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      Under the Radar Theater Festival Canceled as Omicron Surges

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      Putting off the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental work was the latest sign of the variant’s impact on live performance.As a surge of coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant takes a growing toll on live performance, the Public Theater on Friday announced it would cancel its Under the Radar festival, originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 12.In a statement, the theater cited “multiple disruptions related to the rapid community spread of the Omicron variant,” including effects on staff availability, cancellations by artists and audience members, flight interruptions and visa processing delays.Mark Russell, the festival’s director, said in a video interview that his team had worked on plans to streamline Under the Radar — the Public’s annual showcase for experimental work, and one of several New York festivals that have formed around the Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference — so that it could proceed despite the surge. But on Thursday morning, Russell said, he took stock of the test positivity rate and number of cases in New York, and decided it would be irresponsible to press on.“It was not a time for a festival,” he said. “A festival is a celebration. It’s supposed to be a coming together to celebrate this work, and it was not going to be a celebration.”Although last year’s Under the Radar was completely virtual, that took months of planning, Russell said, so it would not have served this iteration to attempt to go hybrid or digital so late. Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said in the interview that all festival artists and staff will be paid as planned.The lineup for Under the Radar was to have included “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner,” by Jasmine Lee-Jones; “Our Country,” by Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff; “An Evening With an Immigrant,” by Inua Ellams; “Otto Frank” by Roger Guenveur Smith; and “Mud/Drowning,” with texts by María Irene Fornés.As part of Under the Radar’s On the Road initiative, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” two monologues by Pascal Rambert, will still be presented by Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y. “An Evening With an Immigrant” is still expected be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” is still planning a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington (Feb. 14-March 6).In December, the Public announced that it would require full vaccination and, through the end of January, proof of a negative Covid-19 test to access its theaters and restaurant. With no main-stage performances during that time, the policy was aimed mainly at Under the Radar, which had been scheduled to end on Jan. 30.Another presentation of experimental performance, the monthlong Exponential Festival, will be presented online, on the festival’s YouTube channel and Twitch. More

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      Under the Radar Festival Returns, Smaller but Still Funky

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      The experimental festival at the Public Theater will return in person with fewer shows and, for the first time, performances outside New York City.The Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual showcase for experimental theater, will return in person next year, Jan. 12-30. The event, now in its 18th year, will feature nearly two dozen artists, with performances held at the Public and Mabou Mines in Manhattan as well as a venue in upstate New York.Those who’ve attended in past years will notice a few differences: The festival will run for three weeks instead of two and include only 15 productions at the Public — all 90 minutes or less — down from the 22 at the 2020 festival.“I’m happy we have a smaller festival this year so we can really concentrate on these pieces and give them the attention they deserve,” Mark Russell, the festival director, said in a phone conversation, adding that he hadn’t yet determined whether the change would be permanent.One of the pieces that Russell said he was most excited to land was Jasmine Lee-Jones’s “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-29). Staged to critical acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater last summer, the 90-minute two-hander explores cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship and the ownership of Black bodies online and in real life.A cultural re-examination is also what Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff have planned for the New York premiere of their hourlong show “Our Country,” a meeting of mythic and modern America set in California’s marijuana country and inspired by Sophocles’ “Antigone” (Jan. 12-16, 21-23).A pair of solo shows also highlight the schedule: The playwright Inua Ellams (“Barber Shop Chronicles”) will perform his 90-minute, music- and poetry-filled piece “An Evening with an Immigrant,” which chronicles his journey from Nigeria to England (Jan. 18-20). Roger Guenveur Smith, an actor known for his roles in Spike Lee films, will return to the festival with his hourlong solo show “Otto Frank,” a historical account of the father of Anne Frank, who was the only immediate member of his family to survive the Holocaust (Jan. 13-16, 20-23).Rounding out the slate is a double bill of “Mud/Drowning,” two intimate works by María Irene Fornés, a Cuban American playwright and director who died in 2018, which, following a sold-out run last year, will return to the experimental theater company Mabou Mines (Jan. 12-16, 18-23, 25-30). “Mud,” a play by Fornés, is