Shed (Manhattan, NY)

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      Final Sondheim Musical Will Be Staged in New York This Fall

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      His long-gestating final show, now titled “Here We Are,” is coming to the Shed; it is inspired by two Luis Buñuel films.Stephen Sondheim’s long-in-the-works Luis Buñuel musical, which he described as unfinished just days before his death, will be staged in New York this fall, giving audiences the chance to see the final show by one of the most important artists in musical theater history.The musical, now titled “Here We Are,” is inspired by two Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics; the book is by the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), and Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) will direct.The show, scheduled to begin performances in September, will be a commercial Off Broadway venture, produced by Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) in a 500-seat theater at the Shed, a multidisciplinary arts venue in Hudson Yards. The Shed, a nonprofit, is being described as a co-presenter.It is not entirely clear when Sondheim began working on the show, but he first discussed it publicly in 2014, and there were delays and setbacks in the years following. He talked about it occasionally during public appearances; for a time it was called “Buñuel,” and then “Square One”; it was backed at various points by the commercial producer Scott Rudin and by the nonprofit Public Theater. And there were workshops over the years, including one in 2016, and one in 2021 featuring Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters; casting for the production at the Shed has not been announced, but there are no indications that Lane and Peters have remained with the project.In an interview days before his death in late 2021, Sondheim described it this way: “I don’t know if I should give the so-called plot away, but the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”Sondheim described the show as incomplete, as did some of his collaborators in the days following his death. It is not clear what state it was in when he died, and what kind of work has been done to it since.Sondheim’s posthumous career has been booming. This season has featured Broadway revivals of “Into the Woods” (which opened last summer) and “Sweeney Todd” (which opens this month), as well as Off Broadway revivals of “Assassins” and “Merrily We Roll Along.” The “Merrily” revival is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in September, the same month that “Here We Are” is now expected to begin at the Shed. More

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      Review: In ‘Misty,’ a Restless Artist Grapples With a Gentrifying City

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      At the Shed, Arinzé Kene mixes spoken word, music and comedy to tell a story of racial tension and male identity in a changing London.There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in “Misty,” which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer Arinzé Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching.The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kene’s opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a “generic angry young Black man”? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but it’s also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist.In the show that Kene says he’s writing, he plays a Londoner navigating an increasingly hostile city, likening its rhythms to the inner workings of a living creature. (“Misty” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, where, in 2018, it transferred to the West End.) Accompanied by live beats and with microphone in hand, he delivers spoken verse as the Black man: He leaves the drunk passenger behind, visits a lover and later discovers that his mother has locked him out of their home and he’s being pursued by the police.The poetry-slam vibe of these scenes is regularly interrupted by Kene’s many critics: His older sister (played as a young girl by the child actor Braxton Paul at the performance I saw) hangs him out to dry over email. The play’s American producer (represented by an empty director’s chair and a lit cigarette resting in an ashtray) is voiced, hilariously, in snippets of speeches by President Barack Obama. “I feel like I’m outside myself, second-guessing what is expected of me,” Kene tells him.Kene’s “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater, our critic writes.Sara KrulwichKene is a versatile artist, who comes across onstage as strikingly honest and vulnerable; “Misty” is as much about the challenges of his creative process as the outcome (a bit of clowning that finds Kene encased in a giant balloon is an apt visual metaphor). The production, from the director Omar Elerian, is beautifully atmospheric, propulsive and often a sensory feat. But “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater.Audience comprehension may be strained, for example, by the time Kene clarifies that the man on the bus isn’t him, but a friend who inspired the show. It’s around the same time that Kene reverses the play’s central, and ultimately overworked, conceit, insisting that white gentrifiers, rather than Black men, are viruses infecting the city. (The police, however, remain antivirals.) Kene favors repetition, in his lyrics and broader thematic construction, a style that might benefit from a tighter running time (the show is two hours with an intermission).There is a meta irony to bemoaning gentrification from inside this Hudson Yards theater, and to confronting white audiences with what they expect to see there. Even in interrogating the conundrum Kene faces as a Black artist, “Misty” narrowly addresses itself to white perspectives. It’s a trap that settings like this one make even harder to escape.MistyThrough April 2 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      The Shed Changes Leadership Structure

