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      A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

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      Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More

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      'Slave Play' Is Returning to Broadway

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      The play, which had been nominated for 12 Tony Awards, will return to Broadway in November.“Slave Play,” the buzzy and provocative drama that was nominated for 12 Tony Awards but won none, will return to Broadway this fall.The playwright, Jeremy O. Harris, announced the plan just after midnight Monday morning, about an hour after the award ceremony shutout, at an after-party held to celebrate “Slave Play” and the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an antiracism group.Harris had been planning the return engagement, win or lose. And he said on Twitter that he never expected to win.“Slave Play has never won one of the major awards of any of the great voting bodies but changed a culture and has inspired thousands of ppl who didn’t care about theatre before,” he wrote on Twitter. “I saw someone randomly reading the play in Slovenia. We already won.”The play’s 12 nominations made it the most nominated play in history, and had it won as best play, it would have become the first play by a Black writer to claim the Tony since 1987. It lost to “The Inheritance,” a sweeping drama by Matthew López that explores 21st century gay life in the aftermath of AIDS; López was the first Latino to win the prize.“Slave Play” imagines a radical form of role-playing for sexually frustrated interracial couples as a way of exploring the lingering effects of slavery in America.“Slave Play” becomes the eighth play by a Black writer slated to run on Broadway this season, so far, a record number. It’s also one of several return engagements by shows whose runs had ended before the pandemic, including “American Utopia,” “Freestyle Love Supreme,” “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Waitress.”“Slave Play,” which had an Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop, ran on Broadway from Sept. 10, 2019 through Jan. 19, 2020. It did not recoup its capitalization costs, but that is not unusual for plays.The producers said the return engagement would be at the August Wilson Theater, and would run from Nov. 23 to Jan. 23. They then plan to transfer the production to Los Angeles for a run at the Center Theater Group.The Broadway run will again be directed by Robert O’Hara, and will feature much of the original cast, including Ato Blankson-Wood, Chalia La Tour, Irene Sofia Lucio, Annie McNamara and Paul Alexander Nolan. However, Joaquina Kalukango will not rejoin the cast in the role of Kaneisha; she is starring in a new musical, “Paradise Square,” scheduled to start previews in February, and will be replaced by Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, who previously played the role in a developmental production at Yale.The lead producers are Greg Nobile and Jana Shea; among the other producers is the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. The producers pledged to make 10,000 tickets available for $39 each and to hold invitation-only “Black Out” performances, as they did during the initial run, for Black audiences. More

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      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More

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      Review: A Darkly Satirical Glimpse Into Life ‘Off Broadway’

