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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

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      Review: ‘You Will Get Sick’ Tells the Untellable, for a Price

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      In a new Off Broadway play, Linda Lavin shines as a woman paid to say what an ailing young man cannot.Disease, dying and death are usually depicted as wretched or bloody onstage. We’re meant to cry or recoil.As you might guess from its title, though, “You Will Get Sick,” which opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, is more matter-of-fact. It seems to promise a bald memento mori in the form of a fortune cookie.Yet the play, written by Noah Diaz, directed by Sam Pinkleton and starring the evergreen Linda Lavin, is far more than that. Neither prosaic nor clinical, it defies all expectations for a story in which the main character receives a fatal diagnosis, telling the tale in the most lively, surreal and surprising ways imaginable.For one thing, Lavin, who is 85, does not play the character who’s ill. Turning the template upside down, she instead plays the caregiver, Callan — if you can call someone a caregiver whose every act of care is minutely monetized. Never lifting a finger without naming a price, she’s more like an end-of-life TaskRabbit, having answered an ad from a man seeking someone to listen to him admit that he’s sick.That he can’t actually say the word reflects on the way his life as a millennial — he’s in his 30s — has failed to prepare him to envision such a fate. But for his initial payment of $20, he purchases the opportunity to practice his confession by telling Callan that his limbs are growing numb as his illness progresses. Soon he will be paying her more to break the news to his narcissistic sister (Marinda Anderson) and others in his orbit. Even his co-workers don’t know why he hasn’t been at work.The playwright, making his New York debut, is withholding too. He elects not to name the character (he’s simply called #1 in the script) or even the disease, which resembles multiple sclerosis. But in Daniel K. Isaac’s typically and appealingly restrained performance, we understand much more. This is a man who protects himself against too much feeling by keeping the flow of information to a minimum. The flow of money replaces it.From left, Marinda Anderson, Isaac and Lavin. All the actors except Isaac play multiple roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch omissions and substitutions are part of the play’s overall approach. We never do hear #1 say the things he wants said; that service is provided instead by a disembodied narrator (Dario Ladani Sanchez) and of course by Callan, who, aside from the paid-for retellings, turns the story into a monologue for her night-school acting class.If this Cubist approach sounds too clever, it is in fact functional. The second-person narration (“Your hand goes numb,” says the voice) reproduces in the audience the sensation of dissociation #1 feels as his body starts to operate independently of his will. And the third-person monologue (“His balance isn’t right,” Callan declaims) demonstrates how our stories, even when buried, may yet leach into the world.For Diaz, theater is clearly part of that process; the slightly indulgent acting class sequences engage in some affectionate if too easy satire. (“There is no can’t,” says the teacher. “There is sometimes cannot … There is mostly maybe … We call that do.”) Yet when #1 accompanies Callan to a session one evening, the trite instruction to “live inside our bodies” becomes, in a quietly joyful moment between them, profound, experienced from opposing side of wellness.Lavin’s wit is in full bloom playing a woman who, unlike herself, is a terrible actor and a worse singer. (When prompted to walk like a lion, she’s suddenly Gwen Verdon doing Fosse.) Callan is as rich as any role she’s had in years — and even richer in some ways, because it doesn’t trade, as her characters in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” and “The Lyons” did, on her innate glamour. Far from it: Her Callan is that woman you see on the subway, pawing through a dirty tote bag, her auburn perm three inches grown out.And yet, as a foul-mouthed, don’t-mess-with-me urban lady with sincere if hopeless dreams in her head, Lavin has never seemed more vital, sly and fearless. When she admits that she wants to play Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” — to which #1 incredulously responds, “Did this Dorothy see the trials of war and age 60 years?” — you somehow feel the deep sense of the ludicrous self-casting.Such underground connections are at the heart of “You Will Get Sick”; Diaz is working a surrealist vein that doesn’t mean to make an argument so much as to plant the seeds of one you can have with yourself later. That all the actors except Isaac play multiple roles — Nate Miller plays seven, marvelously — suggests layers of correspondence among them. Most of Miller’s are fearful, for instance, and Anderson’s are all hilariously tin-eared. When #1’s body starts turning into hay, you may begin to see that they are familiar archetypes as well.Anderson, above center, leads Isaac, Lavin and Nate Miller in animal exercises during an acting class.