a grim consideration of ignorance, poverty and desperation, while “Drowning,” a half-hour “pocket” opera by the composer Philip Glass, is adapted from Fornés’s five-page surreal play based on a short story by Anton Chekhov.A new initiative, “Under the Radar: On the Road,” will also bring a pair of Pascal Rambert monologues, “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” to a venue called PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century in Chatham, N.Y., which sits on 100 acres of orchards, meadows and woodlands (Jan. 14-15, 22-23).Following the Under the Radar Festival, “An Evening with an Immigrant” will also be performed at Oklahoma City Repertory Theater (Jan. 22-23) and at Stanford University (Jan. 29-30), and “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” will transfer to Washington, D.C., for a three-week run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (Feb. 14-March 6).“We’re acknowledging that small-scale work needs touring to survive and reach the widest audience,” Russell said.The festival will also include eight works in the “Incoming!” works-in-process series and the return of concerts by artists including Migguel Anggelo, Salty Brine and Alicia Hall Moran at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan.A full lineup is available at publictheater.org. More

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      Review: Three Generations Awaiting Justice in ‘Cullud Wattah’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play follows one family of women affected by the water crisis in Flint, Mich.Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah.”In a haunting and eye-opening production, directed by Candis C. Jones and which opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater, the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines.“Lead in thuh wattah,” five actors sing as the show opens. A riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” aligns present-day woes with Black traditions of perseverance. Emerging from the darkened periphery with jugs in hand, they recount the circumstances of the crisis like morbid poetry: When the city switched its water supply, who is responsible, how tea began to smell of sewage and rashes spread across their bodies.Urgency in the face of deadliness, “Cullud Wattah” points out, is not afforded to Black communities on the margins. The setting is November 2016, 939 days since Flint had clean water, and the repercussions continue to cascade.Marion (Crystal Dickinson) is a third-generation union assembly worker at General Motors, the city’s flagship employer. Her pregnant sister, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), is in recovery from crack addiction. The slight but indomitable Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell) keeps everyone in line, including Marion’s daughters, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), a queer freethinking teenager with spiritual ties to the continent, and a sly 9-year-old named Plum (played by the adult actress Alicia Pilgrim), who has been undergoing treatment for leukemia.Out of both love and necessity, the women support and care for one another. Marion adjusts Plum’s wig before her first day back at school. Ainee applies lip liner to her sister when tremors in Marion’s hands flare up, from illness or nerves about dating again after her husband’s death.The set design, by Adam Rigg, suggests a house stripped to its raw wood foundations, with hundreds of bottles of murky water lined up and suspended in the air, one for each day it continues to flow from the tap. Bottles of clean water sit atop the refrigerator. (A filter promised by the city should arrive any day now.) The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is anxious and spectral, while Kara Harmon’s costumes lend the women an everyday earthiness.From left, Mitchell, Patterson and Dickinson in the play, which, our critic writes, excels most when generating heat from familial conflict.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many bottles of water are needed to do things that most people take for granted — washing Thanksgiving vegetables, for example (26) — is the kind of granular detail the play brings into focus.The plot stirs around the effect that toxins have had on the family, both internally and externally. “We all marked,” says Ainee, who walks in the house one day with a flier containing information about a class-action suit. Marion’s job at GM, and a potential promotion to management, means she would risk their livelihood if she were to get involved — the moral compromise of capitalism and the weight of personal responsibility coming to a head.Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.While the playwright generates affecting emotion throughout, a fair portion of the dialogue is used to deliver exposition and impassioned proclamations about the impact of contaminated water, even when characters are relating to each other. Jones’ fluid and intimate direction mostly keeps the text from feeling too bogged down in these details.“Cullud Wattah” excels most when generating heat from familial conflict. Performances by the winning ensemble members are nimbly attuned to the language of mothers and sisters, from knowing shrugs and sideways glances to the straight-on withering glares. And in the hands of Dickinson and Patterson, fireworks light up the story at its climax, when long-silenced resentments finally detonate in the sort of blaze that only arises from love.Inseparable as real-world calamity has become from the realm of art, Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah” is especially suited to a moment of environmental unrest. After the play comes to an abrupt end, the cast stands in silence before leaving the stage. They don’t return for a bow, as if this had not been a performance but a call to account.Cullud WattahThrough Dec. 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Visitor’ Lags Behind the Times

