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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’

      by

      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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      in Theater

      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

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Trouble in Mind,’ 66 Years Late and Still On Time

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      Alice Childress’s 1955 play about power and race in the theater is a satire and a tragedy that deserves to be a classic.So far this season, five plays by Black authors have opened on Broadway, each with something urgent to say. Whether despairing (“Pass Over”) or lighthearted (“Chicken & Biscuits”), broadly representative (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”) or laser-beam specific (“Lackawanna Blues”), they are talking to us now, like a newspaper come to life. Like newspapers, too, they are remade every day; when I caught up with “Thoughts of a Colored Man” recently, it had been updated with a hot take on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.Yet for sheer crackling timeliness, the play most of the moment is in fact the oldest: Alice Childress’s “Trouble in Mind,” which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Originally produced in 1955 in Greenwich Village, but derailed on its path to becoming the first play by a Black woman to reach Broadway — a distinction that went to Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” four years later — it is only now getting the mainstream attention it deserves, in a Roundabout Theater Company production that does justice to its complexity.And justice, both broadly and narrowly, is the point. What begins as a backstage satire of white cluelessness and Black ingratiation gradually broadens and darkens into something far more mysterious: a peculiarly American tale of lost opportunity.Because Childress uses the play’s structure to express her theme, the ingratiation naturally comes first, and Charles Randolph-Wright’s lively staging leads with warmth and humor. As a mostly Black cast assembles on a perfectly period set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) to begin rehearsing an “anti-lynching” melodrama called “Chaos in Belleville,” their high-spirited chatter is often about fabricated résumés, mutual acquaintances and glorious triumphs past.Yet for Wiletta Mayer (LaChanze) — and for us as we listen — that past is already beginning to crack open. Though she rhapsodizes to the stage doorman (Simon Jones) about a song she once performed in a show called “Brownskin Melody,” she and her colleague Millie Davis (Jessica Frances Dukes) have more often been reduced to “flower” or “jewel” roles: stereotyped Black women with names like Gardenia, Magnolia, Crystal and Opal. In her most recent job, Millie says, “All I did was shout ‘Lord, have mercy!’ for almost two hours every night.”“Chaos in Belleville,” by a white playwright, is no better, despite its supposedly sympathetic theme. In it, Wiletta is set to play Ruby, and Millie to play Petunia: women working for a white family in the Jim Crow South. When Ruby’s son, Job, gets in trouble after daring to vote, the women are left, as usual, to wail and sing.LaChanze and Cooper, who, our critic writes, gives a brilliant, horrific aria that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes a lynching that his character witnessed as a child.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWiletta has no question that the play “stinks.” But then so does any mainstream play she can reasonably hope to book. An idealistic young actor like John Nevins (Brandon Micheal Hall) — who has been cast, in his first Broadway outing, as Job — may feel pride on becoming a part of the theater, but Wiletta knows better.“Colored folks ain’t in no theater,” she says. They are merely in a business.As such, she and Millie — soon joined by Sheldon Forrester (Chuck Cooper), an old hand playing Ruby’s husband — are experts at not rocking the boat. They dress beautifully (in costumes by Emilio Sosa) and feign enthusiasm. In a hilarious yet devastating scene, Wiletta advises John that, in order to feel comfortable, white producers and directors need Black actors to be walking contradictions. They should be “natural” talents yet experienced, not too needy and yet not too cocky, have no opinions except good ones and laugh at every joke.If this seems extreme, read about the experiences of Black theater artists today. The question they have been asking, in manifestoes and Twitter threads, is whether the systemic imbalance of power backstage is in any meaningful sense different from racism.Some 66 years ago, that was precisely Childress’s question as well, and once the white characters appear it starts to get answered. We see that even the most powerless of them — a put-upon stage manager (Alex Mickiewicz), a Yale-trained ingénue (Danielle Campbell) and a neurotic journeyman (Don Stephenson) — have more agency in their profession than any of the Black characters do. The journeyman, though not very good, never lacks for work. (Stephenson, though, is expert.) The ingénue complains that if “Chaos in Belleville” fails she’ll have to move back to her parents’ house in Connecticut, blithely unaware that Sheldon is probably one week’s salary short of homelessness.But it is of course the director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), who sits at the top of the pecking order, pecking away at everyone’s nerves. An egoist whose veneer of open-mindedness is easily