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      ‘Told It Like It Was’: Ntozake Shange’s Tales of Black Womanhood

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      As ‘For Colored Girls’ returns to the New York stage, we look at how the show found its way from a Bay Area bar to Broadway in 1976.Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” defied Broadway conventions when it opened at the Booth Theater on Sept. 15, 1976. An experimental “choreopoem” focusing on the lives of seven women of color, who are each named after colors of the rainbow, was revelatory and not something you might expect to find on a mainstream Broadway stage.“At the time, Black actresses were still coming out of the stereotype framework of people looking at us and judging us,” Trezana Beverley, who won a Tony for her portrayal of Lady in Red, said during a recent Zoom interview. “Zake broke all those rules and we broke them with her. We were indeed the colors of the rainbow — that was what was so exciting about it.”Monologues detailing loss, betrayal, violence and love are told poetically and combined with movement and music. Through a gentle touch, a soft embrace or an impromptu dance, the women comfort one another as a supportive collective.“Ntozake had an extraordinary way of blending prose with poetry — the rhythms of her words and, of course, the incredible imagination, that she had in her storytelling,” Beverley said.The show ran on Broadway for nearly two years, closing in July 1978 after a total of 742 performances (“Godspell,” which had opened in June 1976, only made it to 527). It became an instant classic and continues to inspire new generations of playwrights, including Aleshea Harris and Dominique Morisseau.To fully appreciate Shange’s work, and what it means to have it return to Broadway this spring (in a production directed by the dancer and choreographer Camille A. Brown), it helps to explore the historical and cultural contexts that led to its original Broadway production in 1976.From Poems to a PlayShange began developing “For Colored Girls” in 1974 while living in the Bay Area, and performed it with the dancer Paula Moss at a bar called the Bacchanal.“Whenever she read her poems, like at the Nuyorican Cafe years ago, she always had musical accompaniment,” Beverley recalled. “She always had a saxophonist, a flutist or a cellist, and she moved with her poems. She has a line in her poem, she says ‘music was like smack to me,’ and you knew it.”She had found inspiration in the Black Women Writers’ Renaissance, which began to unfold around the time she graduated from Barnard College. In works like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Alice Walker’s “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” both published in 1970, the writers explored the specific ways Black women contend with racial and gendered violence.And Shange had her own inner struggles. Her college journals reveal that she “tried to commit suicide,” said Kim F. Hall, the Lucyle Hook professor of English and a professor of Africana Studies at Barnard. “Go back to some of the early interviews. She talks about it very forthrightly,” she said, adding that the title of the play is not “an abstraction.”All of this fed her poetry, and after spending several years on the West Coast for graduate school, she returned to New York and began to turn her poems into a play. And that’s when Ifa Bayeza, Shange’s sister, introduced her to the director Oz Scott.“I directed right from the beginning,” Scott, 72, said. “We did it at DeMonte’s, the bar on the Lower East Side where we started it, and then we went to Henry Street [home of the New Federal Theater], then we went to the Public, and then we went to Broadway.”Opening at the New Federal TheaterBefore the show could move to Midtown from downtown, producers had to invest in an experimental new work. It’s not like there were many plays by Black women, with an all-Black female ensemble, having sustained runs on Broadway.Ntozake Shange in 1977 in a production of “Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon,” a play that she wrote with Jessica Hagedorn and Thulani Nkabinde.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesThat’s when Woodie King Jr., founder of the New Federal Theater, came to see “For Colored Girls” at a bar. He was immediately drawn to the work. And he was especially drawn to the poem “Sorry,” Scott recalled. (“Sorry” details myriad excuses that women have heard from lovers to justify mistreatment.)“I gave it to Laurie Carlos [one of the show’s original cast members] the night before,” Scott explained. “I said, ‘I need this poem in this place. Here’s the poem, memorize it for tomorrow.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Oz, are you crazy? I can’t.’”