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      Daniel Radcliffe to Star in Off Broadway ‘Merrily’ Revival

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      A new production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” is to be staged late this year by the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop in the East Village.The actor Daniel Radcliffe will star in an Off Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Stephen Sondheim musical that famously flopped on Broadway but in the decades since has become an oft-produced and beloved show.The new production, directed by Maria Friedman, is sure to be a tough ticket to get, given Radcliffe’s celebrity and the size of the venue: It is to be staged late this year by the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop at its 199-seat main stage in the East Village.Sondheim, in an interview days before his death last November, said he was looking forward to the production. Friedman, a British musical theater star with a long history of performing in Sondheim musicals, first directed “Merrily” at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2012; that production, hailed by The Guardian with a five-star review, transferred to London’s West End in 2013, and Friedman then directed a run at the Huntington Theater in Boston in 2017.“Merrily” is an unusual show, written in reverse chronological order, about a trio of artists whose close friendship, and shared dreams, unravel over the years. The musical, featuring songs by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, ran on Broadway in 1981; it closed 12 days after opening. The abbreviated Broadway run was the subject of a well-received 2016 documentary film, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened”; Richard Linklater is now spending 20 years making a film adaptation of the musical starring Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein.Ben Brantley, then the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times, called “Merrily” “the much-loved problem child of Sondheim’s musicals.” He saw Friedman’s production in London, where he called it “heart-clutching,” and in Boston, where he deemed it “transcendent.” The show, with an admired score and a critiqued book that builds toward a rooftop moment where the three main characters meet, has been repeatedly rethought; Jesse Green, the current Times chief theater critic, once described himself as “someone who’d gladly patronize a dedicated ‘Merrily’ repertory theater, perhaps on that rooftop, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity.”New York Theater Workshop, best known as the birthplace of “Rent,” said Monday that its production of “Merrily” would run in “late 2022”; it did not announce dates. Radcliffe will play Charley Kringas, a lyricist and playwright; the theater did not announce other cast members.The cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Radcliffe, center, starred in the 2011 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRadcliffe, who vaulted to fame by portraying Harry Potter on film, has starred in several Broadway and Off Broadway plays; he also starred in a 2011 Broadway revival of the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”The “Merrily” production is the final show chosen by James C. Nicola, who has been the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop since 1988, and who is planning to step down in June. Nicola saw the original production on Broadway, and in the decades since, he said, the show “eerily, uncannily, has managed to entwine itself into my own life.”“I had never before heard or read any work of art that seemed to understand me — in fact, all of us Boomers in that precise moment of our lives,” he said by email. “‘Merrily We Roll Along’ is once again magically finding its way into my life.” More

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      ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

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      Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      The Creators of ‘On Sugarland’ Build a Site of Mourning and Repair

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      Ritual and healing are at the center of Whitney White and Aleshea Harris’s new play about a Black community that loses its members to a perpetual war.In the mobile home-lined cul-de-sac at the center of the new play “On Sugarland,” grief is pervasive. A memorial of dog tags, boots and other personal items of fallen soldiers sits center stage, a reminder of a community’s losses. Daily rituals, from services with singing, dancing and shouting to a boy shaving his father’s chin, move mourning from expressions of sorrow to utterances and activities that keep the dead in communion with the residents.“We got a frequency other folk can’t pick up on,” one character says.“On Sugarland,” about a community that is constantly losing its members to a perpetual war, gives new meaning to what Ralph Ellison called the lower frequencies. A register, in this case, that situates life and death on a continuum. The play itself is the latest collaboration between the playwright Aleshea Harris and the playwright and director Whitney White, who previously worked together on the acclaimed “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.” That work, combining an interactive ritual performance with an absurdist parody, bore witness to the many deaths of Black people to police and vigilante violence. Bearing witness is a responsibility that expands justice, James Baldwin wrote.