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    Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof’

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    In a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, a woman rehearses how she would escape her building if Israeli forces were to strike.There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israel Defense Forces attacked it.“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.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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      Review: ‘We Live in Cairo’ Falls Short of Being Revolutionary

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

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      5 Ways This Year’s Tony Awards Reveal That Theater Is Changing

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      As Broadway prepares to celebrate the best of the season, our theater reporter explores what the nominations tell us about the industry and the art form.Tonight’s Tony Awards ceremony will celebrate the best work on Broadway. For those of us who spend a lot of time in and around theater, the event is also a prompt, encouraging us to reflect on what the current crop of shows tells us about how the industry and the art form are doing.Here are some things I’ve been thinking about as this awards season unfolded:Nonprofit theaters are struggling. They’re also developing the most-praised work.Short of money, nonprofit theaters around the country are staging fewer shows, shedding jobs, and in a few cases, closing. Some observers worry that the model that has sustained regional theater for the last half-century is broken.But, at the same time, this year’s Tony Awards tell an amazing success story: 100 percent of the nominees for best new musical, and 100 percent of the nominees for best new play, were developed at nonprofit theaters.Among plays, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” “Mary Jane,” and “Prayer for the French Republic” were all staged on Broadway by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club. (“Mary Jane” had an earlier Off Broadway run at another nonprofit, New York Theater Workshop.) “Stereophonic” was transferred to Broadway by commercial producers after an enthusiastically received Off Broadway run at the nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, while “Mother Play” opened directly on Broadway, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater.Among musicals, “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Suffs” were first staged at the nonprofit Public Theater before being transferred to Broadway by commercial producers. “Water for Elephants” had a pre-Broadway run at the nonprofit Alliance Theater in Atlanta, and “The Outsiders” did the same at the nonprofit La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. “Illinoise,” a dance musical, had a particularly nonprofit nurturing: it was staged at Bard’s Fisher Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and the Park Avenue Armory before commercial producers took it to Broadway.The season was also a big one for American artists.Broadway often frets about the perceived advantages of British productions, which have historically received more government support, cost less to develop, and can benefit from the Anglophilia of some American theater fans. The last five winners of the best play Tony Award all transferred from London (though one of those, “The Inheritance,” was written by an American).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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      Review: A New Lens on Auschwitz in ‘Here There Are Blueberries’

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      Archivists are the heroes of a documentary play about a photograph album depicting daily life among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.You do not expect a camera to be the first thing you see in a play about the Holocaust. Yet even before “Here There Are Blueberries” begins, a spotlight illuminates a Leica on a pedestal. A period advertisement projected behind it promotes it as “the camera of modern times.”That’s apt for a dramatized documentary that looks at its subject from an unusual angle: the discovery of photographs taken at Auschwitz and the archivists who brought them to light.“Blueberries,” which opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop in a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, focuses on the so-called Höcker album, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired from an anonymous donor in 2007. Uniquely, none of the album’s 116 photographs depict victims of the Nazis — only the Nazis themselves, going about the banal daily business of living and enjoying their lives at the camp.That the play takes a similar approach, keeping the victims mostly out of frame, is a blessing and a problem. A blessing because in so doing it avoids both active horror and the cynicism of Holokitsch, in which the murder of six million Jews is appropriated to zhuzh some emotion that might otherwise be absent.But in backgrounding the tragedy, even with the noblest intentions, “Blueberries” (conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman; written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich) gets caught in a different dramatic problem: a problem of moral scale. What it’s about, however worthy, is so much smaller than what it insistently isn’t.It’s not just that the album at the center of the story, being the keepsake of an assistant to the commandant of Auschwitz in 1944, makes no reference to major atrocities in its portrayal of minor pleasures like the title blueberries. We do not see — as we do in the film “The Zone of Interest,” which features some of the same characters and locations — smoke from crematories or glowing evil light at night. In keeping with the museum’s efforts to “avoid undue attention to the perpetrators,” the play’s Nazis are characterized almost as little as their victims.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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      Daniel Radcliffe on Breaking the Spell in ’Merrily We Roll Along’

