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      In ‘The Refuge Plays,’ Nicole Ari Parker Comes Home

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      “What the theater gives me is the feeling that I’m using everything,” the actress said of returning to the stage after a decade away.On the Max series “And Just Like That …,” Nicole Ari Parker plays the elegant documentarian Lisa Todd Wexley. New York audiences will soon see her in another guise, as a great-grandmother living off the grid in Southern Illinois. Her go-to accessory? An ax. This is Early, the woman at the center of Nathan Alan Davis’s “The Refuge Plays,” directed by Patricia McGregor and produced by Roundabout Theater Company in association with New York Theater Workshop.“What the theater gives me,” Parker said, “is the feeling that I’m using everything.”At a recent rehearsal, she had bounded onto the stage in a pink jumpsuit and makeup that aged her several decades. At the start of the first play, Early is in her 80s. The subsequent plays revert her to her 40s, then her 20s. This is Parker’s first stage role since she played Blanche DuBois on Broadway a decade ago, and previews begin Saturday. Asked in a warm-up exercise how she felt, Parker had a one-word answer: “Ready.”McGregor, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, had wanted to work with Parker since seeing her turn in “Streetcar” and marveling at the fragility and ferocity that Parker brought to it. Early, McGregor felt, would be an ideal role for her, allowing her to embody qualities beyond sophistication and glamour. “She’s a mother and an intergenerational caretaker,” McGregor said of her star in a phone interview. “Some of the things that are deeply rooted in what Early’s journey is, she has in her bones.”Will this shift from statement bags to washboard and tub surprise audience members? “Maybe,” Parker said. “I’m surprised!”Parker and Christopher Jackson in an episode of the Max series “And Just Like That ….”Craig Blankenhorn/MaxWe spoke over breakfast the next morning, at a restaurant near the apartment that Parker, 52, uses while filming “And Just Like That ….” Owing to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Parker declined to chat about that project or any of her previous film and TV work. (She referred, glancingly, to the Showtime series “Soul Food” as “the show where I met my husband,” the actor Boris Kodjoe, “that we can’t talk about.”) Across the table, she appeared ageless, and effortlessly chic. She wore a hat, a scarf, two necklaces, two watches, five rings and a bracelet and yet somehow looked as if she’d simply woken up like that.Over coffee and omelets, she discussed, with passion and precision, her love for the theater and the secrets that age makeup can reveal. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you know that you loved performing?At a very young age. And I’m really upset with God that he did not give me a singing voice. Because, in my head, I’ve been a Broadway musical star since I was born. I would watch Shirley MacLaine in “Sweet Charity” over and over. I would watch Judy Garland in “A Star Is Born” over and over. I got into N.Y.U. as a journalism major. But second semester, I remember calling my dad and telling him that I wanted to transfer to Tisch. N.Y.U. is very expensive. My dad paid for my college tuition. And he said, “You can’t give up. You’re about to enter the business of no. And you have to keep going. And you have to be strong.” I always hold that in my heart.What was your training?It was pretty comprehensive — voice, movement, scene study. But while I was studying Shakespeare, I wasn’t going to play Juliet. I played the maid in “The Little Foxes.” I played all these small subservient roles in the classic plays. The sadness around discrimination is that it’s missing humanity. It’s missing that if you and I leave this cafe right now and there’s a thunderstorm, we’re both going to get wet equally in the rain. The sunshine doesn’t discriminate, and neither does love, loss, death, pain, joy. We all have those things that are in these beautiful classic plays. So you and I both could be up for a role. It’s not about washing clean or ignoring diversity. It’s about, what does it add? And what doesn’t it add? What just is.“This moment that I’m having in my career is extraordinary,” Parker said. “The feeling has always been there. I just have slightly better clothes right now, better face cream.