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      Review: In ‘The Doctor,’ a Rare Case of Physician, Harm Thyself

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      Robert Icke’s surgery on a 1912 play about the disease of antisemitism turns it into a riveting debate about identity. But at what cost to the patient?After attempting an abortion at home, a 14-year-old girl lies dying of sepsis at the Elizabeth Institute. No one questions her treatment there; by the time she was admitted, it was too late to save her. But when Ruth Wolff, the Institute’s head doctor, refuses to let a priest perform last rites because it would cause “an unpeaceful death,” ignorance amplified by social media turns a medical decision into a maelstrom. Soon the web is saying Wolff assaulted the priest and killed the girl.Yet it is not simply a question of tweets and misinformation. Wolff is a Jew.So far, the plot of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s adaptation of the 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” by Arthur Schnitzler, aligns closely with the original, except that Bernhardi is a Viennese man in 1900 and Wolff a British woman today. Yet ultimately the two works could not be more different. The production that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, directed by Icke and starring Juliet Stevenson, is less the exercise in Shavian moral argument that Schnitzler rather airily called a comedy than a tragic thought experiment about the failure of identity politics.The thought experiment runs like this: If everyone represents only the group they belong to, instead of an overarching humanity, and if those groups get sliced finer and finer, what hope can there be for a common language, let alone a common achievement? Wolff’s medical ethics are gibberish to a person of faith, as a politician’s equivocation is nonsense to her. When an online petition states that “Christian patients need Christian doctors” it comes close to suggesting a system in which no one can be a doctor at all — and indeed, soon enough, Wolff is forced to resign.That conundrum, honed to a sharp edge in the plotty first act, gets a satirical round table treatment in the second, when Icke puts Wolff before a panel of extreme antagonists on a portentous television program called “Take the Debate.” Faced with an anti-abortion lawyer, a “CreationVoice” activist, a post-colonial academic and a researcher of unconscious bias, Wolff, despite her excellence, gets eaten alive.Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut I have left out a fifth panelist: “a specialist in the study of Jewish culture.” He seems to feel that Wolff, a “cultural” Jew, is somehow not Jewish enough.I felt that way about “The Doctor.” Not because of Icke’s and Stevenson’s faith, whatever it may or may not be; as I don’t believe in matching Christian patients to Christian doctors (nor in a similar matching of critics to plays), I likewise don’t want to limit portrayals of a culture or religion only to its adherents. But it soon became clear to me that, unlike “Professor Bernhardi,” written by a Jew, “The Doctor” is not very serious about antisemitism. How could it be, when the sentimental attachment to identity of any sort is precisely its boogeyman?Icke develops the idea very cleverly. His casting across race and gender ensures that you will be forced to re-evaluate your reactions when you discover, quite belatedly in some cases, that the characters are not as they may look. Is the interaction between a Jewish doctor and a priest with a Scottish accent different when you assume the priest to be white (because the actor is) than when you later learn he is Black? Does it matter whether Wolff’s partner, named Charlie and dressed indeterminately, is a man or woman?Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.That’s in line with Icke’s generally over-caffeinated production, which includes a needlessly rotating turntable set (by Hildegard Bechtler), a scrape-your-nerves sound design (by Tom Gibbons) and a drum kit accompaniment from an aerie above the action (performed by Hannah Ledwidge) as if the breakneck story needed additional propulsion.Stevenson and Juliet Garricks, whose drama mainly unfolds offstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt probably needs less. Its themes, constantly broadening, also thin out. Wolff’s transgender friend, Sami (Matilda Tucker), seems to exist only to be betrayed; the drama of Charlie (Juliet Garricks) occurs mostly offstage.And in the end, antisemitism gets dropped completely. A long final scene, lovely in itself, allows the priest who was at the center of the problem in the first place (John Mackay) to confess and be absolved. Not Wolff. She is asked to re-evaluate her hubris, examine her hidden bias and accept her fallen state with humility. The Jew-baiting of everyone else is, if not excused, forgotten, which is much the same thing.This has been a season of Jews blamed or blaming themselves for the emotional, physical and indeed genocidal violence against them. Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue that the assimilated Jewry of Vienna (among whom Schnitzler was a star) should have seen the Holocaust coming and bought a ticket out. In the musical “Parade,” it is not enough that Leo Frank is lynched; to make him fully human he must be transfigured by love. (He’s dead either way.) And now “The Doctor” subjects its main character to antisemitic dog whistles but, in the end, sees her downfall as her own fault and an opportunity for growth.Well, that’s drama, and all three shows are riveting. No question they are also timely; Icke may even be warning us with that alarming drum kit that time is short. That might explain why his version of the Elizabeth Institute is not a general teaching hospital, as in the original, but a facility dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Though it doesn’t make much medical sense for a girl with sepsis to be treated there, it does make sense for the play. Wolff describes Alzheimer’s as “a fire burning hot on the top” — scorching a path down through the brain from the newest to the earliest memories.You need only glance at the news to know what Icke means. As the memory of the unity and selflessness that once saved the world is all but burned through, how will we remember to never forget?The DoctorThrough Aug. 19 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Juliet Stevenson Returns to ‘The Doctor,’ and the New York Stage

