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    ‘Dead Outlaw,’ a Mummy Musical, Is So Strange It Can Only Be True

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    The creators of “The Band’s Visit” reunited to tell the story of an outlaw whose body toured carnivals for decades.When the composer David Yazbek approached his “Band’s Visit” collaborator David Cromer in 2019 about directing “Dead Outlaw,” a high-energy song cycle that he was developing into a musical, Cromer wasn’t sure he was the right fit.“One of the first things he said was ‘I don’t tend to go out just to hear music; I want more than that,’” said Yazbek, who envisioned a show with an onstage band, interstitial narration and a minimal set. “‘And so maybe I’m the wrong person for this.’”“No, no, no,” Yazbek reassured him. “That makes you the right person. We’ve already got the rock-band-sounding-great part nailed down.”Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town that takes place over a single night, “Dead Outlaw” is a rollicking thrill ride about a bumbling turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose body becomes a traveling, decades-long sideshow exhibited across the country.It also happens to be true.“It’s what I’ve been calling documentary musical theater,” Itamar Moses, who wrote the books for “The Band’s Visit” and “Dead Outlaw,” said over dinner in Greenwich Village with Yazbek, Cromer and Erik Della Penna, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Dead Outlaw” with Yazbek.The rockabilly musical, which is scheduled to run through April 14 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, tracks the ineffectual, booze-filled career and subsequent death, in a 1911 shootout, of Elmer McCurdy, whose involuntary second act has inspired books, plays and a BBC documentary.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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      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: Not Much of a Bandit, but What a Corpse

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of décor to spook the thrill seekers.More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “Dead Outlaw,” a mischievous but never meanspirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “The Band’s Visit.”Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with the book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books, previous plays and a documentary, it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.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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      ‘Swing State’ Review: All Is Not Well in Wisconsin

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      Rebecca Gilman’s play, set in a rural farmhouse, sees an image of the decline of Americans’ interdependence in the death of wildflowers.It’s immediately clear what kind of flinty, progressive woman lives in the converted farmhouse depicted onstage in “Swing State,” the play by Rebecca Gilman that opened on Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater. Well, not so much “depicted” as “duplicated.”You can just about sense the recycling bins beneath the working sink and the Obama memoirs in the book-filled sitting room of Todd Rosenthal’s cozy set, a throwback to the hyper-naturalistic style that has for decades dominated American social drama. Indeed, as the play begins, Peg Smith, whose name alone lets you know she’s plain and real, stands cracking eggs at her kitchen island to make the homeliest food ever devised: zucchini bread.But all is not well among the baskets, birdhouses and earthenware bowls. For one thing, there’s a container of human ashes on the counter. Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) has been a widow for a little more than a year, and not doing well. She and her husband had moved to this corner of rural Wisconsin to enjoy the ancient prairie taking up 48 of their 51 acres; without him — and this being the pandemic year of 2021, without much of anyone — her life feels joyless. She is considering, as the euphemism has it, “self-harm”: The knife with which she chops the zucchini can cut both ways.The prairie isn’t doing well either, abutted by commercial farms and subjected to the runoff of their agrochemicals. A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species: bats, chorus frogs, whippoorwills, wildflowers, butterflies, nighthawks and the insects they feed on.The dying off, though real, is also, alas, a symbol. “Swing State,” as its title suggests, means to connect the land to its people: poorly stewarded and subject to dangerous fluctuations. Though Donald Trump is mentioned only once — Peg says she canceled her subscription to the local newspaper when it endorsed him — he is as much the target here as the agrochemicals. In the play’s cosmology, the debased politics of narcissism have polluted American life with the aggro-chemicals of overly heightened and disordered emotions. Democracy is a prairie.I don’t argue with that premise. Nor with Gilman’s craft; I’ve admired her since her first New York outing, the shocker “Spinning Into Butter,” in 2000. “Swing State”— frugal with themes, meticulous about motivation, minutely sensitive to the timing of revelations — could serve as a case study in dramatic