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      The new musical, based on the 2008 film and delayed by the pandemic, debuts at the Public Theater. But its story of a white professor helping immigrants feels out of step with the moment.What comes to mind when you think about immigration, ICE and deportation? I’m willing to bet more than a few George Washingtons that it’s not “musical.” Perhaps it is doable to respect the politics around these issues and the immigrants trying to build a life in the United States in this format, but it’s tough. Which is why the new musical “The Visitor” feels so obtuse and helplessly dated.Dated because it is based on Tom McCarthy’s 2008 film, a well-meaning artifact of the post-9/11 years about a couple of undocumented immigrants helping a white middle-aged professor get a new lease on life. The film resonated in a time before we had a president who fiercely fought to keep immigrants out, and before calls for diversity echoed throughout our institutions.In the film, an economics professor named Walter Vale travels to New York City from Connecticut to attend a conference, but while there, he finds a young couple living in his long-neglected apartment: Tarek, a drummer originally from Syria, and Zainab, a Senegalese jewelry designer. He lets them stay, and Tarek teaches him the drums. They live there until Tarek is unfairly picked up by the police for an infraction he didn’t commit and put in a detention center for being undocumented.The musical, which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, is directed by Daniel Sullivan and has a book by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Brian Yorkey, who also wrote the lyrics. Tom Kitt (who also teamed up with Yorkey for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Next to Normal”) adds music to this story, which arrives onstage with only minor changes.Long in the works, “The Visitor” was scheduled to begin its performances in March 2020 — practically a century ago in Pandemic Time. To stage the project now without a more significant overhaul of the story was a bold choice, especially with masking and quarantining coinciding with a reckoning about how people of color and their stories are — or, more often, are not — represented in theater and the arts.That’s not to say there haven’t been any modifications. First, previews were pushed back a week last month after cast members raised issues around depictions of race and representation. Then the departure of one of the leads, Ari’el Stachel, was announced in what the theater called “a mutual decision,” and last-minute edits were made in an attempt to refigure the way whiteness was centered in the production.David Hyde Pierce stars as Walter, a widower whose career and emotional life are as stagnant as a glass of lukewarm milk. Ahmad Maksoud, who was Stachel’s understudy, takes on the charming Tarek, and Alysha Deslorieux is the firm and guarded Zainab. Jacqueline Antaramian rounds out the central cast as Mouna, Tarek’s concerned mother.Alysha Deslorieux, left, as Zainab and Jacqueline Antaramian as Mouna in the 90-minute show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHyde Pierce delivers the most subdued version of his usual awkward nebbish with the occasional cantankerous quip. (“Wake up, you little snot rags,” he thinks while teaching his students in an early scene.) But there isn’t much setup for Walter; perhaps intentionally, given how much the show goes on to focus on its white protagonist.Part of it is Sullivan’s brusque direction, which speeds through some character-building dialogue then lingers on scenes that have the clunkiest exposition. And it’s also partly because of the congested score. While the film is quiet and pensive, the show is overstuffed — with seemingly every second of its 90 minutes filled with music.Kitt’s music has a generic pop sound that sometimes works, as in “Drum Circle,” a Disney-esque tune chock-full of lively, layered percussion; and “Heart in Your Hands,” a rather maudlin song with angelic harmonies. (Kitt’s score, particularly “Heart,” is further enlivened by Jessica Paz and Sun Hee Kil’s ethereal sound design.) But most of the time it doesn’t work; upbeat songs or soft, slowed-down percussion feel at odds with the heavy subject matter.This is especially baffling in the energetic “World Between Two Worlds” number, in which detained immigrants perform a “Stomp”-style stepping and clapping routine that abruptly ends when a guard takes one of them away. That said, at least the show moves; Lorin Latarro’s choreography animates even the most mundane scenes, say, in a classroom or on a New York City street. (The ensemble members enter and exit via doorways and a balcony platform in David Zinn’s confined set design of oppressively gray walls that transform into various spaces and institutions that may exclude individuals — an apt metaphor.)Yorkey’s clunky lyrics are what ultimately do the songs in; some are attempts to add introspection to a deeply withdrawn protagonist with a wooden disposition. So we’re treated to obvious lines like, “Here I am in a suit at this conference,” or clichés like, “Find the rhythm within,” and, “You join the [drum] circle and it joins you.”Hyde Pierce speak-sings his way through the score, or spastically works himself up into the bravado needed for the nauseatingly cheesy “Better Angels,” which is meant to be a triumphant showstopper. As Tarek, Maksoud gives an earnest performance but never seems to plumb any emotional depths — or vocal ones either. Deslorieux has the strongest voice of the main