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe hay — not to mention the marauding birds, “The Wizard of Oz” and the narrative legerdemain — could easily have made “You Will Get Sick” too self-consciously poetic, its spray of images dissipating too quickly. But Diaz, who is 29, has had time to refine and tighten the script since he wrote it in drama school in 2018. In any case, it flies by, feeling even shorter yet fuller than its 85 minutes, especially as the imagery coalesces in a neat pull of strings at the end.That a play in which sadness is always biting at your fingers comes off this light and funny in performance requires a great deal of discipline. Some of that clearly comes from Pinkleton, whose direction trusts the material deeply enough to ask the audience to come toward it instead of the other way around. No surprise that he is also a choreographer, nominated for a Tony Award for his work on “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”; he’s alert to the play’s internal rhythms.The Roundabout Theater Company production is also alert technically, with a trick box of a set by the design collective dots, lighting by Cha See, costumes by Michael Krass and Alicia Austin, and — especially — a powerful sound design, both apocalyptic and psychological, by Lee Kinney. He helps you believe in the existence of the soul, and also the forces that threaten it.If this all makes “You Will Get Sick” sound avant-garde and difficult, that’s part of the problem Diaz is addressing. Disease, dying and death are the opposite of avant-garde; they’re old news. And they’re difficult only in the way old news is: They happen to other people, always in the past. When it comes to our own demise, we don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that’s why, in “You Will Get Sick,” we gladly pay Diaz to do it for us.You Will Get SickThrough Dec. 11 at the Laura Pels Theater; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘1776,’ When All Men, and Only Men, Were Created Equal

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      A revival of the musical about the Declaration of Independence underlines the gender imbalance among the Founding Fathers — and everything else.A transformation that’s either wondrous or scandalous, depending on your taste, occurs less than a minute into the Roundabout Theater Company’s otherwise disappointing Broadway revival of “1776.”Barely a line has been uttered or a note sung when the performers, who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, and are wearing more-or-less contemporary streetwear, hike up their black tights and white socks to simulate breeches, don buckle shoes in place of clunky boots, step into frock coats of various colonial cuts and become (thanks to Emilio Sosa’s outstanding costume design) our Founding Fathers. That includes Elizabeth A. Davis, who makes a very visibly pregnant Thomas Jefferson.Though some will see the casting — which is diverse not just in gender but also in race and ethnicity — as a stunt and a travesty, I’m in the wondrous camp. Neither the 1969 musical nor (as “Hamilton” has proved) history itself is so frail as to crumple under new ways of looking at our theatrical and national past. Anyway, if you prefer, you can simply ignore the fact that these fathers aren’t men, and focus — or try to — on the plot, which encompasses nothing less than the months of negotiations and maneuverings that led, just barely, to the Declaration of Independence.But if you are willing to allow yourself a double vision, as the directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus clearly hope, you can take independence a step further. The white maleness of the characters becomes a semi-translucent screen through which we see the many other people, including people like the cast, whom the Declaration never even considered.Sara Porkalob, center, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, who dissects John Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor me, that double vision is the best thing about the production, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. In theory, it deepens the ideas being batted about in the hot, fetid, fly-infested Philadelphia summer. So the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams, as played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is Black, is not just an abolitionist on principle but in essence. And when Sara Porkalob, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, dissects Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum” — showing how the North benefits from the slave trade as well as the South — the fact that she is Filipino American both intensifies and complicates the argument.If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.At first dismissed as Bicentennial-era pageantry, “1776” has survived all the ensuing upheavals of American history precisely because it is, within the confines of the genre, remarkably sophisticated about the forces at play in forging a nation from colonies harboring antithetical philosophies — and in forging a musical from similarly unlikely and conflicting raw materials. An Encores! production in 2016, which featured a racially diverse cast but the usual gender assignments, showed it could be modern and yet thoughtful and moving.But the current revival seems interested in the cast’s experience at the expense of the audience’s. I can understand that impulse, especially when creating space on a major stage for actors who rarely get it.Still, the best interpretations are those that, regardless of the performer’s professional history, find feeling in the specific actions of the text rather than in their personal feelings of exclusion from it. The Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello thus creates the character of the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson mostly by holding back on the outrage and offering smiles and politesse in its place. And as Abigail Adams, the Broadway newcomer Allyson Kaye Daniel is gently firm and dryly touching, achieving a lovely, modest balance in those contradictions.Carolee Carmello, center, as the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson. She’s joined by, from left: Oneika Phillips, Gisella Adisa, Porkalob, Sushma Saha, Nancy Anderson and Eryn LeCroy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore often, though, the performances are so vastly histrionic and unchecked by the social situation (this is Congress, after all) that they seem inside-out. Adams jumps on tables to make points. Patrena Murray so emphasizes Benjamin Franklin’s winky sententiousness that he seems like a joke, not a brilliant tactician. Eryn LeCroy makes of “He Plays the Violin” — a dainty minuet in which Martha Jefferson sings of her love for Thomas — a full-on psychodrama.It does not help that the new arrangements and orchestrations, aiming to refresh the songs’ profiles in the way the casting