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      ‘There’s No Way to Do a Good Job if You’re Judging the Character’

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      The actor K. Todd Freeman has worked with Steppenwolf Theater since 1993. His roles, however challenging, usually don’t exact a personal toll. Bruce Norris’s incendiary “Downstate,” which debuted at that Chicago theater in 2018, is different.“After three or four months of doing the play,” Freeman said, “it’s like, OK, I need to stop.”Like many of Norris’s works (including “Clybourne Park”), “Downstate,” a drama about a group home for men who have committed sexual offenses against children, is in part a provocation, a goad to presumed moral certainties. It focuses on four men: Dee (Freeman), who had sexual contact with a 14-year-old boy; Felix (Eddie Torres), who molested his daughter; Fred (Francis Guinan), a former piano teacher who abused two of his students; and Gio (Glenn Davis), who committed statutory rape.So inflammatory are its themes that Steppenwolf, having received threats, had to hire additional security for the show’s run. And the production, now at the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan after a subsequent run at London’s National Theater, continues to attract controversy, such that anyone who describes it positively risks being seen as endorsing its subject matter.From left: Guinan, Eddie Torres (partially obscured), Davis, Susanna Guzman and Freeman in the play, which is at Playwrights Horizons through Dec. 22.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter the Washington Post critic Peter Marks posted a link on Twitter to his favorable review, conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz, attacked him. They claimed that the play and by extension the review were sympathetic to pedophiles.On a recent weekday, at a restaurant near the theater, three of the actors — the Steppenwolf regulars Freeman and Guinan, and Davis, one of the company’s artistic directors — discussed what it takes to imagine men who have done the unimaginable and how much of their own sympathy they can extend. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you do much research into men who have offended against children?FREEMAN There was a literary department at Steppenwolf that provided a great research packet. They gave the laws, what jail time we all would have had, what sort of rehab we would have had, how we got from the crime to this house. And there were documentaries that were made available to us. It was never overwhelming to me.“I don’t believe in the term ‘monsters’ for human beings. I don’t like the otherness of that,” Freeman said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWas there anything you learned that surprised you or made you question how the country prosecutes and treats sex offenders?DAVIS I talked to Bruce about why he wrote the play. He said, “We live in a country in which you can murder someone, go to prison, come out, and have some approximation of a decent life afterward. But if you’re marked with this scarlet letter, this follows you forever.” He said, “I want to explore how we feel about that as a culture.”GUINAN I was rather shocked by the fact that all you have to do is go online and they’ll tell you exactly where all of these people live. Primarily, it ends up being in really poor neighborhoods. I was just shocked at how many convicted child molesters there are within walking distance of my house in Illinois.FREEMAN I was like, why isn’t there a registry for murderers? I would like to know when there’s a convicted murderer moving into my neighborhood. That’s a pretty horrible thing, killing people. Why aren’t we up in arms about that as well?Have these characters fully reckoned with their actions?GUINAN Fred, while he acknowledges what a terrible thing it was, then says, “I don’t know why the Lord would make me this way.” So I don’t think so. I don’t think he has.FREEMAN There are people who like to define their lives by their past and their scars. Do they need to? And is it bad if they don’t? It’s easy to judge these people. I don’t believe in the term “monsters” for human beings. I don’t like the otherness of that. It helps us think that we’re better or different — that we could never do that. We all could.Guinan said that the role has “opened the question of ‘what about the unforgivable in your own life?’ That’s a question I really have not answered for myself.”Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesCould we? I can’t imagine a circumstance in which I would abuse a child.FREEMAN I can’t either. But most child abusers have been abused. Maybe if you had that past? We just don’t know.Did you ever find yourself judging the characters or feeling repulsion for the characters?FREEMAN That’s just not what you do as a performer. There’s no way to do a good job if you’re judging the character.DAVIS There’s a part of you that understands, psychologically, that what this character has done is wrong, egregious. And then in honoring the story, honoring the character, you divorce yourself of that judgment. If I’m playing a character and I’m not going as far as I can because of my own judgment, I should probably let someone else have it.If you were withholding judgment, why then did the play begin to weigh on you?DAVIS It’s not an easy world to live in every day. You have to prepare yourself for what you’re about to hear and do.FREEMAN These four walls are basically the characters’ entire world. Trying to believe in the reality of that, just believing in the given circumstances, it’s a weight.Is it important to you that the audience empathize with these characters?DAVIS I don’t think we as artists can predetermine the response from the audience. What I owe to the audience is a realistic portrayal of the given circumstance and to let them decide for themselves if they want to feel compassion.FREEMAN To me, this is not a play about pedophiles. To me, pedophilia is a metaphor for the limits of our compassion, our mercy, our grace.“Whether I extend a little bit of grace or a lot of grace or no grace at all, my job is simply to portray what this character was thinking, what they were after, why they do what they do,” Davis said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhat do you make of the criticism that this play is sympathetic to pedophilia?FREEMAN I don’t think there’s a single line in there that suggests that. But it’s seeing them as human.DAVIS It’s a play that forces you to look at these people outside of the worst thing they’ve ever done. For some people, that’s too much.What has been the experience of having to extend your own humanity to the most reviled?DAVIS It’s not any different, in terms of any other character that I might play who does nefarious things. These characters have done particularly egregious acts. But whether I extend a little bit of grace or a lot of grace or no grace at all, my job is simply to portray what this character was thinking, what they were after, why they do what they do. So I don’t know if I would necessarily put it in those terms, that I’m extending my humanity, because it can sound like I’m forgiving them on some level. As an actor, I simply need to get inside of them.GUINAN For myself, it’s opened the question of “what about the unforgivable in your own life?” That’s a question I really have not answered for myself. Do you let yourself off the hook? And how do you do that?FREEMAN This is one of the best roles I’ve ever done. Because it is dangerous. And because it is scary. And incendiary. Who wants to do something that’s forgettable and nice? More

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      ‘Corsicana’ Review: Four Lost Hearts in the Heart of Texas

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      In a strange and beautiful new play by Will Arbery, finding happiness is a process of failing upward.The difference between comedy and tragedy is often just a matter of timing. Bring the curtain down early enough and even “Macbeth” can have a happy ending; in the back story of a play full of laughs, you’ll often find a bucket of tears.Will Arbery’s “Corsicana,” which opened on Wednesday at Playwrights Horizons, is that second kind of play; if its story began any earlier than it does, it would be an emotional blood bath. Instead, without ignoring the bone-deep sadness of characters confused and stymied by loss, it lets us watch them climb their way out of it — heading toward joy and sharing some in the process.The immediate cause of the sadness for Christopher (Will Dagger) and Ginny (Jamie Brewer) is the death of their mother several months before the action. Though they have different fathers, both of whom have long since skedaddled, the half-siblings have similar reactions, within the framework of their evident differences.Christopher, 33, is a wannabe filmmaker who used to teach at a college near Dallas. He has now retreated to the melancholy comfort of his mother’s home, in Corsicana, an hour south. He’s done so, supposedly, to care for Ginny, 34, who has Down syndrome but doesn’t want to be babied. She’s a “grown woman,” as she is constantly forced to remind everyone. Yet she, too, has retreated: No longer volunteering at a nursing home, she instead spends most of her time watching Disney videos and listening to girl-power pop.“I can’t find my heart,” she tells Christopher, who likewise seems to have misplaced his. But if he is clueless about his own suffering, despite the torrents of words pouring out of him, he loves his sister too much not to act. He tries to help her re-engage with the world.How he does so, and how she responds, form the core of a play that is, paradoxically, almost too specific to describe. Weird, perhaps: Some of the characters are ghosts; there are longish passages of improvised song. Dense, certainly: It has the fuzzy texture of lived experience rather than the silkiness of honed argument. Quiet, mostly: The characters — also including a family friend named Justice (Deirdre O’Connell) and a hermitlike artist named Lot (Harold Surratt) — are the opposite of aggressive. In the face of their own deepest hopes, they are passive to a fault.Justice (Deirdre O’Connell) with Ginny, who has uncanny emotional intelligence — something her brother completely lacks. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those who loved the slashing debate and emotional frenzy of Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” which ran at Playwrights in 2019 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, “Corsicana” will thus seem like an about-face. Directed with delicacy and patience by Sam Gold, it steers away from political discourse. Though Justice is writing a treatise on capital, we never hear a word of it; when ideology is discussed it sounds like sharing recipes.The play is nevertheless political, inseparably from its plot. Justice believes that Ginny, who likes to sing, might find something in common with Lot, who aside from making sculpture from trash writes songs from his spontaneous thoughts. But when Christopher approaches him to broker a deal that falls somewhere between babysitting and musical mentorship, it does not go well. He finds a man whose exclusion from society, partly self-imposed and partly not, have made him as forbidding as his (unseen) artworks, which Ginny, when she visits, calls monsters.“Corsicana” sometimes veers too close to the idea that the woman with Down syndrome and the emotionally troubled artist are magic touchstones, with deeper wisdom than others and purer ideals. Ginny has uncanny emotional intelligence, something her brother completely lacks. And unlike Justice, who has ulterior motives, Lot neither shows his work nor seeks to sell it: “Anything I make,” he says, “is a one-way street to God.”But before such moments can cloy, Arbery usefully complicates his case. When crossed, Ginny flounces and says inappropriate things; when upset, Lot goes rigid and sputters and spits. That Ginny very much wants a boyfriend with whom to experience adult pleasure is seen as natural and even wholesome but not without complications. Her erratic path toward happiness, sometimes causing collateral damage, looks a lot like Justice’s. And Christopher’s difficulty integrating a traumatic past into a productive present looks a lot like Lot’s.With so much going on, you can’t say that “Corsicana” — named not for a person or an idea, but a town — has a point. Instead, insofar as it’s a fully imagined world, it has hundreds. (Arbery calls it “an accumulation.”) Watching it, I felt it was about who gets to make art, and for whom. Reading it, I felt it was about how becoming “grown” is, for anyone, a lifelong process of failing upward. Thinking back on it, I feel it was about the way the world tucks beauty inside envelopes of sorrow, and vice versa.And yet I discerned, at an almost cellular level, a particular intention: to show that we all have an equal claim on happiness, if only we know how to stake it. To the extent that the play is autobiographical — Arbery’s sister Julia has Down syndrome — this is no doubt an expression of love. But it is also an effect of Gold’s direction, which feels communal, often placing actors in corners of scenes they aren’t otherwise part of. Even the set, by Laura Jellinek and Cate McCrea, cooperates: two identical living rooms coexisting under one roof.Though I was very moved by all of this, I understand why some theatergoers left at intermission the evening I saw it. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, the play can sometimes seem indulgent; parts of the story feel undigested and perhaps indigestible.Still, Gold and the actors have evidently made sense of it all, which was good enough for me. Brewer, who, like her character, has Down syndrome, is touching and hilarious in a fully realized performance. Surratt, neither caricaturing nor condescending to Lot, is astonishing. And even when Arbery gives Christopher an immensely long aria of self-discovery, and Justice what amounts to a mad scene (if love is madness), Dagger and O’Connell, who is fresh off a Tony Award for “Dana H.,” make it seem like falling off a building headfirst.Or really, heartfirst. Arbery seems to have written “Corsicana” with his internal censors set to their lowest setting, as if he were hoping to make music the way his characters do: for themselves and, as Ginny puts it, “with the door closed.” The tune may be strange and leggy and long, and you have no idea whether it’s funny or sad, but it feels like happiness to overhear it.CorsicanaThrough July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Wish You Were Here’ Review: The Saga of Female Friendship