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      Torrey Townsend’s backstage fiction is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment.It is the fall of 2020, and the American National Theater is desperate to survive the pandemic.In Torrey Townsend’s blistering and hilarious satire “Off Broadway,” presented by Jeremy O. Harris and streaming free on Broadstream, this tenaciously middling nonprofit is millions of dollars in the red, and operating with only a skeleton crew.But it sees one route out of financial calamity. When it finally reopens, it will do so with a surefire smash: Al Pacino in “Othello,” playing the title role. In blackface.Andy, the company’s staggeringly underqualified artistic director, doesn’t recognize this as regressing to a shameful and banished tradition. Rather, he frames it as a brilliant provocation, a metatheatrical challenge to quaintly limited thinking.“Y’all are gonna get eaten alive,” Marla, his horrified associate producer, warns during a Zoom meeting, but no one pays the slightest heed. She is Black; the others are white. They are happy to rationalize the idea.And that, like most of what happens in “Off Broadway,” doesn’t seem at all far-fetched.Directed by Robert O’Hara, who also directed Harris’s “Slave Play” and is an accomplished satirist in his own playwriting (“Bootycandy”), this backstage fiction is both raucously funny and devastatingly on point. It is an indictment of the real world’s overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male theatrical establishment — not just in New York, but nationwide.This spiky critique arrives with perfect timing: as the industry begins to emerge from well over a year of shutdown, with many companies having publicly pledged their allegiance to the goals of the initiative We See You, White American Theater. Will this indeed be a reset to a more vital, inclusive theater, or merely a blip? “Off Broadway” wants to know.Structured as a series of Zoom calls, it’s powered by a top-notch ensemble. The company’s ailing founder, Daryl, is deliciously played by Richard Kind as a shambling, pretentious gasbag, untethered from reality. He is on the verge of retirement when a ticked-off letter writer mocks him as a “morally insensitive, artistically incompetent fraud.” His rage kills him before his cancer can.Andy, played by Dylan Baker, is his chosen successor. That casting is our first clue that Andy will turn out to be a deeply unnerving guy. (This is a compliment; no one does creepy like Baker.) At least as thin-skinned as Daryl, and just as aggressively certain of his own laudable intentions, Andy shuts down any internal criticism of the company’s racism — in hiring, in programming and in what Marla calls its “fusty, elitist, Anglo Saxon neoclassical fetish.”He sees himself as a hero for retaining two people of color, Marla (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Steph (Kara Wang), on his ravaged staff. He is thrilled at “the optics” of promoting Marla from literary manager, and when he promotes Steph to replace her, he promises a raise — eventually. “Fingers crossed,” he says.The surprising beauty of Zoom here is that the format doesn’t prioritize one character over another. Even when Andy monopolizes a meeting, steamrolling Marla and Steph, the eye of the camera in their little rectangles is unblinking. We see in their faces how strenuous it is to endure him silently.And when he is alone online with Steph, we also see that working from home is no barrier to sexual harassment. With that plot twist comes a new layer of grievance. The company’s managing director, Betty (Becky Ann Baker), reflexively defends Andy. And when Steph takes graphic evidence to The New York Times, no #MeToo article comes of it.Well paced at nearly two hours, but segmented to allow watching in shorter chunks, “Off Broadway” entreats us to notice whose voices, perspectives and experiences are dismissed, talked over, ignored. It asks who in the theatrical establishment is willing to listen, and who is willing to act — and act differently — based on what they hear.That is the question of the moment. Whether we get a healthier, more urgent and empathetic American theater depends on the answer.Off BroadwayThrough Sunday; broad.stream/off-broadway More

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      ‘A Level of Abuse’: Laying Bare Theater’s Dirty Secrets