“On Sugarland,” in previews at New York Theater Workshop, follows a preadolescent Sadie as she comes to terms with her mother’s death in combat. The weight of the loss, however, does not prevent her from tapping into her superpower — invisibility. Sadie uses it to her advantage. She can make the dead walk. She can also make the dead talk. And she can act as a conduit to help ease the sting of death. The naming of gods, references to super powers and the repetition of language heighten the play’s sense of reality.Kiki Layne, left, as Sadie and Adeola Role as Odella in “On Sugarland” at the New York Theater Workshop. The play draws elements from Greek tragedy, Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris, 40, who is also a spoken word poet, uses her text to reshape words. Her characters whisper, shout, elongate a vowel or express rhythmic cadence, allowing language to escape the familiar. “I’m not really a singer, but I can hold a tune,” Harris said. “I think a lot about the sonic experience of the things that I’m writing. I feel like they need to hit the right note in order to resonate the way that I want them to.”She showcased her ability to mix genres — spaghetti western, tragedy and hip-hop — in “Is God Is,” a tale of twins enacting a revenge fantasy. Just as multifaceted, “On Sugarland” features a Greek chorus called the Rowdy and draws elements from Southern gothic, Afro-surrealism and hip-hop, producing sounds that prepare the audience for the otherworldly occurrences that eventually unfold.White, 36, also an actor and musician who grew up in Chicago, often incorporates aural traditions into her work as well. Music was always there. Reflecting on her time at Catholic school, she said: “We had liturgical music, which is where you sit and learn the songs, old school, and you look at the hymnals, and you learn to read music and sing. Religious music was how I started loving the arts and loving music. Then I got involved with theater.”Of Harris’s work, White said: “It has a rhythm and a feeling. It feels like you’re hearing notes, and tones and movements.”Echoing Ntozake Shange’s choreopoetic drama “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf,” which is set to return to Broadway in April, and the works of other Black arts movement playwrights, including Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins and Sonia Sanchez, “On Sugarland” mines the wealth of characteristic Black expression without reproducing stereotypes. It presents a vengeful young girl, her aunt who is suffering from addiction and a sensuous elderly neighbor who finds frumpiness offensive.In a recent interview, Harris and White talked about their new work and how their collaborations have helped them evolve as artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle,” said White, right, about the lessons she’s learned from working with Harris. Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesHow does the play create new ways to see Black women?WHITNEY WHITE None of them are stereotypes. None of them are tropes I’ve seen before. While they do dip into things that are familiar to me, they’re not flat, they’re quite complex, they’re just delicious. If you look at all of the roles [in Harris’s work], from “Is God Is” to “What to Send Up” to “On Sugarland,” these three plays create work that people can sink their teeth into for their whole lifetime and what a gift is that.ALESHEA HARRIS It was with great delight that I presented the elder women. I was very excited to create a role for two elder Black women who had a lot of meat inside of their stories and got to be very engaged and activated inside of the tale. I hope it feels like a boon to other Black women who are bearing witness to the work.What types of cultural and theatrical rituals does your work draw from?HARRIS I remember when I started writing “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” that my grad school mentor, Douglas Kearney, reminded me that a ritual is meant to bring something into being, and that just felt like a provocation. For the residents of the cul-de-sac in “On Sugarland,” I was really interested in exploring what their ritual of grieving could be. That wasn’t quite a funeral; that was another spiritual expression of care.WHITE There’s a great range of emotion, and ritual is complex. You’ll go to a family service, one person’s laughing, one person’s crying, one person’s being inappropriate. It is like this multifaceted emotive color wheel of Black life that I feel like it is my job to make sure it’s onstage. Because so often the way Black ritual is depicted onstage and onscreen is this very grim, one-noted thing. Actually, like the life cycle, communities and individuals within those communities possess so much. I want to make sure that my people are as alive, and specific, and colorful, and human as possible.What inspired the chorus, or as they are named, the Rowdy?HARRIS The chorus is embodying the innocence of the community