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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

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      ‘Birthday Candles’ Review: Another Year, Another Cake, Another Profundity

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      Debra Messing expounds on the preciousness of life in a production that aspires to convey eloquent whimsy, but too often feels methodically sentimental.Repetition can make magic happen: repeat a word or a phrase enough times and it breathes new life, fresh meaning. Or repetition can strip language until all that’s left are empty rhythms and sounds. Words are funny like that.Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the American Airlines Theater, tries to build poignancy and depth through moments that repeat like a record needle stuck in a groove. Instead, this Roundabout Theater Company production gets caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes.“I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!” So declares the precocious 17-year-old Ernestine (Debra Messing) as the show opens. It’s her birthday, and her mother (Susannah Flood) is making golden butter cake; it’s a tradition, one that Ernestine clings to for years, baking the same cake for herself over 90 birthdays, which we live through with her in the course of the 90-minute play.Messing, center, as the teenage Ernestine and Susannah Flood as her mother.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith a fanciful offstage chime Ernestine instantly skips from one age to the next, though at an inconsistent clip — sometimes a year, sometimes a decade, but we’re always on her birthday, and she’s always baking her cake. (Messing beats the eggs, creams the butter and mixes the batter in real time, making this sugar-addicted critic wonder: Where are our slices?)As she bakes, the details of her life fill in around her: Family members and friends enter and exit, are born and die. With a chime her high school crush, Matt (John Earl Jelks), becomes her husband. Another and they have a teenage son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), and a daughter in college, Madeline (Flood, heartachingly tragic), and before Ernestine knows it Billy is ready to propose to his hopelessly neurotic girlfriend, Joan (a delightful Crystal Finn).All the while Ernestine’s lovesick friend Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni, adorable at any age) casually strolls in unannounced, carrying a torch for her for decades.With ordinary characters expounding on the preciousness of life, “Birthday Candles” aspires to convey eloquent whimsy — births, deaths, love, despair, whole constellations of human feelings and thoughts — but it’s Christine Jones’ wondrous set design that wordlessly manages the trick.A homey powder-blue kitchen is framed by three door-less thresholds on the left, right and center — each one representing passage into the house or the outside world, or a more metaphysical passage into the afterlife. Dwarfing the kitchen is a night sky messy with floating objects — keyboard, tricycle, dollhouse, umbrella, soccer ball, a teddy bear with his right arm extended, left paw positioned over his face as though in embarrassment or fear.It’s there that we neatly see how the personal can meet the universal. Down below, though, we are dutifully following an unrelenting parade of progeny embodied, “Lehman Trilogy”-style, by Flood, Finn, Jelks and Livingston. At some points it becomes a hassle to see the view from Ernestine’s family tree, given how quickly figures in her life disappear, and how children transform into grandchildren, then great-grandchildren.These shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their characters’ varied ages in succinct lines: a lifetime in just a few minutes. Most of the cast, particularly Messing, who delivers an awkward caricature of a teen and then the exaggerated hand-wringing and dithering warble of an old woman, struggle in the sunrise and sunset years.Vivienne Benesch’s direction exaggerates the methodical sentimentality of Haidle’s script, allowing broad, clichéd gestures to do shorthand work. The teens, slouching from one end of the stage to the next, are unbearably self-righteous. (“You’re a shadow in a suit posing as a human, you should be ashamed of yourself,” sneer the teenage avatars of two generations, in one of the play’s funnier repetitions.) And the middle-aged adults wilt into the weary postures of seniors, with their sighs and ailments, right before our eyes.The shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their aging characters in a few lines. Late in life, Messing’s Ernesteine is flanked by (from left) Flood, Enrico Colantoni, Christopher Livingston, Jelks and Crystal Finn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Ernestine shuffles closer to a century of birthdays, the metamorphoses lean into emotional manipulation. We watch one character suddenly going slack, his face twisting and his hands stiffening in place, as if suffering a stroke. It’s unsettling, but for anyone who has seen family affected by illness, such transitions feel gauche; a quick change in posture and a handful of lines meant to represent the monumental losses we reckon with in, as Ernestine calls it, “the daily human errand.”