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      Daniel Radcliffe caught the first batch of Tony nominations during the announcement at 8:30 a.m. He texted congratulations to his “Merrily We Roll Along” co-star Jonathan Groff, who was nominated for best actor in a musical.But then dad duty called before his own category, featured actor in a musical, was announced at 9:00.“I was in the middle of doing breakfast and trying to put my son down for his morning nap, so I got a text from a member of the cast letting me know I was nominated,” said the actor, 34, who stars as the lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas in the acclaimed revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”Radcliffe’s Tony nomination — for his fifth Broadway role since his 2008 debut in “Equus” — is the first of his career. And it’s extra special, he said in a phone conversation from his New York apartment on Tuesday, because not only Groff, but his other “Merrily” co-star, Lindsay Mendez, was also nominated, for featured actress.“People in your line of work probably get bored of actors talking about how much they love each other, how much they enjoy working with each other,” said Radcliffe, who is best known for playing Harry Potter onscreen. “And we do say it a lot, but this group is really awesome — Lindsay, Jonathan, the whole cast. I feel so lucky.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You recently were the ring bearer at Lindsay’s wedding, for which Jonathan served as the officiant. How did that come about?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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      Review: ‘I Love You So Much I Could Die,’ an Experiment in Distance

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      Mona Pirnot’s crisis-centered play uses all its resources to keep the audience at a physical and emotional remove from her sorrow.Whether it’s thought through or instinctual, turning your back to the audience certainly makes a statement. The person onstage might need to hide from an intrusive gaze, or might be deliberately trying to recalibrate the nature of spectacle and the expectations we place on it. Or maybe it’s all part of a grand conceptual design involving the subconscious connections we make when absorbing art.It’s tempting to reach for that last explanation when considering Mona Pirnot’s “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” partly because this New York Theater Workshop production is directed by Lucas Hnath (her husband), who explored the link between storytelling and sound in his plays “Dana H.” and “A Simulacrum.” But this show is too slight, too wan, to bear the weight of analytical dissection.Pirnot, who wrote and stars in “I Love You,” spends the entire 65-minute running time sitting at a table, facing away from the audience. When she picks up a guitar and sings the songs that dot the narrative, we cannot see her expression.We can’t see it during the spoken sections, either, because her words, generated by a speech-to-text application, are piped out of a laptop in a male-sounding voice. A cursor is visible moving across the screen, highlighting the text as the gnomic A.I. interpreter works its way through; at times it feels as if we are sitting in on a willfully dull karaoke session.Interweaving songs and stories, Pirnot pieces together a traumatic event from her life, in a manner that feels solipsistically granular. “I’m the kind of person who will think and think and think, and then think about what I’m thinking, and then think about what I think about what I’m thinking,” she says. “My mom calls it having a pity party.”If that’s her own mother’s take — especially in light of the show’s subject, which gradually comes into relief — imagine the challenge it is to elicit interest, not to mention compassion, from a theater full of people not related to Pirnot. It is a challenge “I Love You” struggles to meet.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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      When the Voice You Hear Is Not the Actor You See

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      The playwright Lucas Hnath has been making magic with the sound of speech. Now he’s directing a play by Mona Pirnot, his wife, in which a computer speaks her words.In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when the playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or her therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: She typed her thoughts into her laptop, and prompted a text-to-speech program to voice them aloud.It was a coping mechanism that also sparked a creative pivot: Pirnot’s then-boyfriend, now-husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a longtime interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His last play, “A Simulacrum,” featured a magician re-creating his side of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via a tape recording; and his play before that, “Dana H.,” featured an actress lip-syncing interviews in which the playwright’s mother recounted the trauma of having been abducted.Now Hnath is directing Pirnot, who wrote and is the lone actor in “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” a diaristic exploration of how she was affected by a life-altering incident that incapacitated her sister at the start of the pandemic. In the 65-minute show, in previews Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, Pirnot sits on a ladderback chair, facing away from the audience, while a Microsoft text-to-speech program reads her lines. Between chapters of storytelling, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings songs that she wrote.Disembodied drama: Pirnot sits with her back to the audience for the entire play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe computer’s voice is male, robotic, and, of course, unemotional; its cadence, and the length of pauses, varies based on how Pirnot and Hnath have punctuated the text. The program makes occasional mistakes — a running joke concerns the pronunciation of Shia LaBeouf — that the artists cherish. Hearing a machine recount stories of very human pain can be awkwardly funny, and audiences are laughing, particularly early in the show, as they adjust to the disorienting experience.“I like the relentlessness that I can get with [the computer’s] voice that’s kind of shocking and surprising, and I find it to be at times very moving but at times extremely anxiety provoking,” Pirnot said. “This actually feels like I’m capturing and sharing a little bit of what this felt like.”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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      ‘Merry Me’ Review: A Loopy Sex Comedy Focused on Female Pleasure

