O’Connell, Deirdre (Actor)

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    Review: ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ Brings the Witches but Forgets the Magic

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    Deirdre O’Connell shines as a modern-day descendant of an accused witch in Sarah Ruhl’s unfocused new play at Lincoln Center Theater.A wax statue of a 17th-century Salem woman stands at the center of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater’s spare stage. We’re in the Salem Museum of Witchcraft, and this woman, wearing a fearsome scowl and a black frock, was one of the victims of the town’s infamous witch trials.If that brings to mind your English class lesson on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or what Becky, a Salem museum tour guide, dismissively refers to as her town’s “goddamn Christmas pageant,” that’s part of the intention of this new Sarah Ruhl play, “Becky Nurse of Salem.” The Lincoln Center Theater production, which was directed by Rebecca Taichman and opened on Sunday, brings in the witches but forgets the magic.Becky (Deirdre O’Connell), who introduces herself to the audience as descendant of the wax woman, Rebecca Nurse, goes off script delivering a colorful, expletive-ridden summary of Miller’s work to a tour group. On another tour, she sets the record straight on “The Crucible”: Abigail, the young woman who supposedly seduced the older, married John Proctor, wasn’t 17 as rendered in the play, but 11. And that one of Miller’s personal inspirations for the work was his lust for the younger Marilyn Monroe.After Becky is fired for her improvisations, she turns to a local witch (Candy Buckley) for help. One spell leads to another, and soon Becky is magically manipulating her interpersonal relationships, including those with her longtime friend (and crush) Bob (Bernard White) and her granddaughter, Gail (Alicia Crowder), who has been hospitalized for depression.When Becky isn’t dealing with the repercussions of using hocus-pocus to fix her life, she’s conversing with her dead daughter or stepping into Rebecca’s memories. And the play is strongest in these scenes, when it bridges Rebecca Nurse’s witch trial with Becky Nurse’s contemporary witchcraft.O’Connell, left, and Alicia Crowder as Gail. Riccardo Hernández’s spare set design leaves a lot to the imagination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn her afterword to the play, Ruhl (“In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play,” “The Clean House”) writes, “I thought that I would end up writing my own historical drama about the Salem witch trials, but every time I tried to dip my toe into the 17th century my pen came back and told me to stay in my own era.” That bit of authorial indeterminacy, unfortunately, is apparent in the script, whose disparate elements are like individual puzzle pieces rather than one cohesive portrait.The technical elements also feel incongruous. The folky original music, composed by the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, is too sentimental for the show’s tone. And the lighting, a range of flashy disco-magic hues and otherworldly flickering designed by Barbara Samuels, comes across as too enchanting for a staging that is short on whimsy. Riccardo Hernández’s set design leaves a lot to the imagination — a large black feathered wing is suspended from the ceiling, while an unadorned stage with a cedar clapboard back wall evokes the forest.Set during the Trump presidency, “Becky Nurse of Salem” obliquely comments on the ways women are portrayed and judged in society. The most exciting part of this work is halfway through, when the cast, all in Puritan garb, circle Becky, now Rebecca, chanting “lock her up.” Suddenly the play becomes frightening, the stakes more immediate. But soon the references are dropped and the play moves on.Then there are Becky’s more existential issues: She feels trapped in her hometown, facing limited job prospects, being in love with her married best friend, and trying to raise a granddaughter. Also in the mix is opioid addiction, which has rocked Becky’s family.The more realistic bits of Becky’s story feel like little more than loose sketches of characters and circumstances, and there’s a lack of chemistry among cast members. Her boss at the museum, Shelby (Tina Benko), is a sneering academic with little empathy. Bob is the sweet friend who’s always loved her. Gail is the grieving teenager who wants to both connect with and liberate herself from Becky. And Stan (Julian Sanchez), Gail’s new morose, goth boyfriend, seems to be there to provide another conflict in Gail and Becky’s relationship.O’Connell, who won a Tony this year for her performance in Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” elevates the not quite three-dimensional Becky, giving her a rough-around-the-edges New England charm — along with the nasal, r-dropping accent to match.The production, under Taichman’s tepid direction, is full of short scenes whose transitions have the cast quickly and unceremoniously rolling furniture on and off the set. O’Connell carries much of the humor, but otherwise the show’s comic timing is oddly off, and flat attempts at laughs, like the witch’s unique pronunciations of words like “oil” (“ull”), are unrelenting.In its final minutes, “Becky Nurse of Salem” tries to wrest its themes together via a heartfelt monologue and a cloying ritual. But by that time it’s too late. The play spends two hours dancing around a vaguely defined feminist message. That’s the very problem in this production: It hasn’t figured out the spell that will bring real magic to the stage.Becky Nurse of SalemThrough Dec. 31 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      She Won a Tony. But Deirdre O’Connell ‘Can’t Think About That.’