“Birthday Candles” nearly suffocates in such grandiloquent pronouncements and existential metaphors. Ingredients for the birthday cake include not just the usual pantry staples but “stardust, the machinery of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.” Characters recite lines from “King Lear” so as to share the mad monarch’s rantings about the nature of life and the passage of time.Even a poor goldfish, a nonunion actor in a round bowl on the kitchen table, works his tail off as a stand-in for what Kenneth calls “the divinity within yourself.”In some ways this reach for the cosmic comes with the territory. In surreal plays like his 2016 “Smokefall,” Haidle aspires to mix multigenerational family drama and poetic musings. And he acknowledges that this work, his Broadway debut, is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” which, like his classic “Our Town,” employs chronological jumps as a means of considering love, life and death in the stories of everyday people.At its most strained, “Birthday Candles” feels like an imitation of a superior work. The time-hopping conceit doesn’t allow us to get a real sense of the world beyond Ernestine’s kitchen. That said, there were plenty of empathetic sniffles and sighs in the audience during the performance. The most moving moments to me were those quiet exchanges that functioned as silhouettes for unspoken griefs. After one devastating loss, Ernestine and Matt bake a cake together in a weighty silence; after a few seconds he walks away, head hanging like a half-mast flag on a windless day.Ernestine’s story predictably finishes by circling back to the beginning — cake, stardust and atoms. Allow me to end with my own dose of carefully administered déjà vu: repetition can make magic happen. But real magic comes from the forward-march of a life whose everyday rhythms may repeat, sure, but still leave room for accident and chance — the most sensational improvisation.Birthday CandlesThrough May 29 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org; Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. 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      Debra Messing Can Age Easily in ‘Birthday Candles.’ It’s Baking That’s Hard.

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      An actress with an obsessive work ethic, Messing is learning to make a cake onstage in “Birthday Candles” on Broadway.“Birthday Candles,” the existential dramedy now in previews on Broadway, relies on a simple recipe: an eight-step process for a golden butter cake. At every performance, the actress playing Ernestine, the show’s Everywoman heroine, bakes that cake onstage, in real time.Here, in Roundabout Theater Company’s production, that actress is Debra Messing, which means that “Birthday Candles” depends on yet another recipe: Find a Hollywood star. Rehearse. Repeat.If you’re wondering whether Messing is a baker, let’s just say that when she tried out the recipe during the first wave of the pandemic, the cake exploded. She had added nearly two cups of baking powder, rather than nearly two teaspoons.“It took me two days to clean out the oven,” she recalled in an interview. “I can honestly say that the baking has become the thing that I am most nervous about.”Considering that Messing never leaves the stage, and that Ernestine ages 90 years — from 17 to 107 — in 90 breathless minutes, this is saying something.MESSING, A 53-YEAR-OLD ACTRESS who marries daffy comedy to a ramrod work ethic, was speaking on a recent afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the American Airlines Theater, where “Birthday Candles” opens April 10. She wore a purple sweater and a surgical face mask, with her famous red hair mounded on top of her head — less of a bun than an entire gâteau.John Earl Jelks, left, with Messing in the play, which opens April 10 at the American Airlines Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Messing tells it, she has always been hungry: “to act, to learn, to progress.” Taken to “Annie,” a musical about a spunky redhead, as a 7-year-old, she decided that acting was for her. Even then, she took her craft seriously; the following summer, she played a blind girl in a play at camp and insisted on rehearsing with her eyes closed. She walked off the stage and into the orchestra pit. It was the first of many workplace injuries to come.Messing wanted to be a musical theater performer, a triple threat. Her dancing, she said, is merely adequate, so she tops out at a double threat. After college at Brandeis and graduate school at New York University, she talked herself into a lead role on the sitcom “Ned and Stacey.” Michael J. Weithorn, the creator, hadn’t thought that she came across as Jewish enough or neurotic enough. But Messing is, by her own proud admission, both of these things.“Happy neuroticism,” said Vivienne Benesch, who is directing “Birthday Candles” and has known Messing since graduate school. (Benesch has a lot of memories from those days; one involves a unitard.)