Sanders, Jay O

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares189 Views

    ‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

    by

    Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters who are caring for their dying father in this tender, funny family drama.Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Maryann Plunkett Says Goodbye to Her Lives in Rhinebeck

      by

      She has portrayed three characters over the course of the 12 plays in Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama.” A decade later, it’s time to move on.Talking with the actress Maryann Plunkett recently, it was hard to know, at times, whether she was speaking as herself or Barbara, Mary or Kate — the three characters she has played over the course of Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama” cycle.Plunkett, 68, has, after all, spent a lot of time immersed in Nelson’s created world: She and her husband, Jay O. Sanders, have appeared in each of the Rhinebeck cycle’s 12 plays. And when the final installment, “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” closed on Sunday, she ended an 11-year journey that documented the lives of three families in upstate New York.There were the Apples, who lived through and reminisced about epochal moments in American history, such as Sept. 11, and came together on Zoom during the pandemic lockdown. Then came the Gabriels, whom Nelson visited three times during the 2016 presidential election year. And after that, the Michaels, an artistic family facing the death of its matriarch, a luminary of modern dance.Along with her husband, Jay O. Sanders, Plunkett has performed in each of the 12 Rhinebeck plays.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett, right, hugging her fellow cast member Rita Wolf before “What Happened?”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett made her Broadway debut in 1983, replacing Carrie Fisher (herself replacing Amanda Plummer) in “Agnes of God,” and opened the musical “Me and My Girl” as the lead three years later. But while she had established herself as a New York treasure, seeing Plunkett in Nelson’s plays, with their profoundly humane intertwining of politics and family relationships, felt revelatory. Over the years, you could see the most subtle emotions float on her face; she would draw the audience in without appearing to be acting at all.Barbara, Nelson said, is “sort of the heart” of the Apple family. “And that’s very much something that comes out of Maryann just naturally,” he added. “She’s an extraordinarily truthful actor, and because of that each time it’s alive, it’s fresh, it’s real. And it’s present, it’s immediate.”With the conclusion of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett is taking on other projects, including a new musical in development and the Kelly Reichardt film “Showing Up,” in which she plays Michelle Williams’s mother.None of that, though, makes leaving her Rhinebeck characters any easier. In a video interview from her home in Manhattan ahead of the last performance, Plunkett talked Apples and pimentos, a certain election night and moving on. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.The “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett said, “has been the experience of my lifetime.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThere are similarities among the three women you have played in the cycle, yet they are not the same people at all. How did you work it out with Richard Nelson?His writing is so specific, without giving you directions on how to do it, that you would just go: “Oh, only Barbara would say this,” or “Kate would never say this.” So it’s very clear without being obvious that, yeah, this is Barbara’s soul, this is Mary’s soul, this is Kate’s soul. I mean, who gets a chance to do a project like this in their lives? Not a lot of people. And to do it with your husband? What a gift that we have been given.And you never played a couple in the cycle.[laughs] No! We were brothers and sisters, then he was my brother-in-law, and in this one I’m the widow of his ex-wife. It was very easy to play brother and sister because we really like each other, and we’re playful with each other. I suppose in a strange way maybe you don’t want to play lovers or something because people might go “Oh, they have no chemistry together.” That would be really embarrassing.The characters all feel real, and lived in. Did anything particularly resonate with you?My mom died three weeks before our first read-through of the first Apple play. She had dementia, and I spent a lot of time with her. Uncle Benjamin, in the Apple plays, had a stroke. It wasn’t dementia, but it manifested itself in things that are similar to dementia, and I felt a great closeness. The yearning maybe was for my own mother, with the protectiveness and responsibility toward him. So much so that after the final performance of the fourth play I said to John DeVries, who played Benjamin, “I feel like I’m having to say goodbye to my mother again.”“Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know,” Plunkett said. “They will move forward.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe conclusion of the Gabriels trilogy, “Women of a Certain Age,” takes place on election night 2016. What was it like to do the show, at the Public Theater, that specific evening?After the play they had a reception downstairs, and they had monitors all around the lobby. I was looking at Richard, and I said, “Oh come on, how bad can it be?” And he said, “Don’t look” [laughs]. And this pall fell over the crowd. My son and his girlfriend were there, it was only the second election they had ever voted in. The next night we were, mercifully, off. When we came back on Thursday, the audience was so somber. Things that used to be a laugh line — it was just these sounds of grief.Food has played a central part in the shows. In the Gabriels plays, you even had to cook in real time. Was it hard to focus on your lines?There was a lot to prepare: Slicing a sausage or an onion, and some things had to be in the oven by a certain time. Of course I’m not looking at a timer, it had to be in by a certain line. It’s almost like music: There is a rhythm. This one [“What Happened?”] is the first play where I have nothing to do, preparing or serving the dinner, and during rehearsal it was weird for me. “Can I do this?” “No, you can’t come in and start cooking; this isn’t your home.”Sanders, left, with Plunkett and Nelson. The trio have worked together on the Rhinebeck plays for over a decade.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesWhat has it been like to spend 11 years on this project?It has been the experience of my lifetime. Our son was in high school, and now he’s 27 years old. My mom had just died, my dad had died three and a half years before the first play. It’s crazy. When we did the 9/11 one, “Sweet and Sad,” you could tell when there were people in the audience who had perhaps lost someone because you would feel the grief. And some nights in this one, when I’m talking about Rose’s death and say it was the virus, sometimes you will hear reactions [makes a gasping sound]. And it’s very hard to just stay focused.What is it like to face down the last performance?I have to say to myself, “We’re going to do a tour” [laughs]. I can’t be self-indulgent and go “Oh my God, it’s over, poor me!” The other day during the show, I got emotional so I picked up the jar of pimentos on the table, and that grounded me. I held on to them until I finished that section. Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know. They will move forward.It looked like he was done with the Apples after four plays, but then he wrote three more for Zoom. Is the “Rhinebeck Panorama” really finished?Sad as I am to say that, yes, I believe it is. It’s this decade, in this country, and in the lives of these three families. And the decade is over, plus one. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      To Love, Honor and Co-Star: Making Room for Two on Zoom