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      When Deirdre O’Connell returned to work two days after winning this year’s Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, the production staff of her current show, “Corsicana” at Playwrights Horizons, greeted her with a balloon arch and cake. O’Connell, 68, enjoyed it. For a little while, anyway. But “Corsicana,” a lonesome, oblique quartet by Will Arbery, is in previews. It begins press performances soon. O’Connell needed to rehearse. So she put the celebration aside.“I just went, ‘Well can’t think about that anymore,’” she said, later that same day. “I have to work.”Perhaps you saw last fall’s “Dana H.,” the show that won her the Tony, in which she spent a harrowing hour and change lip-syncing a woman’s recollections of her abduction by a white supremacist. Or maybe you have already caught “Corsicana,” in which she seems to unseal her character’s soul as casually as you or I uncap a beer. Or, at some point in the last four decades, you might have witnessed the performances that earned her Obies, Lucille Lortels, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize.O’Connell in “Dana H.,” lip-syncing and “brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor,” Jesse Green wrote in his review.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut possibly you have never seen O’Connell onstage, so here is what I can tell you: She is an actress of rigor and possibility. She will abandon herself to a character without apology or vanity or self-preservation. Some actors are simply better at the business of being alive, at seeming to present life onstage, and she is one of them.Her absolute focus, Lucas Hnath, the “Dana H” playwright, told me, “creates an opening for something — call it life, call it the spirit. Something ineffable and wild rushes in to fill the space.”Or here is how Les Waters, the director of “Dana H.,” put it: “She is available to life.”O’Connell — Didi, to her intimates — is petite and nimble, with a queenly nimbus of red hair and a default expression, offstage anyway, of intent curiosity. She grew up in western Massachusetts, the granddaughter of a Ziegfeld girl and the daughter of Anne Ludlum, an actress and playwright. As a child, she was, as she put it, “a classic theater nerd,” shy and uncomfortable offstage. “And then strangely comfortable and excited” when performing, she said.Jamie Brewer, left, and O’Connell in the Will Arbery play “Corsicana,” now in previews at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter two years of college, she made her way to Boston, apprenticing with an experimental theater company there, and then joining others — in San Francisco, in Baltimore. That scene took a lot out of her. “I felt a little too vulnerable just having my life swallowed up by it,” she said, so in her mid 20s she moved to New York, determined to become what she called “a regular actress.” (Has anyone ever thought of O’Connell as “regular?”) Yet she carried experiment with her. Even in her most controlled performances — “Dana H.” among them — there is something feral, ungovernable at the heart.She spent the next five years pouring drinks, pouring coffee, learning how to audition, learning how to act. In her late 20s, right around the time she found the rent-stabilized East Village apartment (with a bathtub in the kitchen) where she still lives, she booked the national tour of John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God.” Except for the five years she spent in Hollywood, amassing just enough jobs for a nest egg and a Screen Actors Guild pension, she has rarely been offstage since. Screen acting, it turns out, never gave her what she wanted, a feeling of un-self-consciousness, of surrendering to a role in a way that sounds a little like religion, a little like ego death.“I’m into the numinous experience,” O’Connell explained. “I’m into the thrills.”She hadn’t expected to win the Tony on Sunday night. With good reason. “Dana H.,” which required O’Connell to mouth along to prerecorded interviews with the playwright’s mother, demanding complete submission to the text and its rhythms, is more challenging than most Broadway fare. And it had closed in November, meaning that some Tony voters might already have forgotten it. Besides, three of the four women in her category (LaChanze, Ruth Negga and Mary-Louise Parker) are far better known.O’Connell had watched the Tonys for decades, once in person, but much more often at home, in that same rent-stabilized apartment that she shares with her partner, Alan Metzger, an educator. She knew that at the moment an award is announced, everyone stares at the losers. So as the Tonys entered its final hour, she prepared herself.“I was ready to be so awesome and classy,” O’Connell recalled.But she didn’t lose. And so O’Connell, who had appeared on Broadway only twice before, found herself walking up the aisle of the Radio City Music Hall, in a black jumpsuit from Rent the Runway. On that jumpsuit: “I thought it was going to be a little more Cinderella, but then I was like, I guess not, I guess I’m old,” she said. (None of the designers her producers contacted offered to dress her. Their loss.)O’Connell in her dressing room at Playwrights Horizons. “There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “You really don’t know how to behave.