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      In the face of financial challenges, the arts institution is making adjustments: Alex Poots, its founding artistic director and chief executive, will now just focus on being artistic director.Having come into the world just a year before the coronavirus pandemic started, the Shed — an architecturally ambitious $475 million arts center in Hudson Yards — has weathered a bumpy beginning. In addition to sold-out performances (such as the recent play about Robert Moses starring Ralph Fiennes), the institution has had its share of financial struggles (28 of its 107 full-time workers were laid off in July 2020).Now, the Shed is making perhaps its biggest adjustment yet, announcing that Alex Poots, the founding artistic director and chief executive, will no longer be chief executive — but will continue to focus on the creative side of the institution as its artistic director.The change is effective immediately; Maryann Jordan, the Shed’s current president and chief operating officer, will handle day-to-day management in the interim.“It has become more and more clear to me that, to really take us on to the next chapter, I need to dedicate my entire time to the artistic direction of this organization,” Poots said in a telephone interview, adding that the change was his decision. “I see it as a positive step forward.”“I’m not going to say it’s not been a struggle, but we’ve gotten through it every time we’ve been confronted with challenges,” he added. “We’re very robust to have built the first arts center since Lincoln Center on an entirely new model with a completely new team.”More on the Coronavirus PandemicNew Subvariant: A new Omicron subvariant, known as XBB.1.5, is surging in the northeastern United States. Scientists say it remains rare in much of the world, but they expect it to spread quickly and globally.Travel: The European Union advised its 27 member nations to require negative Covid-19 tests for travelers boarding flights from China to the region, amid a surge in coronavirus cases in the country.Misinformation: As Covid cases and deaths rise in parts of the United States, misleading claims continue to spread, exasperating overburdened doctors and evading content moderators.Free at-Home Tests: With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service.Jonathan M. Tisch, who in April succeeded the Shed’s founding chairman, Daniel L. Doctoroff, and who — with his wife, Lizzie — in 2019 donated $27.5 million toward the building’s construction, insisted this was not a demotion for Poots. “Alex has done a remarkable job over the past eight years of establishing the Shed as one of New York City’s — and probably the country’s — premiere cultural institutions,” Tisch said in an interview. “But it’s a tough job to be artistic director and C.E.O. at the same time. In conversations, Alex expressed interest in stepping back from being top executive to allowing his focus to center on ensuring our success.”Cultural institutions across the country have struggled mightily throughout the pandemic, primarily because of the lost revenue from closures and canceled performances. The Shed had the added hurdle of being just a year old, without the opportunity to build a loyal audience or donor base. In the wake of the pandemic, the Shed reduced its annual operating budget to $26.5 million from $46 million in 2020; its full-time staff is now 88.Last month, Poots sent an email to staff members saying that “in an uncertain economic environment,” the Shed would consolidate some of its artistic operations.“To align our program developments and resources, we are exploring ways of merging program areas into an interdisciplinary department that works within and between art forms in unified ways,” Poots said in the email, obtained by The New York Times. “After much deliberation, this new model includes the discontinuation of the visual arts Chief Curator position.”That curator position was held by Andria Hickey, who last February left Pace Gallery to join the Shed. She will be staying on, as curator at large.Having one chief curator “makes less sense now,” Poots said in the interview, “because we need expertise across a very wide range of disciplines.”The Shed has also had to adjust to the stepping back of Doctoroff, because of illness. Doctoroff led its successful fund-raising efforts and shepherded the institution into existence after he served as a deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg, who himself supported the Shed.Other successes include the Fiennes play written by David Hare, “Straight Line Crazy”; the comedian Cecily Strong’s New York stage debut; and an ambitious three-part exhibition by the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno. In addition, the Shed was among the first arts institutions to reopen after New York’s pandemic shutdown. And the institution managed to raise the remainder of its building costs — $135 million — during the coronavirus crisis, Doctoroff said in an interview.“We’re still learning,” Doctoroff said. “We’ve started to understand the model. I’m encouraged, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t normal start-up bumps and bruises. I think we will be incredibly successful over time.” More

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      ‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses

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      Off Broadway at the Shed, Ralph Fiennes is glorious in David Hare’s sputtering portrait of the man who paved New York.I doubt I’d have enjoyed meeting the real Robert Moses, New York’s paver of highways, evictor of minorities, eminent domain eminence and all-purpose boogeyman. But it’s a huge pleasure to meet him, in the form of Ralph Fiennes, in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” which opened on Wednesday at the Shed.Whether the creature Hare and Fiennes create has anything to do with the creature that created modern Gotham remains, for a while, an irrelevant question. Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater.Fiennes is too gloriously entertaining for that. Melodramatic in the old-fashioned sense, a hero or villain from an operetta or Ayn Rand, he crows his lines like a rooster, albeit in an accent suspended somewhere between East Anglia and Texas. With his nose pointing straight up and his chest pointing straight out, he’s a figurehead on the prow of a ship that can slice through icebergs as easily as red tape.Also through consonants: When he says “boardwalk” — a thing he despises, with its “so-called amusements” and “lox and bagel merchants” — the word has three syllables: the board, the wal and the k.So what if Moses is racist, antisemitic (though Jewish by birth) and an unabashed elitist who aims to advance ordinary people’s fortunes “without having any respect for their opinions”? Here he is wit and pith personified — and why would he not be, with lines honed by Hare in high-gloss mode?Usually that high gloss means Hare is up to some undermining; in plays like “Plenty,” “The Judas Kiss” and “Skylight,” good badinage almost always means bad faith.But in “Straight Line Crazy,” the connection is unclear, forcing you to ask why such a progressive playwright would spend even half a play valorizing a man who, among many other practical atrocities, displaced 7,000 families to clear space for Lincoln Center and 40,000 residents to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A clue in the script: “Moses’ life is so prodigious and his reach so great,” Hare notes, “that I have chosen to concentrate on just two decisive moments in his extraordinary career.”From left: Danny Webb as Gov. Alfred E. Smith, Fiennes and Judith Roddy as Finnuala Connell in the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesApparently, one act will try to counteract the other, so it makes sense that the production, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage for the London Theater Company, should introduce us to Moses in 1926. At that time he is merely the chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, and his antagonists are not yet sympathetic proles but out-of-touch gentry.These are the owners of Nassau County estates whose gorgeous seclusion, not to mention their orchards, are threatened by plans for the Northern and Southern State Parkways. The play’s first substantial scene is in fact with a (fictional) Vanderbilt, supplied with a big-eared butler named Fergus and an even bigger sneer.“Leave him at the end of the drive,” this Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) instructs the servant after dispensing with Moses.But of course it’s Moses who dispenses with Vanderbilt. In their scene together and in the long one that follows, at a headquarters that serves as a hive of urban planning, the power broker is shown breaking under- and overlings like twigs to get his way.I say he is “shown”; he is not dramatized except to the extent he is self-dramatized, with prompts from those underlings. (Their interruptions of “Why?” “What do they do?” and “What’s that?” amount to dramaturgy by laxative.) Perhaps because they too are fictional, and purpose-built, they have few characteristics except those that pertain to Moses: Ariel Porter (Adam Silver) is the meek one who backs off every argument, and Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) is the spunky one who stands up to him, at least on small points.It’s not until an official overling arrives that any actual drama occurs. He is Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a populist Democrat who is Moses’ patron and also, one begins to suspect, his patsy. That piquant combination, along with Danny Webb’s hilariously earthy take on the governor, gives the interaction between the men, needling each other among the maps and models of Bob Crowley’s set, the unlikely spin of a Mutt and Jeff comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Durante.Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat’s going on beneath the comedy is less funny: On the theory that no one will tear up a road once it’s built, even if they’d have forbidden it beforehand, Moses orders construction to proceed on the parkways without having obtained the governor’s approval. That this is offered as an amusing example of flair and determination instead of a warning about subterfuge and megalomania means that Hare has either fallen under the Great Man’s spell or wants to make sure the audience has.Surely, you think during intermission, as you study the weird intrusion of the mall-like Hudson Yards into the city’s urban fabric, things will turn around in the second act, which the program tells you is set in 1956. That’s when Moses’ plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park met with fierce resistance from a new kind of opponent: the “minstrels and artistic women with handbags” of Greenwich Village. Cue Jane Jacobs.Alas, that journalist and urban theorist, who has so far popped up merely to say hello, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil. It’s a strange choice to make Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) a minor character. Perhaps because of the inconvenience of history — the two never met — we are denied a direct confrontation, and with it a satisfactory climax.Instead, Hare goes uncharacteristically soggy, hauling Moses’ alcoholic wife into the conversation for pathos and having Finnuala, after decades in service to the builder’s vision, finally repudiate it. Moses loses on minor, mostly made-up points, not the knockout that Jacobs, Caro and time actually delivered.But even as the directors’ invention fades along with Hare’s — the community meetings, full of serious nodding, are especially silly — Fiennes never falters. His Moses, like his performance, becomes a car in search of a road, gunning the engine with nowhere to go.That’s no tragedy. The play is still a pleasure, and Moses is still in the doghouse. The man who, in Hare’s formulation, thinks cars are the “can opener” to the tin that is America would not recognize a Manhattan that after decades of discussion is soon to institute congestion pricing.If the efficiency of the brute is often superior to the fecklessness of democracy in getting things done, it is not always as lasting — which is reason enough to see “Straight Line Crazy.” In the midst of what feels right now like the losing fight of progressivism, it’s worth peeking at the devil, with fear and envy and a little schadenfreude.Straight Line CrazyThrough Dec. 18 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Ralph Fiennes to Star in Play About Robert Moses at the Shed