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      The British actress is reprising her role as the Jewish physician at the center of an ethical drama. “It’s like a tailored suit,” the director Robert Icke said.At the start of Robert Icke’s “The Doctor,” the actress Juliet Stevenson stands alone in a spotlight onstage. “Am I sure? Yes. Yes!” she says crisply as if to an invisible interlocutor. “I’m crystal clear. I’m a doctor.”As the play’s title character, a grammatically exacting neurosurgeon named Ruth Wolff, Stevenson will repeat those last two phrases many times as events unfold and Ruth’s clarity and intellectual certainties erode. Eventually they will transmute into something far more inchoate as her life unravels, and self-doubt begins to permeate her conviction that being a doctor is all that matters.“The Doctor,” which opens Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama, “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish physician who refuses entry to a Roman Catholic priest trying to administer last rites to a patient dying from sepsis after an abortion. In Icke’s version, the issues go beyond questions of medical ethics and religious affiliations to include identity politics and cancel culture.The play, and Stevenson, received rave reviews when “The Doctor” was first presented in 2019 at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke was then the artistic director, and later after it transferred to the West End. “One of the peaks of the theatrical year,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, adding that “while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god.”During an interview, Stevenson, 66, said the piece “takes a lot of the preoccupations of our time and plays them out on a very large, Shakespearean scale. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong. We can explore all the angles because it’s safe. We’re on a stage, it’s a play!”After a long rehearsal, she was enthusiastic and voluble during our conversation at the Bishopsgate Institute, a cultural center in East London. “I have always wanted to put myself at the service of great writing, share it with people in the dark,” she said. “Every culture has that ancient ritual.”In Britain, Stevenson is a familiar face who has taken on a variety of roles onstage and on-screen since graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1978. But to U.S. audiences, she is probably best known for the 1990 Anthony Minghella film, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a romantic comedy about a woman mourning her dead lover, who returns as a ghost.“I don’t want to play King Lear any more. I want to tell women’s stories,” Juliet Stevenson said about the lack of roles for women over 40. An image of a wolf, her inspiration animal, is affixed to her dressing room mirror.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe never aspired, she said, to a Hollywood career. “I am not at ease in the industry and no good at all that glamour stuff,” she added. “I am not an actress because I felt this face has to be on a screen.”And despite playing lead roles in major West End productions that have moved to Broadway, including “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” her only previous appearance in New York was a 2003 City Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.”“I never wanted to leave my children for long stretches while filming or acting outside the U.K.,” Stevenson said. “But now my youngest is 22, and I am free!”She comes “with this relish,” she said for a first-time move from the West End to New York: “It’s amazing to have a first time at my age!”“The Doctor” is Stevenson’s third collaboration with Icke, after playing Gertrude in his 2017 production of “Hamlet,” starring Andrew Scott, then alternating with Lia Williams in the roles of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in his update of Friedrich Schiller’s “Mary Stuart.”Stevenson first met Icke in 2010 at the Almeida Theater, where he was then an associate director. “We did a gala with a whole lot of famous actors doing Shakespeare, and I offered to run lines,” Icke recounted in a telephone interview from New York. “Juliet was the only person who wanted to rehearse and wanted notes. She was performing a very difficult bit of ‘As You Like It,’ and there was something about the rhythm and music of what she was doing that was amazing, and I stored it up.”They kept in touch, and, in 2015, when Stevenson congratulated Williams backstage, after watching her performance in Icke’s “Oresteia,” the director had a flash of inspiration. “I had been thinking about “Mary Stuart” for a long time, and looking at Lia and Juliet, I realized if I solved the problem of how to cast it by not solving it and doubling the roles, I had the key.”These parts in Icke’s productions have been important moments in her career, Stevenson said, adding that she would never have