“Ned and Stacey” ran for two years. When it ended, Messing booked “Will & Grace,” a sitcom about a gay lawyer (Eric McCormack) and his best friend, a straight interior designer (Messing). Though a conventional network sitcom, “Will & Grace” was a milestone for queer representation, and it allowed Messing to refine her gift for dizzy, kinetic physical comedy.“She’s not afraid to show up and fall over things in service of the story,” McCormack said in a phone interview, as he was recovering from emergency dental surgery — but still wanted to speak about his friend.McCormack also confirmed her reputation as something of a workaholic. “That is her strong suit,” he said. “She will delve.”When the original run of “Will & Grace” ended, in 2006, Messing starred in a mini-series, “The Starter Wife,” that later came back for an additional season. In 2011, she heard about a new musical drama, “Smash,” a brainchild of the playwright Theresa Rebeck and Steven Spielberg that was planned for Showtime before it moved to NBC.“I was like, ‘I have to be part of this,’” Messing said. “I am going to be able to play a character where I watch people sing and dance all day long.”She was cast as Julia, the book writer of a Broadway-bound musical about Marilyn Monroe. Rebeck recalled being glad to have her, saying: “She’s extremely beautiful. And she’s funny. She’s fearlessly funny.” (Rebeck also said, perhaps less generously, that Messing had a lot of input in Julia’s controversial, scarf-forward wardrobe.)Despite a strong pilot, “Smash” splintered. Messing blamed the firing of Rebeck after the first season, but problems had surfaced earlier. When it ended, after two seasons, Messing went to Broadway for John Patrick Shanley’s oddball romantic comedy “Outside Mullingar.” She played a detective on “The Mysteries of Laura,” another show that didn’t last for long. Then “Will & Grace” was revived — something Messing preferred not to discuss. When it finished in 2020, after three seasons, she was ready for Broadway again.“Birthday Candles,” by Noah Haidle, premiered at the Detroit Public Theater in 2018. A year later, Roundabout, which has a long relationship with Haidle, greenlit a cold reading. Haidle requested Messing because, he said, “She’s good at acting and a very famous person.”Messing, who listens to the “Birthday Candles” script as she falls asleep, said, “Doing the work gives me peace.”Kholood Eid for The New York TimesBenesch, the director, sent the script to Messing, who read it on her bed, laughing, then crying. She arrived for the reading more prepared than anyone Haidle had ever seen. Afterward, Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, said that he wanted the play for Broadway. But it seemed as if there were other plays contending for a slot. So, to sweeten the deal, Messing sent him a cake, with sprinkles and “Let’s Do It” written in icing.Had she baked it?“Oh, hell no,” Messing said. “I wanted him to say yes.” The next day, he did, but then the pandemic pushed opening night back a couple of years.THE PLAY, WHICH GESTURES toward modernist classics like Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” takes place on a single set: the kitchen of a middle-class home in Grand Rapids, Mich. Ernestine enters as a teenager. “I am going to be a rebel against the universe,” she says. “Wage war with the everyday.”When the lights go down 90 minutes later, she is a great-great grandmother, reconciled to the universe. In between there are births, death, comedies, tragedies. Every scene takes place on one of her birthdays and the golden butter cake is baked continuously, without benefit of a mixer. (They’re too loud.)During the pandemic lockdown, Messing caught up on “Real Housewives” shows and attempted the ukulele. She also studied the script for “Birthday Candles.” Some parts came to her easily; she identified with the young Ernestine’s passion and expansiveness. The breakdown of the middle-aged Ernestine’s marriage, her experiences of loss — these resonated, too. But what Ernestine undergoes later is unfamiliar. “I haven’t experienced any of it yet,” Messing said.She watched YouTube videos of centenarians: studying how they moved, how they sat. She also worked with a voice coach to learn about what happens to the larynx as women age. Ernestine never leaves the stage, so there are no prosthetics or wigs. Aging, then, is effected through body and voice, plus subtle changes in hairstyle and eyewear.“I’m not 107,” Messing said. “I don’t know anyone who’s 107. So part of it is trusting that the homework will protect me and support me.”It’s working, for Haidle anyway. “Whatever she’s doing,” he said, “it’s like a magic trick.”Part of this trick: Messing listens to the script every night while she sleeps. (“So intense,” Haidle said.) This, she believes, helps her learn lines. It also makes her feel that she is doing her utmost. “Doing the work gives me peace,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s helping or not, but putting it on and falling asleep to it, I like to think that it’s getting embedded in a deeper way.”Nothing about her approach seems light. Typically, actors move through technical rehearsals casually. But during a recent one — as Messing and a co-star, Enrico Colantoni, worked through a scene — she seemed to give a full performance for each pass. She even wanted him to do a real kiss.