cast, crooning with delicate rolling r’s for her character’s accent. As Mouna, Antaramian’s voice is inconsistent, and she has a loose grasp on her character’s accent.Maksoud with ensemble members in the musical. The ensemble etches “small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe ensemble, however, often upstages the main cast members, etching small but remarkable performance moments, even in the background and during the fleeting transitional numbers.In one, Katie Terza nearly blows off the walls of the Public with a brief yet transcendent Arabic song, and the professional drummer Takafumi Nikaido (also the production’s djembe coach) could easily steal the entire production.The few attempts at nuance — a comment from Walter showing how he’s also guilty of racial stereotypes, a mention of him as a white savior, and an added back story about Zainab’s abuse-ridden immigration journey — cannot change the story that’s being told or how uncomfortably it sits in our current moment. Even with the additions, the immigrant characters still ultimately function as markers of Walter’s emotional growth and development; they have bits of personality and back stories but can’t stand on their own in a plot without him.So what does one do with a work of art that, by the time of its premiere, has already been outpaced by the moment? How can you contemporize a work whose very conceit — its whole plot, its central perspective — will land like a well-meaning but ignorant cousin’s comment in a conscientious cultural conversation?These questions, of course, are larger than what the Public has on its stage right now. “The Visitor” proves that we can’t always pick up exactly where we left off. Sometimes that’s a good thing.The VisitorThrough Dec. 5 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Richard Nelson’s New Play Closes a Chapter of Theater History

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      “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad” is the 12th and final installment in the quiet yet sweeping “Rhinebeck Panorama.”A character named Kate tells a story, of a story told to her, about a man attending a play. The actors are all deaf, and they rest their cheeks and chins on a big table, which stretches out to the audience, to feel the vibration of a spinning top. From his seat, the man leans in and puts his forehead on the surface.“He wants to share in what the characters are feeling,” Kate says. “He wants to be at that table too.”Kate’s monologue is delivered almost in passing — no one onstage even responds to it — yet it reflects, in just a few lines, the mission and magic of Richard Nelson’s decade-long, 12-play project called the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” which concludes with “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” opening Sept. 8 at Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe Theater.These works, written and directed by Nelson — and realized with aesthetic unity by a consistent creative team and a de facto acting company — contain the four Apple Family plays, which feature a family gathering in Rhinebeck, N.Y., on days that happen to be of national significance; the Gabriels trilogy, about another Rhinebeck household that we visit at three points during the 2016 election year; three pandemic Zoom plays that revisit the Apples as they talk through collective trauma in real time; and a two-part exploration of the Michaels, an artistic family on the verge, then the other side, of immense loss.Charlotte Bydwell in one of several dance scenes in “What Happened?,” which takes place after the death of a dance luminary.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlong the way, Nelson has established a style of theater that has its roots in Chekhov: not naturalistic or realistic, but, as Nelson said in a recent interview, an attempt at verisimilitude. Through the dozen plays he makes a case — in our cultural moment of polarized absolutes — for questioning, nuance and, above all, conversation as a way to connect people, process the unknown and ultimately be in the world.“Centuries from now, when people want to know what a certain class of person lived like in America, they’ll go to Richard’s plays,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produced nearly all of the panorama. “The characters are individual, yet they capture the shape of our time.”The plot of each Rhinebeck play couldn’t be more simple: A family prepares or eats dinner. Conversations are discursive, guided more by the timeline of the meal than anything else; but within them are sprawling and subterranean dramas that reveal themselves through ordinary discussion rather than traditional theatricality. Conflicts are rare — raised voices, even rarer.If the series has a broad arc, it is in how the characters relate not just to time, but to place: the Apples find a home in Rhinebeck, while the Gabriels are pushed out of it and, the Michaels, by the end, are assembling around a table in France.