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      Hansol Jung’s new play riffs on Greek dramas, the Restoration comedy “The Country Wife” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”On an imaginary island off the coast of some enemy state that exists only in fantasy, a navy is becalmed. A blackout is to blame, but it’s the good kind of blackout — the kind that stops a war in its tracks.Still, it means the phones aren’t working. So when Pvt. Willy Memnon’s mother calls him up from elsewhere on the base camp, she does it the analog way: on a paper cup attached to a string.“William Iphigenio Memnon,” she says, using his full name because she means business, “pick up the cup, I need to ask you something.”Unusual middle name, no? Then again, his father is Gen. Aga Memnon, and his mother is Mrs. Memnon, a.k.a. Clytemnestra. And in Hansol Jung’s delightfully loopy sex comedy, “Merry Me,” it matters not a whit that navies don’t tend to have generals and privates, or that the Clytemnestra we know from ancient Greek drama, mother to the sacrificed Iphigenia, stays at home when her Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War.In “Merry Me,” directed by Leigh Silverman at New York Theater Workshop, Clytemnestra (Cindy Cheung) tags along, and becomes one of quite a few women to fall for the seductive charms of Lt. Shane Horne (Esco Jouléy), Jung’s libidinous heroine. Another is Willy’s frustrated wife, Sapph (Nicole Villamil) — as in Sappho, and yes she writes poetry.From left, Cindy Cheung, Shaunette Renée Wilson and David Ryan Smith in Jung’s refreshingly playful mash-up, directed by Leigh Silverman. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesVirtuosic though Shane is at giving sexual pleasure, she is having trouble with her own orgasms, which for reasons best known to her she refers to as her “merries.”“Can we not call it that?” her psychiatrist, Jess O’Nope (Marinda Anderson), requests, not unreasonably.Shane, just out of solitary confinement “for having sexed up the general’s wife,” has a plan to hatch, and she needs Jess’s help — Aeschylus and Euripides being merely two of the sources that Jung (“Wolf Play”) is riffing on in this frolic through the stacks.She borrows, too, from William Wycherley’s notoriously randy Restoration comedy “The Country Wife.” Its hero, Horner, spreads a rumor of his own impotence so he can proceed with his many liaisons unsuspected. The version of that in “Merry Me” involves Jess telling everyone that Shane has turned straight.This lie is handy for fending off General Memnon (David Ryan Smith), who wants Shane “court marshaled for her heretically heterophobic courting habits.” It also ensures her freedom to woo women, with Sapph soon topping the list. Except that the pseudo-enlightened Willy (Ryan Spahn) is nowhere near as gullible as his father.It’s a ridiculous, convoluted plot, with only a tenuous logic in its connection to Shane’s orgasmic quest, but there is a gleeful, almost punchy abandon to this play’s dedication to queer female pleasure, embrace of bawdy fun and relish of theatrical in-jokes.With shout-outs to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Thornton Wilder, “Merry Me” pilfers successfully from Shakespeare (when Sapph dons a mannish disguise that Shane sees right through) and from Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (which lends a glamorous, comic, sexually skilled Angel, played by Shaunette Renée Wilson). If such a mash-up smacks slightly of drama school, “Merry Me” also has a refreshingly playful spirit that established artists sometimes lose out in the world.Rachel Hauck’s set gives an angel’s-eye view of the base camp, with rows of miniature tents arrayed on a vertical backdrop, and in fact the Angel and her winged colleagues are much concerned with goings-on there. Godlike, they caused the blackout that has paused the war. To lift it, they demand a sacrifice — and in this feminist retelling, that’s not going to be anybody’s daughter.Pvt. Willy Memnon, they’re looking at you.Merry MeThrough Nov. 19 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘The Refuge Plays’ Review: A Surreal Family Saga on the Homestead