taken on Gertrude in “Hamlet” without his insistence. “I thought, ugh, these voiceless women in Shakespeare,” she said, “but he took that problem, that silence, and put it in the center.”But there have been many important moments, starting when she was around 10 and performed a W.H. Auden poem, “If I Could Tell You,” at school, she said. “It was the first time I felt a light bulb go on, felt I had to be a vessel for the poem to pass through me to an audience.”Jeremy Irons and Stevenson in New York City Opera’s 2003 production of the musical “A Little Night Music” at the New York State Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStevenson, the youngest of three children, lived abroad with her family as her father’s job with the British Army’s Royal Engineers took them to Germany, Australia and Malta. At 9, she encountered “an amazing drama teacher, Bess Jones,” at a boarding school just outside London, and started to go to the theater in her teens. When she saw “King Lear,” she immediately wanted to play the title role. “I was just possessed by it, the size of his anger, passions, love, regret, grief,” she said. “I stomped around being Lear for months; of course he is just like a badly behaved adolescent!”She successfully auditioned for the Royal Academy — “a culture shock” — where she felt lost and insecure until a teacher harshly criticized her performance of a speech from “Antony and Cleopatra.” “My anger found its way into the words, and I could feel the temperature of the room change,” she said. “I thought, OK, this is what acting is.”After graduating, she found ensemble work (“Shape No. 2, Sea Nymph No. 2 and Hellhound No. 3”) in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Tempest,” and stayed for eight years playing lead roles in Shakespeare productions and new plays, and working with directors like Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn and Howard Davies.She had also started working in film, appearing in Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers” and “a couple of forgettable movies” before working on “Truly, Madly.” Also in 1990, she performed in “Death and the Maiden,” winning the best actress Olivier Award in 1992, and met her future husband, Hugh Brody, an anthropologist. Over the next two decades she had two children and played a dizzying number of roles onscreen (“Emma,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Departure”) and onstage (“The Duchess of Malfi,” “Private Lives,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Duet for One”).“Juliet pours her life and love and soul into everything,” said the theater director Natalie Abrahami, who worked with Stevenson in Beckett’s “Happy Days” and “Wings,” by Arthur Kopit. “She is always pushing, really good at asking instinctive, actor-led questions: ‘Why would the character act this way? What memory is triggered here?’ She is always making the map of a character’s life as three-dimensional as possible.”In “The Doctor,” Stevenson “climbs an extraordinarily difficult mountain with Ruth,” said Naomi Wirthner, who plays Ruth’s antagonist, the surgeon Roger Hardiman. “It’s a rock face that she climbs every night, every rehearsal, and just when you think she is at peak Ruth, she will find a deeper, stronger layer.”While writing “The Doctor,” Icke said, he was thinking about “the genius archetype, cancel culture and how society deals with the exceptionally abled. The examples are usually men, like Picasso, but I was interested in the interaction of genius and femaleness.”He knew, he added, that he wanted to write “a virtuosic, lead-actor play, like ‘Jerusalem’ with Mark Rylance. There is something about watching a great actor shoulder a big boulder and drag it up the hill. This was very specifically written for Juliet. It’s like a tailored suit; there isn’t a line of Ruth Wolff that is innocent of the knowledge that it will be spoken by her.”When he sent Stevenson the script, it spoke to a long-harbored frustration. “I had got really fed up with the lack of roles for women over 40,” she said. “And I don’t want to play King Lear any more. These are men’s stories, and I want to tell women’s stories.”She added that coming back to “The Doctor” after a break “was like holding up a mirror to so many cultural tensions: the demonizing of otherness, George Floyd, antisemitism, the agonizing history of abortion in the U.S.” The play also responds through its eclectic casting, she said, to the policing of which actors can play which characters. “When you see a white actor and discover the character is Black, it forces you to think, would I have reacted differently to that situation had I known that?”Warming to the theme, she continued.“My job description as an actor is to tell other’s stories, to imagine myself into other people’s lives,” she said. “Let’s not lose our richness. Let’s throw all these subjects up in the air and let them catch the light as they fall.” More

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      The Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov Makes a Rare Visit to New York