“Rhinebeck is a complicated place, as all places are,” said Nelson, who has lived in the Hudson Valley town since the early 1980s. “You take something small, and you just look at it enough, and you see all the pieces and all the things.”The plays have all been set on the days when they open. But despite that specificity of time and location — and a milieu of predominantly white, educated people — they have achieved broad resonance, including international adaptations and imitations. And by being presented in the round in small spaces, they also elicit the intimacy of a private gathering.From left, Jay O. Sanders, Nelson and Maryann Plunkett — whom Nelson called “the beating heart” of the Rhinebeck plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJay O. Sanders, who along with his wife, Maryann Plunkett — “the beating heart” of the panorama, as Nelson called her — has starred in all 12 plays, recalled asking a question during “The Gabriels” that was promptly answered by a man in the audience who, like the one in Kate’s story, seemingly wanted to join them at the table.But that is the effect of Nelson’s style, in which no arguments are made and people represent nothing; as Sanders said, “The drama of just living is enough.” In a note for “What Happened?” Nelson includes a telling quote from a hero of his, the early-20th-century theater artist Harley Granville-Barker:One is tempted to imagine a play — to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle — from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.Easier imagined than done. Nelson said that any time he has written a line that sounds like him or his beliefs, it gets cut. “The truth,” he added, “comes from the characters speaking to another character, and not for the audience to overhear.”In rehearsals, actors are directed to talk as they would at home, not to project as they typically would. They are aware, at all times, of where they are directing their questions or lines. In real life, Nelson said, rarely does someone speak to an entire room; so his characters don’t either.“It’s very unusual,” Sanders said. “And it takes a lot of courage.”The plays have flashes of prescience and recognition. You can, for example, trace former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s career through the seven Apple plays, which open in media res with an expletive and mention of his name. The first installment of “The Gabriels,” from early March 2016, includes the now-haunting line, “Don’t you feel something really bad is going to happen?”At times, though, Nelson’s characters — and perhaps Nelson himself — have been unequipped to deal with history in the making. The Apples gathered on Zoom in early July 2020, amid the upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the theater industry, platitudes reigned; but in Rhinebeck, a group of white people didn’t really know how to talk about it.Their not thoroughly engaging with Black Lives Matter frustrated some in the moment, including The New York Times’s critic, Jesse Green. But that wouldn’t fit Nelson’s approach to theater. Instead, the Apples ask questions with no answers, and are quietly saddened by a world that might be passing them by.“What you don’t want to do is make an argument,” Nelson said. “I don’t think my characters are confident about what’s going on. Everybody has their own journey.”Plunkett and Sanders, center, seen here in the 2011 play “Sweet and Sad,” have acted in the entire “Rhinebeck Panorama.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat tension arises again in “What Happened?” — “I don’t know” is a common line — the first of the staged Rhinebeck plays not to be produced by the Public. (Presented by Hunter Theater Project, it is being underwritten by a single donor, Susie Sainsbury. The second two Zoom plays were also independently produced.)There are no bad feelings between Nelson and the Public; the separation was a matter of logistics. “He was not going to let a pandemic slow him down,” Eustis said of Nelson. “It was sad for me that for the first time, I couldn’t keep up with him. So on a level it breaks my heart that this is not at the Public.”Nelson felt that “What Happened?” couldn’t wait any longer. He had written a version last year for a live theater season that never came, with politics on his mind as the election approached. But he rewrote it to open now, as live theater re-emerges in New York. Gone are any mentions of the current or former president; instead the loss presaged by the first play in 2019 — the matriarch, a modern dance luminary named Rose Michael, has cancer — permeates its sequel.That, in addition to the setting of Angers, France, makes for a departure from the panorama. “What Happened?” may be a mirror of the present, with characters regularly sanitizing their hands and sharing how they passed time in lockdown, but its preoccupations are also comparatively abstract: the loss of life, of youth, of work.And of Rhinebeck itself. Plunkett said that during a recent rehearsal it hit her: “I found myself tearing up. This specific place that we resided in and explored for a decade — not many people have gotten to do that, and I’m very fortunate. You realize how short a decade is.”Nelson may return to Rhinebeck in the future — he has written a television series of Chekhov stories set there in the present — but for now “What Happened?” is the last time he is bringing a family together at a dinner table to weave, as the critic Ben Brantley once wrote, “momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian.”The audience is, as always, invited to the table. “We’re living in a moment of confusion, tragedy and loss, but together,” Nelson said. “We are not alone.” More

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      in Television

      Is Jeremy O. Harris’s Play for ‘Gossip Girl’ Real? Now It Is.