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesA person could argue that this award was the culminating moment of a nearly five-decade career. And yet, O’Connell — who looked awesome, classy and indisputably shocked — used her 90 seconds of speech time to look forward, manifesting the theatrical future she hopes to see.Holding her statuette, she said, “Please let me standing here be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”After receiving the award, a golf cart shunted her to one press room, then another. The ceremony had ended by then. She had left her purse at her seat when she walked onstage. “What New Yorker walks away from their keys and their phone?” she said. Still, she managed to reunite with Metzger, and they attended an after-party at the Plaza and a second one at the Omni and then it was after 3 a.m. and she was in a car, heading back to that bathtub in the kitchen.The next day, Monday, she slept late and then read through congratulatory texts and emails, too many to ever answer. Washing dishes, she suddenly felt devastated that she hadn’t thanked Metzger in her speech; she had felt too reluctant to reveal any of her private life. Which is to say, there were a lot of feelings, most of them good.“There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “Because you’re so suddenly shot out of a cannon, and you really don’t know how to behave.”On Tuesday, after cake, she spent some hours rehearsing the role of Justice, a librarian, an anarchist, a would-be lover, a friend. Sam Gold, the director of “Corsicana,” who in an email noted both her “free and open energy” and her extreme technical precision, gave her notes. She catnapped. Then she performed — baring her character’s soul, without showiness or fuss.“I like the excavating of finding another person inside me,” she said of her process.After bows, she changed her clothes and tidied up. Just past 10 p.m., she emerged into the fetid air of Hell’s Kitchen, greeted a few friends and fans, and went to find a restaurant that was still open.Even offstage, over a mediocre dinner at a sidewalk table on a block that smelled of sewage, it was something fine and rare to be held in her attention, to be, for a moment, her collaborator.This, anyway, has been Arbery’s experience. “It almost feels a little unfair to get to work with someone so good,” he told me.She marveled that she had been able to keep going for typically long hours, at typically low pay, for all of these years. That cheap apartment helped, she said. As did the fact that she has no children, though she is close to Metzger’s. The Tony could have come to her earlier. “I could have taken it at 48. I could have used it,” she said. But she has never felt that she missed out on much. The numinous experience, the thrills, they have always been near at hand. And she is happy to have received the prize now.“I certainly didn’t think that it was going happen this way,” she said. “It wasn’t a plan. But it’s pretty sweet.” More

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      Tony Awards Predictions: ‘Strange Loop’ and ‘Lehman’ Look Strong

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      We surveyed voters ahead of this year’s ceremony on Sunday. They are strikingly split in the races for leading musical performers.After a strange year on Broadway, it looks as if it could be a “Strange” night at the Tony Awards.Our annual survey of Tony voters — well, it was annual, until the coronavirus pandemic disrupted everything — suggests that Michael R. Jackson’s meta-musical “A Strange Loop” is favored to win the all-important race for best new musical at this year’s Tony Awards, which will take place on Sunday night. If there is an upset, it will come from “MJ,” the biographical musical about Michael Jackson.Over the past few days, I have connected with 181 of the approximately 650 Tony voters to talk about their choices in eight key categories. This is not a scientific poll — voting continues through Friday; the voting pool is distorted, and diminished, by coronavirus cancellations that left many ineligible to vote in some categories; and numerous voters have been scrambling to catch up with missed shows while hoping to vote at the last minute. To see actual statuettes handed out, you’ll have to tune in to the award show Sunday, which starts with a one-hour streaming segment on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then continues at 8 p.m. with a three-hour segment broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.But interviews with a large subset of voters make clear which races are locked up, and which are insanely close.The race for best play is all sewn up.The best play Tony Award seems certain to go to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a riveting history lesson that chronicles the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial empire. The play was originally written by an Italian playwright, Stefano Massini, and then adapted by a British writer, Ben Power.The survey suggests that “Lehman” will win easily — a supermajority of voters believe that it was the best play of the season, and those who do not support it are splitting their votes among the other four contenders, making any other outcome improbable.A plurality of voters also favor one of the “Lehman” stars, the great English actor Simon Russell Beale, in the unusual seven-nominee race for best leading actor in a play. Beale’s career has been spent mostly on the British stage, and this would be his first Tony Award.Simon Russell Beale, center, with Adam Godley, left, and Adrian Lester in “The Lehman Trilogy.” All three are competing for a best actor Tony Award.