stripped away, he regularly explodes in nasty snits that today would be understood (and yet perhaps tolerated) as big-man harassment. Though he calls Wiletta “darling” and “my sweetheart,” his growing intransigence in response to her growing dissatisfaction is the primary source of conflict within the play.From left, Don Stephenson, Michael Zegen, Brandon Micheal Hall, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Jessica Frances Dukes in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheir fight is a fascinating knot of racial politics and dramatic theory. In Zegen’s apt take, Manners has the reptilian insouciance of a would-be Elia Kazan, bringing to the stage the new techniques of Method acting he has learned as a hack in Hollywood. Yet Manners’s demands are completely incoherent, and as Wiletta fails to satisfy him despite “justifying” and “relating to” the nonsensical dialogue she’s given, she realizes that “Chaos in Belleville” is in fact racist — and, in defending it, so is he.LaChanze gets that arc just right in a wonderfully rangy and compelling performance. At first confident that she can continue to game an unfair system, her Wiletta becomes almost existentially confused as insight floods in; when finally she regains her clarity and resolves not to participate in her own degradation, it has the weight of both victory and defeat in one choice.By then, we understand that “Trouble in Mind,” its title taken from a classic blues song about suicide, is, for all its backstage comedy, a tragedy of waste — not, like lynching, the waste of what happens so much as the waste of what doesn’t.All the Black characters, but none of the white ones, know that tragedy intimately. At one point, Sheldon, who spends most of “Chaos in Belleville” saying “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and whittling pointlessly at a stick, casually remarks that unlike that play’s author and director he has actually witnessed a lynching. Cooper then gives us a brilliant, horrific aria, filled with Method detail, that makes you see as if you were behind his eyes, and at the same time makes you understand how much of America’s talent has been squandered.That includes Childress, a figure who looks in hindsight a lot like Wiletta. It was because she refused to license a softened ending that “Trouble in Mind” did not make the move to Broadway after its Off Broadway success; none of her later work made it to Broadway either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important — or that, in our day, as this eye-opening production demonstrates, we can’t make it important again.Trouble in MindThrough Jan. 9 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway

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      Wiletta Mayer walks into the theater already knowing how things will go. Smartly dressed, attractive and middle-aged (don’t ask for a number, because “a woman that’ll tell her age will tell anything”), she is a veteran actress who’s played maids and mammies and knows how to cater to white directors and producers. You can call it “Uncle Tomming.” Or you can call it plain common sense. Either way, it’s a living.Until enough is enough.Alice Childress created Wiletta Mayer, the protagonist of her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” to paint a realistic portrait of what it was to be Black in the theater industry. Or to be more accurate: She wanted to portray what it is to be Black in theater, because 66 years later, as the play opens on Broadway in a Roundabout Theater Company production, the words Childress wrote remain just as relevant.And yet this author and play, a comedy-drama about an interracial cast rehearsing an anti-lynching play written by a white author and led by a white director, haven’t gotten their proper due in the decades since its premiere. Childress was supposed to be the first Black female playwright on Broadway, with a play critiquing the racism and misogyny of the theater industry.Thanks to interfering white theatermakers and a Broadway unwelcoming to challenging Black art, things didn’t turn out as planned. But the content of the play, and its troubled production history, prove how rightly “Trouble in Mind” and its author should be celebrated as part of the canon.From left: Chuck Cooper, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Michael Zegen in “Trouble in Mind,” which will have its long-awaited Broadway opening night this month.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the play, Wiletta arrives for her part in “Chaos in Belleville” alongside a young Black actor named John; an older Black actor named Sheldon; a younger Black actress named Millie; and two white actors, Judy, a well-meaning yet naïve Yale graduate, and Bill, a neurotic character actor. The play within the play is about a Black man who dares to vote and is killed for it.During rehearsals Wiletta tries to give the newcomer John tips on how to survive as a Black actor in the business, but her own advice fails when the white director, Al Manners, pushes her to perpetuate stereotypes.It’s a familiar scenario, one Childress encountered herself as a young actress in the 1944 Broadway production of “Anna Lucasta.” She based Wiletta on the character actress Georgia Burke, who appeared with her in that production. Like Wiletta, Burke had also done her fair share of mammy roles, and she would later appear in the original Broadway “Porgy and Bess.”Burke had problems with the director of “Anna Lucasta,” but Childress knew her to complain only to her fellow Black actors; when it came to white directors and producers she kept quiet for the sake of her career.In “Trouble in Mind,” Childress wrote a version of Burke who finally had to speak up.