And Jason Alexander’s trick-filled production, which opened on Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater, cannot hide that the stakes are too low.For Beau (Eric McCormack) and his sister-in-law, Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), those stakes are close to nonexistent. Theirs is, after all, a once-a-year tryst. And since each is already cheating merrily on a spouse, the initial problem — Sylvia wants a bigger commitment, but Beau is overbooked — does not seem very problematic.The interruptions that then arrive with the dulling punctuality of a track coach grasping a stopwatch do not much complicate matters. The first is Beau’s pragmatic wife, Marjorie (Lilli Cooper); the second is her foppish lover, Clarke (Alex Moffat). Because Clarke is Beau’s brother and Sylvia’s husband, the impact of his affair is nullified within minutes as the adulteries cancel each other out.While you try to absorb the overneat crisscross symmetry of that setup, notice the cottage itself, a classic Cotswolds hideaway fully furnished with opportune dangers: a twisty staircase, a library ladder, a trapdoor window seat and alarming taxidermy. (The amusing set is by Paul Tate dePoo III.) With croony jazz (sound by Justin Ellington) and lovely Deco frocks (by Sydney Maresca) we are clearly in the 1920s. In a marcelled blond bob (by Tommy Kurzman), Sylvia looks simply smashing.The cast mostly delivers elegant work, our critic writes, with Eric McCormack as Beau and Laura Bell Bundy as Sylvia consistently hitting their marks. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yes, that’s how they talk. If the play is not exactly new — it has been making the rounds since 2013 — it wishes it were even older. Specifically, it places itself in the “Private Lives” era of Noël Coward, when brittle Brits in smoking jackets dropped bon mots along with their ashes. (The dozen hidden-cigarette jokes provided by the prop supervisor, Matthew Frew, are the funniest part of the show.) Also suggested are the identity confusions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and the country-home sexcapades of “Nothing On,” nested within Michael Frayn’s glorious backstage farce “Noises Off.”But to suggest something is not to achieve it, and though “The Cottage” operates like a farce it only rarely achieves a farce’s liftoff. That’s when the pressure on the characters becomes so intense that it initiates a kind of verbal and physical fission.A few moments here hint at that possibility, as when Sylvia says, “So, you stuck a mustache on a mustache and changed your name to Richard?” — a line that is both perfectly logical in context and logic’s perfect opposite outside it. And Moffat’s extreme character choices, including postures that find him tied up in pretzels with his feet en pointe, nearly turn this “Saturday Night Live” clown’s performance into modern dance.But these are squibs; they zoom up, pop briefly and fizzle. Despite the cast’s mostly elegant work — Bundy and the self-mocking McCormack consistently hit their marks — the script and what feels like Alexander’s desperation to keep things aloft inevitably let them down. I am not, for instance, aware of a scene in Coward involving 30 seconds of earsplitting flatulence. Nor do the stinger chords that announce each new character’s entrance inspire confidence in the production’s genre discipline.“The Cottage” is therefore more of a spoof than a farce, and less a spoof of Coward or Wilde than of Feydeau, soap operas and middlebrow adultery comedies of the 1970s like “6 Rms Riv Vu” and “Same Time, Next Year.” More or less successfully, they all used humor to assuage the sexual anxieties of their times by showing how characters twisted into agonies of jealousy and desire might nevertheless come to a good end.Rustin wants to do something similar by introducing three additional amatory complications, including Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), about whom it would be unfair to say more. In different ways they lead Sylvia, who gradually becomes the center of the play, to reject the traditional assumptions that too often trap women in loveless marriages. Developing this feminist angle on Coward, Rustin name-checks the English suffragist leader Emmeline Pankhurst and draws on a surprise instance of intergenerational sisterhood to resolve the plot.Though the misogyny of man-made social institutions (and plays) is not exactly news, I was glad of this development in theory, and impressed with Bundy’s ability to carry it off at the just-right midpoint between silly and serious. But after all the temporizing and flatulating earlier, the last-minute arrival of a point seemed, well, beside the point. Had I laughed more than twice in the play’s previous 119 minutes, I might even have found it funny.The CottageThrough Oct. 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thecottageonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      How to Squeeze a Feminist Farce Into an English Country House