“Kiss me,” she insisted. “Kiss me, come on.” Under her sweater, blue this time, she was wearing a pain relief patch, because hunching over as a 107-year-old, as she had done in rehearsal the day before, had put a lot of strain on her lower back.Baking has required extra preparation. It’s a science, Messing said, and science was never really her thing. It doesn’t help that each stir, crack and sprinkle is precisely timed to Ernestine’s milestone events.“The milk is the thing that really just makes me want to go to a sanitarium,” she said.But Messing has practiced — and practiced, and practiced — and she believes that by the time the play opens, she will be able to bake the cake comfortably, reliably linking each step to Ernestine’s sweet and bitter journey through life.Still, there are limits. “Frosting?” she said. “Forget it.”At home, she has finally made the cake successfully and marveled at how humble staples — butter, sugar, eggs — combine into something astonishing, a moment of transcendence wrested from the ordinary. So even though allergies and intolerances and an eating plan she adopted around the time she turned 50 mean that Messing avoids nearly all of the ingredients, she tried a bite.“I was like, This is so delicious,” she said. “I was like, Oh yeah, I get it.” More

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      Debra Messing Masters Baking for ‘Birthday Candles’

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      An actress with an obsessive work ethic, Messing is learning to make a cake onstage in “Birthday Candles” on Broadway.“Birthday Candles,” the existential dramedy now in previews on Broadway, relies on a simple recipe: an eight-step process for a golden butter cake. At every performance, the actress playing Ernestine, the show’s Everywoman heroine, bakes that cake onstage, in real time.Here, in Roundabout Theater Company’s production, that actress is Debra Messing, which means that “Birthday Candles” depends on yet another recipe: Find a Hollywood star. Rehearse. Repeat.If you’re wondering whether Messing is a baker, let’s just say that when she tried out the recipe during the first wave of the pandemic, the cake exploded. She had added nearly two cups of baking powder, rather than nearly two teaspoons.“It took me two days to clean out the oven,” she recalled in an interview. “I can honestly say that the baking has become the thing that I am most nervous about.”Considering that Messing never leaves the stage, and that Ernestine ages 90 years — from 17 to 107 — in 90 breathless minutes, this is saying something.MESSING, A 53-YEAR-OLD ACTRESS who marries daffy comedy to a ramrod work ethic, was speaking on a recent afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the American Airlines Theater, where “Birthday Candles” opens April 10. She wore a purple sweater and a surgical face mask, with her famous red hair mounded on top of her head — less of a bun than an entire gâteau.John Earl Jelks, left, with Messing in the play, which opens April 10 at the American Airlines Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Messing tells it, she has always been hungry: “to act, to learn, to progress.” Taken to “Annie,” a musical about a spunky redhead, as a 7-year-old, she decided that acting was for her. Even then, she took her craft seriously; the following summer, she played a blind girl in a play at camp and insisted on rehearsing with her eyes closed. She walked off the stage and into the orchestra pit. It was the first of many workplace injuries to come.Messing wanted to be a musical theater performer, a triple threat. Her dancing, she said, is merely adequate, so she tops out at a double threat. After college at Brandeis and graduate school at New York University, she talked herself into a lead role on the sitcom “Ned and Stacey.” Michael J. Weithorn, the creator, hadn’t thought that she came across as Jewish enough or neurotic enough. But Messing is, by her own proud admission, both of these things.“Happy neuroticism,” said Vivienne Benesch, who is directing “Birthday Candles” and has known Messing since graduate school. (Benesch has a lot of memories from those days; one involves a unitard.)“Ned and Stacey” ran for two years. When it ended, Messing booked “Will & Grace,” a sitcom about a gay lawyer (Eric McCormack) and his best friend, a straight interior designer (Messing). Though a conventional network sitcom, “Will & Grace” was a milestone for queer representation, and it allowed Messing to refine her gift for dizzy, kinetic physical comedy.