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      Pavel Kolesnikov took on a test of pianism, the “Goldberg” Variations, and assembled a conceptual program inspired by Joseph Cornell.Few pieces in the piano repertoire are as revealing of a performer as Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. With few indications of tempo or articulation, they force constant interpretation. It’s hard to think of a better personality test.Except, perhaps, programming. A pianist’s choice of what to play can be more illuminating than the performance itself. A recital might focus on a single composer or group together a few sonatas; but there’s also another route, more conceptual, of compiling something more akin to a playlist.Over two evenings at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan this week, the pianist Pavel Kolesnikov shared his artistry with both routes, with one concert devoted to the “Goldbergs” and the other a moodily nocturnal collage inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblage “Celestial Navigation.”Kolesnikov, a Russian-born pianist who lives in England, is at 34 already a stalwart of the London music scene. He has recorded the “Goldbergs” and performed them alongside the choreographer-performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. But he has been virtually absent from New York’s stages.He shouldn’t be. His two Armory recitals exhibited pianism of poetic freedom, assured interpretive choices and a D.J.’s ear for subtle musical connections.His Bach was boldly argued — the kind of performance that invites disagreement but is defended so persuasively, even detractors can’t help but appreciate it. His take on the “Goldbergs,” an Aria followed by 30 variations and a return to the original theme, was openly personal, the score more like a coloring-book outline filled in with a palette of Kolesnikov’s creation.In Bach’s mathematical construction, the 32 movements are mirrored in the Aria’s 32 measures, which are split into two 16-bar passages that are both repeated — a structure that recurs throughout. Like most pianists, Kolesnikov approached the first run of each passage straightforwardly, with a clarity that rendered the score’s precise architecture in vivid detail.On the repeat, however, he seemed to put that structure through a stress test. Near-constant pedalwork shaded phrases with anachronistic nuance. One variation might bleed into another, such as the closing G of the Fifth being held into the first measure of the Sixth, which starts with the same note; the Quodlibet variation emerged from a haze of sustained, hammered chords at the end of the 29th.This was a reading of the “Goldbergs” too modern for purists of historically informed performance, yet also far from the slack indulgence of Lang Lang’s divisive recording. I didn’t remember, until I returned to my notes for Kolesnikov’s second recital, that I had described his treatment of the Aria’s return as Chopinesque — which turned out to be just the word to describe his program “Celestial Navigation (After Joseph Cornell).”Cornell’s sculptural assemblage — a muted evocation of how humans have made sense of the night sky, with references to mythology and science — doesn’t exactly lend itself to musical translation in the way that, say, a synesthetic painting by Kandinsky would. But Kolesnikov’s program is cleverly similar in its juxtapositions, unlikely pairings united not in aesthetic or time but in something loftier.It’s always refreshing to see musicians interacting with other mediums, and for Kolesnikov this isn’t even a first: He has also put together a recital inspired by Proust. As a conceptual thinker he resembles the pianist Vikingur Olafsson. But while Olafsson approaches programming like an essayist laying out a constellatory argument, Kolesnikov cultivates a mood. His performance at the Armory was a gathering of congenial poets.At the heart of the evening was a trio of suites that followed a basic construction: a Messiaen piano solo, a Chopin Nocturne and a fragmentary reprise of the Messiaen. Surrounding those were a Pavane by Louis Couperin (not the more famous François); Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Océan”; and Thomas Adès’s Dowland-inspired “Darknesse Visible.” Then, in the second half, Kolesnikov closed with Schubert’s D. 935 Impromptus.Covering nearly 350 years of music history, these pieces couldn’t possibly belong to the same sound world. But Kolesnikov nudged them as closely together as possible — again applying modern pedalwork to the Baroque, and using Chopin as a stylistic anchor. The result was often disorienting; Messiaen’s colors shone more brightly, and Schubert leaned with blunter emotions toward the Romantic.Kolesnikov’s blanket dreaminess lent a memory-like remove even to passages of storminess and, in one of the Chopin Nocturnes, a moment of “I could have danced all night” bliss. These were idiosyncratic interpretations in service of a greater whole.As in the “Goldbergs,” some of this could be seen as sacrilege. Maybe. What is inarguable, though, is that given two opportunities to reveal himself to New York, Kolesnikov came out and declared what kind of pianist he is: entirely, confidently, eloquently himself. More

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      Jeremy Strong to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘An Enemy of the People’

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      The production, with a new script by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, will begin early next year.“Succession” is ending. So what’s next for Jeremy Strong? He’s returning to Broadway.Strong, whose celebrity has skyrocketed with his portrayal of the scheming Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” will star next year in a Broadway revival of the classic play “An Enemy of the People.” Strong will portray the title character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who becomes a pariah when he decides to reveal that the water in local spa baths is contaminated.The play was written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen and has been staged on Broadway 10 times, most recently in 2012. There have been other New York productions, too; a socially distanced one-woman version of the show was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging.This new production will feature a script rewritten by the playwright Amy Herzog, who is no stranger to reimagining Ibsen: Her revised version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is now on Broadway, with Jessica Chastain in the starring role.Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” previously appeared on Broadway in a 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” He has also appeared in several Off Broadway productions.The “Enemy of the People” revival will be directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award for directing the musical “Fun Home,” and whose more recent Broadway ventures have been polarizing productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”“An Enemy of the People” is scheduled to run for 16 weeks in early 2024; an announcement on Friday did not specify the exact dates or the theater, and did not reveal any further casting. The producers are Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Patrick Catullo, who previously collaborated on Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show “The Old Man & the Pool.” More

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      Review: Holding Hands With the Homeless, in ‘Love’

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      Alexander Zeldin’s heartbreaking play set in a temporary housing facility retunes our attention from the big picture to the small accommodations.Whether with a gun, a mastermind or a monster, most thrillers thrill by invoking the specter of death: Who’s going to die and how? But “Love,” which opened on Tuesday at the Park Avenue Armory, keeps the audience ears-up anxious for 90 minutes without recourse to any of that. Its most alarming prop is a coffee cup, accidentally purloined, and what passes for a mastermind is a housing bureaucracy that’s evil only in its inefficiency. No one dies, yet the emotional threat level is off the charts and peculiarly personal. Call it a moral thriller: The monster is us.And make no mistake, “Love,” written and directed by Alexander Zeldin, implicates its audience. Quite literally in some cases: About 75 of the 650 seats in the Armory’s vast Drill Hall are placed onstage with the set, which represents the dingy common room of a temporary housing facility. At times, the characters, who are residents of that facility, will glance suspiciously at us ticket holders, as if we too were unhoused residents, and might have stolen a sandwich. Other times they sit among us or, at one point, reach out for solace.Yet even though “Love” is the middle play in a trilogy called “the Inequalities,” there is very little preachy or overtly political about it. The characters certainly have no time for treatises; each is desperate, for different reasons that add up to the same one, to get out of the facility as soon as possible. Colin, an unemployed man in his 50s, and his mother, Barbara, teetering on the edge of senility, have lived in Room 4 for nearly a year, trying to fend off impending indignity. This even though, as a new resident named Emma insists, “it’s six weeks maximum by law.”Emma, too, has a deadline: Very pregnant, she does not want to give birth before finding a proper home. She is naïvely confident that her stay in Room 5 — along with her partner, Dean, and Dean’s two children from a previous relationship — is temporary.The arrangement seems fine for the girl, Paige, who is still young enough at 8 not to mind much her bleak and reduced surroundings; she’s more interested in rehearsing the school Christmas pageant. But for her 12-year-old brother, Jason, the sudden change of circumstances — the family could not afford a sudden rent hike where they’d been living — comes at a time when external disappointment finds too much fuel in the onset of garden-variety adolescent dismay.Naby Dakhli, left, and Hind Swareldahab in the play. They discover a common language in Arabic, and erupt in conversation, becoming real to themselves and thus to us, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat “Love” — first performed in London in 2016 and seen across Europe since then — is in fact set at Christmastime, with a few decorations and the promise of mince pies, is (aside from some unnecessarily scary sounds between scenes) the play’s only obvious heart-clutcher. Still, it’s apt: Dean is, after all, an out-of-work tradesman, and the promise of a late-December baby puts us in mind of injustice as old as the Bible.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.So do the other two residents we meet, both apparently refugees. Tharwa, from Sudan, and Adnan, from Syria — played by Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli — are mostly silent in the presence of the native-born English characters, and are thus misunderstood or suspected of vague wrongdoing. Only when they discover a common language in Arabic and erupt in conversation that we get the joy of, if not the gist, do they become real to themselves and thus to us.Merely remaining real — surviving the deprivation of home and privacy that most of us take for granted — is here a kind of victory. But just as Zeldin isn’t interested in stripping the dignity from his characters any further than the system has done already, he also refuses to sanctify them.Yes, there are acts of kindness (Barbara offers Paige a gift), moments of unexpected diversion (Adnan watches “Billy Elliot”) and simply ordinary observations of family life (Paige is thrilled by Colin’s constant cursing). The play’s title is neither an irony nor a plea; it’s an emotion that survives as a lullaby sung over a cellphone or a casual nickname or a serious declaration of commitment.But if the system were not dehumanizing there would be no drama; without its broken trust, no betrayals. For Dean (Alex Austin), the betrayal is bureaucratic; to advance in line for housing he must get a new job, but waiting in lines is a full-time job itself. For Barbara (Amelda Brown), the betrayal is physical and mortifying. For endlessly practical and even-tempered Emma (Janet Etuk), it’s the constant scraping down of patience that finally results in a crushing act of unsympathy.Alex Austin and Janet Etuk as a couple who are new to the facility, and hoping to find a new home before their baby arrives.