construction.A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat, for me, is the problem. We have become very familiar with the workings of social-problem plays like this. If we see Peg staring nervously at the knife in the first minute, and by the second scene (out of seven) learn that a footlocker containing a Winchester rifle has been stolen from her barn, we may already discern the shape of the rest. That there are only three other characters — one of them Ryan, who has recently been released from prison — does not leave many doors open.Ryan and Peg are both outsiders, oddballs trying to survive in a system that puts a premium on conformity and offers little help, or hope of reform, to those who suffer or do wrong. They are classic lefty tropes: the do-gooder who is seen as a crackpot and the misunderstood young man who is seen as a threat. The two remaining characters — Kris Callahan Wisnefski, the town sheriff, and Dani Wisnefski, her niece and the newbie deputy — represent the over-reactive forces of conservative society, more interested in order than in goodness. Sheriff Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald) immediately accuses Ryan of the theft and sets out to prove her prejudice. Dani (Anne E. Thompson) is eager to do right but is intimidated (and undertrained) by her barky aunt.In Robert Falls’s staging, imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and presented here by Audible, every collision is clearly tuned. The scenes snap into place like machine-tooled puzzle pieces, with lighting (by Eric Southern), costumes (by Evelyn Danner) and music (by Richard Woodbury) that all but feeds the audience its emotional cues. And though Gilman does much to complicate the characters’ motives with back story that’s elaborately layered into the dialogue — so elaborately that at one point a character is forced to ask, “Why are you telling me this?” — none except Peg seem quite believable.Fisher is able to absorb the complications into a rounded performance in which they feel surprising but not synthetic. She has more to work with, of course, as she is onstage for most of the play’s 105 minutes, but also more to build on, having been a Gilman regular, like Falls, for years. (In New York she played a stalking victim in Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl” in 2001.) She seems to move through the variously depressed, angry, loving and resigned aspects of the character like a hawk gliding on thermals. You barely notice the turns.In the play overall, though, you do. And until a thrillingly staged climax that moves unusually fast, you usually foresee the corners with plenty of room to prepare. The result is a play that seems becalmed on its surface despite the powerful emotions underneath — not just the characters’ emotions but the author’s.Gilman, who now lives in the part of Wisconsin where the play is set, the so-called Driftless Area, is evidently passionate about the same things as Peg. She too has become a volunteer for the Prairie Enthusiasts, a group dedicated to protecting the Upper Midwest’s natural heritage. (In the play the group is called the Prairie Protectors or, more derisively, the Prairie Geeks.) And clearly Gilman is invested in her overarching metaphor, telling Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times that the human ecosystem, like the natural one, is “not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”If only she had dramatized that, I could be more of a full-throated warbler in praising the play. What “Swing State” actually dramatizes, sometimes movingly, is despair. Its action is driven less by any visible coarsening of America’s democratic ecosystem than by depression, alcoholism, spite and bad luck.If anything, it is about the “swing state” of individual emotion, regardless of politics. (Even the good liberal Peg is erratic and sometimes nasty.) Still, its message — because yes, there is a message in all plays featuring sinks with running water — applies to our personal as well as our national ecosystems: “You can’t give up even if you want to.”Swing StateThrough Oct. 28 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; swingstateplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Swing State’ Playwright Wants to Sound an Alarm for a World in Trouble

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      In her Off Broadway drama, which had an acclaimed run in Chicago, the playwright looks for hope to outweigh despair in a fractious, anxious time.The playwright Rebecca Gilman moved away from small-town Alabama long ago, but a soft Southern lilt still shapes her words. In all the years she lived and worked here in her adopted city of Chicago, she remained immune to its Bill Murray accent. The broad tones of nearby Wisconsin have likewise left no mark.Rural Wisconsin itself, though, has burrowed deep in her soul. After more than a decade of traveling back and forth from Chicago, Gilman relocated full-time to Green County, Wis., about four years ago. If you want to send her into a soliloquy, just ask what she loves about the prairie. She will talk about its colors and how they change throughout the year — from white to pink to purple to a wind-stirred sea of yellow — and then she will venture into its metaphors.