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYou moved to Los Angeles in 2000. Did you always hope to come back and do theater?I just kept booking jobs. I did let my agents know, but the timing wasn’t always right. Then I got a call saying that Emily Mann was doing a production of “Streetcar” and she was coming to L.A. to meet just a few people. On the day I met her, I sat in the parking lot and I said a prayer: “God, if this is the closest I get to Blanche, being on a shortlist, I’m grateful.” But a 40-minute lunch turned into a three-hour lunch. She asked me if I was more of a Stella or Blanche. I was like, “Emily, I can play Stanley.” I was bursting at the seams to be maximized.Are you an avid theatergoer?I am a passionate theatergoer. I’ll go by myself. I’ll drag a friend. I’ll see two shows in a day. I stay for the talkbacks. I buy the good seats. Last year was on fire, with “Between Riverside and Crazy,” “A Strange Loop,” “The Piano Lesson,” “The Lehman Trilogy.” “Death of a Salesman” — I saw that three times.How did “The Refuge Plays” come to you?I had really wanted to work with Patricia McGregor. When I saw her production of “Ugly Lies the Bone,” I thought, this is magnificent. I met her after and we just stayed in touch, looking for a journey that we could take together. She sent me the play. And the breakdown said Early, matriarch of the family, early 80s. I called my agent and I said, “I’m a grandma!” He said, “Read the play.” And then I was lost in the magic.Who is Early?Her given circumstances are pretty loaded. She was violated. She made a bold choice to go on her own with her newborn. She killed a bear. She built a house. She can see ghosts. This is the kind of play where you can’t leave any of that out.How did it feel yesterday to see yourself in the age makeup?So cool. As women we’re told to panic about wrinkles. And I just felt so beautiful with that age makeup on. Everything that was drawn on my face, contoured into my face, I felt like I knew a secret in advance. Like, don’t waste any time fearing something that could be so glorious.This is a play about family. Has it made you think about your own experience of family, legacy, inheritance?Both of my parents were born in the ’40s. I feel so lucky to have both of them right now while doing this play, to have an immediate family that’s chopped wood or used a washboard. A lot of the details of Early are in my family. I feel honored to represent that. I said to my mom, “Do you know how to kill and pluck and cook a turkey?” She said, “Yes, baby. You have to boil it first to get the feathers out. And don’t let the gallbladder split because that bile will make the meat bitter.”How does it feel to be experiencing so much success, so much fame, at 52?I just did what my dad asked me to do. I fell down but I kept getting back up. In order to be resilient in this business, you had to feel like you’d made it even when you were just living off of bagels. This moment that I’m having in my career is extraordinary because it’s opening more professional doors. But on the inside, the feeling has always been there. I just have slightly better clothes right now, better face cream. More

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      American Airlines Theater on Broadway to Be Renamed for Todd Haimes

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      Roundabout Theater Company’s flagship theater will honor Haimes, the transformational leader who died in April.Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit with the biggest footprint on Broadway, has decided to rename its flagship theater, which currently bears the name American Airlines, in honor of its recently deceased and transformational leader, Todd Haimes.The theater, on West 42nd Street, is a 740-seat house that opened in 1918 as the Selwyn. It was renamed for American Airlines in 2000, when Roundabout assumed operations and raised money by making a sponsorship agreement with the airline.The airline’s naming rights expire in early 2024, according to a spokesman for Roundabout, and the nonprofit’s board decided to rename the building for Haimes, who had an extraordinary impact on the company: He joined Roundabout as managing director in 1983 and reversed its flagging fortunes; he held a variety of titles over the years, and at his death in April he was both artistic director and chief executive.Roundabout, now one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the United States, has five performance spaces in Midtown Manhattan: three Broadway houses, including the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54 as well as the American Airlines Theater, plus the Laura Pels Theater, which is an Off Broadway venue, and the Roundabout Underground black box theater, which is Off Off Broadway, both at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center.On Thursday night, the lights of all Broadway marquees were dimmed in Haimes’s honor. Another ceremony will be held next spring to dedicate the Todd Haimes Theater.American Airlines did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      ‘Primary Trust’ Review: Sipping Mai Tais, Until Bitter Reality Knocks

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      In Eboni Booth’s new play, William Jackson Harper performs with astonishing vulnerability as a man alone and adrift.Maybe you’ve seen him tucked into the corner of a dive bar, muttering to himself now and then, empty glasses multiplying on his table. And perhaps you’ve thought — though, it’s just as likely you haven’t — What’s up with that guy?In “Primary Trust,” the playwright Eboni Booth zooms in on one such man: He lives in a fictional suburb of Rochester, N.Y., where mai tais are his drink of choice at an unlikely tiki bar named Wally’s. He is alone and adrift in this tender, delicately detailed portrait, though surely he has not always been. Listen, and he’ll tell you about the moment he almost drowned and how he learned to keep his head above water.