and the Black community at large, an innocence that’s criminalized. There’s this language from Evelyn [a character in the play] about the chicks being snatched up from beneath their mothers, and they’re conscripted, they’re being sent off to fight in the war, so their numbers are dwindling.My psychic proposition is to remind us that we are complex, that there’s nothing inherently bad. That there’s great joy in what we do. Just in Black expression, Black mundane expression around the block is gorgeous. It isn’t always held up as such. The proposition is to see ourselves with great complexity and love.WHITE Aleshea sent me a video early on in the process, and she said, “This is the video that inspired the Rowdy.” It’s this beautiful group of young Black people with this speaker, just radically taking up space in a celebratory way that moves through their bodies.When I watch that video, it reminds me of being young in Chicago, growing up, spending time on the South Side with all these other young Black people my age. We would just take over the community, and that wasn’t a negative thing — it was a beautiful thing. It’s so sad that our communities so often are criminalized and viewed in these negative ways. What does it mean to see a group of young people in the prime of their lives die off one by one? What does that say about what these characters are experiencing in the world?How have you, as artists, changed through your collaboration?WHITE Aleshea is making work that is giving voice to the deepest parts of the Black experience. I feel that the way she has changed my work is that I realize I don’t have to settle on stereotypes. I don’t have to settle with naturalism. I don’t have to do things the safe way.The work can be as aesthetically challenging as it is culturally significant. I don’t have to settle until I have work that is as strong and rigorous as possible. Working with her has changed my understandings of what I know to be possible and what I’ve always believed was possible. Black work can be as experimental and aesthetically excellent as anything else, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.HARRIS Working with Whitney has emboldened me and reminded me that what I want to do is possible. The weird things that I’m doing with language on the page can ring, can scream in a body. Let’s be disruptive of respectability politics. Whitney also understands my desire to present Black women with great muscularity onstage. We understand the rules. We understand how we should conduct ourselves. We were taught how to present ourselves in the world so that we could stay safe. I think she agrees with me that those things aren’t keeping us safe. So, we might as well be fearless. More

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      ‘Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord’ Review: Our Sewing Superhero

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      The first post-shutdown live performance at New York Theater Workshop is almost a debriefing after the crisis we have endured.Before the lights go down at New York Theater Workshop, Kristina Wong gets up from her Hello Kitty sewing machine, where she’s been making a face mask, to deliver some trigger warnings about the solo performance she’s about to give.Her tone is tongue in cheek — she is, after all, a comedian — but her heads-up to the audience is for real, because she’s wading straight into one of the great divides in live theater right now: between people hungry for drama that examines the last 20 months and people desperate for psychic escape from all that.“This show takes place in the pandemic,” Wong says. “I know. I know! Now you get to find out if watching live theater about the pandemic, during a pandemic, is your thing. And because it’s set in the pandemic, there are mentions of death, illness, poverty, mental health stressors, racism, trauma.” A pause, and then she adds one more possible trigger: “The last U.S. president.”Truth be told, I have not been clamoring for theater about dire recent events. And I confess that, en route to Wong’s show, I was feeling particularly ground down by all the barefaced people I’d seen, once again, on the subway.Yet “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” turns out to be a spiky comic tonic for just such gloom. Directed by Chay Yew, it’s the first post-shutdown live performance at New York Theater Workshop, and it’s ideally suited as such: almost a debriefing after the crisis we have endured, even though we haven’t reached its end.Wong’s outfit includes a bandoleer with bright spools of thread, which she slings across her chest, and, strapped to her back, a giant pair of scissors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDon’t be fooled by the bluster in the show’s title. The tale that Wong tells isn’t truly self-aggrandizing. It’s about the Auntie Sewing Squad, a far-flung group of volunteers she assembled from her home in Los Angeles in March 2020 to make face masks, which were desperately needed then and perilously hard to come by. Selflessness and human connection are dominant themes of this narrative.