“She’s not afraid to show up and fall over things in service of the story,” McCormack said in a phone interview, as he was recovering from emergency dental surgery — but still wanted to speak about his friend.McCormack also confirmed her reputation as something of a workaholic. “That is her strong suit,” he said. “She will delve.”When the original run of “Will & Grace” ended, in 2006, Messing starred in a mini-series, “The Starter Wife,” that later came back for an additional season. In 2011, she heard about a new musical drama, “Smash,” a brainchild of the playwright Theresa Rebeck and Steven Spielberg that was planned for Showtime before it moved to NBC.“I was like, ‘I have to be part of this,’” Messing said. “I am going to be able to play a character where I watch people sing and dance all day long.”She was cast as Julia, the book writer of a Broadway-bound musical about Marilyn Monroe. Rebeck recalled being glad to have her, saying: “She’s extremely beautiful. And she’s funny. She’s fearlessly funny.” (Rebeck also said, perhaps less generously, that Messing had a lot of input in Julia’s controversial, scarf-forward wardrobe.)Despite a strong pilot, “Smash” splintered. Messing blamed the firing of Rebeck after the first season, but problems had surfaced earlier. When it ended, after two seasons, Messing went to Broadway for John Patrick Shanley’s oddball romantic comedy “Outside Mullingar.” She played a detective on “The Mysteries of Laura,” another show that didn’t last for long. Then “Will & Grace” was revived — something Messing preferred not to discuss. When it finished in 2020, after three seasons, she was ready for Broadway again.“Birthday Candles,” by Noah Haidle, premiered at the Detroit Public Theater in 2018. A year later, Roundabout, which has a long relationship with Haidle, greenlit a cold reading. Haidle requested Messing because, he said, “She’s good at acting and a very famous person.”Messing, who listens to the “Birthday Candles” script as she falls asleep, said, “Doing the work gives me peace.”Kholood Eid for The New York TimesBenesch, the director, sent the script to Messing, who read it on her bed, laughing, then crying. She arrived for the reading more prepared than anyone Haidle had ever seen. Afterward, Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, said that he wanted the play for Broadway. But it seemed as if there were other plays contending for a slot. So, to sweeten the deal, Messing sent him a cake, with sprinkles and “Let’s Do It” written in icing.Had she baked it?“Oh, hell no,” Messing said. “I wanted him to say yes.” The next day, he did, but then the pandemic pushed opening night back a couple of years.THE PLAY, WHICH GESTURES toward modernist classics like Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” takes place on a single set: the kitchen of a middle-class home in Grand Rapids, Mich. Ernestine enters as a teenager. “I am going to be a rebel against the universe,” she says. “Wage war with the everyday.”When the lights go down 90 minutes later, she is a great-great grandmother, reconciled to the universe. In between there are births, death, comedies, tragedies. Every scene takes place on one of her birthdays and the golden butter cake is baked continuously, without benefit of a mixer. (They’re too loud.)During the pandemic lockdown, Messing caught up on “Real Housewives” shows and attempted the ukulele. She also studied the script for “Birthday Candles.” Some parts came to her easily; she identified with the young Ernestine’s passion and expansiveness. The breakdown of the middle-aged Ernestine’s marriage, her experiences of loss — these resonated, too. But what Ernestine undergoes later is unfamiliar. “I haven’t experienced any of it yet,” Messing said.She watched YouTube videos of centenarians: studying how they moved, how they sat. She also worked with a voice coach to learn about what happens to the larynx as women age. Ernestine never leaves the stage, so there are no prosthetics or wigs. Aging, then, is effected through body and voice, plus subtle changes in hairstyle and eyewear.“I’m not 107,” Messing said. “I don’t know anyone who’s 107. So part of it is trusting that the homework will protect me and support me.”It’s working, for Haidle anyway. “Whatever she’s doing,” he said, “it’s like a magic trick.”Part of this trick: Messing listens to the script every night while she sleeps. (“So intense,” Haidle said.) This, she believes, helps her learn lines. It also makes her feel that she is doing her utmost. “Doing the work gives me peace,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s helping or not, but putting it on and falling asleep to it, I like to think that it’s getting embedded in a deeper way.”Nothing about her approach seems light. Typically, actors move through technical rehearsals casually. But during a recent one — as Messing and a co-star, Enrico Colantoni, worked through a scene — she seemed to give a full performance for each pass. She even wanted him to do a real kiss.“Kiss me,” she insisted. “Kiss me, come on.” Under her sweater, blue this time, she was wearing a pain relief patch, because hunching over as a 107-year-old, as she had done in rehearsal the day before, had put a lot of strain on her lower back.Baking has required extra preparation. It’s a science, Messing said, and science was never really her thing. It doesn’t help that each stir, crack and sprinkle is precisely timed to Ernestine’s milestone events.