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      Robert O’Hara and Torrey Townsend discuss their collaboration on “Off Broadway,” a biting satire about a company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases.One day in 2016, Torrey Townsend unexpectedly received a message from Robert O’Hara, a writer and director then on the rise thanks to his raucous, exuberantly provocative satires “Bootycandy” and “Barbecue.”The email was actually sent to Townsend’s boss, the artistic director of a respected New York theater, but he had access to the account as part of his administrative duties. O’Hara was not writing about some exciting new project, though.He was calling out the company, which both men declined to identify, for its failure to employ artists of color.“He really struck me as somebody who I felt aligned with politically,” Townsend said. He reached out and eventually invited O’Hara to his show “The Workshop,” in which an aging almost-was leads students in a playwriting class.Benja Kay Thomas, Jesse Pennington and Jessica Frances Dukes in Robert O’Hara’s 2014 play “Bootycandy” at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was enthralled and amazed,” O’Hara said. “It challenged sacred cows of our industry, and I think we all need to be held accountable for the work we do.” He agreed to direct Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway,” a lacerating, wickedly funny portrait of a struggling New York company whose leaders are willfully oblivious of their racial and gender biases, which include stunt casting so preposterously offensive, you can only laugh at it. Enablers of the status quo, meanwhile, include a wealthy patron and, yes, The New York Times.O’Hara’s star rose further after he directed Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” and an industry reading of “Off Broadway,” starring Dylan Baker as the white heir apparent to a white artistic director, took place in 2019. “If Robert wanted me to work on something, I was totally going to do it,” Baker said. “And as soon as I read the script I said ‘Who is this guy Torrey Townsend? He knows how to write.’ ”Yet the play wasn’t getting picked up, with only the Brooklyn incubator the Bushwick Starr expressing interest, according to Townsend.Eventually, he and O’Hara worked out a deal for a streaming iteration with Harris, who has been helping produce theatrical projects (including the recent Pulitzer Prize finalist and digital native “Circle Jerk”) with HBO seed money, and producers from “Slave Play.” The production — with Baker again, alongside his wife, Becky Ann Baker, Jessica Frances Dukes, Richard Kind and Kara Wang — has already been recorded, and will be free to stream on the new platform Broadstream Media from June 24-27. (Advance sign-up is required.)O’Hara and Townsend recently sat down for a joint video chat about the nonprofit theater world’s dysfunctions and the play’s comedic sneak attacks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Austin Pendleton, center right, as a washed-up playwright who teaches a course in dramatic writing in Torrey Townsend’s “The Workshop.”Knud AdamsDo you think American theater is wary of scrutinizing itself too closely because it feels so beleaguered that it closes ranks?ROBERT O’HARA Yes, and we also take things much more personally: We think that if you talk about a play, you’re actually talking about the personal worth of the people who created it. And so if you criticize, it’s almost like you’re criticizing that person, as opposed to criticizing the institution and the systemic racism inside those choices.I am obliged to point out the obvious, which is that Torrey is a white man.O’HARA Well, racism was invented by white people [chortles] so I would love to know what white people think of their invention. It was exciting to see how a white guy would deal with their invention of racism in the American theater, and own it.Do you think theater has gotten away with so much for so long because it assumes artists can be judged by different rules?TORREY TOWNSEND I think there’s a quasi-religious component to this whole culture. There’s no other way to explain the level of exploitation that goes on unless it’s being sustained by an illusion of that kind. In 2018, Michael Paulson published a story [in The New York Times] about Gordon Edelstein and the Long Wharf Theater. [Edelstein, at the time the artistic director of the theater, had been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment.] About six months later, a firm in New Haven hired an attorney, Penny Mason, to write an independent review. In her concluding remarks she says that Edelstein’s mantra at the theater was “we are a family” — not a workplace, a family.O’HARA We’re always using words like “home” or “artistic home.” But there’s a level of abuse that happens in homes that we sort of allowed to happen: “Well, that’s just the way I was brought up.” We accept a level of trauma, I think, in our childhood and upbringing.Why tweak “Off Broadway” so it now also deals with theater during Covid-19, instead of simply transposing the 2019 version on Zoom?TOWNSEND The script lent itself to an update because it was already about the catastrophization of the theater. A lot of behavior that we witnessed in theaters during the pandemic has been totally absurd and deranged, and we wanted to honor that [laughs].O’HARA I feel that it would be ridiculous to create a new piece about Off Broadway that doesn’t acknowledge that it was gone for a year. That, to me, led to an even deeper sense of satire: you’re still holding on to these beliefs, but you don’t have a theater.The married couple Becky Ann Baker and Dylan Baker in a scene from Torrey Townsend’s new play, “Off Broadway.”via Torrey Townsend“Off Broadway” has dark undertones, but it also is, unabashedly, a comedy. Was it hard to refine what gets a laugh, considering some of the subject matter?TOWNSEND It requires constant effort, constant trial and error. It is very important to me that the work be funny.O’HARA There’s a comfort level where people can laugh, and then you can get behind them and show them some truths. Sometimes funny is painful; sometimes pain is funny. Sometimes the way I can deal with the institutionalized racism and homophobia and sexism and assault and harassment is to simply laugh. Because if I don’t, I will go out and harm something, or harm an individual, or say things that are harmful.Why focus on a small Off Broadway company?O’HARA When you think of the shows that address the theater, they’re usually about Broadway. But on Broadway you have to create your whole team every time, whereas Off Broadway and regional theater are set inside institutions. And what an institution does with creativity is never really examined.TOWNSEND It was important to me to weave the language about money into this play. The corporate world is more a part of the nonprofit theater world than we’re really aware of. There is a connection between this corporatization of American theater and the underlying abuse that ensues because we are conducting business as if we’re inside Trump Tower. I don’t think there’s a difference between the way Michael Cohen and Donald Trump are doing business and the way people are doing business inside an administrative office. It’s the dirty secret of the American theater: These theaters are run by bank managers, by accountants, and their donors are rich people working on Wall Street.O’HARA I have been head-hunted to see if I was interested in running an institution, and one of the most important skills they are looking for is an ability to fund-raise. For an institution to work, you have to know the lay of the land. And the lay of the land is that, although it says nonprofit, we are not trying to lose any more money — we’re trying to get as much money as possible.What is the solution: more public funding, more division of labor between artistic and fund-raising duties?O’HARA One of the things I think is necessary is diversity. Diversity will breed different people with different skill sets to show you different ways to run this institution. You need to disrupt the person in charge, you need to disrupt what power means and how power is distributed. That in itself will generate a new relationship to fund-raising. I don’t know very many happy artistic directors. There’s also a level of division that needs to be had: Am I going to be the artistic head and can that actually allow other people to deal with the educational and the finances and all this other stuff?The show points out how the system has long reproduced itself.O’HARA You have people who feel it’s OK to run an institution for 30 [expletive] years. “I’m against white supremacy but I want to run this [expletive] for 30 [expletive] years.” And I’m like, “No, get out! Go run something else!” They know who they are. And it’s unacceptable. They’re fossils.Off BroadwayJune 24-27; broad.stream/off-broadway More