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      Sanaz Toossi’s new play follows a group of five women in Iran as they and their friendships change against the backdrop of marriages and revolution.The five Iranian women of “Wish You Were Here,” which opened on Tuesday night at Playwrights Horizons, joke about sex and their bodies. They file one another’s toenails and lick their cheeks with a disarming degree of comfort. And they show off their psychic connections by playing rounds of “What am I thinking?”Yet these friends can also be vicious, mocking one another with the targeted hits of a loved one who knows where to stick the knife.The playwright Sanaz Toossi drops in on this group in 10 scenes — one for almost every year from 1978 to 1991, a period encompassing the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the country’s steps toward economic stability. Pushing that upheaval somewhat awkwardly to the background, Toossi focuses instead on the women and how their relationships to one another — and to themselves — change with marriages, deaths and sudden departures. Their friendship is its own saga of constantly fluctuating degrees of intimacy and friction.We meet the women at around 20 years old, all preparing for a wedding in a living room in Karaj, Iran: Salme (Roxanna Hope Radja) is the bride, wearing a snowy-white dune of lace and tulle, “big in a way that sort of feels humiliating,” according to the neurotic Shideh (Artemis Pebdani). Rana (Nazanin Nour), a rambunctious firecracker still dressed in her red silk pajamas, promises never to get married or have kids. Same goes for the churlish, eye-rolling Nazanin (Marjan Neshat), who’s aiming for an engineering degree. Zari (Nikki Massoud), carelessly reposed over a very 1970s floral couch, gives the impression of a naïve youth. These women taunt and prod one another, their insecurities and fears often colliding like bumper cars at a carnival.Though the pure Salme, who faithfully prays for what she believes is the best for her friends — a husband and children for Nazanin, admission into an American medical school for Shideh — seems like she’ll be our main protagonist in the beginning, that’s quickly shown to not be the case. Nazanin becomes the anchor of every scene, even as the other women enter and exit, though, structurally, the play hadn’t previously indicated that would be the case.Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s direction tries to bring out the color of these women’s personalities but collides with the limits of the script, which, squeezing 13 years into a 100-minute run, struggles to focus its lens and communicate the subtle dynamics among the friends. The characters lack context, beyond the very occasional mention of a fiancé or child, and so their actions — which they always make outside of the isolation of this one living room — lack stakes. The sequence of marriages and the not-so-distant sirens of war turn up as transparent markers of progress, but they never believably penetrate the tiny bubble of time and space where these characters live.Arnulfo Maldonado opts for a kitschy set of a living room with patterned rugs, pink and beige walls and ornate Iranian furniture, though the stage remains oddly static even as the production moves through different living rooms across 13 years of different fashions, as beautifully captured in Sarah Laux’s costume design, from the pastry-pouf wedding dress and flirty bridesmaids dresses of the ’70s to a denim maxi skirt in the ’80s. Reza Behjat’s lighting design gracefully captures the sunrises and sunsets of the passing years.Still, each of the actresses gives an expert performance. Pebdani, who has played one of my favorite recurring characters on the comedy series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” is just as funny here as Shideh, though she has minimal scenes and little to work with. Nour and Radja bring appropriate exuberance and softness, respectively, to their characters, and in Zari, Massoud presents an arc from guilelessness to self-awareness and maturity.Reuniting for Nazanin’s wedding, from left: Shideh (Pebdani), Salme (Radja) and Neshat (Nazanin). Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNeshat, who provided profoundly expansive performances in another recent Playwrights production, “Selling Kabul,” and as the complexly drawn Toefl teacher in “English,” continues her streak of rich, marrow-deep character portrayals. With each of her characters, Nazarin included, Neshat gradually sheds their armors of self-possession and strength, their reserve and resolve, to reveal how fragile, scared and insecure they truly are. In other words, Neshat transforms empathy into a dramatic act we witness, in real time, on the stage.With her last produced work, the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies’ scintillating production of “English” from February, Toossi accomplished wonders with her language; she offered an examination of national identity, othering and the construction of a private and public self all within the subtle discussions of phonetics, pronunciation and syntax in an English language class in Iran. There are glimmers of that work here, too, as in the exquisite poetry of the final scene. (“She will never know how fast this earth can spin underneath you,” one character, now an American expat, swears in a monologue about her future daughter. “How one day you can have a home, and the next, as you are hurtling through the air, you will have to vanquish home.”)Even as “Wish You Were Here” circles around themes of the female body and national politics, aiming to land somewhere with a statement, it constantly backs away. In a playwright note, Toossi asks: “Doesn’t every play exist within a set of politics? Must a play be political if the events of the play are affected by the politics of the play’s setting? Isn’t every play political? I can’t