“The milk is the thing that really just makes me want to go to a sanitarium,” she said.But Messing has practiced — and practiced, and practiced — and she believes that by the time the play opens, she will be able to bake the cake comfortably, reliably linking each step to Ernestine’s sweet and bitter journey through life.Still, there are limits. “Frosting?” she said. “Forget it.”At home, she has finally made the cake successfully and marveled at how humble staples — butter, sugar, eggs — combine into something astonishing, a moment of transcendence wrested from the ordinary. So even though allergies and intolerances and an eating plan she adopted around the time she turned 50 mean that Messing avoids nearly all of the ingredients, she tried a bite.“I was like, This is so delicious,” she said. “I was like, Oh yeah, I get it.” More

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      Review: Learning ‘English,’ When Your Accent Is a ‘War Crime’

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      In a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi, four Iranians and their language teacher find second selves in a second tongue.If you’ve ever tried, as an adult, to learn a new language, you know how painful it can be; it’s bad enough to hear yourself mangling Italian, but worse to hear it mangling you. For those of us accustomed to sounding sharp with our words, it can come as quite a blow to discover the shabby figure we cut in the ill-fitting suit of someone else’s.How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.The play, a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, is after all set in Iran in 2008, against a backdrop of travel restrictions and family separations. Each of the four students prepping for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, at a storefront school in Karaj, a city of two million not far from Tehran, has a different reason for enrolling.For the cheerful 18-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the promise and pleasure of new opportunity is reason enough. “English is the rice,” she explains in the inadvertent poetry of the partially fluent. “You take some rice, and you make the rice whatever you want.”But the others are more ambivalent. Dignified Roya (Pooya Mohseni) is there only because her son, who lives in “the Canada” with his wife and daughter, has insisted she speak English if she wants to live with them. He will not have his daughter’s assimilation threatened, he has warned, by a grandmother cooing in Farsi.If Roya is angry about this situation, she mostly suppresses the feeling, leaving her son hilariously passive-aggressive voice mail messages in which she offers evidence of her growing fluency. “I know all the numbers now,” she tells him. “Forty-three. Five hundred and thirty-eight. And seven.”But for Elham (Tala Ashe), anxiety is upfront: Having failed the Toefl five times, she must pass it if she wants her provisional acceptance at an Australian medical school to become official. When the Toefl teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), tells her that “English isn’t your enemy,” she answers, “It is feeling like yes.” Her accent, she adds, is “a war crime.”Marjan learned English during nine years spent living in Manchester, England, gradually experiencing the way the fog of alienation can give way, through language, to the thrill of connection. Now that she is back in Iran, though, her English is eroding at the edges, at least in comparison to that of the fourth student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose accent is minimal and vocabulary exceptional. Playing a game in which everyone must name items of clothing as quickly as possible while tossing a ball, he wins handily, wowing the others with “windbreaker.”Tabbal, left, plays the standout student in the English class taught by Neshat’s character. We understand her fluency (nine years in Britain), but there’s a mystery behind his (where did he learn the word “windbreaker”?).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the course of 22 scenes representing lessons, office hours and smoke breaks during the six-week course, we get to know all five characters well, and yet they also remain as stubbornly enigmatic as people do in real life. Their progress, too, is unpredictable, their skills sometimes stalling, then bounding forward, with new words and seemingly new ideas emerging.Not that we are told this; we just see it happen, thanks to Toossi’s clever theatricalization of the process. (When the characters speak English, they do so haltingly and with an accent; when they speak Farsi, which we hear in English, it’s swift and unaccented.) Even Elham, her W’s no longer sounding like V’s, and her tempo improved from largo to allegretto, is eventually able to pose a challenge to Omid’s fluency.The mystery of that fluency (why does he know “windbreaker”?) is one of the more obvious tensioning devices in a play that, despite its pleasures — but also at the root of them — has a somewhat schematic structure. Like a lifeboat movie, it