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      Williamstown Festival Will Take the Shows Outside

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      After a lost live 2020, the theater will stage a musical at a museum’s reflecting pool and an immersive show, all over town, based on real events.The Williamstown Theater Festival, which was forced by the pandemic to convert its 2020 season into a series of audio plays, will present live performances again this summer, though not in its indoor venues.Instead, the festival announced on Wednesday three shows that will be staged outdoors throughout the festival’s college-town home. Alongside new plans for scaled-down seasons at Tanglewood and at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, it marks a tentative step toward business as usual for the culture-rich region of Massachusetts.The Williamstown season will open on July 6 with “Outside on Main: Nine Solo Plays by Black Playwrights,” to be staged on the front lawn of its main venue. The series, curated by the writer and director Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), includes short works by the writers Ngozi Anyanwu, Charly Evon Simpson, Ike Holter and Zora Howard, among others.The world premiere of the musical “Row,” with songs by Dawn Landes and a book by Daniel Goldstein, will be staged at the reflecting pool of the nearby Clark Art Institute starting July 13. The show, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is about a woman who intends to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Initially slated to be produced last summer, “Row” was recorded as part of the festival’s deal with Audible, and will be released April 8 on that platform.The third show, “Alien/Nation,” is a world premiere immersive production that asks audiences to journey through Williamstown by foot or car and “plunge themselves into the center of stories inspired by real events that took place in Western Massachusetts in 1969,” according to a news release.Scheduled to run from July 20 to Aug. 8, it is the brainchild of the Tony Award-nominated director Michael Arden and a company called the Forest of Arden, who devised it along with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman. Early last summer, Arden and some of his collaborators created a similar, experimental piece called “American Dream Study” in New York’s Hudson Valley.The festival typically presents seven shows per summer; according to a publicist, digital-only productions are still to be announced.The Berkshires ended up a national center of attention last summer when Berkshire Theater Festival’s “Godspell,” staged outdoors in a tent next to its main venue, became the first musical production in the country to get approval by the leading actors’ union since the theater shutdown.This summer Berkshire Theater Festival has announced outdoor productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Nina Simone: Four Women,” while Shakespeare & Company will open its season with Christopher Lloyd in the title role of “King Lear.”Barrington Stage Company, another notable theater in the region, promises a seven-show season that features a Gershwin revue and the comedy “Boca” outdoors and four shows indoors, including two world premieres and a solo play about Eleanor Roosevelt. More

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      Review: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its Destination