“Darling, don’t think. You’re great until you start thinking,” Al Manners says to Wiletta during rehearsals. That kind of condescending treatment may have been par for the course for Black theater performers. Childress, however, was uncompromising.“She was a woman of amazing integrity,” said Kathy Perkins, Childress’s friend and the editor of a major anthology of her plays. (She is also the lighting designer for Roundabout’s production.) “She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”Childress, at left, with actors rehearsing the premiere of “Trouble in Mind” in 1955.Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIt’s this integrity — or, more accurately, the times choking a great writer of integrity — that cost Childress Broadway. In an ironic echo of the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when “Trouble in Mind” was slated for its Off Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with the actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.The play premiered on Nov. 5, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theater, and ran for 91 performances.But that version isn’t the version we know today.The white producers were concerned about the play’s ending, which they thought was too negative. According to Perkins, as a relatively new playwright Childress was intimidated by these experienced producers.And then there was the rest of the cast and crew to think about. Childress was a fierce advocate for unions and workers’ rights, and feared that pulling the play would cost everyone their jobs. So she conceded, providing an ending of reconciliation and racial harmony, even though she maintained that it was unrealistic.The New York Times praised the play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire” — except for the ending. Childress always regretted the change, and said she’d never compromise her artistic integrity again. So when “Trouble in Mind” was optioned for Broadway with the happy ending and a new title (“So Early Monday Morning”), Childress refused. She would have been the first Black female playwright to see her work there; instead, that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry four years later, for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Childress, who died in 1994, never had the financial success nor popular recognition that her work merited in her lifetime. It’s unfortunate because her plays are works of merit. Many of her works, like “Florence” (1949), “Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” (1966) and “Wine in the Wilderness” (1969), are confrontational without being pandering or preachy. Not simply about race, they are also about gender and class and artistry, and challenge their audiences to look at their own prejudices and misconceptions. (Theater for a New Audience is reviving “Wedding Band,” a tale of interracial love set amid the 1918 flu pandemic, Off Broadway this spring.)And they’re clever. The meta structure of “Trouble in Mind” makes Childress’s satire especially poignant; it’s both explicitly biting and subtly searing.Childress, at right, with James Broderick and Ruby Dee, the stars of the 1972 production of her play “Wedding Band.” Theater for a New Audience will present a revival in 2022.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesOne reason Childress is often left out of conversations about the American canon is her style. In an essay in “The Cambridge Companion to African-American Theater,” the historian and dramaturge Adrienne Macki Braconi calls Childress a “transitional” writer, unheralded because her work reflects “the conventions of dramatic realism.”“Critics often overlook their subtle variations on the form, including such innovations as bold thematic content; assertive, complex female characters; and a focus on lower-class and middle-class blacks,” Macki Braconi wrote of Childress and the writer Eulalie Spence.Sandra Shannon, a scholar of Black theater and emeritus professor of African-American literature at Howard University, maintained that Childress’s blend of naturalistic dialogue and social commentary put her “at the top of her game” among playwrights in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Her plays, Shannon said, “raise awareness, stop short of just getting out and marching in the streets.”And La Vinia Delois Jennings, the author of the 1995 book “Alice Childress” and a distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Tennessee, pointed out the “dynamism” of Childress’s works, which so often feature Black women taking agency. The stereotypical trope of the angry Black woman gets turned on its head, Jennings said, proving that anger can be “liberating — a force that brings about change.”But for all of Childress’s dynamism, it still took over 60 years to get her work to a Broadway stage.A 1950 portrait of Alice Childress, painted by Alice Neel, was included in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art show.The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner; The Collection of Art BerlinerCharles Randolph-Wright, who will be directing the Broadway production, said he’s been eyeing this play for the big stage for more than a decade.On June 20, 2011, a nonprofit called Project1Voice hosted an event in which 19 theaters across the country did readings of “Trouble in Mind.” Randolph-Wright directed a Roundabout reading at the American Airlines Theater, which included André De Shields, Leslie Uggams, Bill Irwin and LaChanze, who will be starring as Wiletta in the full production at the same Broadway venue.