“When you go to a prairie, it’s just teeming with life — butterflies, bugs, birds, everything,” she said on a stiflingly hot August afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the Goodman Theater, where her new play, “Swing State,” was in rehearsals for its New York run. “It’s an ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else. Some of the plants have to be pollinated by particular butterflies. Particular butterflies have to have lupine to lay their eggs. Monarchs have to have milkweed. And it is not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”Gilman, 58, worries about the prairie’s destruction, but she acts on that fear, volunteering with an endearingly named group, the Prairie Enthusiasts, to protect the land. She worries, too, about threats to wildlife — like white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats — so she recently trained as a “bat ambassador,” to raise awareness of their plight.And like so many inhabitants of this bellicose, burning planet, Gilman worries about its survival if people cannot find a way to coexist and cooperate, at the most intimate local level and beyond. In “Swing State,” which is scheduled to begin previews on Friday, at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan, she wrestles with that anxiety, and with the hopelessness that it can bring.The actors Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher rehearsing the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where “Swing State” had an acclaimed run last year.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesDirected by Gilman’s longtime collaborator Robert Falls, the play is set in what is known as the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, where the rolling landscape is untouched by glacial sediment, or drift. The principal characters are driftless, too — lacking the purpose that human beings require to thrive.Peg, a recent widow in her 60s, cherishes the acres of ancient prairie on her land, and takes crotchety good care of her 20-something neighbor Ryan, a recovering alcoholic who looks out for her, too, as he scrambles to get his life together. But with the natural world in escalating peril, and her husband now just ashes in a box, Peg cannot summon the will to go on.Set in 2021, “Swing State” is only subtly a play about the coronavirus pandemic, depicting the isolation that people felt in its early stages, and the knee-jerk, politicized hostility that arose around masks and vaccines. It is more interested in the ways that antagonism has replaced goodwill, and how lethal to community such hardheartedness can be.When the play had its premiere at the Goodman last October, the critic Chris Jones wrote, in a rave review in The Chicago Tribune, that Gilman had captured “the feeling that America has atrophied, the sense that once-shared values have swung so far to the extremes that the bones of a nation have crumbled.”Yet she frames it all in up-close, personal terms, using just four characters — all residents of the same tiny township. The story isn’t overtly about civic life; at the same time, it is hugely about civic life.“The play, for me,” Falls said, perched in a cushy chair a few feet from Gilman, “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing. One could say civility in politics. One could say very much the environment. One could say a democracy.”For all the rough-and-tumble raucousness of the national shouting match, though, “Swing State” takes a gentle tone.“In a way,” Falls said, “it becomes the quietest play, sitting in the middle of the biggest epic social circumstances.”The longtime collaborators at a rehearsal last month. Falls said the play “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesA TONY AWARD WINNER for his 1999 production of “Death of a Salesman,” Falls, 69, was nearing the end of his long tenure as the Goodman’s artistic director when he decided he wanted to stage one more Gilman play. It would be the sixth in a collaboration that began with her 2001 play “Blue Surge.”In late 2020, when the pandemic was keeping him at home in Evanston, Ill., wondering darkly if actors would ever act without masks on, Gilman was at home in southern Wisconsin, not knowing if she would ever write another play — because, she said, “everything just seemed sort of pointless.”But then he called her up and asked her to. Always, he said, he has felt a connection to her voice, and to the “moral sensibility” at the heart of her plays — a quality he ascribed to her deeply understanding “how the world truly works” yet rejecting “the cynicism of just throwing up your [expletive] hands.”“I really wanted to do a new play by Rebecca,” he said, “to the point where it didn’t really matter what Rebecca wanted to write about.”Gilman had two conditions, swiftly granted: that Falls would direct and that Mary Beth Fisher — who originated lead roles in two of Gilman’s best known plays, “Spinning Into Butter” (1999) and “Boy Gets Girl” (2000), both at the Goodman — would star.As Gilman wrote the role of Peg for Fisher, she poured into the play what was on her mind. Even in those dire days when theaters were shut down and the industry’s future was grim, Gilman’s eyes were on a more collective danger.