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      Joshua Safran’s “Gossip Girl” reboot filmed a scene from an imaginary work by the “Slave Play” playwright. Then the Public Theater commissioned it.We hear him before we see him come across the screen: Aaron howls and barks then gallops, on all fours, onto a white, wooden thrust stage, ringed on three sides by the audience. This enraged man — the son of Aaron the Moor from “Titus Andronicus” — is stark naked and covered in blood.“What? What? Have I not arrived as you assumed I would? Like a black dog, as the saying is,” he demands, panting and sniffing, shouting into the faces of the seated theatergoers.He backs away slowly. “You do know who I am, riiight?” Aaron drawls. “The inhuman dog. Unhallowed slave.”This intense scene from a play-within-a-TV-show commands viewers’ attention in Episode 3 of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot. And it’s all courtesy of Jeremy O. Harris, the Tony-nominated playwright of “Slave Play.” Shortly after the episode dropped, though, people began to speculate on social media if the play was real or not.With a tweet, Harris recently confirmed that “The Bloody and Lamentable Tale of Aaron” is, in fact, a real play. He began writing his dream Public Theater play for “Gossip Girl” after chatting with the show’s creator, Joshua Safran (“Smash,” “Soundtrack”).The series’ showrunner, Joshua Safran, left, and Jeremy O. Harris during the taping.Karolina Wojtasik, via HBO MaxUpon seeing the play’s opening scene during the taping, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater — who makes a cameo as an audience member in the episode — turned to Harris and asked, “Can we commission this?” Harris said he had a contract the next day.“I was dreaming this play into existence,” Harris said in an interview. It’s a play he’s been thinking about for seven years, since he started studying “Titus Andronicus” — his favorite Shakespeare play.“Titus Andronicus,” thought to be Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, tells the bloody tale of the downfall of Titus, a Roman general. Titus returns home from war with Tamora, Queen of the Goths, as a prisoner to the Roman emperor; her lover, Aaron the Moor, is in tow.Tamora gives birth to a child, fathered by Aaron, who then kills the nurse to keep the child’s race a secret and flees with the baby to save it from the emperor. But Lucius, Titus’s son, captures Aaron and threatens to kill the child. To save his son, Aaron confesses to a plot for revenge. Lucius, who is later proclaimed emperor, orders Aaron be buried up to his chest and left to die. The baby, however, survives.Harris’s play, then, picks up where Shakespeare left off. We meet Aaron (portrayed by Paul James in the “Gossip Girl” episode), named after his father, in his 20s. He has been raised, ironically, by Lucius Andronicus, now in his 60s. And he’s thirsty for revenge.“The thing that I think makes Aaron a complex character in literature is because he’s like, ‘I’m evil because I’m Black,’” Harris said of Shakespeare’s play. “And this time, he’s like, ‘No, I’m evil because you guys have socialized me. You have socialized rules around what Black means and what maleness means.’”When the opportunity to shoot at the Public arose, Harris knew two things: He wanted to do “Aaron.” And he wanted the director to be Machel Ross, who also directed his play “Black Exhibition” at Bushwick Starr in 2019. Lila Feinberg wrote and Jennifer Lynch directed the “Gossip Girl” episode, in which several characters grapple with what to make of the challenging work.“I loved it. But it’d be committing theatrical seppuku to transfer it,” a theater critic mutters to another at the show’s after party.The other responds: “It would close in a week, especially without a star. I just wish it wasn’t so confrontational.”In an interview, Ross said she “knew that the text was evoking a very specific sort of confrontation between audience and performer.”How could they thrust the “Gossip Girl” cast and universe into this play from the moment it begins, she wondered? Enter: a naked Paul James.“I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to have to be comfortable. I’m going to have to make other people uncomfortable, and own the stage, and be very physical,’” James said in an interview.Harris described the play to Safran, the show’s creator and showrunner, as the audience’s worst nightmare: A naked Black man covered in blood, coming up to them and asking them to touch him. It’s a confrontational idea, and one that the “Gossip Girl” character Zoya Lott — a newcomer to the world of glitz and glamour depicted in the series — can identify with.“Are you kidding me? A provocative play like ‘Aaron’ is exactly what Broadway needs after a year on pause,” Zoya (played by Whitney Peak) fires back at the naysayers. “What it doesn’t is another ‘revisal’ of — of anything. Especially one devised by white people, about white people, starring white people.“That’s why the theater was invented, right? To challenge audience members to — to think beyond their own narratives. I mean, come on, have you never read Shange? Albee? Fornés?”About that exchange, Safran said in an interview: “That’s what Zoya is wrestling with in this world with these people. Can I actually speak my mind, or do I have to fit myself into a box and just observe?”In the show, Harris sweeps into the room, playing himself. “Hey. Who are you?” he asks Zoya. “You seem very much like someone to me. Let’s find a less confrontational space and have a little talk,” he says.“Zoya is one of the only people that can look at their world and process it and call out things as they are,” Harris said. “And make a little mess along the way as she does that.”In fact, Harris will be returning as himself to the show in the second half of its first season, in Episode 10, as a fairy godfather of sorts to Zoya. As for the status of the play itself? “I think it’ll be done when it’s done,” Harris said. More

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      New Work by Suzan-Lori Parks to Be Part of Public Theater Season