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhy is “Lehman” winning? The show, with a meaty subject that both explicates and implicitly critiques New York City’s hugely important financial industry, was a showcase for its three main actors, each of whom played many roles, and it had a showpiece set, designed by Es Devlin, that contained the action within a rotating glass box.Directed by Sam Mendes, it arrived on Broadway with a lot of buzz. After productions in Europe, it had been staged Off Broadway, at the Park Avenue Armory, in 2019, and that production was the talk of the town, becoming a best seller for the nonprofit, with some seats reselling for several thousand dollars.The road to Broadway was bumpy: “The Lehman Trilogy” began previews at the Nederlander Theater less than a week before theaters shut down in March 2020; it then resumed previews 18 months later and finally opened last October. The run sold well, particularly given that much of it overlapped with the pandemic surge associated with the Omicron variant, and it ended Jan. 2 before the production moved to Los Angeles for another brief run.Read More About the 2022 Tony AwardsHosting Duties: Ariana DeBose, who will host the ceremony, vows that this edition will celebrate the often unsung actors who have stepped in during the pandemic.Ruth Negga: The actress, who is nominated for her role as Lady Macbeth in Sam Gold’s staging of the play, infuses the character with intensity, urgency and vitality.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.Choreography: Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dances of the past but miss some opportunities to elevate the dancing; “For Colored Girls” effectively weaves language and motion.The play faced some criticism from those who felt that it soft-pedaled the relationship between the Lehmans’ early business practices and slavery; the production sharpened its references to race via script revisions made during the theater shutdown.Among new musicals, ‘A Strange Loop’ is the favorite.“A Strange Loop” also arrived on Broadway with a big head of steam: During the pandemic, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on an Off Broadway production staged by Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions in 2019.The musical is about a young aspiring musical theater writer who is Black and gay, and who is haunted by a mostly self-critical inner dialogue that springs to life in the show.The musical, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Stephen Brackett, garnered the strongest reviews of the season, and picked up 11 Tony nominations, more than any other show.Voters praised the show’s originality and its raw honesty. As is true with every show, this one also has its skeptics — some voters find the songs unmemorable, or the explicitness off-putting — but in the Tony race, it is benefiting from the fact that there is no consensus about any of the other nominees.Some industry veterans have suggested that Tony voters who live outside New York might be reluctant to support “A Strange Loop” because its sexual content could make it challenging to produce on tour. But that does not appear to be a decisive factor: “A Strange Loop” is favored by half of the voters I spoke with; about one-fifth are supporting “MJ,” the musical about Michael Jackson, which they uniformly praised as entertaining, and the other contenders have less support.“Six,” the fan favorite that was all the rage in 2020, when it came within a few hours of opening before theaters shut down, seems to have lost some heat among voters who no longer think of it as a new show because its run began before the pandemic. But shed no tears for “Six”: it is proving to be hugely successful, with strong box office grosses and a thriving touring market.Several acting races are down to the wire.Voters are remarkably divided in the races for best leading musical performers.In the race for lead actor in a musical, the voters are evenly split between two young actors, Myles Frost, 22, and Jaquel Spivey, 23, each of whom is making his professional stage debut this season. Frost is nominated for his convincing depiction of a driven Michael Jackson in “MJ,” and Spivey is nominated for his soul-baring performance as the self-doubting protagonist in “A Strange Loop”; both have wowed audiences, in very different ways. Each of them has support from about one-third of voters.In the race for lead actress in a musical, the voters are torn between Sharon D Clarke, who played the pained but powerful maid at the heart of a revival of “Caroline, or Change,” and Joaquina Kalukango, who plays a determined tavern owner in the new musical “Paradise Square.”Joaquina Kalukango, left, of “Paradise Square” and Sharon D Clarke of “Caroline, or Change” are in a tight race for lead actress in a musical.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the race for best actress in a play, Deirdre O’Connell, who uncannily lip-synced recorded interviews with a kidnapping victim in “Dana H.,” has a modest edge among the voters I talked to. But the margin was not big enough to predict what will happen with any confidence; the other leading contenders appear to be LaChanze, for her performance as a truth-telling actress in “Trouble in Mind,” and Mary-Louise Parker, for her performance as a woman abused by her uncle in “How I Learned to Drive.”‘Company’ leads in the musical revival category, but the best play revival is harder to predict.The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important writers in musical theater history, was among the biggest theater stories of the last season, and it appears that Tony voters are now inclined to honor the final Broadway production that he worked on with the prize for best musical revival.About half of voters say they are choosing the gender-reversed revival of “Company,” which Sondheim strongly supported before his death. The show, first produced in 1970, previously centered on a man contemplating his single life as he turns 35; this version, directed by Marianne Elliott, puts a woman in the same predicament.The revival of “Company” appears to be the leading contender in the best musical revival category.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Company” appears to have twice as much support as its nearest competitor, the revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More