“Primary Trust,” which opened at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan on Thursday, finds Kenneth (William Jackson Harper, of “The Good Place”) approaching 40 when the bookstore where he’s worked for 20 years closes shop. (The owner, played by Jay O. Sanders, needs cash for surgery.) But Kenneth has never found a job on his own; social workers helped him get his current one some years after he was orphaned.Much of this back story Kenneth relays himself, addressing the audience, in the director Knud Adams’s graceful production for Roundabout Theater Company, from what resembles a miniaturized model of a provincial square. (The scaled-down set is by Marsha Ginsberg, and the elegant lighting is by Isabella Byrd.) In 15 years, Kenneth explains, all this will be leveled and replaced by condominiums. The municipal motto — “Welcome Friend, You’re Right on Time!” — feels laden with uncertain melancholy: It could be a salutation from the threshold of death.Harper, right, with Jay O. Sanders and April Matthis, who, our critic writes, turn small roles into four-course meals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMordant subtext and typically empty sentiments are among the ways Booth demonstrates that language can convey deep pain one minute and ring utterly hollow the next, usually in the service of capitalism. In contrast to Kenneth’s confessional narration are the rote greetings of a carousel of servers at Wally’s (all played by April Matthis, including one who becomes a fast and flirtatious friend) and the sales pitches Kenneth later lobs at customers (also played by Matthis) after he lands a teller position at a local bank. (“Primary Trust” doubles as the name of Kenneth’s new employer, and an abbreviated metaphor for what was lost when his mother died.)As in her superstore dark comedy “Paris,” presented by Atlantic Theater Company in 2020, Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast. And though Kenneth’s Blackness is an underlying aspect of his experience, it is not the acute source of his alienation. His foundational trauma, and his longtime coping mechanisms, are gradually revealed (early on it becomes clear that Bert, his near-constant companion played by Eric Berryman, is imaginary), and he begins to reach through the cracks of his isolation to discover good, decent people.Harper, who is onstage for nearly all of the production’s 95 minutes, performs with astonishing ease and vulnerability, particularly given the depths he is asked to plumb in monologues directly to the audience; he lends the currents flowing through Kenneth’s interior life extraordinary subtlety and immediacy. Booth’s one-man study is wonderfully vivid, but there’s only so much emotional engagement that the unburdening of feelings, rather than their enactment or discovery, can inspire. Her other characters are far more loosely sketched: Sanders and Matthis turn small roles, rich with concise, sideways detail, into four-course meals, paradoxically making them feel underused.The production’s play on perspective and proportion, with people as tall as buildings, enhance the undertones in Booth’s work that question who, and what, we pay attention to and why. Do New Yorkers, for example, who Kenneth remarks “step over human beings sleeping in the street,” think about places like this, or about why someone might be drinking for two at happy hour and talking to no one?Throughout the production a bell, like the ones that summon unseen workers from behind service counters, dings repeatedly, sometimes seemingly incessantly, variously marking the reset or passage of time. It feels like a disruption — an unexplained and overused device that interrupts the flow of life. Maybe it’s actually a wake up call, and not just for the man who’s been living in a daze.Primary TrustThrough July 2 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Todd Haimes, 66, Who Rebuilt the Roundabout Theater Company, Dies

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      After rescuing the company from bankruptcy, he turned it into a major player on Broadway and one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in the country.Todd Haimes, who rescued New York’s Roundabout Theater Company from bankruptcy and built it into one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66.A spokesman, Matt Polk, said his death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of osteosarcoma. Mr. Haimes had lived with the cancer since 2002, when he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the jaw.As the artistic director and chief executive at Roundabout, Mr. Haimes had an extraordinarily long and effective tenure. He led the nonprofit company for four decades, turning it into a major player on Broadway, where it now runs three of the 41 theaters.Roundabout has focused on classics and revivals but has also been a supporter of new work. Under Mr. Haimes’s leadership, it excelled on both fronts, winning 11 Tony Awards for plays and musicals it produced and nurturing the careers of contemporary American writers, including Stephen Karam, Joshua Harmon and Selina Fillinger.Among Roundabout’s biggest successes during his tenure was a 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” originally starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, that survived a bumpy start (a construction accident interrupted performances for four weeks) and then ran for nearly six years. It returned a decade later for a one-year reprise.There were many other triumphs, including a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” that is now touring the country. Both productions won Tony Awards.Catalyzed by America’s social unrest over racial inequality in 2020, Mr. Haimes led Roundabout in an effort to unearth lost gems written by artists of color. One result was an acclaimed Broadway production of the Black playwright Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama, “Trouble in Mind.” It had never made it to Broadway because Ms. Childress had refused to soften the show’s ending to make it less challenging for white theatergoers.Mr. Haimes joined Roundabout in 1983 as managing director. He was just 26, and the company, founded in 1965 and saddled with debt, was operating in rented space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. At one particularly desperate point he used his own credit card to keep the company afloat. But a few weeks after he arrived, the board of directors voted to shut it down.A board member subsequently donated enough money to buy the company some time, and Mr. Haimes engineered a turnabout — cutting the staff, reducing expenses, improving marketing and, over time, expanding the audience with measures such as early weekday curtain times to attract an after-work crowd, special events for singles and gay theatergoers, and discounts for children. In 2016, he became the first presenter to allow the livestreaming of a performance of a Broadway show, a much-praised revival of “She Loves Me.”Mr. Haimes, right, with Gene Feist, Roundabout’s artistic director, in the theater in 1986. “I have no desire to be on stage, but I get a tingle just being around one,” he said.Jack Manning/The New York TimesBernard Todd Haimes was born on May 7, 1956, in Manhattan to Herman and Helaine Haimes. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.His onstage life was exceedingly brief: In elementary school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he wore a dress to play the title role in a production of “Mary Poppins.” He later claimed that he had landed the part because he was the only child who could pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at Yale. Before arriving at Roundabout, he was general manager of the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford and managing director of the Westport Country Playhouse, both in Connecticut.“I had no desire to trade stocks and bonds, and making Nivea cream wouldn’t turn me on,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I’ve loved the theater all my life. I have no desire to be onstage, but I get a tingle just being around one, ever since I worked on the stage crew for ‘How to Succeed in Business’ on Broadway when I was in 10th grade.”He became producing director of Roundabout in 1989 and added the title of chief executive in 2015.“The advantage of my background is that all of my artistic decisions are being informed by management concerns,” Mr. Haimes said in 2004. “No one’s ever going to accuse me of being a crazy artist. The disadvantage is the same: that perhaps there are brilliant things other people could accomplish that I just can’t.”He is survived by his wife, Jeanne-Marie (Christman) Haimes; two children, Dr. Hilary Haimes and Andrew Haimes; two stepdaughters, Julia and Kiki Baron; and four grandchildren. His first two marriages, to Dr. Alison Haimes and Tamar Climan, ended in divorce.Mr. Haimes led Roundabout’s move to Broadway in 1991, when he began presenting work in the Criterion Center, which no longer exists. The move was a turning point for the company. “Because of the Tony Award eligibility,” he said, “we will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to obtaining the rights to plays, securing directors and attracting distinguished actors.”In 2000, he moved the company into the renamed American Airlines Theater, which is now Roundabout’s flagship house. It has since also acquired the theater at Studio 54 and assumed operations of the theater now known as the Stephen Sondheim.Among the Tony-winning shows produced by Roundabout during Mr. Haimes’s tenure were revivals of the plays “Anna Christie” and “A View From the Bridge” and of the musicals “Nine,” “Assassins,” “The Pajama Game” and “Anything Goes.” Roundabout was also among the producers of Tony-winning productions of two new plays, “Side Man” and “The Humans.”The company now runs five theaters, all in Midtown Manhattan, including the three Broadway houses, an Off Broadway theater and an Off Off Broadway black-box space that it developed to give a platform to emerging playwrights.Over the years there have also been flops and budget deficits, and some critics have suggested that Roundabout was overextended. Its enormous real estate footprint became a financial challenge that the company addressed partly by renting out some of its Broadway venues to commercial producers. The company made a significant amount of money, for example, by renting out the