“The world is in trouble,” she said. “It’s not just the theater that’s in trouble. The world is in trouble. And if the planet dies, all of our precious art is going to die with it. That was the urgency I was feeling. Like, can we create something that also communicates this?”In her swing-state township that Joe Biden won by two votes, where she and her husband joke that maybe they tilted the balance, Gilman doesn’t really talk politics with people anymore: too hazardous.“There’s so much potential for conflict and animosity,” she said, “that you kind of just don’t go down that road because you also have to live next to each other, where there aren’t very many people. You don’t want to make enemies of your neighbors. I don’t know my neighbors’ politics, and I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to know, because I need them if we get stuck in the snow, or they need me to come to their daughter’s high school graduation party.”Fisher, right, with Anne E. Thompson, left, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in the play.Liz LaurenThat polarity and interdependence are woven into “Swing State”; likewise what Gilman said was her fear of losing the people most precious to her, and her alarm at what was vanishing from her beloved outdoors.“Despair is a really strong word,” she said. “But when you do go out into the natural world regularly, it’s impossible not to see what’s dying. It’s impossible not to see what we’re losing.”When bird-watching became a popular pandemic activity, friends would ask her to take them. It gave them solace and gave her solace, too, but hers came with an asterisk.“I was so happy that they were discovering it,” she said. “But at the same time, I was thinking, there used to be so many more birds here. Every time we’d go out, I’d think, oh, gosh, I wish you had come out with me 10 years ago. I wish you’d come out with me five years ago. The birds that we used to see here are not here anymore.”Falls spent his first 13 years of life surrounded by cornfields in rural Illinois, where his mother’s side of the family were farmers. He has always preferred city to country, books to bird-watching. Yet when Gilman took him onto the prairie and handed him a pair of binoculars, he immediately made a rare sighting: a Henslow’s sparrow, a type of bird that figures poignantly in “Swing State.”Theater people in general being fond of superstition, he took that as a “great omen” for the play. Maybe it was, given the show’s success so far — the accolades in Chicago, then the transfer of the Goodman production to New York by Audible Theater, which will record an audio version for wide release.The play’s title, by the way, isn’t just about Wisconsin as a purple state. It’s about the characters’ emotional landscapes, Gilman said, “swinging between despair and hope.”She has no interest in providing false hope, preferring to acknowledge reality. But she doesn’t want to knuckle under to despair, not least because it’s unfair to abandon the world’s troubles to generations that didn’t cause them.So, she said, it’s a balancing act, one in which “meaningful work that makes the world better” — the kind her characters are in search of, and that she has discovered on the prairie — is part of finding a way to heal.“Put despair and hope on the scale,” she said. “You’re going to have to work to make hope outweigh despair, but I do think it’s possible. And I do think that the work is necessary in a way it never has been before.” More

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      ‘Drinking in America’ Review: Men in a Cracked Mirror

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      After 15 years away from the stage, Andre Royo of ‘The Wire’ goes all in with an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues at the Minetta Lane Theater.Andre Royo practically glows with pleasure as he walks onstage at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. That’s the first surprise at “Drinking in America,” an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues peopled with misfits, screwups and creeps.We’re not expecting Royo’s shy smile, either, or what seems like genuinely warm feeling when he opens by telling the audience how good it is to be home, meaning both back in New York and back onstage. It has been 15 long years since this actor, a Bronx native best known for portraying the heroin addict Bubbles on the HBO series “The Wire,” has done a play.Yet it takes him just a couple of minutes of patter to forge an easy, sure connection with the crowd. And once he slips into the monologues, you can sense how attuned he is to our presence, even while he stays firmly in character. Royo understands deeply the symbiosis of theater, and it is beautiful to watch him tap into it.“Drinking in America” had its premiere in 1986, when Bogosian’s name was synonymous with provocatively hip, hetero-masculine theater. These dozen monologues are a cracked mirror held up to American men of that wealth-obsessed era, variously pursuing, embracing and rejecting the American dream. If it’s not a flattering look for them — several of Bogosian’s guys are outright Neanderthals with women — it still makes good theater, because of Bogosian’s observational acuity, and because of the fireworks that ensue when an actor is all in.Royo is all in, from the first monologue, “Journal,” a mini-comedy about the jejune reflections of a young guy on an acid trip, to the last, “Fried-Egg Deal,” about an alcoholic panhandler whose flattery of a prosperous passer-by turns to truth-telling.