“Sweatshop Overlord” is also about mothers and daughters and heritage — sewing skills passed down from one generation of Asian American women to the next — and how at a time of horrific anti-Asian bigotry and violence in this country, some of those women harnessed perennially undervalued skills for an urgent common good. Amid corrosive cultural discord, as President Trump and others loudly blamed Asians for the coronavirus, they acted with a kind of ferocious grace.Wong, whose Zoom version of the show was part of New York Theater Workshop’s online programming last May, didn’t mean the Auntie Sewing Squad to last more than a few weeks.“There is a rumor that the U.S. post office will be delivering five masks to every address in America,” she tells the audience, one month into the project, “and that will make us obsolete very soon.”Remember that rumor? “Sweatshop Overlord” is full of little memory jolts like that. Those deliveries never happened, of course, and Wong’s group grew to include hundreds of people — including her own mother — who sewed more than 350,000 face masks for vulnerable communities before disbanding in August 2021.“Is America a banana republic disguised as a democracy?” Wong asks more than once, aghast at what she sees as the government’s failure to protect its citizens from the pandemic threat.Alternating dark humor and wry social commentary with anger, sorrow and fear, she tells the story of the Aunties inside the chronology we all lived through. These were ordinary Americans — many Asian, mostly female — enlisting in a fight for the health and well-being of their country. Sort of like a patriotic war movie in which the hostilities involve a lethal virus and belligerent resistance to mask wearing, and where people under fire volley back with the copious fruits of traditional “women’s work.”To immerse herself in this battle, Wong dons a wonderfully playful action-hero costume by the Tony Award winner Linda Cho. The bandoleer that Wong slings across her chest holds bright spools of thread, not bullets; a jumbo pair of scissors is strapped to her back.Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set has an upstage wall made of surgical masks, which becomes an ideal screen for Caite Hevner’s many projections.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs vital as her humor is to the tone of the performance, the production design is just as important. The set, by Junghyun Georgia Lee, has an upstage wall made of about 1,400 surgical masks — an ideal screen for Caite Hevner’s many projections — but the real eye-catcher is the candy-colored sewing room laid out before it.The objects there are built on an Alice in Wonderland scale: tomato-shaped pincushions as big as chairs, a gargantuan seam ripper in royal blue, bobbins a giant could use. It feels heightened and hallucinatory, like the first year of the pandemic, but also safe, like a child’s playroom. Amith Chandrashaker’s saturated lighting aids the shift between those moods.“Sweatshop Overlord” sags a bit in its last third, and one moment meant to be solemn is puzzling instead. But Wong is good company and an accomplished storyteller, and she and Yew have made a show that is both heartening and cathartic. Tripping our collective memories of a strange, scary, isolated time, it asks us to recall them together. Which helps, actually.Back out on the street afterward, we’re lighter — and, thanks to the Aunties, imbued with hope.Kristina Wong, Sweatshop OverlordThrough Nov. 21 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Kristina Wong’s Pandemic Story: Sewing With Her Aunties

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      The performance artist ran a mask-making operation during the pandemic. That inspired her new comedy at New York Theater Workshop.Kristina Wong is an in-your-face performer who, until this month, hadn’t performed for an in-person audience since March 2020. The thought of looking into dozens of eyes, not just the little green light on her laptop, made her feel, well, weird.So her stage manager, Katie Ailinger, came up with a plan to ease her back into the rhythms of live performance: She taped stock photos of people’s faces around the rehearsal room at New York Theater Workshop, where in September Wong began to prepare “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” a one-woman show about running a sewing group during the pandemic.“Just turning my head and having a range of motion is a whole thing — and having eye contact again is huge!” Wong, 43, a comedian, performance artist and community activist, said recently during a phone interview from her dressing room. She was about to run through an afternoon technical rehearsal of the 90-minute production, a hybrid of stand-up, lecture and performance art that is scheduled to open Nov. 4.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” Wong said, who is also a member of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhile Wong was stuck at home in Los Angeles, she stayed busy leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a volunteer group of mostly Asian American women she founded in March 2020 to make face masks for health care workers, farm workers, incarcerated people and others. She recruited 6-year-old children, her 73-year-old mother and others for the operation, which ballooned to more than 800 “Aunties,” a cross-cultural term of respect and affection for women, as well as “Uncles” and nonbinary volunteers in 33 states. Together, they distributed more than 350,000 masks.