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat these expressions of systemic despair feel so specific and personal is no accident. Zeldin developed “Love” in a series of workshops that included families who had experienced homelessness. (Swareldahab had never been in a theater before joining one of them.) The set and costume design, both by Natasha Jenkins, have the same feeling of lived-in authenticity: Your eye notes the stray single sneaker, abandoned on the roof of the shared bathroom, and the barely translucent windows scrunched high up in the corners of the room as if they too are trying to escape.Yet despite this and Marc Williams’s aptly harsh lights, which remain lit above the audience when they’re lit above the stage, “Love” is shaped by the poetics of drama as opposed to the logic of documentary. The characters are too particular to be placards, filled by the cast with so much subtext you’d think they would burst. And perhaps they do; among the uniformly excellent actors, Brown, as Barbara, stands out for her devastating portrait of dementia, Queen Lear in a shelter instead of on a moor.But unlike Lear she is a mother; Colin, though often rough and gross, is in Nick Holder’s wonderful portrayal surprisingly babyish and dainty underneath. Tharwa is a mother, too, but for reasons we don’t quite know, she is, as the script says, “without her children.” And Emma will be a mother any day. Together, the three women give “Love” a spine that would keep it standing as drama even if the armature of enforced homelessness were one day, thankfully, dismantled.I say “enforced” because bureaucracies are man-made and, with sufficient political will, reformable. We can sit around and argue that. Meanwhile, about 274,000 people are without homes in England, and about twice as many in the United States.Though “Love” is a great piece of theater — funny, beautifully staged, and with the kind of excitement that retunes your attention to tiny heartbreaks instead of just huge ones — I couldn’t help but wonder why it was easier to engage the subject inside the Armory than on Park Avenue. (There were several homeless people on the subway I took home.) When one of the characters reaches for audience members’ hands, they freely give it. How freely outside?LoveThrough March 25 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More

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      Alexander Zeldin Brings ‘Love’ to the Park Avenue Armory

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      Because his shows are based on research and interviews, and are grounded in pressing social issues, the British writer and director Alexander Zeldin is often said to practice docu-theater.The first part of his “Inequalities” trilogy, “Beyond Caring” (2014), is about zero-hour contracts (a British term for when an employer does not have to offer a minimum number of hours), while “Faith, Hope and Charity” (2019) is set at a community center for the poor and the homeless. Zeldin’s “Love,” which starts previews at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, and opened in 2016 at the National Theater in London, takes place in a temporary-housing facility. “The whole project is to write the tragic knot of our time,” Zeldin said.Yet he grimaced when that docu-theater label came up in a video conversation from London, where he was rehearsing “Love” — so popular across the Atlantic that it has traveled to eight European countries since its premiere, including France, Austria and Serbia, and was filmed by the BBC in 2018 — before its American debut.“I don’t see what I do as docu-theater at all,” he said, adding, “My script is about music. It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”For Zeldin, 37, subject and form are inextricably linked. In “Love,” for example, the house lights remain on and the actors portraying the people at the shelter often sit amid‌ or walk around audience members, as if to say they are us and we are them, separated only by circumstance. Meanwhile, the narrative is carefully built in a tragic arc.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.“The structure is very classical and that’s very, very deliberate,” Zeldin said. “It’s rooted in life with an ambition to be judged or experienced as theater, not as testimony.”Amelda Brown during rehearsals. Her character in “Love” is losing control over her mind and body.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin grew up in Britain as the son of an Australian mother and a Jewish refugee father who was born in Haifa, Israel. His death when Zeldin was 15 created instant turmoil.“I was in trouble at school and all sorts of things that made me find theater, a place where I could have a real concentration of life,” Zeldin said. “I was very drawn to how it was making me feel life with the intensity that I felt in the most intense moments in my own life, which were quite a few at that time.”He started exploring theater at 17; his first play was an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel “Moderato Cantabile.” After studying at Oxford, Zeldin roamed the world, soaking up theater cultures and making works in countries like Georgia, Egypt, South Korea and Russia. In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.