“I said, ‘Laurie, don’t worry. Just memorize it,’” Scott recalled. “And so, we got to that spot, and she just went into it, and Woodie King was sitting there, and she just looked at Woodie, and she gave the whole poem to Woodie, and she was letter perfect.”It was as if King were the “sorry” lover, sitting there and absorbing the women’s stories. “What propelled me to bring it to the New Federal Theater,” King, now 84, recalled, was that the “women in it were very beautiful and very Afrocentric.”The cast continued to rehearse and eventually performed for Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater.“I’d been working for Joe Papp,” Scott said. “I was stage managing ‘The Sun Always Shines for the Cool,’ Miguel Piñero’s play, and around seven o’clock when we’d finished rehearsal, I just scooted everybody out and would sneak the colored girls into the Public Theater and we would rehearse there. Somebody told me that Joe knew. And I said, ‘Joe doesn’t know.’ Joe knew.”They showed Papp the work in a little space that Papp had turned into a movie theater, Scott said. Gail, Papp’s wife, was there and she cried. “She said, ‘You got to do this, Joe,’” Scott said. “And so, Joe said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it in this little 40 to 50 seat theater.’”“I said, ‘You give me a theater, I’ll fill the space.’ So, Joe teamed up with Woodie, and we did it at Henry Street,” Scott said.In the introduction to the 2010 published version of “For Colored Girls,” Shange described opening night at Henry Street as being “divine” with “supplicants flocking from everywhere.”Beverley noted that “At the New Federal Theater, it was like we were at church. Sisters were falling out in the aisle, they were so energized and charged.”After the shows, Beverley said: “We would see a sister in the shadows, and she would follow us down the street, and then she would say, ‘Can I say, can I say something to you?’ And they would say thank you. Thank you for telling my story.”“You see,” she continued, “that’s one of the great impacts that the show had because it told the Black woman’s story. She told it like it was.”Opening Night at the PublicWith the move from Henry Street to the Public, the audience shifted from predominately Black to predominately white, and that continued to be the case when the production moved to the Booth Theater. Even with the growing size of the theaters, the work maintained its intimacy through its poetry, dance and music.On June 2, 1976, opening night at the Public’s Anspacher Theater, the show was sold out. “Joe Papp said, ‘I want you to invite all your friends,’” Scott recalled. “And I said, ‘Joe, the play is sold out.’”“He said, ‘Oz, tell your cast to invite all their friends,’” Scott said. “So, all our friends were out in the lobby of the Anspacher. And when the place was full. Joe said, ‘OK, bring all your friends, have them sit on the stairs.’” King was one of many to fill the stairs.“They sat in the front on the stage. There was no room. And I said, ‘Joe, what about the fire marshal.’ He said, ‘Oz, the play is an hour and 15 minutes. By the time the fire marshal gets here, the play will be over.’”“It was an absolute brilliant move,” Scott added, “because the energy in that room — you had the critics, they were all locked into that room, everybody was locked into that room. It was a magnetic night.”In its move to Broadway, the cast was expanded to include understudies. “I was brought in to audition to replace Zake,” Seret Scott, 72, an original member of the Broadway cast, said in a telephone interview. (Shange also performed in the play, as the Lady in Orange.)From the opening night on Broadway, the cast knew they had a hit. “You could hear ‘Oh!’ or ‘Mmm’ or somebody who would suddenly weep because it was too close,” Seret Scott said. “You could hear the comments. So that is how we knew we were embraced.”The Show’s LegacyPhysical movement drives “the choreopoem.” Instead of completing the play, Shange’s work is meant to unfold through dance and changes to the poems. Donald Sutton, the Shange estate’s literary trustee, said, “Ntozake saw herself as a dancer who supported herself as a professional writer.”He continued, “The chorepoem is driven by the poetry, but the poetry is danced and the poetry is accompanied in sound and the music. Putting all three of those elements together is very difficult.”For the Broadway revival, he added, “Camille’s background as a choreographer and her experience in stage directing gives her the opportunity to realize the choreopoem.”For the 2022 production, which begins previews April 1 and opens April 20, Brown will make her Broadway directorial debut; she is also choreographing the show. (Brown previously choreographed the Public’s 2019 revival of “For Colored Girls,” which was directed by Leah C. Gardiner.)The show “provides me the space to really dive into what I do which is choreography, but also storytelling of the body,” Brown said in a telephone interview. In executing her dual role, Brown will be drawing from her own work, specifically “Black Girl: Linguistic Play” and “Ink,” to find a physical language for Black girls and women to express their stories. “One of the lines in the work says, ‘sing a Black girl’s song,’ and that’s what it’s about,” Brown said. “What is the song for each of us — that anthem, that macro anthem that we all respond to but individually that speaks to us personally?”Although Brown said she is committed to providing a healing space for women of color, she said she plans to build on that legacy as well. “I think it is easy for you to get trapped into a certain way that this show needs to be done,” Brown said. “We need to hit these markers. They need to say it this way, we need to make sure this happens. I had to get out of that. I was talking to a friend and she said, ‘This is an offering.’ It’s going to be my offering.” More