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” said Wong, a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco. (She’s served as an unpaid elected representative of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles since 2019, an unusual electoral journey that is the subject of her one-woman show “Kristina Wong for Public Office,” whose national tour was interrupted by the pandemic.)After disbanding the sewing squad (she hosted a retirement party for the Aunties in Los Angeles in September), Wong shifted her focus to bringing the tale of her 504 days leading the group to the stage in a production directed by Chay Yew. And a streaming version of the show ran at New York Theater Workshop in May.In a conversation a few days before previews began, Wong discussed her journey from an out-of-work artist to the leader of hundreds of volunteers, her mother’s changed opinion of her performing arts career and how she hoped the show would reshape people’s perceptions of Asian Americans. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In March 2020 your tour for “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was postponed. What made you want to start a mask-making group?I was home without income feeling sorry for myself, and I stumbled across some articles that said there was a need for homemade masks. It started with me taking my Hello Kitty sewing machine and fabric and making a naïve offer to the internet: “If you need masks and don’t have access to them, I will help you!” But my ego wrote a check my body couldn’t cash, and within four days I was inundated with requests, so I started a Facebook group of people whom I knew could sew. We had Aunties cutting the elastic off their fitted sheets, the straps off their bras. It was a Robinson Crusoe situation.Why did you call yourself a “sweatshop overlord”?My first volunteers were all Asian women, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is the sickest moment, we are a modern-day sweatshop.” Our mothers and grandmothers did garment work — my grandmother and grandfather did laundry work as part of their rite of passage to America — and now we find ourselves doing this work again, for free, because the government hasn’t prepared us for this moment. So it was this gallows humor joke that I was the sweatshop overlord — also humor about child labor because I was ordering children around.At what point did you realize this was a show?Within the first 40 days, one of the Aunties — my first mentor, Leilani Chan of TeAda Productions [a Los Angeles-based theater company] — was like, “We’re going to try to figure out how to make work online.” So I’d get a booking from a college or a theater and then would just create new sections up to that point in the pandemic.The shows, which were all [streamed] live, became an event for the Aunties. I would post in our Facebook group “I’m doing a performance about us now,” and they would all change their name to “Auntie So and So” in Zoom. They’d openly chat with audience members during the performance and be there for the Q. and A. afterward, usually at their sewing machines. So it was me half-entertaining them, but also trying to bring our story into existence.“With this show,” Wong said, “I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhat changes did you make for the in-person production?Doing the show from my home on Zoom — and the fact that we were all in a pandemic — was a great shorthand for the audience, but now I’m moving into a neutral space that is a representation of my home. So I realized I’d have to spend more time laying out context that we might’ve forgotten, and also trying to think about the bigger meaning of all this, rather than just putting moments to memory.You use comedy as a way of talking through micro- and macro-aggressions against Asian Americans. How did anti-Asian sentiment affect you personally?The great irony is that I didn’t even wear a mask for the first few weeks I was sewing them, because I felt like the mask I permanently wear on my face was already a sign to the world: “I’m a foreigner. I’m an immigrant. I brought the virus here. Come get me.” With this show, I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.Were you concerned that people wouldn’t want to relive the pandemic?We need to figure out how to visibly see Asian Americans and culture. During the pandemic, I saw Asian American women not as quiet, subservient virus passers but as warriors behind sewing machines doing the work of protecting Americans. If there’s a museum one day about this moment in history, please let there just be a little footnote that remembers our work. And I’ve learned that, especially as an artist of color, I can’t wait for someone else to write that footnote, so this show is really me screaming at people to know how to respect our labor.As recently as 2015, your mother was still sending you newspaper articles with the average pay for careers like doctors and government officials to try to dissuade you from pursuing a performing arts career. Is she more supportive now?My mom called me when I first started this and told me, “You’ve got to stop making those masks; stay inside!” I got