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      A family in exile contends with its future, and its ghosts, in Nathan Alan Davis’s new Off Broadway play starring Nicole Ari Parker.The unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” retreats, after an alienating odyssey through the South and Harlem, to live in a secret cellar. Underground is both an escape from oppression and a sanctuary where he can see himself on his own terms.Ellison’s 1952 novel is like gospel to the eldest matriarch in “The Refuge Plays” by the playwright Nathan Alan Davis. “Gotta make your own world in this world,” says Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a great-grandmother homesteading with her family. She can still chop firewood and hunt squirrels with a hammer, but when we first meet Early in this keen but unwieldy family saga, opening Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater, her daily life has evolved beyond the need for such primal skills.Four generations of Early’s family are living together in the present-day Illinois wilderness, sharing a cabin built years ago by Early and her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts). The too-small sofa and ratty armchair draped with quilts and crochet (the persuasively salvaged set is by Arnulfo Maldonado) indicate a modest home where her relatives choose to live out of kinship rather than necessity.Early’s great-grandson, Ha-Ha (J.J. Wynder), is the purest product of this social experiment: a 17-year-old who is deferential, bookish and comically naïve about girls. (Many of Davis’s character names are freighted with exaggerated symbolism.) Ha-Ha’s mother, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu), tried striking out on her own when she was younger, but eventually returned. And Joy’s mother, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the wife of Early’s deceased son, Walking Man, is the functional head of the household, though not for long: The spirit of Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), a routine and welcome visitor, has just foretold her imminent death.Davis’s grand ambitions for “The Refuge Plays” are indicated by its running time — three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions — and by a title that suggests its three parts may not exactly cohere. The action rewinds to the past, revealing what drove Early into the woods, why others followed and what binds them together. (“If you don’t need me, leave me,” Early tells Walking Man.) Each act operates in a different mode: Sitcom conventions play out in the first (with Early as the armchair curmudgeon); surreal and Shakespearean elements dominate the second (with ghosts who incite an Oedipal revenge plot); and the third imagines a meet-cute in exile.Daniel J. Watts and Parker play a young couple who meet-cute in exile in an earlier section of the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Patricia McGregor and presented in association with New York Theater Workshop (where McGregor is the artistic director), benefits tremendously from bold interpretations of Davis’s characters. McGregor accentuates the humor Davis weaves throughout, and even mines more from between the lines, giving the production a sustained momentum. But the pace lags when Davis’s airy lyricism occasionally tips toward the sentimental, as in the heavy-handed second act. Early, for example, insists she has cried a nearby river with her tears.Parker (“And Just Like That …”) has an innate gentility that would seem an odd match for Early’s wild fate, but there is frisson in the juxtaposition and Parker lends Early a poised ferocity. Her flinty exterior is a formidable match for Eddie, the World War II vet who becomes her husband. Slightly sideways and nursing his own wounds, he’s a philosophical jester (Watts can land punchlines with the whites of his eyes) and proof that civilization inflicts violence in many forms.“The Refuge Plays” is populated with gifted storytellers, whose language is sticky with associations (like “if all your worries was ice cream” that melted at death’s door), and who can clearly see the ills of the outside world from the safe distance of their own. They conceive their identities in relation to one another, reflecting an organic sense of human responsibility, yet rib and curse one another like the members of any family would.Davis, whose speculative 2016 drama, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem,” was also produced by New York Theater Workshop, takes a sweeping view of Black life while isolating his characters from the social contexts and systems that would otherwise shape them. Some, like Early and Eddie, have their memories to contend with, while Walking Man, who was born in the woods, encounters human injustice from an absurd angle (beneath a heifer he tries to slaughter with a switchblade).In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.The Refuge PlaysThrough Nov. 12 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 20 minutes. More