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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ Casts a Long Look at Hate

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      Lloyd Suh’s play is a riff on the arrival of the real Afong Moy, possibly the first woman from China in the United States, and a lens on contemporary racism.Afong Moy is known as “The Chinese Lady,” but really she is just a girl — 14 when she arrives alone in New York in 1834, brought by a pair of merchant brothers who struck a deal with her father in China to put her in a museum for two years, on display.Possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, she is marketed as a curiosity. Crowds pay to ogle her as she brews tea, eats with chopsticks and walks around the room on her bound feet. It’s a performance of cultural identity, and she is happy to enact it — enthusiastic, even, at the start. Cheerfully naïve, unsuspecting of the world’s cruelty, she views herself as an educator, fostering understanding.“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says to her gawkers, who are also us: the audience at the Public Theater, watching Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” a moving and often sharply funny riff on the story of the real Afong Moy, traversing 188 years of American ugliness and exoticization in 90 swift, heightened minutes. A two-hander, it hopes with all its battered heart that we will, by the end, see Afong in her full humanity, and through her see this nation with clearer eyes. But it is not optimistic.“The Chinese Lady” was first staged in New York in 2018, when Ralph B. Peña directed a profoundly affecting, smaller-scale production for his Ma-Yi Theater Company at Theater Row, on 42nd Street. That was of course before the pandemic — before an American president scapegoated an entire population by calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and before physical attacks on people of Asian descent became an ever-present threat in New York and across the country.Peña’s current Barrington Stage Company-Ma Yi production, presented by Ma-Yi and the Public, retains the same gorgeous cast, with Shannon Tyo as Afong and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung, her cynical, deadpan interpreter. (Cindy Im and Jon Norman Schneider play the roles at some performances.) On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s gilt-framed set — simpler and more capacious than the one she designed for Theater Row — the show is more anguished, more mournful, more urgent than before, and sometimes that makes it heavy-handed.History is told through the eyes of Tyo’s character, Afong Moy, who arrives in the United States to be on display at a museum.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTyo and Isaac’s chemistry, though, has only deepened. In their bickering, their loneliness, their not-quite-solidarity, they remain entirely winning and occasionally devastating. (From here, proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the show.)When they are cut loose from each other, after decades of symbiosis — and years at a P.T. Barnum museum — there is no more forlorn sight than Atung alone, a tiny cog in Barnum’s exploitative machine.Long gone by then are the glamorous days when Afong toured to far-flung American cities and met a president — “your emperor, Andrew Jackson,” she calls him, to us. (If that’s an endearing misunderstanding of his title, it’s also a pretty accurate read on his expansionism.) In a revolting re-enactment, we watch him touch her foot: a cowboy barbarian looking down on her even as he sexualizes her.Afong, for all her childlike naïveté when she first arrived, has always been hungry for knowledge of the United States. She speaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Manifest Destiny; the Chinese men building the railroad out West; the people who were already living on these lands in 1492. She finds the country fascinating, and its self-mythologizing wildly overblown.It is not the place where she thought she would spend her life; she believed she would return to her family, not make a home in a place where she is not sure she belongs. When she realizes she will have to do that utterly on her own — breaking out of the box where American culture wants to keep her, under its hostile gaze — she becomes a roiling force of indignation and self-determination.That happens in the play’s penultimate scene, and Tyo absolutely kills it. So it’s unfortunate that the final scene undermines her with ill-conceived design.As Afong recounts horrific 19th-century acts of brutality