really mad at her, but then she completely surprised me — she was like, “OK, mail me some fabric, get me the patterns.” Then she recruited all her friends and got really into it. I think she feels really proud.Is she coming to see the show?She was really scared to come to New York because of hate crimes and the Delta variant, but she and my dad are coming to watch the show. I’m really happy she gets to see it, and I think she’ll be surprised because she doesn’t know how much she’s in it. My shows have been my way to have honest conversations with my parents from a distance — they learn more about me from watching my shows than us sitting at the dining room table, where I’m mostly just lying to them and hiding stuff. And I think they know this!How much of the show is just you, Kristina Wong, on that stage, and how much is you playing a character?This is my great dilemma! I play a character named Kristina Wong who’s mostly me, but highly dramatized. Did I really crawl on my belly to go to the post office? No, but it did feel like life or death a lot of the time. More

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      When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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      These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Review: Unearthing the Late Curiosities of Tennessee Williams

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      “Hilton Als Presents,” from New York Theater Workshop, features three of the playwright’s overlooked and often disparaged works.Once mortals become immortal, it’s easy to forget how precariously they stumbled through life. That is certainly true of Tennessee Williams, who ensured his place in the pantheon of American playwriting with his early hits “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but spent his last two decades — after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961 — in what Hilton Als calls “a kind of critical purgatory.”But critics at their most vital aren’t a baying wolf pack chasing weakened prey. They’re champions of the overlooked, the underpraised, the misunderstood. In that spirit, Als, a writer for The New Yorker who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, is asking for a reconsideration of some late Williams works.In “Selections From Tennessee Williams,” the second episode of the two-part New York Theater Workshop podcast “Hilton Als Presents,” he plucks excerpts from three plays dismissed in their own time: “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” from 1969; “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” which succumbed in 1975 en route to Broadway; and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” Williams’s final Broadway premiere in his lifetime. It opened in 1980 on his 69th birthday and was met with such a pile-on of viciously mocking reviews that it closed after just two weeks.These plays are not exceptional in Williams’s oeuvre as considerations of masculinity, sexuality or the divided self — though, as Als notes, each includes a male artist character.Directed by Als, and with skillful audio production and editing by Alex Barron, the podcast does not always succeed in conveying, with voice and stage directions, what we need to envision.The scene from “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” starring Raúl Castillo as a band leader and Marin Ireland as a sexually rapacious belle, feels too untethered from context to add up to anything. But each of the other plays is memorable for a standout performance and for glimmers of beauty in the text.The longest excerpt, from “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” at first seems an airless exercise: an encounter between a brittle yet lascivious American woman (Nadine Malouf) and the Japanese barman (James Yaegashi) she is harassing. It comes to life only belatedly, with the entrance of Reed Birney as her husband, Mark, an exceedingly drunken painter struggling to maintain his dignity and harness his artistry. It is an utterly lived-in performance, edged with terror and mirth. (John Lahr, in his biography of Williams, calls this play “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche,” and he is correct.)“In the beginning,” Mark says, his hands shaky, paint all over his suit, “a new style of work can be stronger than you, but you learn to control it. It has to be controlled.”Williams, at that point, was not doing so well at controlling his art, his addictions or his emotional frailty.The other magnetic turn is by Michelle Williams in “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” which the playwright labeled “a ghost play,” about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Zelda — a role originated by Geraldine Page on Broadway — Williams evades the traps that lie in wait in Tennessee Williams’s women: the masks and artifices of gender and class that made him famous for writing diva roles, and that often expose those characters to ridicule. Against the odds, Michelle Williams locates a human being.“Are you certain, Scott, that I fit the classification of dreamy young Southern lady?” Zelda asks her husband (played by André Holland). “Damn it, Scott. Sorry, wrong size, it pinches! Can’t wear that shoe, too confining.”Tennessee Williams, too, felt pinched and confined by expectations. He was forever in competition with his younger self.Als’s production doesn’t persuasively argue for these late plays. But it does accomplish what a critic is meant to do when elevation is in order — to urge close examination of something that might otherwise escape our gaze.Perhaps, taking Als’s cue, some brilliant director will see a way.Hilton Als Presents: Selections From Tennessee WilliamsThrough July 31; nytw.org. At anchor.fm/nytw79 and major podcast platforms. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More