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      The new Broadway comedy “The Cottage” begins with a pair of lovers in an English country house in 1923, the morning after their annual illicit tryst. Sylvia, played by the “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy, is aflame with passion for her paramour, Beau, played by Eric McCormack of “Will & Grace.”On an afternoon in mid-June, the cast wore street clothes as they did a stumble-through of the show at a rehearsal studio in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. When Beau, in a fit of desire, sank his teeth into Sylvia’s foot, McCormack was in fact gamely biting into Bundy’s sneaker top.Ah, the glamour of acting!There is a certain borrowed elegance, though, to the play itself. Arguably a farce — though the playwright, Sandy Rustin, rejects that term, which to her suggests stock characters and clowning — “The Cottage” is a feminist twist on witty British comedies in the Noël Coward mold.“The Cottage” cast rehearsing, from left: Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy, Dana Steingold, Lilli Cooper and Alex Moffat.OK McCausland for The New York Times“I’m really a huge fan of that whole genre of upper-crust British style,” said Rustin, whose best known play is the murder-mystery comedy “Clue,” adapted from the 1985 movie. “But the female characters often leave much to be desired. They’re often just there to serve the men. I was interested in finding a way into that genre where the women ruled the roost.”It’s no accident that Rustin, an actor who learned sketch writing and improv at Upright Citizens Brigade, set “The Cottage” in the 1920s, as British women’s rights were gaining traction. But the feminism, for much of the play, is more insinuated than overt.Only gradually does it become apparent that Sylvia, Bundy’s character, is the heroine of this ensemble piece, which starts previews on July 7 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Cheating with Beau, Sylvia is married to Clarke, who, in turn, is deep into an affair with Marjorie, Beau’s wife. All of them, and a couple of other lovers besides, turn up at what is, by Act II, a very crowded cottage.The cast of six includes Lilli Cooper — a Tony Award nominee for “Tootsie,” seen most recently on Broadway in last year’s feminist farce, “POTUS” — as the heavily pregnant Marjorie. Alex Moffat, late of “Saturday Night Live,” plays Clarke, a role that taps Moffat’s talent for falling down stairs. Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld” fame, directs.“Comedy’s hard,” Alexander said, though at rehearsal he was an exuberant presence, watching from behind his music stand. “To make something light is heavy lifting.”In the days after the stumble-through, he, Rustin and some of the actors spoke individually by phone about what it takes to pull off this nouveau-throwback play, in period style. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Alexander with the playwright Sandy Rustin on the play’s set at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesIt’s all about precision, darling.SANDY RUSTIN Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play, they’re in an Oscar Wilde play. And then it kind of comes off the rails. That reality sort of unravels.LAURA BELL BUNDY I’m in, like, 140 out of 147 pages [of the script]. And let me tell you, these words, they are not normal to my vernacular. Remembering where all the “rathers” and the “darlings” go, I swear that has been the most difficult thing. If you don’t get the exact wording, it’s like, that’s not the style. And also you have to speak it so quickly, because that’s the rhythm.‘Pace becomes a character.’ERIC McCORMACK As Jason has said many times, these are all great words, but without the pace, without the absolute synergy of the six of us, they’ll just sit there. This becomes its own thing when the six of us are firing on all cylinders, and the pace becomes a character, virtually. The urgency of the play isn’t just the jeopardy of “Oh my God, somebody’s coming to the door,” as much as it is, we’re all kind of running for our lives. We’re dancing for our lives.BUNDY There is a rhythm to comedy, especially stage comedy. The comedy is inside the way that some of those lines are being delivered, the pace in which they are, the volume in which they are. That is essentially the same as musical theater, or the same as multicamera comedy. Which is why I think Eric is nailing this. That’s also why Jason is nailing this.At a rehearsal last month, from left: Steingold, Alexander and Nehal Joshi. OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe play is like a musical. Or Whac-a-Mole.JASON ALEXANDER I call it the sort of nonmusical musical. With a musical number, everybody in it, even if they’re wildly separated from each other, they all understand the tempo, the intonation, the mood of the piece, the movement of the piece. This play and this cast require that in a very similar way, but there’s nobody keeping a drumbeat, and there’s nobody playing a melody. So they have to feel it internally with each other.LILLI COOPER We’re all kind of cogs in this wheel. And there are six of us onstage sometimes. But, you know, the focus has to be on something very specific. So we need to learn how to blend in with the scenery in moments and pop forward in moments. In rehearsal the other day, I compared this play to a Whac-a-Mole. We need to figure out which mole, and when, do we pop out of the hole.The script is a kind of score.BUNDY When I lost my voice the other day, it was hard for me to convey all the tonality that, when you shift the tone of voice, can hit a punchline. No matter what the format is, whether it’s musical theater comedy or whether it is absent of music, there’s still music to it.McCORMACK This role is literally a three-octave role. You need all of those notes to just sort of surf the wave of that very highfalutin English conversation.From left: Joshi, Bundy and Steingold. “Every single actor is walking onto the stage as if they are in a legit Noël Coward play,” Rustin said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesPoses are drawn