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its DestinationAudra McDonald stars as Blanche DuBois in a radio-like production of the Tennessee Williams classic that still has a way to go.Audra McDonald, left, and Ariel Shafir in a rehearsal for the Williamstown Theater Festival and Audible Theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreDec. 3, 2020When a great play like Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” gets a major revival with an ideal star like Audra McDonald, but the result is nevertheless a blur, you might be tempted to fault the director, in this case Robert O’Hara.But don’t blame O’Hara so fast. As a stager of revivals, he is probably perfect: both a bomb-throwing activist and a strict constructionist. His production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” for the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer was faithful to the text yet, with just a few theatrical gestures, managed to graffiti over Hansberry’s slight optimism with an awful truth for our times. My colleague Ben Brantley aptly wrote that O’Hara burned “a hole right through” the 60-year-old play.So I was more than eager to see what O’Hara would do at Williamstown this summer with “Streetcar,” a play so overripe with opportunities for rethinking that it almost seemed like low-hanging fruit. Since its debut on Broadway in 1947, it has graduated from American classic to cultural touchstone, many of its lines even better known (thanks in part to the 1951 movie) than the story that gave them birth.Yet that story — of the “apelike” Stanley Kowalski and his “delicate” sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois — was problematic enough to make the first major production after the #MeToo movement a rich opportunity. Its atmosphere of perfumed longing for a past that included Black servants working on white people’s crumbling plantations made it singularly vulnerable, too.McDonald, left, rehearsing the play with Robert O’Hara, the director.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat O’Hara’s Williamstown production was to star McDonald, our leading vocal tragedienne — in a part that, though spoken, seems like one long, ascendant aria — made this “Streetcar” a must-see event of the summer.But of course it could not be seen, not then and not now.After the pandemic forced the cancellation of its live season, Williamstown took the novel and in many ways noble route of reconfiguring most of its planned offerings as, essentially, radio dramas, produced with Audible Theater, the audiobook and podcast division of Amazon. “Streetcar,” the first out of the gate, was released on Thursday; three other titles will follow this month, three more in the new year.Most of those upcoming plays being new works, they may not suffer as much as “Streetcar” does from the unasked-for translation to a medium in which it is literally impossible for a director to show us anything. And it turns out that Williams’s pungent language, full of poetic touches for Blanche and brutal ones for Stanley (Ariel Shafir, replacing the better-suited Bobby Cannavale), needs more showing than prosaic plays do, not less. Without faces and bodies to anchor them, and despite McDonald’s willingness to go anywhere emotionally, the lines too often float away or, in Stanley’s case, sink with a thud.What remains isn’t so much bad as flat. Even with sophisticated engineering, audio has a difficult time detailing subtle emotional contours: Everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once. That problem is exacerbated by a podcast limitation O’Hara discovered during rehearsals: “Silence doesn’t help you,” he recently told my colleague Alexis Soloski. “Most times it sounds like someone missed the line or there’s a been a mistake.”Skipping over those aurally unhelpful empty spaces makes for a swift production; it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, with the play’s three acts combined into one uninterrupted sequence. But haste also eliminates many of the inflection points in the characters’ development as they hustle from high point to low. Carnality, so central to the story — “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation,” Blanche laments — gets lost in the shuffle.Carla Gugino, left, stars as Stella alongside McDonald’s Blanche DuBois.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat’s particularly injurious to our understanding of Stella (Carla Gugino): the fulcrum keeping Stanley and Blanche, her husband and sister, in tenuous balance. Her own swings of affection are almost impossible to register without some of that uncomfortable silence to frame them. And why in any case should we be comfortable about her returning to Stanley after each of his violent outbursts? Williams wants us to struggle with that contradiction.As O’Hara has demonstrated in staging his own work — and in his Tony Award-nominated direction of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” — he usually relishes discomfort and contradiction. But for most of this “Streetcar,” he seems surprisingly hands-off, following Williams’s elaborate instructions about music and sound (rendered for this production by Lindsay Jones) a bit too obviously. If someone is eating, we’re sure to hear the slurp.Only in the climactic scene between Stanley and Blanche, when Stella is at the hospital about to give birth, do things begin to get usefully wild. As Blanche succumbs to panic — and then to Stanley’s sexual violence — O’Hara amps up the expressionism inherent in Williams’s script and lets loose with a hooting, cackling, grunting soundscape of terrifying nightmare noise.This characterization of Stanley as a jungle animal, and Stella as his prey, struck me as a neat reversal of the racist trope usually aimed at Black men, turning it instead into a comment on white men’s violence against women in general and, because we know McDonald is Black, against Black women in particular. To the extent that the playwright’s obvious sympathy for Blanche can sometimes drive “Streetcar” dangerously close to antebellum nostalgia — the DuBois plantation was, after all, called Belle Reve, or “Beautiful Dream” in French — O’Hara’s choice rebalances the picture and subtly detoxifies the narrative.It’s that kind of theatrical activism I expected to hear more of, and that I hope O’Hara gets to explore more fully in a live production with McDonald. She has all the elements of a great Blanche in place, just not the place itself.Onstage, she and O’Hara might also get closer to the molten core of the drama, which isn’t just about the tragedy of the modern always supplanting the antique, the dynamic overcoming the delicate. It’s also about not letting regret for those facts blind you to their necessity. Blanche, however the world has harmed her, has harmed plenty of others. Plantations weren’t pretty; they were sites of violence. If O’Hara can steer “Streetcar” further in that direction, it’ll really be something to see.A Streetcar Named DesireAvailable on Audible; audible.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More