against Chinese Americans, projections (by Shawn Duan) that had been subtle and mostly static throughout the show start flashing historical headlines and illustrations, then news coverage of contemporary anti-Asian attacks.The impulse is understandable — to make utterly clear that Chinese Americans, long the targets of racist violence, are still menaced as outsiders in their own country. But the intimate power of Suh’s text and Tyo’s performance would have made that connection potently on their own.The production’s final, upstaging image is a wall of disembodied eyes: a digital crowd, creepy and cold. It’s meant, presumably, to expand our sympathy into the wider world. But whatever moral reckoning the play sets in motion occurs between Afong — living, breathing avatar of generations — and the audience. Yet the lights go dark on her.We do, by the end of the play, fully see Afong Moy. In that last moment, let us look.The Chinese LadyThrough April 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Out of Time’ Review: Once Sidelined, Now Taking Center Stage

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      Five Asian American actors, all over 60, deliver monologues that touch on grief and heritage, on adult children and cultural cancellation.She is absolutely elegant, and completely isolated — a documentarian, microphone clipped to her chest, talking to an unseen camera about the last time she hugged someone.This will be the final film in the long career of this quietly charismatic woman, and the first in which she steps into the frame to center the narrative on herself. Although her real subject, she says, is someone near to her, now lost.“My Documentary,” written by Anna Ouyang Moench and performed by Page Leong, is the captivating opener to “Out of Time,” a collaboration between the National Asian American Theater Company and the Public Theater that gathers five new solo shorts by Asian American playwrights into a single program.The five performers are Asian American actors, all over 60, deep into careers in which their odds of working have been far tougher than for their white contemporaries. In “Out of Time,” they step into the frame — figuratively speaking, mostly — to tell wide-ranging stories that touch on grief and heritage and the pandemic, on adult children and cultural cancellation, on making art and pulling off an optical illusion.Not all of the art-making succeeds in Les Waters’s uneven production at the Public, but every actor is one you’ll want to see again, and that is a large part of the point. So is the potent sense of worldviews and experiences that the American stage has generally ignored.“My Documentary” is a beautiful piece of writing. A life story that’s a love story, too, it has a bruised awareness that “misunderstanding something very important as you’re living it” is a human tendency. In Leong’s hands, the nameless documentarian is compelling in a lean-forward way: Funny, sharp and warm, she has a whole cogent argument against hugging at work, and remembers her own sons in their earliest years as “agents of chaos” in her life. Connection and solace are what she’s seeking with her film. They’re also what the monologue brings.A series of long, sheer fabric curtains (by the design collective Dots) form most of the set for “Out of Time,” and when we first glimpse Mia Katigbak in Mia Chung’s play “Ball in the Air,” it is through them as she crosses upstage, intently playing with a paddle ball. You know the kind: wooden paddle, rubber ball attached by a string.It’s an intriguing start, and Katigbak — a founder of the National Asian American Theater Company and a dependably excellent mainstay of downtown theater — is a fine paddle ball player, it turns out. But the monologue is all confusion, written in short chunks that seem to come from three different strands of narrative that aren’t so much braided together as stacked on top of one another: one about an election, one about a friendship gone wrong, another about a car ride, if I’ve parsed them right. They might make perfect sense intercut in a film. Here they blend together muddily.Rita Wolf, behind a curtain and onscreen, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s monologue, “Black Market Caviar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe sole moments of clarity concern the optical illusion: a ball that Katigbak seems to make disappear in midair. (Steve Cuiffo, New York theater’s go-to magic guy, is listed in the program as a consultant.) Later, speaking directly to the audience, she tells us how it works. You’ll come away with that knowledge, anyway.The program’s rough patch continues with the next play, Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Black Market Caviar,” a gorgeously layered monologue foiled by Waters’s staging. Performed by Rita Wolf, it is a message of love and comfort spoken by a woman named Carla, 30 years in the future, to her younger self. In the script, Backhaus says that Carla appears in “a portal from somewhere that opens before you on December 31st, 2019.”Maybe it was the urge to mix things up that enticed Waters to place Wolf at such a chilly distance from the audience, veiled behind a curtain, seated in profile and talking to a video camera. We see her in close-up on a screen downstage, her image frustratingly out of sync with the sound of her voice, which travels faster. But is watching someone on video what we’ve come to the theater for?The screen prevents the vital communion between actor and audience, making it harder to hear Backhaus’s play — about a genetic predisposition toward cancer passed down from one generation of women to the next in Carla’s family, and about undoing the trauma that came from keeping that scary fact a secret.