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTo Love, Honor and Co-Star: Making Room for Two on ZoomHiring couples to act together allows us to see two people in one virtual space. For the couples themselves, though, it can feel like “there’s no escape.”Michael Urie, left, and Ryan Spahn have acted together in one short play during the pandemic. Spahn also handled the camera for Urie’s performance of “Buyer & Cellar” from their apartment.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021Last fall, the actor Jason O’Connell agreed to star in a new production of “Talley’s Folly,” Lanford Wilson’s wistful two-hander, for Syracuse Stage. The other hand? His wife, Kate Hamill. While they would film the piece in an empty auditorium, they would spend much of their rehearsal time at home, on Zoom. So much for leaving your role at the stage door.“There’s no escape,” O’Connell said, mostly joking. “There’s no time apart, there’s no breather. There’s no one to complain to about my co-star.”Since March, when theater began to pop up online, savvy producers have looked for Zoom box workarounds and ways of generating the intimacy that only actors sharing the same airspace can provide. A Covid-19 friendly solution: Hire cohabiting couples to perform opposite each another — on sofas, in bedrooms and on the occasional closed stage — with no grids or time lags intervening.That explains how viewers saw two Apple family siblings — Maryann Plunkett’s Barbara and Jay O. Sanders’s Richard — quarantining together in the latest Richard Nelson trilogy, with their West Village apartment subbing for Barbara’s Rhinebeck house. Cohabiting actors also enabled a surprising scene in Sarah Gancher’s “Russian Troll Farm.” Having spent the play on separate screens, the disinformation workers Greg Keller and Danielle Slavick suddenly leapt into the same box and then into bed.Some of these couples have acted together for decades; others have almost never shared a marquee. None of them could have predicted that they would be turning their homes into theaters and reassuring the neighbors that the bloodcurdling shrieks are just a work thing.The New York Times spoke to six theater couples about acting together while living together. These are excerpts from the conversations.Kate Hamill and Jason O’ConnellTogether eight yearsJason O’Connell, left, and Kate Hamill in the Syracuse Stage production of “Talley’s Folly.”Credit…via Syracuse StageHow they met At the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, through a mutual friend. They married in January 2020 and had planned to honeymoon last summer.Pandemic project “Talley’s Folly”Have you worked together much?O’CONNELL We worked together on Kate’s first play, “Sense and Sensibility.” We did “Pride and Prejudice.” Then I wrote an adaptation of “Cyrano” that I directed her in.HAMILL We know lots of people who have a professional/personal divide, but we really don’t.How has working from home been?HAMILL We’re both workaholics. We’ve had to adjust to a slightly different pace of life. Like, “Do we have any hobbies?” After we got done with our first Zoom rehearsal of “Talley’s Folly,” we turned off the camera and we both started crying because we had missed that part of our lives.O’CONNELL It was very, very special, but also bittersweet.HAMILL In the pandemic, as a couple, you either come out of it, like, “Wow, this is really strong and great,” or “Oh no. I’m glad we like each other.”Greg Keller and Danielle SlavickTogether 14 yearsDanielle Slavick, left, and Greg Keller in “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy.”Credit…via TheaterWorks HartfordHow they met At the National Theater Conservatory in Denver, Colo. “We had a talk in the library once about death,” Keller said.Pandemic project “Russian Troll Farm”Have you worked together much?SLAVICK We’ve done a bunch of workshops and readings and stuff, but only one other production together, Sheila Callaghan’s “That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play.”KELLER Nobody’s wanted to bring the passion that is our relationship onto the stage.How has working from home been?SLAVICK Exciting. But also daunting. I was still breastfeeding during rehearsals and I was also pregnant, so I was very nauseous. Having people be part of your home life was just kind of vulnerable. But you’re, like, my favorite actor. So I just liked the opportunity to talk with you and listen to you in that medium.KELLER I’m blushing over here.SLAVICK There was so much equipment! It took over our apartment.KELLER A new couple with a kid moved in. They would hear us screaming at each other, her having fake orgasms.SLAVICK I actually stopped them in the hall and let them know that they don’t need to call the police.Crystal Dickinson and Brandon J. DirdenTogether 21 yearsBrandon J. Dirden, left, and Crystal Dickinson in “The New Math”Credit…via The 24 Hour PlaysHow they met In graduate school at the University of Illinois. “I will never forget seeing her for the first