decide.” Unfortunately, despite the successes of the production, the playwright’s indecision creeps through.It’s exciting to see a portrayal of the complexity of female friendships, including both the niceties and the petty rivalries alike. It’s something I’ve been considering a lot lately in conversations with my female friends — how we have shaped and been shaped by one another, how we’ve grown into or outgrown the roles we’ve been assigned in each other’s lives. There’s so much to appreciate and even more to explore here, within the confidences of rowdy, supportive, spiteful women; I just wish we’d have witnessed it onstage.Wish You Were HereThrough May 29 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Downstate’ and ‘Catch as Catch Can’ in Playwrights Horizons New Season

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      The company has announced five works for its 2022-23 lineup, which will include Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” directed by Tina Satter.“Downstate,” a Bruce Norris play that The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, has called a “squirmy moral-thrill-ride,” will make its New York premiere in October as part of Playwrights Horizons’s new season, the company announced on Monday.As Adam Greenfield, the artistic director for Playwrights Horizons, put it: “If theater is here to catch us off guard, to shake our foundations, to make us rethink our values and realize the ways in which we’re hypocrites,” Norris can really point that all out.“I sometimes think he’s like the Molière of our time,” Greenfield said in a recent Zoom interview.The 2022-23 season will be Greenfield’s first full, in-person season since assuming the role of artistic director in 2020. And the five-show lineup, which features coproductions with Page 73 Productions, MCC Theater and WP Theater, is packed with themes emerging from the pandemic lockdown, including a variety of perspectives on “normalcy.”The lineup includes Mia Chung’s “Catch as Catch Can,” a drama in which two white, working-class New England families examine what Greenfield called “the slipperiness of identity and the way identity can fall apart or collapse,” and the debut of Agnes Borinsky’s “The Trees,” a parable of two siblings who fall asleep in the park and wake up literally rooted to the landscape.“Catch as Catch Can,” which, in 2018, The Times called a “tender horror story,” returns in October. This time, it is being staged with an all Asian cast playing the Irish and Italian working class — with actors also playing double roles of father and daughter, mothers and sons.“The Trees,” which will premiere in February 2023, is special to Greenfield. He knew this Borinsky play was the first work he wanted to program when he became artistic director.“She sees the world sweetly despite seeing all of the reasons not to,” he said. The play, which, Greenfield described as involving two people who turn into trees and the community that forms around them, will be co-produced with the incubator theater company Page 73 Productions (the company’s latest work was the spooky political drama, “Man Cave”).The earthy Off Broadway production will have plenty of shine from Broadway visionaries. “The Trees” will be directed by Tina Satter, whose fall 2021 Broadway docudrama “Is This a Room” received critical acclaim. And the last time Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 teamed up, it was to debut “A Strange Loop,” which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for drama and opens on April 26 for its own Broadway run.The other shows, slated to debut in March 2023, are the world premiere of Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” (a coproduction with WP Theater), described by Greenfield as a surprise-filled “Swiss Army knife of a play” with “a delicious sense of goofy comedy” centered on three siblings making sense of unreliable parents.Also in March is John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain” (co-produced with MCC Theater), a candid drama that follows siblings (also a set of three) struggling to find language for closure and grief — in outer space. It’s a science fiction version of the American family play that, Greenfield said, “explodes open.” More

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      ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

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      The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More

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      Review: In ‘Tambo & Bones,’ a Minstrel’s Guide to Making Money