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      New York Theater Workshop Plans a Summer Reopening

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      The Off Broadway institution unveiled a “superseason” of performances beginning in August, and continuing through 2022-23.One major Off Broadway institution announced its return to live performances on Tuesday when New York Theater Workshop unveiled its 2021-22 season, which will begin in August and overwhelmingly feature projects by women and people of color.Among the five productions announced is “Sanctuary City,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok, which was eight preview performances into its run last March before the pandemic brought live theater to a standstill. That play, about two teenage children of undocumented immigrants, will be directed by Rebecca Frecknall and is planned for September.New York Theater Workshop also said it had slated four shows so far for 2022-23, including a staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” that had originally been planned for 2020. Directed by Sam Gold and adapted by Clare Barron, its starry cast was set to include Greta Gerwig, Oscar Isaac, Steve Buscemi, Chris Messina, Lola Kirke and more. The new ensemble hasn’t been announced, but Jeremy Blocker, the theater’s managing director, said in an interview that “the goal is to keep that incredible company together.”Unveiling two seasons at once — a “superseason,” as James C. Nicola, the theater’s artistic director, coined it in an interview — is a way to both “make a big noise” about coming back to the stage and to honor commitments made to artists before the pandemic, he said. But perhaps most notably, it offers some breathing room for his successor when Nicola steps down in June 2022 after leading the theater for 34 years — a tenure that has included early runs of the acclaimed “Slave Play” and Tony Award-winning musicals like “Rent,” “Hadestown” and “Once.”“I realized how, having done it for 30-something-odd years now, how personal this is — how personal it is to be in a conversation about work that’s still in the state of being imagined by an artist,” Nicola said. “It’s going to be a really interesting challenge to not be a part of that for a while once I leave.”The 2021-22 season is set to open in August with Whitney White’s “Semblance,” which is being billed as a “filmed theatrical experience” on the perception of Black women, presented both virtually and as an immersive installation. White, who last year won an Obie Award for her direction of “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” will also direct the world premiere of “On Sugarland,” written by the fellow Obie winner Aleshea Harris, in early 2022.This fall, Kristina Wong will build on her streamed work “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” for a new show about creating a homemade face-covering enterprise during the pandemic. It will be directed by Chay Yew. And closing out the season is the musical “Dreaming Zenzile” — a world premiere based on the life of the South African musician and activist Miriam Makeba — written and performed by the singer Somi Kakoma, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.“What is emerging to me in that season ahead is the nature of community — the necessity, the compulsion, that we have as a species to gather,” Nicola said. “To be a part of a family.”Following “Three Sisters” in 2022 is “american (tele)visions,” a multimedia memory play about an undocumented Mexican family, written by Victor I. Cazares — the theater’s playwright in residence — and directed by Rubén Polendo. Liliana Padilla’s “How to Defend Yourself,” about a group of college students channeling their emotions through a self-defense class after a fellow student is raped, will follow. Padilla is set to co-direct with Steph Paul and Rachel Chavkin, whose New York Theater Workshop credits include the Off Broadway run of “Hadestown.”That season’s final production, of those announced so far, is “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a contemporary myth, written by Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”), about a hero who is half Nigerian mortal and half Greek god.Coronavirus safety protocols might change, but for now the theater is planning to ask audience members for proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test, and to require that masks be worn in the house.Performance schedules have not yet been announced, but when live shows return to New York Theater Workshop’s stage, employees in the industry who lost work during the pandemic will have one less financial worry: Their tickets will be free. More