time,” Dirden said. “This gale force coming straight at me.”Pandemic projects “New Math,” as part of the 24 Hour Plays Viral Monologues; “Lessons in Survival”Have you worked together much?DICKINSON The first show we did was “Angels in America.” Brandon was Belize and I was the angel.DIRDEN We work together maybe every other year. It actually helps the relationship. We can’t be too mean to each other, because we’re probably going to have to work together pretty soon.How has working from home been?DICKINSON The 24 Hour Plays reached out to us. I told Brandon, “We’re doing it. You’re going to do one and I’m going to do one. Because we’ve got to do some art.” So we did and I told them, “That was great. Brandon and I should do one together.’” Two weeks later, they were like, “We want to take you up on that.” And I was like, “How are we going to home-school?” We told our playwright, “You have to incorporate our kid.” Which turned out to be fun. Though we did almost kill each other for about five seconds.DIRDEN Chase [their son] was the best part of the process. He took direction very well.Michael Urie and Ryan SpahnTogether 12 yearsUrie and Spahn in Talene Monahon’s short play “Frankie and Will.”Credit…via MCC TheaterHow they met Friends set them up. “We had plans to see ‘Doubt,’” Urie said. “Very romantic.”Pandemic projects “Nora Highland,” “Buyer & Cellar,” “Frankie and Will”Have you worked together much?URIE Most recently, “Hamlet,” which we did in Washington, D.C. We’ve also worked together on some movie projects. Ryan and Halley Feiffer wrote “He’s Way More Famous Than You,” which I directed.SPAHN That was when we learned how to collaborate. We turned our apartment into the production office.How has working from home been?SPAHN Jeremy Wein does Play-PerView. He reached out. I had never even heard of Zoom. I had this two-hander, “Nora Highland.” Michael and Tessa Thompson did it live online.URIE There was no audience, but it felt something like theater, because it was live.SPAHN We would talk about the hunt for that feeling of opening-night jitters.URIE “Buyer & Cellar,” which we did in our living room, had exactly that. It was a big old comedy put together right before you. Ryan was the director of photography.SPAHN After that one, we did a short play Talene Monahon wrote, “Frankie and Will.” Our dog was in it. And we have a cat, so we had to animal wrangle. It gave us something to put our manic, terrified, and laser-focused energy into.Jennifer Byrne and Timothy C. GoodwinTogether four yearsJennifer Byrne, left, and Timothy Goodwin at home with their dog, Awesome.Credit…Timothy C. GoodwinHow they met During a production of “Shear Madness” in Fort Myers, Fla. “We had a start-over first date in New York City,” Byrne said.Pandemic project “Singles in Agriculture”Have you worked together much?BYRNE We never work together. I’m in musical theater and Tim is into plays and film and TV. Our paths for auditions rarely cross.How has working from home been?BYRNE Ken Kaissar and Amy Kaissar, the artistic directors of Bristol Riverside Theater, were looking for acting couples quarantining together. They hit us up by email and Ken found “Singles in Agriculture.” We did a Zoom cold read and it was our rhythm, it was our energy. It felt right.GOODWIN Usually you can leave work at work. But the space that we sleep in is also our rehearsal space and our performance space. We have a nice lighting set up. But as soon as the rehearsal is over we tear it all down.BYRNE We literally open the blinds, we open the windows and we shut the door so that it gets super cold in the bedroom. Almost like starting over.Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. SandersTogether 32 yearsClockwise from lower left: Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett as two of the Apple siblings, along with Laila Robin, Stephen Kunken and Sally Murphy in “What Do We Need to Talk About? Conversations on Zoom.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow they met On the set of “A Man Called Hawk,” a spinoff of “Spenser: For Hire.” “Our first kiss was on film,” Sanders said.Pandemic project The Apple Family Plays’ pandemic trilogyHave you worked together much?SANDERS Countless reading and workshops. And some small film things.PLUNKETT Because of the Rhinebeck panorama [Richard Nelson’s sequence of Rhinebeck-set plays], it feels like we’re working together all the time. We like to work together.How has working from home been?PLUNKETT With the Zoom plays, we’re sitting side by side. It’s the utmost in trust, and playfulness, knowing that I’m looking into Jay’s eyes, but I’m also looking into the character’s eyes. Shoulder to shoulder, captured in a little tiny box, there’s no room for faking it.SANDERS I used to dream about this, when I was a young actor, finding someone who could be a partner, who could be at the same level. It’s a very rare relationship that we’re fortunate to have. We appreciate it every day.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More