“I’ll never forget everyone coming up to me saying, ‘Did you rewrite this?’ and I was like, ‘No, she wrote this in 1955.’ And they said, ‘But you tweaked it —’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t touch one thing,” Randolph-Wright explained.After all, theater insiders and outsiders are still loudly calling for improved representation more than a half-century later.“There’s been a false sense of progress. That progress has been in fits and starts,” Shannon said. “The same issues that Childress deals with, or dealt with in the 1950s with ‘Trouble in Mind,’ have always been bubbling beneath the surface. They’ve never gone away.”In one scene in the play, Manners says, “I want truth. What is truth? Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe, that is all. You must have integrity about your work.”Though the statement comes from a flawed character, the sentiment is Childress all the way. Perkins said that at the end of the day, Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she only wrote for herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.Randolph-Wright said he thinks of John Lewis when he approaches the play. “It is ‘good trouble,’ ” he said, referring to the call to action made famous by the activist and congressman. “It agitates, it illuminates, it makes you laugh, it’s entertaining.”But he hopes this production will only be the beginning — that audiences will learn more about Childress’s work, and that she and other Black writers will get greater recognition for their contributions to the art form. Because this moment — after Black Lives Matter and “We See You, White American Theater,” and when seven new Broadway plays this fall are by Black writers — is perfect for Childress, but also for Spence and Ed Bullins and Angelina Weld Grimké and other Black playwrights past and present.So will change really come this time around? The version of “Trouble in Mind” that’s finally arriving on Broadway ends inconclusively, not optimistically. The ending Childress’s producers rejected back in 1955 seems right for right now. More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘Caroline, or Change’ Makes History’s Heartbreak Sing

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      An electrifying revival of the 2003 musical, featuring a titanic performance by Sharon D Clarke, follows the money to the source of American inequality.Difficult, even painful stories are no impediment to great musicals. Maybe the opposite is true. Pogroms, suicides and revolutions have all been turned into transcendent shows.Still, few have dared to tell as many such stories as “Caroline, or Change” does. But of the subjects “Caroline” grabs in the meaty fist of its ambition — civil rights, economics, mourning, the Mississippi floodplain — the most radical is also the most traditional: the anguish of troubled love.I speak not of love like Tony and Maria’s, nor even Porgy and Bess’s, but of the love, more honored in the breach, between Blacks and Jews. No musical has ever faced its country’s history, its creators’ history and the history of its genre — which has often caricatured both groups — as unblinkingly as “Caroline.”That was true when it premiered at the Public Theater in 2003 and feels truer now in the electrifying Broadway revival that opened on Wednesday at Studio 54. Not because much has changed in the show itself. Tony Kushner’s book and lyrics, no less than Jeanine Tesori’s flood of ’60s-style music, remain models of thematic concision, wonders of imagery, daring pileups of incompatible emotions.But the world around “Caroline” has changed in ways that make it seem more prescient, more painful and — despite a performance of tragic grandeur in the title role by Sharon D Clarke — more hopeful now than it did back then. As if to acknowledge that, the first thing we see in Michael Longhurst’s shrewd staging for the Roundabout Theater Company, based on his 2018 British production, is a Confederate statue called “that ol copper Nightmare Man.” By evening’s end, at least that nightmare will be over.Others will remain to prickle your conscience and your politics; the premise almost seems designed to make you squirm. Caroline Thibodeaux is a 39-year-old Black woman who, in 1963, works for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Cleaning, doing laundry and minding 8-year-old Noah after school, she earns $30 a week; on that paltry salary, lacking the help of her absent husband, she must sustain her children. With tyrannical self-discipline that leaves little time for warmth, she very nearly manages.As the leading character in a musical, Caroline is unique: Titanically dour, she seeks to repel all sympathy her circumstances might invite. Noah, too, is a complex character, mourning his mother’s death from lung cancer and fixating on Caroline as a substitute parent. (In this production, three young actors alternate in the role.)Despite their twinned sadnesses, Noah’s love thaws Caroline only to the point of allowing him to light her daily cigarette. Otherwise, she treats him as she might an untrained puppy, shooing him out of the basement where she works, “16 feet below sea level,” in the oppressive heat and humidity of the appliances of her trade.The equilibrium of this precarious system is carefully set up in the opening scenes, as is the musical’s stylistic daring. Instead of a chorus, Kushner provides a pantheon of singing allegorical figures: the bubbly washing machine (Arica Jackson), the infernal dryer (Kevin S. McAllister), the sexy radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles, wearing aerial tiaras), and the serene moon (N’Kenge). (Later, there’s also a bus, wonderfully voiced by McAllister.) Around these companions she can be herself, as she daren’t around Noah or his despised new stepmother, Rose.Clarke, center, in the musical in which the emotional underpinnings of the household are equated with economics, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCaroline’s imperviousness at first tips the balance of the show’s sympathy toward Noah, whose fantasy of being centrally important in her life is excused by his youth and his grief. (If he is something of a martyr, perhaps it is not insignificant that Kushner sets the semi-autobiographical story at 913 St. Anthony Street.) In a more typical musical, the fulfillment of his needs would fulfill Caroline’s as well.Instead, Noah (Jaden Myles Waldman on the night I attended) precipitates the show’s crisis, unwittingly egged on by Rose (Caissie Levy). Recently married to Noah’s feckless father, and trying to assert authority in the awkward situation, she imposes a new rule: Caroline should keep any change she finds in Noah’s dirty clothes. When Noah, in response, starts leaving money deliberately, Caroline must fight with herself about taking it; the emotional underpinnings of the household, which Kushner equates with economics, very quickly collapse. Change causes change.And that’s barely the half of it. “Caroline” is as full of incident as Kushner’s “Angels in America,” but hugely condensed and then heightened by song. The wonder is that it is never less than thrilling to experience. This being a musical, the music is part of that; Tesori’s wondrous score is like the search function on a car radio, picking up snippets of every genre on the dial. The sounds of klezmer, blues, Broadway, Motown, Mozart and girl-group pop, among many others, pinpoint each character but also serve as expressive vehicles for the larger ideas the story is assembling.Those ideas start small. It seems merely an irritating infraction, for instance, that Rose mispronounces Caroline’s name as Carolyn — until you notice Clarke wincing as if struck when it happens.And Noah’s fantasies, which at first seem merely sweet, soon grow ridiculous and grandiose. He imagines Caroline’s children — teenage Emmie (Samantha Williams) and her younger brothers Jackie and Joe (Alexander Bello and Jayden Theophile on the night I attended) — praising him over dinner for his largess: “Thank God we can eat now!” In reality, they do not think of him at all.Caroline does, if no longer as a pitiful boy then as an ethical dilemma, an heir to the exploitative ways of even liberal whites. Nor does she see Rose as anything more than a tightfisted employer. I’m afraid I almost did, too; it’s a rare miscalculation that she is made the villain of a piece that doesn’t need one. (Surely Noah’s father, Stuart, a musician who in John Cariani’s performance is as mournful as the clarinet he plays, is just as culpable.) In any case, the force of the characters’ needs, once set in motion, is more than enough to do the damage.From left, Adam Makké, Caissie Levy, John Cariani, Chip Zien, Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn at a Hanukkah dinner that sets up the oncoming collision.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLonghurst best dramatizes the oncoming collision in his acute staging of the Gellmans’ Hanukkah dinner. At the middle of the stage, the family — now expanded to include Rose’s lefty father visiting from New York (Chip Zien) and Stuart’s don’t-rock-the-boat Southern parents (Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn) — sing and dance and argue. Rose’s father offers Noah a marvelously compact sermon along with a fateful $20 bill:Money follows certain laws,it’s worth how much it’s worth becausesomewhere, something’s valued less;it’s how our blessings come, I guess.Meanwhile we see Caroline, her friend, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), and Emmie hustling to prepare and serve the holiday meal as they circumnavigate the Gellmans on a turntable. Though the whites are literally centered, the image nevertheless decenters whiteness, with the Black characters often obscuring them. Thus we are well prepared, though we may still gasp, when late in the second act Noah asks if he and Caroline can ever again be friends.Her answer is crushing: “Weren’t never friends.”That huge lesson in the boy’s life, a lesson the actual boy evidently took to heart, is but a moment in Caroline’s. The story does not end with him but with her and her family. If this is an admirable insight from white authors, keep in mind that the musical was strongly shaped by Black artists as well, among them the original director, George C. Wolfe, and his Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Their imprint is everywhere.Now Clarke, who won an Olivier award for her performance in the British production, adds hers. She makes of the maid an almost Shakespearean figure; even at the depths of the character’s despair, in the scarifying 11 o’clock number “Lot’s Wife,” she commands attention without begging for it, and does not allow herself, because Caroline wouldn’t, the luxury of collapse.The result of that restraint is more painful than cathartic, leaving the story’s emotional release to those who can afford it: Caroline’s children. The chance to believe in change is her hard-won bequest to them — and, in this devastating, uncomfortable, crucial musical, to us.Caroline, or ChangeThrough Jan. 9 at Studio 54, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More