Sondheim for five years to the producers of “Beautiful,” the Carole King biomusical.Mr. Haimes was one of a handful of leaders of nonprofit theater companies in New York whose decades-long tenures have raised eyebrows among those who want more turnover. He held onto the Roundabout job even when he took another one, as artistic director of the deeply troubled Toronto theater company Livent, in 1998; that company collapsed, and Mr. Haimes stayed at Roundabout.Roundabout’s size — 150 employees and a $50 million annual budget — has given it the ability to support significant endeavors offstage. It operates education and training programs, including school partnerships that serve more than 4,000 students each year and a partnership with the stagehands union to train theater technicians.But like many nonprofits, it has not yet fully rebounded from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Roundabout staged one show on Broadway this season, a revival of “1776.”Mr. Haimes, who was often content to remain in the background, was a well-liked and enthusiastic figure in the industry. He was active in both the Broadway and the Off Broadway communities, serving on numerous committees, and over the years he taught at Yale and Brooklyn College.But he remained a businessman and a booster at heart.“Basically I’m incredibly insecure and don’t take myself seriously as an artist,” he said in a 1998 interview. “But somehow my taste seems to match up with what the public wants.” More

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      Danny and Lucy DeVito Head to Broadway With Roundabout Theater Company’s New Season

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      The actors will play a father and daughter in “I Need That,” a comedy written by Theresa Rebeck.Danny DeVito and his daughter, Lucy, will co-star in a new Theresa Rebeck play on Broadway this fall, presented by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, which announced its 2023-2024 season on Tuesday.Roundabout said that its Broadway season would include two three-hander plays: “I Need That,” the new Rebeck play, as well as a revival of “Home,” a 1979 play by Samm-Art Williams.“I Need That” is a comedy about a widower, played by DeVito, struggling to let go of clutter after the death of his wife. Lucy DeVito will play the character’s daughter, and Ray Anthony Thomas will play his friend; the production, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, will begin performances in October at the American Airlines Theater. Von Stuelpnagel also directed Rebeck’s last Broadway play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” in 2018; that show was also produced by Roundabout.Danny DeVito previously starred on Broadway in “The Price,” another Roundabout production, in 2017.“I had such a great time the last time I was there, and we’re chomping at the bit to do this one,” Danny DeVito said in a joint interview with his daughter.In 2021, when many theaters were still closed, Danny and Lucy DeVito collaborated on an audio play, “I Think It’s Worth Pointing out That I’ve Been Very Serious Throughout This Entire Discussion or, Julia and Dave Are Stuck in a Tree,” by Mallory Jane Weiss, for Playing on Air. That show was directed by Von Stuelpnagel, and led to this new venture: The DeVitos said they’d be open to working with Von Stuelpnagel again, at which point he mentioned their interest to Rebeck, who wrote the new play for them. They workshopped it with a staged reading at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont in 2022.“It’s a very humanistic, character-driven, slice-of-life story,” Lucy DeVito said. “The themes speak to loneliness and love, and the hardships you experience with your family while getting older.”“I Need That” will be her Broadway debut.Danny and Lucy DeVito have worked together on a variety of projects: Among them, last year’s “Little Demon,” an FXX animated comedy, as well as “Curmudgeons,” a short comedic film in 2016.“Home,” which Roundabout plans to stage on Broadway next spring, is about a North Carolina farmer who is imprisoned as a draft dodger during Vietnam, and then has a series of adventures in a big city as he tries to put his life back together. The play was first staged Off Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1979 and then transferred to Broadway in 1980.“The play itself is a freshet of good will, a celebration of the indomitability of man, a call to return to the earth,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote in the Times in 1979. “In all respects — writing, direction and performance — this is one of the happiest theatrical events of the season.”The revival will be directed by Kenny Leon, one of the most prolific directors on the New York stage and a Tony Award winner for directing the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”Roundabout, which only staged one show on Broadway this season (a revival of “1776” that ran for three months), said it hopes to stage three next season; the third has not yet been announced.Roundabout also announced Tuesday plans to stage two plays Off Broadway next season: “The Refuge Plays,” an intergenerational family drama written by Nathan Alan Davis (“Nat Turner in Jerusalem”), and directed by Patricia McGregor (she is the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, and that theater is also associated with the production), next fall, and “Jonah,” a boarding school coming-of-age story written by Rachel Bonds (“The Lonely Few”) and directed by Danya Taymor (“Pass Over”), next spring. And it said it would produce “Covenant,” about a blues musician who may or may not have made a deal with the devil, written by York Walker and directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene and staged in its Off Off Broadway underground black box space in the fall. More