“If I wasn’t where I was, you couldn’t be where you was,” the panhandler says. “’Cause, you know, ’cause you can’t have a top without a bottom.”The pièce de résistance, though, is “Our Gang,” a wild ride of a comic tale about an out-of-control, drug-fueled night that spirals into rampant violence and destruction. Like characters in plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Mark O’Rowe, both of whom owe something to Bogosian, Royo’s narrator views it all through the lens of hilarity, and regales us accordingly.Directed by Mark Armstrong, this handsomely designed revival leans into the ’80s-ness of the script, which is peppered with boldface names of that decade. (The set is by Kristen Robinson, costumes by Sarita Fellows, lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by John Gromada.) But Bogosian has made a few subtle changes for this Audible Theater production.In “Wired,” Royo plays a Hollywood wheeler-dealer, the kind of guy who snorts a line of cocaine and downs a generous shot of bourbon to get going in the morning. On the phone with someone who wants a big star for a project, he explains that an unnamed actor is out of the running because he has a broken hand.“He couldn’t punch out Ricky Schroder today,” the wheeler-dealer says, referring to the child star of the ’80s sitcom “Silver Spoons,” who in more recent years has made headlines as an anti-vaxxer.Schroder wasn’t the original celebrity named in that bit of dialogue, but the tweak is perfect — for practicality and snark.Other monologues are chilling. In “The Law,” a preacher rails against “satanic abortion clinics” and cultural enemies who have been brought down by gunfire and “only understand the discipline of the bullet.” In “Godhead,” a heroin addict insists he doesn’t want any part of the American dream, merely his fix.“Just let me have my taste,” he says. “Have my peace.”Throughout, Royo’s performance crackles with liveness — the kind of lightning in a bottle that Audible intends to capture on audio for wide release. You could wait for the recording. Far better, you could get yourself to the Minetta Lane and experience this show in the moment, in all of its dimensions.Drinking in AmericaThrough April 8 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; drinkinginamericaplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      A24, the Indie Film Studio, Buys New York’s Cherry Lane Theater

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      The studio’s first venture into live performance follows the move by Audible, Amazon’s audio subsidiary, to stage works at the nearby Minetta Lane Theater.A24, the independent film and television studio barreling into next weekend’s Academy Awards with a boatload of Oscar nominations, is making an unexpected move into live performance, purchasing a small Off Broadway theater in New York’s West Village.The studio, which until now has focused on making movies, television shows and podcasts, has purchased the Cherry Lane Theater for $10 million, and plans to present plays as well as other forms of live entertainment there, in addition to the occasional film screening.A24, whose films include the leading Oscar contender “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is not the first film studio to make such a move: the Walt Disney Company has been presenting stage productions at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater, which it leases from the state and city, since 1997. But Disney, of course, is an entertainment industry behemoth that has mastered the art of multiplatform storytelling.A more comparable move, perhaps, was that by Audible, an Amazon audio subsidiary that since 2018 has been leasing the Minetta Lane Theater, in Greenwich Village, for live productions which it then records and offers on its digital platform. And Netflix, the streaming juggernaut, has in recent years taken over several cinemas, including the Paris Theater in New York, as well as the Egyptian and Bay theaters in Los Angeles.The A24 acquisition, coming at a time when many theaters are still struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, suggests a vote of confidence in live performance. A24 plans to present some events celebrating Cherry Lane’s centennial this spring, and then to close the theater for renovations before beginning full-scale programming next year.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Much remains uncertain about how the company intends to use the theater. A24 declined to make anyone available to speak on the record about the acquisition, but an official there said that the company had not yet decided whether it would develop work for the stage, or present work developed by others. The official, who was granted anonymity to describe the company’s plans, said that the studio hoped the theater would allow it to strengthen existing relationships with writers and performers who work on stage and screen, and to develop new relationships with comedians and theater artists.A24 plans to retain the theater’s existing staff while adding to it with its own team, the official said, and as part of the renovation it plans to install technology so the theater can be used for film screenings.The official said A24’s theater venture is a partnership with Taurus Investment Holdings.