features the immediate and broad differentiation of characters, their shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.Nor are its themes entirely novel; the drama of superimposing one language on another is at the heart of works as widely varied as Brian Friel’s “Translations” (in which a 19th-century cartographer is charged with rendering Irish place names in English) and the hyper-asterisked Leo Rosten novel “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,” set among immigrants in a night school English class and turned into a musical in 1968.But the delicacy of Toossi’s development handily makes up for both problems, especially the hysteria of lifeboat melodrama; in a recent interview in The New York Times, she told my colleague Alexis Soloski that “writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave.”So in dealing with characters who could easily be exoticized in their chadors, Toossi has chosen instead to focus on their familiarity; like most of us, they deal less with the disaster of geopolitics than with an atmosphere of mild if daily discomfort. As such, the insights here are deep but never shattering, as when Roya perceives the crucial distinction between the verbs “visit” and “live” in one of her son’s messages. If the world’s happiness does not depend on it, a grandmother’s does.The director Knud Adams gently underlines the calm, almost classical rhythms of Toossi’s writing. Chopinesque piano solos play between scenes. As the play contemplates the question of language from several angles, the cube-like set, by Marsha Ginsberg, slowly rotates, offering in turn a street view of the building, the classroom interior and an entry portico. The cast is uniformly excellent, in a suitably unshowy but fully lived-in way.Too much delicacy has a way of wearing thin, though; with its refusal of trauma and even climax — the romance, if there is one, is buried — “English” begins to feel a bit overlong despite its moderate running time of an hour and 45 minutes.Still, the longueurs are worth it, forcing the audience into a useful position of slight non-fluency. We don’t always know what is going on in the play, as we don’t in the world either. And as each character struggles to decide whether to become another person by mastering another language, we are asked to consider whether we in the English-speaking West are not just cultural imperialists but linguistic ones as well. And whether, perhaps, those are really the same thing.EnglishThrough March 13 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      A Season to Savor a Cherished Musical Again and Again (and Again)

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      Our critic didn’t set out to see “Caroline, or Change” seven times, but amid so much uncertainty the show turned out to be just what she needed.Settling into my seat at Studio 54, I let the sound design begin to transport me like a musical overture — the chittering of creatures and the bubbling of water, echoing from tall grasses and low haze on the edge of a Southern swamp.At each performance of “Caroline, or Change,” I look forward to this calming bit of preshow acclimation, even as a Confederate statue stands imposingly at center stage. And I keep my eyes peeled for the theater’s Covid safety enforcer patrolling the orchestra, arms crossed, scanning the audience for any unmasked faces. Spotting him calms me, too.When the lights dim, the statue is wheeled off, and in its place when they come up again is Caroline Thibodeaux, in the person of the astonishing British actor Sharon D Clarke, doing laundry in a Louisiana basement in 1963.I didn’t set out to see this musical masterpiece by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori seven times this season, but I have. For the record, I’d been scared to see it even once — scared the way you get when you cherish a work of art so fiercely that you don’t want to risk finding it diminished.It didn’t matter to my brain that theater’s habit of reinvention is one of the things I love about the form, or that this Broadway revival got rave reviews in London. “Caroline” is my favorite musical, and I was protective of my memory of it. I’d been mad since 2004 that George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production ran only a few months. (Hold a grudge much? Yeah, I know.)Yet Michael Longhurst’s gorgeous iteration, for Roundabout Theater Company, turned out to be just what I’ve needed: a work of intricate beauty to savor again and again in this strange, uncertain season. After catching the first preview in October, I started telling people that I would see it three times a week if I could.Sounded like I was exaggerating. I was not.Inspired by Kushner’s own Louisiana childhood, “Caroline” is the fictional story of a divorced Black maid working for a Jewish family mired in grief and paying her what they know is too little to get by on. Comedy and fantasy leaven the ugliness and pain, but the music, the lyrics, the characters are complex. It’s not a show to be absorbed in one swoop.If this production had opened as planned in what was to have been the busy spring