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      Dave Harris’s hip-hop triptych exploring racism and capitalism is meant to be a biting satire, but it has little force behind it.The minstrel show — that racist brand of theater that perpetuated stereotypes about Black people — was all the rage in the 1800s and hung around until the rise of the civil rights movement put the genre in its grave. And yet, I bet that even today, most Black Americans have witnessed or participated in a minstrel show of some sort — a performance of Blackness that simplifies and debases it.If that performance makes a profit — well, that’s capitalism for you, right? Even a young playwright with a new Off Broadway production may fall into that trap — and he knows it.This scourge of capitalism — as the engine of slavery, as a shaper of Black art and identity — is what the two characters in “Tambo & Bones” must grapple with. The play, which opened at Playwrights Horizons on Monday in a coproduction with the Center Theater Group, aims to be a sharp satire about the intersection of race and performance, especially when money is in the picture — as it always is in our country of wealth and opportunity.Written by the poet and playwright Dave Harris, “Tambo & Bones” begins by introducing us to two minstrel characters, Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy). Dressed in tattered period attire, they mill around in an artificial pastoral scene, alongside fake trees and grass designed like paper cutouts from a children’s storybook. Tambo just wants to nap under his cardboard tree, and Bones is doing all he can to hustle up some quarters. (After all, their pipeline to success is “quarters to dollars to dreams.”)The setup of two friends waiting around for something to happen, discussing what they most crave and value, recalls the story of two old goats who famously waited for some guy named Godot — or, more recently, the play “Pass Over.” Though here it lacks the lyrical dexterity and layered meanings of either.In the lengthy second part of the show, which is described as a “hip-hop triptych,” we hear the promised music in the form of a concert, though songs are limited to this middle section. Tambo and Bones, dripping in diamonds and gold chains, come out on a platform surrounded by the hard lights and scaffolding of a stadium; they’re now contemporary rappers who trade lyrics, Tambo more Nas or Chance the Rapper to Bones’s 50 Cent. Their different rap styles, however, aren’t the only ways the two are at odds: Bones wants to game the system to achieve the same amount of wealth as his white peers, while Tambo thinks the system is broken and must be brought down completely.I won’t spoil the third part, but it jumps to the future, in a changed society where the story of Tambo and Bones has become a vital part of history.In the play’s second part, Fauntleroy, left, and Davis assume the roles of rappers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarris’s concept is promising. It brings to mind plays like “Underground Railroad Game,” “3/Fifths” and “Black History Museum,” which used music, games and immersive art installations to deliver biting satire on subjects like minstrelsy and the effects of institutional racism. But “Tambo & Bones” drops its two characters — actually, more like archetypes (the Black activist, the Black businessman) — into the supposedly satirical world of the play and shuffles them around with little development of the central themes and progression of the main ideas.The director, Taylor Reynolds, doesn’t help clarify or illuminate Harris’s shallow script, defaulting to only one mode: loud and emphatic. And the transitions between sections do little to connect the parts in service of a grand thesis. A satire and a concert and an off-road turn into speculative fiction: “Tambo & Bones” is a lot of things, but nuanced is not one of them.Harris tries to have it both ways when it comes to his play’s stance, critiquing how some creators, producers and audiences capitalize on Black trauma, while self-consciously acknowledging that he, too, is part of that practice. (In an essay in the program, Harris writes about how performances of trauma are often rewarded in the world of poetry slams.) In one scene in particular, he has his characters explicitly call him out: As if by addressing the issue head on, he can absolve himself of it.At the very least, the costumes (by Dominique Fawn Hill) and lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin) have a clear execution and purpose, as the show shifts from the affected sunniness of the minstrel setting to the aggressive reds and roving spotlights of the concert. The scenic design, by Stephanie Osin Cohen, however, feels more functional than finessed; the bucolic setting of the first part is quickly swapped for the Madison Square Garden-style arena, and unsightly orange panels are rolled out and lined up in a row to form a makeshift wall for the final part.And even though the 90-minute show may not always be entertaining for the audience, at least the actors have fun. Davis keeps up with the sudden turns of the production but is stuck with an unremarkable character. Fauntleroy, as the more interesting Bones, brings an infectious sense of play to the production; his blithe performance in fact feels unmatched by the material, which even Fauntleroy’s enthusiasm can’t elevate.“Tambo & Bones” ends abruptly, with no bows. It’s an attempted mic drop but with no force behind it, an ineffectual grab not for the quarters or dollars that Bones seeks but for the greatest currency of any stage, minstrel or otherwise: an audience’s attention.Tambo & BonesThrough Feb. 27 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More