“I really believe my theater is going into the right hands,” said Angelina Fiordellisi, who has owned the theater since 1996. “They love to develop and produce the work of emerging writers, and a lot of their writers are playwrights. I can’t imagine a better way to bring future life to the theater.”Fiordellisi, 68, has been trying to sell the theater for some time. “I don’t want to work that hard anymore,” she said, “and I want to spend more time with my family.”The purchase, which was previously reported by Curbed, includes three attached properties, including a 179-seat theater, a 60-seat theater and eight apartments, on the Village’s picturesque, curving Commerce Street. The Cherry Lane, in a 19th-century building that was a brewery and a box factory before being converted to theatrical use in 1923, bills itself as the city’s longest continually running Off Broadway theater.In 2021, Fiordellisi agreed to sell the property to the Lucille Lortel Theater for $11 million, but the sale fell apart. Last week, Lortel announced that it had spent $5.3 million to purchase a three-story carriage house in Chelsea, where it plans to open a 61-seat theater in 2025. The Lortel organization also has a 295-seat theater in the West Village.The Cherry Lane will now be a for-profit, commercial venture; Fiordellisi had operated it through a nonprofit, occasionally presenting work that she developed and more often renting it to nonprofit and commercial producers. Fiordellisi said she will convert her nonprofit to a foundation that will give grants to playwrights and small theater companies. More

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      ‘Lucy’ Review: There’s Something About the Babysitter

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      A workplace comedy set at home, this cleverly detailed production explores child care as both labor and primal instinct.Hiring a babysitter is a high-stakes leap of faith. How well can you really know someone before trusting them with your kids? And what’s going to happen when you’re not at home? Maybe she won’t quite be Mary Poppins, but let’s hope the glint in her eye doesn’t remind you of the unassuming villain in a psychological thriller.With her Pre-Raphaelite curls, plinking bangles and wide-eyed smile, the candidate who sweeps through the door in “Lucy,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater Monday night, appears closer to the former ideal. Ashling (she’s distantly Irish) calls herself a career nanny with 40 years of experience, despite seeming not quite as old herself. Played with a sly incandescence by Lynn Collins, Ashling colors her speech with generous emphasis, insisting that child care keeps her young and that she considers her role on par with a co-parent.The client, Mary, looks like she could give birth at any minute, and has let her search for help come down to the wire. Played with delicate, white-knuckled composure by Brooke Bloom, Mary is an overworked radiologist and single mother with a 6-year-old daughter (Lucy, for whom the play is named) and a son on the way. She is the sort of tightly wound person motherhood has only somewhat unraveled; when she offers Ashling the job, it comes with a stack of guidelines as thick as a novella.Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, “Lucy” is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. When Mary discovers, for example, that she can smell Ashling’s perfume on her infant son at night, it feels like an intimate intrusion. But when Mary awkwardly confronts her, Ashling is breezily evasive.“Lucy” is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn, as tension between the two builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two-hour running time. Mary is undoubtedly a micromanager. Ashling, meanwhile, relishes her freedom, reminding Mary of what she has sacrificed to become a mother. And though Ashling’s strangeness is undeniable, it’s also slippery to pin down. The most telling clues may come from Lucy (Charlotte Surak, adorable), but how reliable can a young child be?Schmidt, who recently adapted “Cyrano” into a stage musical and whose play “Mac Beth” recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, “Lucy” is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, it confronts questions of power, possibility and human nature.Schmidt’s staging, produced by Audible, is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. The tasteful austerity of Mary’s open-plan kitchen-living room aptly reflects her strict minimalism, as does her understated, mostly black wardrobe (the set is by Amy Rubin and costumes by Kaye Voyce). Cha See’s dynamic lighting underscores the play’s subtly eerie shifts in mood, and there’s unexpected humor in the music from sound designer Justin Ellington (perhaps a nod to the play’s future release as an audio play).“Lucy” is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not, and the systems that assign value to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.LucyThrough Feb. 25 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; lucytheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

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      In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More