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      Review: In ‘The Wanderers,’ Two Marriages and a Movie Star

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      Anna Ziegler’s play about an Orthodox couple in the 1970s and an unorthodox one in the 2010s explores the limits of longing.There’s no shortage of stories that explore the merits and pitfalls of arranged marriages. In the Jewish subcategory alone, we have “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and the perennial “Fiddler on the Roof.” But Anna Ziegler’s awkwardly hitched play “The Wanderers,” which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, may be the first to consider the problem of forced matches while also exemplifying it.A shotgun seems to have been involved in forcing its two incompatible tales under one roof. The first begins in 1973 with the wedding of Esther and Schmuli, members of the Satmar Hasidic community who barely know each other. Even if Schmuli (Dave Klasko) is a bit meek, and Esther (Lucy Freyer) alarmingly headstrong, they seem at first like a traditional Orthodox couple, looking forward to making a family.Nevertheless, within five years, their marriage is in ruins. Schmuli has spirited away their daughters; Esther has fled Brooklyn with their infant son, Abraham.That’s not a spoiler but the foundation for the second story, which takes place decades later and proceeds in alternating “chapters” with the first. Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is now an acclaimed 40-something novelist, having won, we are told, “a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards before turning 30.” The purple samples of his work provided suggest that the prizes were massively misjudged.Somewhat too conveniently for himself and the play, Abe is married to the daughter of another Satmar refugee. His mother and hers, best friends since childhood, raised Abe and Sophie (Sarah Cooper) to be each other’s “bashert”: their fate, their soul mates.Eddie Kaye Thomas and Sarah Cooper, on the table, portray a married couple with connections to an Orthodox couple played by Lucy Freyer, far left, and Dave Klasko, sitting at the two ends of the table.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhether they also chose that fate is an open question; for all their similarities, there are also crucial differences. For one thing, Sophie, who is biracial, grew up with a father — a Black professor of environmental science — but Abe rarely saw his after the separation. Precious about his loss, yet glib about other people’s, he has the charismatic narcissist’s ability to finagle subservience.That’s already a lot of plot for a 105-minute play, even before the lopsided interaction between the two stories, and the potential to explore generational harm through them, is overshadowed by an out-of-the-blue development. At a reading in a Brooklyn bookstore, Abe spots in the front row a well-known actress, a longtime crush who is apparently on his freebie list. Immediately afterward he receives an email that leads to a correspondence featuring thousands of others, many flirtatious to the point of virtual adultery.Unaccountably, the actress is given the name Julia Cheever, a herring so far past red it’s bleeding. As played by Katie Holmes, with whom the character shares certain biographical features, Julia is glamorous and wry but strangely underpowered. That’s in part a lack of stage authority; in this Off Broadway Roundabout Theater Company production, Holmes, though she appeared in the 2008 Broadway revival of “All My Sons” and in Theresa Rebeck’s “Dead Accounts” in 2012, is still feeling her way around a world that lacks a camera.But her indistinctness is also the result of the problem of representing virtual communication onstage. Sometimes the director Barry Edelstein has Julia sit face-to-face with Abe, or even touching, as if in the same room. Other times, she wanders about Marion Williams’s set, which consists almost entirely of books, while reciting her emails as if they were soliloquies.At least hers are down-to-earth. Abe’s are high-flown, pretentious — which is but one way this plot thread recalls the infamous electronic flirtation between the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and the actress Natalie Portman. Ziegler has said she found that correspondence, part of which was published in The New York Times, “pretty juicy,” but in repurposing it for the play, she seems to have spilled the juice everywhere. As written, and in Thomas’s crafty performance, Abe bears enough of a resemblance to Foer (who also has a mother