“Don’t succumb to the fear,” Carla counsels, surely knowing that the mere fact of her being alive so far in the future is heartening.“Be afraid,” she says, “and live your life.”The program bounces back with Naomi Iizuka’s “Japanese Folk Song,” starring Glenn Kubota as a silver-haired retired banker named Taki, speaking to his grown daughter about his life — and his loathing of jazz, including the Thelonious Monk song that gives Iizuka’s monologue its name.The script carries a poignant dedication, “to Takehisa Iizuka (1934-2020),” and the playwright has said that Taki is strongly influenced by her father. The character tells the audience, in a quick prologue to the play, that he is not the real Taki but rather a stand-in who looks like him. This, then, is theater as a tender, comic, aching act of remembrance.Leonie, the famous septuagenarian novelist in Sam Chanse’s “Disturbance Specialist,” the final monologue, is very much not retired, though a younger generation who deems her tweets problematic is trying to make her go away. In response, Leonie has shown up defiantly at her alma mater to give a speech.Performed by Natsuko Ohama, it’s a thoughtful play, discursive and entertaining, with sympathy for a lifelong artist-activist who worked hard to earn a place at a table where white men were so much more freely welcomed, and who abruptly finds that place threatened. Yet Leonie, for all her indignation, recognizes that her detractors may have a point.She was young and furious once, too. And she knows that, even at her age, she must adapt to thrive.Out of TimeThrough March 13 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More

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      5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

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      “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” More

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      Danai Gurira Will Star as Richard III at Shakespeare in the Park

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      The actress, known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” will headline a return to semi-normal for the annual festival, which will also present “As You Like It.”The Public Theater, anticipating a semi-normal summer this year, is planning two full-scale productions for Free Shakespeare in the Park, including a run of “Richard III” starring Danai Gurira in the title role.The annual festival, ordinarily a highlight of summer in New York, took place via radio in 2020 (the play was “Richard II”), and then last year featured a single, small-cast show before a reduced-capacity audience (it was called “Merry Wives” — even the title was abbreviated) as the theater tried to adapt to shifting safety protocols necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.Both pivots won praise, but this summer the Public is ready to go big again, with a two-show season and full-capacity audiences. “Richard III” will feature a cast of about two dozen, and it will be followed by a reprise of the Public’s 2017 production of “As You Like It,” which, by featuring New Yorkers from all five boroughs alongside professional actors, will have a cast of several hundred.“Last summer was a lifesaver, and this summer is going to be a huge shot of energy,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s ebullient artistic director, pledged in an interview. “We are planning to have a full summer and to produce in as large and vibrant a scale as we ever have.”Of course, the pandemic’s not over, and there will be rules. At the moment, the Public is still planning to require patrons to show proof of vaccination, including a booster shot for those who are eligible, and to require mask wearing by patrons. Also, Eustis said the goal will be to keep both productions short enough that they can be performed without an intermission, which means some serious trimming for “Richard III,” originally one of Shakespeare’s longest plays.The production of “Richard III” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), who is no stranger to trimming — his halved production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is now running at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater downtown.Eustis said that he and O’Hara chose “Richard III” because it has not been seen at Shakespeare in the Park for many years, and because it felt relevant.