of 2020, there’s no way I would have seen it as many times as I have. Repeated viewing at any scale is a rare luxury for me, and the chance to do it to such an extent with “Caroline” is a direct effect of the pandemic. In an unsettled season with a cascade of postponements and cancellations, lower ticket demand and fewer productions mean bargain prices and, if you’re a theater journalist like I am, a lot more free evenings.So I have been taking advantage — which I feel guilty admitting, because of course I could have spent that same time seeing deserving new work that I missed completely. Instead I’ve been giving one show a closer, longer look than usual, watching extraordinary cast members deepen their performances so far beyond that thrilling first preview that I can’t honestly regret it.Domhnall Gleeson, with Aoife Duffin in the background, in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesCritics tend to see multiple productions of the same play — especially in seasons when there seem to be 47 stagings of “King Lear” or 18 of “The Tempest” — but not multiple performances of a single production, unless it transfers somewhere, usually to Broadway from Off Broadway or an out-of-town tryout. Even then, we only see the beginning of each run, while the production keeps changing after that.In theater — unlike films and TV shows, which stay frozen no matter how many times you watch them — the ritual of repetition coexists with change. As in other kinds of live performance, exact duplication is impossible, and also not the point. Evolution is the hope, which I’ve seen realized in “Caroline.”It has been quite frankly exhilarating to watch the company get tighter and tighter, especially at a time when public perception is that Broadway in particular and theater in general are a pandemic shambles. At the matinee just this Wednesday — the matinee! — Clarke gave a shattering performance, as alive to the text and the moment as any other I’d seen, but with elements new to me: an inflection, a movement, a vocal fillip at the end of a song. Such are the many layers of her character.“I love dissecting it. I love it,” Clarke exulted to me in an interview in October, the day after the first preview.Three months on, with the musical’s limited run set to close this weekend, it feels like she is still investigating.The other show I revisited this fall was Enda Walsh’s “Medicine,” but that wasn’t because I’d been wild about it initially. Walsh’s plays sometimes land with me and sometimes don’t. This one — chaotic, often funny, with Domhnall Gleeson’s understated performance at its heart — did not.I first saw it in November at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Six days later, in an interview, Gleeson told me that he had only just figured out how the show, which the company had performed elsewhere, worked in the St. Ann’s space. I gave it another shot because of that — and because his passion for another Walsh play, “The Walworth Farce,” prompted me to read it, an experience that left me wide awake when I finished it after 1 a.m., my every nerve ending taut.The second time I saw “Medicine,” in December, I watched it more deliberately, and it absolutely landed. Outside afterward, I walked through a patch of park and stood staring out at the East River, shaken. If the play had stayed in town longer, I’d have gone again.But when I see a show repeatedly in the same run — as I did with two of the plays in Phyllida Lloyd’s Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, also at St. Ann’s — I tend to top out at three viewings.Zawe Ashton, from left, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the 2019 Broadway production of “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened with the Broadway productions of “The Cher Show” (where seeing Stephanie J. Block’s understudy at one performance made me realize Block’s particular power) and “Sea Wall/A Life” (where I listened ferociously to figure out what was sound design and what was sound bleed from outside). My curiosity about both was professional, though; going more than once was about reporting.Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was different. Its first preview blindsided me: a Pinter play that could make me cry? I became fascinated with the geometry of emotion in the production — with where Lloyd placed the characters on the set, and how their isolation signified. Determined to watch the staging from different angles in the house, I went five times in all.When I told Lloyd about that, during an interview toward the end of the show’s run, he inquired about the actors: “And have you noticed variations in their performances?” I still wonder which answer he might have been looking for: reassurance that the show had stayed lively or that it hadn’t flown off the rails.I would be a little heartbroken if “Caroline” had gone off the rails — always my worry when a production runs for a while. As it is, when it gives its final performance on Sunday, I plan to be there, seeing it for the eighth time.After that, I expect I’ll be in the market for a new obsession. I’m thinking maybe “Company.” More