named Esther) to make you wonder what the point is.In any case, the real governing spirit here isn’t Foer but the frequently name-dropped Philip Roth; Abe seems to aspire not just to his stature but also to his characters’ unapologetic selfishness. That Sophie tolerates this while also taking nearly sole responsibility for their two children, who could not possibly be as whiny as her husband, is something of a mystery, at least for a half-hour. But pretty soon, and with growing irritation thereafter, the explanatory twist becomes obvious, leaving the big revelation at the end of the play a letdown.Is it too much of a hint to mention that catfish is not kosher?Helpfully, Cooper, known for her comic lip-syncing of Donald Trump, has a fresh and natural energy onstage. Even so, the plot mechanics ensure that Sophie isn’t given enough playable material to make us want to stay in her story. And Abe, who thinks he is deep, is unbearable.The social strictures facing Freyer’s Esther and Klasko’s Schmuli seem impossible to alter and are thus political, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only by contrast, Schmuli and Esther are more engaging. The forces aligned against their happiness are not merely theoretical as with Abe and Sophie; they emerge from social strictures that seem impossible to alter and are thus political. This gives the emotions of their scenes more complexity, and though Freyer can’t do much else with her troubled character, Klasko is at times heartbreaking in his portrait of conflicted and hopelessly unenlightened love.The comparison between the two marriages, each undone by the search for something outside the characters’ ken, nevertheless feels specious. The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing. More authentic are the wigs by Tommy Kurzman and costumes by David Israel Reynoso; you certainly never question which world you’re in as the fur hats and wigs — the shtreimels and sheitels — give way to sweatpants.Still, “The Wanderers” feels, like its vague title, unmoored. That has not been a problem with Ziegler’s previous plays, which include “Photograph 51” (about the molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin) and “Actually” (about a campus sexual assault trial). Both feature stories in which a strong argument is developed single-mindedly through specific conflicts that point toward a crisis.It’s an irony that in trying to weld two such stories together, “The Wanderers” doesn’t enhance those elements but compromises them. Arranged or chosen, not all marriages are bashert.The WanderersThrough April 2 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      She Went Viral Mocking Trump. Now Sarah Cooper Is Taking on a New Role.

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      She is making her professional stage debut in the Off Broadway drama “The Wanderers,” and fulfilling a childhood dream. “It’s transformative,” she said.Way back in 2020, when Donald Trump was still in office and many Americans were stuck at home, Sarah Cooper became Internet-famous in a most idiosyncratic way: by lip-syncing some of the president’s more inartful musings.Using tools she had at hand — her wit, her phone — she built an enormous audience for her short-form videos mocking Trump’s remarks on everything from the coronavirus to crustaceans.The exercise was a bit of a lark, and a bit of a coping mechanism. But for Cooper, an actor-writer-comedian who had had little luck breaking into the entertainment world, it was also a game-changer: She finally signed with an agent (at William Morris Endeavor, one of the biggest talent agencies); she starred in her own Netflix special (“Everything’s Fine,” created with Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph); she adapted one of her books, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings,” into a pilot (it did not get picked up, but was still “an amazing experience”); and she shot a Jerry Seinfeld film (“Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story,” currently in postproduction).Now, at age 45, she is at last doing the thing she has dreamed of since she was a child: performing in a play. She is making her professional stage debut in “The Wanderers,” a drama by Anna Ziegler that is in previews Off Broadway at the Roundabout Theater Company, with the actress Katie Holmes also in the cast.Cooper, who last performed in theater as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, has had a circuitous path back. Born in Jamaica, she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 3, and at first found little family enthusiasm for her artistic aspirations. “They didn’t think that I’d be able to support myself as an actress,” she said, “which, you know, they had a good point.”At college she switched her major from theater to economics; after graduating, she worked in tech design. At 30, she quit to try her hand at acting; when that wasn’t going well, she turned to standup comedy, “and then,” she says, “I went broke.”She wound up managing a design team at Google, but quit that to write. And then came the pandemic, the videos, and all that followed.