“My script is about music,” Alexander Zeldin said. “It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesA big preoccupation was the austerity programs implemented by Prime Minister David Cameron, so Zeldin hit the pavement and conducted extensive research. For “Love,” he went to shelters and reached out to organizations like the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. He was put in touch with Louise Walker, now 47, who inspired the characters of Emma and Dean, a young couple marooned at the shelter with Dean’s children.After Walker lost her home, Zeldin learned, she and her children ended up in housing that was meant to be temporary but lasted for months. She faced Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths and had to juggle contradictory administrative demands, which we discover with horror in the play. “I do think that the whole system is designed to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unworthy and just to stay in the squalor that this society put you in,” Walker said in a video chat.“In every part of the process, Alex was like, ‘You’ll be involved and tell me if I’m relaying correctly the things that you’re saying to me,’” she said. “He allowed us to very much tell our story.” (She and her daughter Renée are in the BBC film.)Zeldin wrote sketches of scenes, which he refined into an outline through a series of workshops. “We bring in 30 or 40 people, we pay them to be involved, and then we go out into the world working with families in their homes, understanding their situation,” he said. “Because I was doing so much work with community groups anyway, it felt natural to me that that should be part of the artistic process, that there should be a room, a great radical mix of people in the room.”This is represented onstage as well. While some people in the cast have theater experience — like Amelda Brown, who joined the cast in 2021 and whose character, Barbara, is losing control over her mind and body — some don’t. It’s an important semantic distinction that Zeldin prefers to “professional” versus “amateur.”Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli during a break from rehearsals.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“Hind’s a big professional,” he said, referring to Hind Swareldahab, who plays Tharwa, a Sudanese refugee like herself. “She’s performed at the Odéon twice, she’s performed at the Vienna festival, Geneva, the National Theater. She’s got a great C.V. and she’s a brilliant actor, but she’d never been in a theater before she worked with me. She didn’t know there was a front of house, she didn’t know there was a stage. And so that brings you face to face with the question of, What is the theater for? And unless we ask this question, if we rely on habit, we will die.”Swareldahab, 46, who works as a pharmacist, heard about one of the “Love” workshops in an email from the Refugee Council, a charity and advocacy group. She has done the play many times now, and still marvels at its emotional toll. “Every second, every line, we feel it,” she said. “It’s not easy to watch. Every country, people cry. Everything is real. It’s hard to watch.”At the same time, it should be clear that the show is not a huge downer but is about resilience and our shared humanity — and it pulses with the power of a good yarn.“I want theater to be useful to the world, and I passionately don’t think that that is against poetics, against great storytelling, against entertainment, against accessibility,” Zeldin said. “I’m very lucky that ‘Love’ sells out. It’s a show that people want to see, and that’s very important to me.” More

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      Review: In ‘Monochromatic Light,’ Artists Saturate and Vacate Space

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      Tyshawn Sorey’s music, initially written with Mark Rothko’s abstractions in mind, comes to the Park Avenue Armory with art by Julie Mehretu.If you write a musical composition in homage to Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” and if you premiere it in the actual Rothko Chapel in Houston, you’d seem to be anchoring its meaning and context in rather firm ground. But the American composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey is a more restive and conjectural artist than that; and his “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the chapel earlier this year, has come to New York rewritten, reorganized and reinvigorated.This latest, and now staged, version of “Monochromatic Light” premiered at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, and it retains the spare and ritualistic tenor of Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” with long rests between its inquiring viola phrases and soft rumbles of the timpani. Here in New York, though, Sorey’s music is heard in the company not of Rothko but of another American painter: the contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, whose dense and digitally conversant abstractions flow and swarm where Rothko’s brooded. The production, by the avant-garde journeyman Peter Sellars, has been souped up for the Armory’s cavernous drill hall and augmented with young dancers. The running time has ballooned, too, from under an hour to a good 90 minutes.In scaling up, Sorey may have sacrificed the ecclesiastical concentration that both he and Feldman before him had found in Houston. The night has its longueurs. But this rethought and more antagonistic “Monochromatic Light” strikes a new richness in New York, and it affirms how abstraction can give form to