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      “The Visitor” and “cullud wattah,” two shows postponed by the pandemic, will get their premieres alongside works by James Ijames, Shaina Taub and Lloyd Suh.The Public Theater’s 2021-22 season will feature a mix of projects postponed because of the pandemic and new works, including “Plays for the Plague Year” by Suzan-Lori Parks.Behind the scenes, the Off Broadway nonprofit — responding to renewed calls for racial equity in the theater industry — said it will include over 50 percent representation by people of color in artistic leadership roles, from the directors and writers to the choreographers and the designers.“This last year and a half, in addition to Covid, has been about a call for racial justice and equity that we take profoundly seriously,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said in an interview. “The Public obviously has always been, we felt, progressive on racial issues. And what became clear to us is we weren’t progressive enough.”The season begins with a musical that was about to have its world premiere in March 2020, before theaters were shuttered because of the pandemic: “The Visitor,” by Tom Kitt, Brian Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Directed by Daniel Sullivan and based on the film about a college professor and two undocumented immigrants, it will feature David Hyde Pierce and Ari’el Stachel, both Tony Award winners. Performances will begin Oct. 7.The pandemic also led to the postponement of the debut of Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play, “cullud wattah.” In the interim, she received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which honors work by women and nonbinary playwrights. The play is about the effects of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., on three generations of women. Candis C. Jones will direct the play, which begins performances in November.Another delayed work, Mona Mansour’s “The Vagrant Trilogy,” about Palestinians’ displacement, will be directed by Mark Wing-Davey and will now open in April 2022.And Shaina Taub’s anticipated musical about the American women’s suffrage movement will take the stage in March 2022. “Suffs,” described as an epic show about some of the unsung heroines of the movement, will be directed by Leigh Silverman and feature the choreography of Raja Feather Kelly.In addition to Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote a play a day since the beginning of the pandemic, the season will also include “Out of Time,” a collection of monologues by five award-winning Asian American playwrights; “The Chinese Lady,” Lloyd Suh’s portrait of the first Chinese woman to step foot in America in 1834; and “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s “hilarious yet profound new ‘Hamlet’-inspired play” set at a Southern barbecue, Jesse Green wrote in his review of a streaming production. (Some of these are co-productions with Barrington Stage Company, Ma-Yi Theater Company, NAATCO and National Black Theater.)The theater artist Daniel Alexander Jones’ digital album, “Altar No. 1 — Aten,” will unfold through a series of weekly installments beginning Sept. 22. And Joe’s Pub will be back, too: The performance space tucked inside the Public will have live music starting Oct. 5.The lineup of shows reflects the current moment well, Eustis said, for a few reasons. There’s the representation of artists of color and the partnerships with theater companies hit harder by the past year than the Public. And then there’s what he called Parks’s “astonishing” new work, “Plays for the Plague Year.”“They give a sort of map,” Eustis said, “and a day by day examination of what this year has been, like no other work of art I’ve seen. I think it’s an incredibly important and powerful work.”Parks began writing “Plays for the Plague Year” on March 12, 2020, and it covers at least a year. Among the snapshots she captured were those “almost like a small domestic adjustment drama,” Eustis said, in April, and the murder of George Floyd in May, as well as the racial reckoning that followed.The past year has sparked dialogue and rocked foundations, and the theater is no exception. Much of the conversation at the Public has been in the gap between “we need to be more thoughtful” and “the show must go on,” Eustis said.“Because the show must go on; it really must,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out a way to be more thoughtful about how we work, and more mindful about and contemplative about the ways we treat each other while the show goes on.” More

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      Review: Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives,’ Now in South Harlem

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      Jocelyn Bioh reshapes a comedy of clever women, frail men and harsh revenge into one of love and forgiveness, just when New York needs it.Who couldn’t use a warm welcome back to live theater like the one being offered these late-summer evenings in Central Park? There, Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives,” a joyful adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” set in an African diasporic community in Harlem, is doing everything a comedy can do to embrace all comers.First, the director Saheem Ali, who was born in Kenya, delivers enthusiastic greetings over the Delacorte Theater’s loudspeakers. Next, Farai Malianga, a drummer from Zimbabwe, leads the audience in a call and response chorus of vernacular African salutations: “Asé” (Nigeria), “Yebo” (South Africa) and “Wau-Wau” (Senegal) among them. By the time the play proper starts, we are all guiltless cultural appropriators.Or should I say the play improper? Purists who pine for the original (circa 1597) text — and possibly the world in which it existed — will find plenty that gets their goat in Bioh’s makeover, including roasted goat. She has cut the number of characters nearly in half and the running time by more than a third. (Ali’s production comes in at a swift 110 minutes, with no intermission.) Much of Shakespeare’s wordplay, incomprehensible without an Elizabethan thesaurus, has been swept away along with words like “master” and “mistress” and their buzzkill implications.Thankfully, Bioh has not replaced them with woke lecturing. She has said she wanted a “Merry Wives” that her Ghanaian family could enjoy, and in achieving the goal has not excluded the rest of us. Or, rather, she has made us all a part of the family, perhaps erasing some of Shakespeare’s worldview in the process, but underlining the human qualities we know from our own households — or, if not, from popular culture.So Jacob Ming-Trent, as the idle, appetitive Falstaff, hilariously combines into one bigger-than-life portrait your drunk uncle, a horndog Redd Foxx and some would-be Barry White. The identical mash letters he writes to the two upright wives of the title — the tart Madam Ekua Page (Pascale Armand) and the glamorous Madam Nkechi Ford (Susan Kelechi Watson) — are instantly familiar as the delusions of a sitcom character who, in thinking he’s a catch, sets himself up to be caught.Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” takes audiences to 116th Street in South Harlem, an area teeming with West African shops and culture.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the letters are discovered while Madam Page is having her hair done at a Senegalese braiding salon on 116th Street tells you a lot about the production’s good humor. The salon is part of Beowulf Boritt’s elaborate transforming puzzle of a set, which also includes an urgent care clinic run by Dr. Caius (David Ryan Smith) and Mama Quickly (Shola Adewusi), and a laundromat, wittily called the Windsor, where the women’s revenge on Falstaff is eventually carried out amid baskets of “foul linen.”If the production — including Dede Ayite’s costumes and Cookie Jordan’s wigs — looks especially grand, that is part of the welcome too. The Public Theater could not of course stage any Shakespeare in the Park last year, and for 2021 decided to make the most of its resources by combining its usual two productions into one. The choice of material was likewise a twofer: a big comedy when we really needed one after a small, grim year, yet also a play celebrating Black life in America, when we really needed that as well.Not just Black life, though. The celebration is universal, which does not always jibe with the petty meanness of the Shakespeare. Casually misogynist references have therefore been excised, so that one character, Anne — the marriageable daughter of Madam Page and her husband, Kwame (Kyle Scatliffe) — is said to speak “sweet-sweet like a woman,” not “small” like one. Abuse of even a fictional female has been flipped: When Falstaff, in the second of his three comeuppances, is beaten “most pitifully” while wearing a ludicrous disguise, it’s as the old man of Benin (“dressed like some ol’ Black Dumbledore”) instead of Shakespeare’s old woman of Brentford. And Bioh has made several adjustments to embrace queerness where the original used it merely for humor.MaYaa Boateng, left, as Fenton and Abena as Anne Page, who is courted by three suitors in “Merry Wives.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese substitutions do not feel politically correct so much as warmly embracing. Anne’s three suitors still include the dim Slender (Joshua Echebiri) and the frankly mincing Dr. Caius. But the third, Fenton, is now a pure-hearted woman (MaYaa Boateng) instead of a fortune-seeking man. That Anne’s parents make no fuss about Fenton’s sex (their objections are mostly financial) may feel somewhat utopian, but Anne’s sure preference for her, as expressed in a performance by the actress Abena that’s a standout even in this across-the-board excellent ensemble, is indisputable.The spurned suitors are let off lightly here; in a switch from the original, both end up liking the match they are tricked into when they cannot have Anne. Unfortunately, the Falstaff part of the story is not, as it should be, more dangerous. With his shin-length shorts and virtual reality goggles, chatting with the audience about a pandemic spent watching Netflix and eating snacks, Ming-Trent’s Falstaff is more of a clown than a menace. As Bioh has written the character, we are forced to conclude that his lust is grotesque because, in an otherwise body-positive production, it is housed in a figure “about two yards wide.”From left, Susan Kelechi Watson, Pascale Armand and Kyle Scatliffe in the play, with costumes by Dede Ayite and an elaborate set by Beowulf Boritt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf that puts too much emphasis on the character’s outer traits, missing the opportunity to use his story to examine men’s inner frailty, Bioh’s script — and Ali’s supple direction — balance that in the story of Madam Ford’s husband, who suffers from the jealous fear that his wife is unfaithful. In a conventional production, Ford is laughable; here, Gbenga Akinnagbe makes the man’s misery quite real. His relief, when his wife forgives him after first torturing him with false evidence, is thus a more moving moment than usual.Forgiveness, instead of revenge, is the evening’s unexpected theme. And not just for the characters. Near the end, in a coup-de-outdoor-theater, Boritt’s set slides away and offers us all a magical view of Central Park, lit as if it were a heavenly playground by Jiyoun Chang. Can we hope that this marks the beginning of a happier moment in our city and country?Bioh suggests as much. It is not merely Falstaff she has in mind when demonstrating, in this healing adaptation, that even the worst old reprobates can be taught a lesson and welcomed back into the family. After all, whether from Ghana or Zimbabwe or Brooklyn or Stratford-upon-Avon, we are all, if you look back far enough, an African diasporic community.Merry WivesThrough Sept. 18 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More