“Let’s just say that ‘Richard III’ is the artistic work that for the first time really examined a political figure who utterly committed to the big lie — whose entire career is based on telling blatant falsehoods and somehow getting away with it,” Eustis said. “The idea that showmanship, devoid of content, has become a powerful political force makes it very germane for this moment.”Gurira, Eustis said, was an obvious choice to star: Best known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” she is also an accomplished playwright (“Eclipsed”), a member of the Public’s board and a Shakespeare in the Park alumna (“Measure for Measure”).“She is a great actress who has become super-famous without people necessarily seeing the work she’s greatest at,” Eustis said. “Richard III is a spectacularly theatrical and rich character to play, and somebody with her ferocity and intelligence is going to make a spectacular Richard.”Darius de Haas, center, as a banished duke with a welcoming message in the 2017 Public Works production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what will it mean to have a woman play Richard? “We are not going to re-gender the role, but what that means exactly we won’t know until we’re doing run-throughs,” Eustis said. “I know where we’re starting, but that doesn’t mean we know where we’re ending.”“Richard III” has been staged at Shakespeare in the Park four times previously, most recently in 1990, starring Denzel Washington.This summer’s production of “As You Like It” is a remounting of a production that had a short run in 2017, staged as part of the theater’s Public Works program, which integrates amateur performers from throughout New York City into musical adaptations of Shakespeare plays. In the years since it was created at the Public, this adaptation has been staged 35 times in school, community and professional theaters, including at the Dallas Theater Center, Seattle Repertory Theater, and the National Theater in London. The Public had hoped to give it a full run in 2020, but the pandemic prevented that.This “As You Like It” was adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery; Taub wrote the music and lyrics, and Woolery is the director, with choreography by Sonya Tayeh (“Moulin Rouge!”). As with the earlier version, this summer’s production will feature Darius de Haas, Joel Perez and Taub.The dates for the two productions, as well as the full casts, will be announced later.Shakespeare in the Park has since 1962 been staged at the 1,830-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and last week the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a $77 million renovation of the theater. Construction is expected to begin this fall, after the summer season ends; Eustis said that he is hopeful that construction can be phased and contained to off-season periods, so that Shakespeare in the Park can continue without further interruptions. More

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      Coronavirus Is Surging. Avant-Garde Arts Festivals Are Closing.

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      Under the Radar, Prototype and the Exponential Festival, annual January beacons of experimental work, have canceled their in-person offerings.Last Wednesday, the staff of the Under the Radar festival agreed on a path forward.They would limit the number of performances in the festival. They would not offer food or drink. The Public Theater, the host of this annual celebration of experimental performance, had already mandated that audience members provide the results of a negative PCR or rapid antigen test, in addition to confirming full vaccination status.Everyone concurred that these measures would keep audiences, artists and staff safe amid the current coronavirus surge. The festival would be able to open on Jan. 12, as planned.But Mark Russell, Under the Radar’s artistic director, woke up on Thursday morning and realized he and his colleagues were wrong.“I was sort of in denial, riding down the river of denial for a while,” he said on a video call Friday afternoon. “We tried all the adjustments until the last minute, and put a lot of work into rejiggering again, and then rejiggering again.”With case numbers rising, jiggering only went so far. When he spoke on Friday, the Public had just announced the festival’s cancellation, citing “multiple disruptions related to the rapid community spread of the Omicron variant.” This was just after the Exponential Festival, a multi-venue, multi-arts program based in Brooklyn, had made the decision to go entirely online. And on Monday, Prototype, a festival of avant-garde opera and musical theater, largely spiked its 10th anniversary celebration that was meant to open on Jan. 7. (One Prototype show, “The Hang,” will still open, a bit later in the month than scheduled.)Developed to complement the annual Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference, these three January festivals have grown to fill an essential niche, introducing presenters and civilians to innovative theater and performance — local, national and international. It was announced on Dec. 23 that the conference would go digital, which made the subsequent cancellations less surprising, if no less sad.Kristin Marting and Beth Morrison, two of the founding directors of Prototype, spent Friday morning telling artists that, while the festival would pay out their contracts, they wouldn’t be able to perform.