suffering and freedom in ways more straightforward expression so often cannot.At the Armory, “Monochromatic Light” is staged in the round. Sorey, at center, conducts an ensemble of just three musicians, playing viola, keyboards and percussion: nearly the same instrumentation as Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” Singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street sit at a distance, and behind the audience is an octagonal gangway, with one massive reproduction of a Mehretu painting hanging above each side. Three of the eight abstractions were seen in her 2020 exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery; one appeared this year at David Zwirner in a group show devoted to Toni Morrison; and four are new, incorporating dense layers of halftone dots, sprayed clouds of bright yellow or green and seething black squiggles.The staging echoes Philip Johnson’s octagonal nave of the Houston chapel, but from the opening moments of gently struck tubular bells, it’s clear that Rothko’s dark reticence is being left behind. For Mehretu’s works here are not paintings but blowups on translucent screens, lit from front and back by colored spots. (The lighting designer, James F. Ingalls, a longtime Sellars collaborator, synchronizes the color adjustments across all eight paintings so that, at a given moment in the score, their backgrounds will all glow purple or aquamarine and their tremulous blacks will emerge or recede.)Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, one of the eight dancers who performed in the Brooklyn-born style known as flex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesUp on the gangway are eight dancers, one per painting, who bend and writhe throughout in a Brooklyn-born style of dancing known as flex. The performers are athletic, the men among them perform shirtless, but choreographed by Reggie Gray (also known as Regg Roc) they appear vulnerable, fragile, under threat; they contort their arms as if they’re fractured or disjointed and draw in their stomachs as if taking a punch.The score is rangy and spatial, the tempo largo to larghissimo. (There’s no beat as such; Sorey marked time with strokes of his baton lasting a second or longer.) Its opening minutes are especially minimal. Against a long and attenuated trill of the viola, Mehretu’s backgrounds become a lurid green or mysterious blue and the black lines of the paintings start to look more querulous. The dancers moonwalk and roll their necks; their motions are smooth and spasmodic by turns, and several of them present bulging eyes and pained expressions that recall the existential intensity of butoh.The dancers’ broken movements, and Mehretu’s colliding layers and shaking lines, bring out an anxiety in Sorey’s score that probably did not come through in front of Rothko’s hushed paintings in Houston. There’s an angst and frailty in the scattered notes Kim Kashkashian brings from her viola, while the percussionist Steven Schick bows between the bars of a marimba to produce a spooky, theremin-like keening. The silky ah-ah-ah choral lines, a Feldman quotation that I imagine worked better amid the Rothkos, feel out of place against Mehretu’s unsettled paintings, though there is sharper accompaniment from Davóne Tines, the solo bass-baritone, walking through the audience and later circumnavigating the gangway. As he wrenches forth fragments from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the words octaves apart and isolated by long silences, the evening takes on the tone of a funeral march.The solo bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing in front of an enlarged reproduction of a painting by Julie Mehretu, with the flex dancer Jeremy “Opt” Perez lying on the gangway below.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSorey’s interpolation of a spiritual into “Monochromatic Light,” as well as the dancers’ channeling of Jamaican vernacular movements and the violent news imagery that Mehretu abstracts into her churning backgrounds, all imbue this threnody with the particularities of Black grief. But it resists resolution throughout. This is a work of Blackness (or blackness) in abstraction — one that defies the supposed blankness of nonobjective painting or art music on the one hand, and current market demands for social advocacy on the other. Blackness in abstraction, as the curator Adrienne Edwards has written, is a more capacious and immanent model of artistic creation than many of our institutions can handle. It requires a dual engagement with form and identity, which, in Edwards’s words, “shifts analysis away from the Black artist as subject and instead emphasizes blackness as material, method and mode.” It can draw as much from Rothko, whose murals in Houston are black with purplish-blue undertones, as from Du Bois or Eastman or O’Grady. It pushes past biography or storytelling, and enters the realms of the psychic, the global, the cosmic.What I most admired about Mehretu’s midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year was how she used magnitude to defy the diminishment and simplifications that even our “diversified” cultural institutions still assign to artists outside the dominant representation. Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light,” for all its spareness, does the same. Where Mehretu saturates space, Sorey vacates it, yet both painter and composer offer vital examples of how to create at full scale when the times impel others to reduce their ambition. This is how you speak to some and to all at once; this is how you mourn and stay free.Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)Through Oct. 8 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More