from the past.ALEXANDER Can we find a common language of behavior and action and movement and playing style that is clearly rooted in what we now think of as the over-the-top styles of acting from the ’30s and ’40s? There’s a sort of a posing there that is just behaviorally different. I’ve said to Eric once or twice, “Eric, that arm gesture that you just made is very 2023.”BUNDY The body language of [Sylvia] being this fairly well-to-do woman from the 1920s in Great Britain: How does that body hold itself? I’m figuring that out. Then as she begins to transform and become a more authentic version of herself that isn’t wrapped up in the niceties of the time and what a woman should be, how a woman should be behaving, how does the body language change? All of that is stuff that I’m having to be really calculated about.Bodies are comedy fodder.RUSTIN I tend to write really physical comedies, where it’s equal parts text and what’s happening to the bodies onstage. The two things for me are married. The humor comes from how these people are inhabiting their space.COOPER I was fairly recently pregnant, a year and a half ago. It is so crazy how putting that [costume pregnancy] belly on truly brings me back. It’s like this sense memory. When I was pregnant, I kind of couldn’t believe it; it’s pretty wild that we grow humans inside ourselves. So there’s this absurdist element to it. There’s comedy in spatial awareness. Like, I physically take up more space when I have this belly on.“I call it the sort of nonmusical musical,” Alexander said. It’s all about timing. Victor Llorente for The New York TimesPies, no. Stairs, yes.McCORMACK Besides just being a hundred years old and not really wanting to fall down stairs anymore — I’ll leave that to Alex — what’s hard about physical comedy, mostly, is doing something that feels in the moment. We’ve all seen pies in the face and all that stuff. But finding an original moment, particularly in a moment of high angst or high anxiety, is just a great reward.ALEX MOFFAT I’m interested to get into the theater and see what the stairs look like. Currently in our [rehearsal] space, it’s just a few stairs. I can [fall down them] six or seven times a day, as we have been doing. But if it’s like 12 stairs coming down from the upstairs of the cottage, we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do.The political message? Sneak it in.BUNDY I was very attracted to this play because of this epiphany this woman [Sylvia] begins to have — that her joy does not need to revolve around the love of a man. Women’s sexuality is so stigmatized. And the thing is, these truths about what it means to be a woman with sexual drive, that’s also making us laugh.MOFFAT Hopefully it’s just a barreling freight train of guffaws. But absolutely it might surprise people with how the play has such a great, strong, feminist point of view. Just doing a really funny thing and taking people along for that ride, it can work as long as people get swept along in the comedy of it, in the story of it. And then maybe at the end they go, “Oh! That made an interesting point.”COOPER One of my favorite lines in the show is [paraphrasing], “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a man.” It’s such a revelation to these people that they truly ponder it. That concept being so unfathomable to this generation is funny in itself. And feminist. More

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      Jason Alexander Will Direct a Comedy on Broadway This Summer

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      “The Cottage,” written by Sandy Rustin, will star Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy and Lilli Cooper.“The Cottage,” a farce inspired by and also sending up the work of Noël Coward, will come to Broadway this summer in a new production directed by the “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander.The play, which has had several productions in small theaters over the last decade, will star Eric McCormack (“Will & Grace”), Laura Bell Bundy (“Legally Blonde”) and Lilli Cooper (“Tootsie”).“The Cottage” is a British farce by an American writer, Sandy Rustin, whose murder mystery drama, “Clue” (adapted from the board-game-based film), is now among the most-produced plays in the United States.Set in England in 1923, the comedy is set off by the revelation of an extramarital affair that brings a group of interconnected people together at a country house.It was first staged in 2013 at the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens, and has since had productions in Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida, as well as on Long Island, and it has been optioned for television.Alexander directed a reading of the play in 2016 and led a developmental workshop in 2017. This production will be his Broadway directing debut, but he has appeared on Broadway in six shows and won a Tony Award for starring in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”“The Cottage” is scheduled to begin performances July 7 at the Hayes Theater, with the opening scheduled for July 24. It is a commercial production, renting space from a nonprofit; the lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner, who last collaborated on the stage adaptation of “The Kite Runner” that ran on Broadway last year.This summer is shaping up to be an unusually busy one for Broadway: “The Cottage” is the fifth show to announce a summer opening thus far, joining the musicals “Back to the Future,” “Here Lies Love” and “Once Upon a One More Time” and the play “Purlie Victorious.” More