is meant to refresh the story, merely make them muddy — and make many of the lyrics unintelligible.If that’s not always a great loss, it certainly detracts from the show’s most powerful number, “Momma, Look Sharp.” A simple minor-key air sung from the point of view of a dead young soldier, it is performed here (by Salome B. Smith) as a belty anthem, complete with a moaning and heaving ensemble and a figure apparently representing Momma. (She’s looking! She’s crying!) When performers mime the emotions we should be having, the storytelling contract has been broken.Nor do Page (who is also the show’s choreographer) and Paulus (who has directed Broadway revivals of “Pippin” and “Porgy and Bess”) show much interest in the show’s humor. As some of it is ribald and sexist — probably accurately so — they prefer to defuse it by winking as if to say: Don’t worry, we don’t mean any harm. What a wasted opportunity! In dealing with such material, a nonmale cast might mean harm in the best way, forcing us to think about the character of men in their time and ours, and providing the kind of added value a regendered revival seemed to promise.Instead we get subtracted value. I don’t mean for the cast, who deserve the opportunity, or even for the theater as an industry and an ecosystem. As the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar said in a New York Times round-table discussion about putting history onstage, there is merit in “moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see.” I agree. And if those narratives sometimes fail, well, so do most others; we might as well be open to everything.But underlining one’s progressiveness a thousand times, as this “1776” does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It’s only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?1776Through Jan. 8 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘… What the End Will Be’ Review: Learning to Let Go

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      The intergenerational comedy is a poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra.Kinship with our elders is a privilege not often afforded to queer people. How many sons have come out to gay fathers and grandfathers? Imagining the possibility of these generational bonds feels like a reparative gesture in “…What the End Will Be,” an astute and poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra, which opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater.Did I mention it’s also a comedy?The play is set in a stylish living room in a posh Atlanta suburb, where Maxwell (Emerson Brooks) has taken in his ailing father Bartholomew (Keith Randolph Smith). Because Bartholomew has Stage 4 bone cancer, there’s only one way this can go, and he is already browsing for caskets online. But Maxwell, a careerist whose ambitions are a fortress against reality, is in deep denial. (“No dying,” he says to his father, laying the ground rules for their new living arrangement.)While Bartholomew is readying his goodbyes, Maxwell’s teenage son, Tony (Gerald Caesar), is figuring out who he wants to be. When Antoine, a femme and fabulous boy from school (Ryan Jamaal Swain), is caught sneaking out of Tony’s room, Tony reveals that he’s more than just a friend. “That’s your type?” Maxwell asks derisively, betraying a reflexive narrow-mindedness. (Tony had already confided in Charles, Maxwell’s more understanding husband, played by Randy Harrison.) But Bartholomew is pleased. “Bring it in, Champ!” he says, with a predictable aphorism about apples falling from trees.Then he grows wistful. “I wish I would’ve had somebody hug me when I came out of the closet,” he continues.Now, Chloe (Tiffany Villarin), a gracious in-home nurse, is Bartholomew’s most intimate source of comfort. The ghost of his dead partner (also played by Swain) haunts him like the pain he refuses to rate honestly on a scale from one to 10.Learning to let go — of personal hang-ups, social expectations and ultimately of life itself — is at the heart of “… What the End Will Be,” which is not shy on sentimentality. Directed by Margot Bordelon, the 90-minute production would not feel out of place on prime-time television, where straightforward setups deliver clear emotional payoffs with a side of laughs. But there’s gratifying nourishment in Ra’s recipe, a restorative fantasy as much as it is an unabashed tear-jerker.What if instead of being presumed absent, Black fathers were depicted as fallibly present? And rather than having his life taken away, a Black man were pictured in control over how he leaves the world? That all of the men in Ra’s play are gay fuels his confrontation with the assumptions and limitations heaped on them because they are Black.Assured and affecting performances from the cast succeed in tugging at heartstrings, especially Smith’s, whose frail ox ready for pasture is rueful but grounded, in a role that might easily turn maudlin. Swain is a total delight as the most self-actualized queen in the room, unwilling to dim his light for anyone still living in the dark. (“I’ve been offending people since I twirled out of the womb,” he says.)Bordelon’s staging for Roundabout Theater Company balances the play’s humor with its sobering central conceit. The slickly appointed interior, designed by Reid Thompson and covered with art that Bartholomew describes as Afrocentric, demonstrates Maxwell’s faith in the protective powers of material wealth. But money is no defense from human frailty.“… What the End Will Be” is less wide-ranging and conceptual than Ra’s previous work Off Broadway, “In the Southern Breeze,” and more playful and light-footed than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” also staged by Roundabout when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.In “… What the End Will be,” facing death really means reckoning with life — what makes it worth living despite its impermanence — and learning how to seize some measure of joy for yourself. It’s everything that is meant when we say that Black lives matter.… What the End Will BeThrough July 10 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More