“Those videos absolutely changed my life,” she said during a recent interview at her apartment high above Downtown Brooklyn, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Cooper is playing a woman who is struggling with her identity as a mother, a wife and a writer in Anna Ziegler’s “The Wanderers,” a Roundabout Theater Company production that is now in previews.Tim Barber for The New York TimesWhat is “The Wanderers” about?“The Wanderers” is about two couples. One couple is very much an arranged marriage, in the Orthodox Jewish community, and the other couple is not arranged. On the surface, it looks like one couple has all of these freedoms and the other one doesn’t. And yet the struggles are very similar between the two.Tell me about your role.I play Sophie, and I am half-Jewish/half-Black. I had a huge failure earlier in my career, but my husband is very successful. When we meet Sophie, it’s about 10 years into their marriage, and she is struggling with her identity as a mother and a wife, and how that is affecting her longing to be a writer. And she’s really feeling distant from her husband.You had a marriage end during the pandemic. How does taking this role resonate for you?It’s very personal: I’m a writer as well; I have a lot of impostor syndrome as well; I question my talent on a nightly basis. I just relate to this character so much.It’s been three years since your first Trump video, which you called “How to Medical.” How do you see that chapter of your life?Right afterward I was very scared of just being known as the Trump Girl, and felt like I wanted to distance myself from it. But I meet people who just come up to me and they just go, “You made me laugh when it was so hard to laugh.” It’s just made me appreciate it a lot more. Those videos helped so many people, and they also helped me. So I’m thankful for it now, even though I know that if I die right now, my obituary would have the name Donald Trump in it, which is not great, but what are you going to do?Do you ever feel tempted to do it again?People ask me to do it all the time, and I have no desire. I like the idea that it exposed the meaninglessness of his words, but I think now that it’s been exposed, there’s nothing left to really do with it.And you’re not going to turn it into a cycle with other characters?I’ve noticed I am very good at lip syncing, so I’ll never say never. But right now I’m really enjoying acting, which is really what my childhood dream was.So what is it like, being in a play?We did a table read, and table reads are always very scary because you think if you do it wrong, you’re going to get fired immediately. And then we moved very quickly to getting on our feet in the rehearsal space for four weeks, which was such a gift. And then you get on that stage, and the lights hit you, and you’re in a costume, and you’re looking at this man who is just this actor but now he’s your husband — it’s transformative. Oddly I feel it’s where exactly I need to be and where exactly I belong.What are you learning?I’m working on my voice, mainly. I’m learning to breathe while I’m speaking, learning how to project, learning about my diaphragm, doing morning and afternoon exercises. I have to say the name of a Philip Roth book, “Sabbath’s Theater,” so all I do every day is say “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater.” It’s not that easy. I got a lot of opportunities by not using my voice, and so now I really have to figure out what that means to use my voice.Have you been seeing theater?I have seen “Take Me Out” four times. I just love that play. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jesse Williams are so great. And masculine vulnerability is just wonderful to watch. I also saw “Tina” twice — I see a play and I have to go see it again. I don’t know what I will see next but if I love it I will see it multiple times.I’m having a hard time figuring out the overlap between “Tina” and “Take Me Out.”Well they both start with T! Actually, I don’t know what it is. With “Tina,” it was the contrast between that forward-facing, “I’m doing this amazing performance; I’m making you happy; I’m making you dance” and then, a second later, “I’m beaten by my husband.” Showing how those two things could be happening at the same time — this awful, awful struggle and this amazing performance — that was incredible to watch. And also, Adrienne Warren — her voice and her presence was just so amazing.So what do you hope is next for you?I am writing a memoir that’s coming out in October. And I want to tell stories. That’s really what I want to do, and whether that’s through writing, through acting, through standup, I want to be able to do whatever it takes to tell stories.Why a memoir?My very first book was “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” and I look back now and realize that a lot of that was inspired by my father, because my father always looks very smart. My memoir is about embracing looking foolish. The more foolish I can allow myself to look, the better, because that’s exposing who I am more, and not conforming to what I think people want to see.Do you miss Trump?In 2020, he said some brilliantly stupid things. You can’t write that stuff. The stuff that he said, it was gold. So I don’t want him back, but making those videos was a lot of fun. More