“Purell Piece” was among the shows presented online last year by the Exponential Festival.Cory Fraiman-Lott“It’s been a terrible day,” Morrison said on a conference call that afternoon. “Tears and, of course, understanding. But incredible disappointment.”The cancellations speak to the difficulties of producing live performance in New York during a pandemic, even assuming the most responsible health and safety practices. On Monday the Joyce Theater said it would not be able to go ahead with Ayodele Casel’s tap-dance work “Chasing Magic,” which had been scheduled to open on Tuesday. Broadway is reeling from closures — most recently, Manhattan Theatre Club halted “Skeleton Crew” through Jan. 9 — and the unconventional, small-scale work championed by the trio of January festivals has been even slower to resume in the city.Now audiences will have to wait another year, at least, before this bounty properly returns. And the individuals and ensembles who create experimental work — and are often dependent on the income from touring it — will have to wait that much longer for showcases.When asked about the decision to cancel their live shows, the directors of all three events listed risks to performers and audiences, as well as visa problems and supply chain delays. Theresa Buchheister, the artistic director of the Exponential Festival, cited the cost — in both time and money — of testing performers every day.Russell mentioned the high positivity rate among the Public’s staff. “I might have been in a place of telling someone they can’t go on, because we don’t have a technician to run the lights,” he said.Ironically, the festivals all managed to open last year, albeit digitally. Prototype programmed six shows, three of them world premieres and three new to the United States. Under the Radar offered seven shows, as well as an online symposium and access to works in progress. The Exponential Festival presented a staggering 31 events, “Corona Cam Show” and “Purell Piece” among them. But all of the artistic directors had bet on a return to live performance — a decision made this summer, after vaccines were widely available but before the Delta and Omicron surges.“Maybe we shouldn’t have planned to do so many things in person, but we really thought that it was a choice that could happen,” Buchheister said.Until very recently that risk felt small, especially compared to the potential rewards. “We’re live producers,” Morrison explained on Wednesday, when Prototype was still planning to go ahead. “We’re interested in live theater and live opera and singing in the room and bringing people together and feeling everybody’s heartbeat synced in the audience. That’s why we do what we do and why we love what we do.”Silvana Estrada was to have performed her “Marchita” as part of Prototype.Mariscal/EPA, via ShutterstockSilvana Estrada, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Mexico who had been booked to perform her “Marchita” at Prototype, described the frustrations of working digitally. “That’s something that I talk about a lot with my colleagues,” she said in a phone interview on Thursday. “Singing to a computer makes you feel so miserable. For me, having an opportunity to actually perform live again, it’s a fulfillment that I spent a long time without.”Prototype and Under the Radar had planned entirely live slates, feeling that a hybrid model would divert too many resources — artistic and financial. Only the Exponential Festival had preset an online option, with 15 shows to be presented live and four to be made available on YouTube. But in late December, after Buchheister tested positive, the decision was made to move Exponential online entirely. Seven of the live shows chose to adopt a digital format; eight opted to postpone.Dmitri Barcomi, the creator of “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report,” didn’t seem too upset. “I think an even greater level of intimacy can be achieved through the added privacy of an at-home viewing,” he wrote in an email. Besides, he added, “so much of our generation discovered their queerness online, so it feels like a welcome back party!”But the online format didn’t work for everyone. “This play is meant to be experienced in person,” Marissa Joyce Stamps, the writer and director of “Blue Fire Burns the Hottest,” which had been booked for Exponential, wrote in an email. And Under the Radar and Prototype didn’t feel that their scheduled works could or should pivot at the last minute. Instead they both hope to return next year, perhaps in hybrid form, perhaps going all-in again on live.“This is what we do,” said Marting, the Prototype director. “Because art is meaningful in people’s lives. It’s not for special occasions. It’s for the fabric of our lives.” More