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      The production of “Straight Line Crazy,” by David Hare, will begin preview performances Oct. 18 and have a nine-week run.“Straight Line Crazy,” the play by David Hare about the contentious urban planner Robert Moses, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage, is coming to New York this fall.Following a buzzy spring run at the Bridge Theater in London, the play about Moses’s legacy of power and divisive creations of highways, parks and bridges will premiere at the Shed’s Griffin Theater for a nine-week run with preview performances starting Oct. 18 and an opening night slated for Oct. 26.“Straight Line Crazy” follows Moses’s rise to influence in the late 1920s as one of New York’s most powerful men, and then his devolution in the late 1950s, when grass-roots organizers and public transportation advocates decried his public works for displacing residents and disenfranchising communities who stood (or lived) in the way of his vision.“I think what this play evokes for us, and evokes here in New York, is who gets to shape our city spaces, who gets to shape our public spaces? What voices are engaged in these processes that affect so many?” Madani Younis, chief executive producer at the Shed, said in an interview.Moses will be played by the Tony Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes (also known for playing Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies), returning to New York theater for the first time since 2006, when he starred as the gaunt miracle worker (and possible charlatan) in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.”The theater critic Matt Wolf wrote in The New York Times that in the London run of “Straight Line Crazy,” Fiennes had “enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane,” adding that he almost wished the play were longer.Younis, of the Shed, said, “This is the rise and fall story of a very divisive figure and it stirs up questions for our present about civic responsibility, about values and who shapes cities.”“This is what great art should always do,” he said.The production will run through Dec. 18. More

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Intelligent Life’ Review: Cecily Strong’s ‘Awerobics’ Workout

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      Taking Lily Tomlin’s roles in a revival of Jane Wagner’s metaphysical comedy, the “Saturday Night Live” star is put through her paces.Of the many lines that have stuck with me since I saw the original Broadway production of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 1985, perhaps the sharpest was the one that seemed aimed directly at my generation of disappointed go-getters.“All my life, I’ve wanted to be somebody,” a character named Chrissy says, “but I see now I should have been more specific.”Chrissy attends self-awareness seminars and considers suicide. She is angry at a world that offers “false hopes” but angrier at herself for failing to have it all. “I feel I am somewhat creative,” she explains to a friend after aerobics class. “But somehow I lack the talent to go with it.”That was never the problem with Jane Wagner’s play; it bristles with barbed insights that have kept me nursing the beautiful bruises for 35 years. And the good news is that in the revival that opened at the Shed on Tuesday night, starring Cecily Strong and directed by Leigh Silverman, many of those barbs are as piercing as ever, breaking the skin of American optimism. Wagner’s existential one-liners amount to a Rosetta Stone of sardonic comedy, an overlooked source of stylings typically attributed to men like Steve Martin, Steven Wright and Will Eno.Yet because those writers are part of a tradition that has rarely had much of interest to say about women, “Intelligent Life” has always seemed like a necessary corrective. Among the 14 characters Wagner wrote for Lily Tomlin — her partner then, and her wife since 2013 — just two were male; only one, a health nut by day and a cokehead by night, remains in the revised edition presented here.Though a few other characters have also been cut — including Judith Beasley, the hilarious Tupperware saleslady who shifted to sex toys — the 10 women Strong must play in split-second succession are sufficient to make the show an aerobics class of its own. That puts the focus more squarely on its mixed platter of female frustration. Kate, a socialite, thinks she may actually be dying of boredom. Agnus Angst, a throwaway teenager, screeches her punk poetry at an unloving world. Brandy and Tina, two cheerful prostitutes, get picked up by yet another john who turns out to be just a journalist.Strong stars as 10 women in the revival of Jane Wagner’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWagner works hard to particularize these women, but the play, which has over the years lost an intermission and been streamlined into one 95-minute act, has trouble getting started. In part that’s because the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from their aperçus. In her spoken-word act, Agnus intones, “The last really deep conversation I had with my dad was between our T-shirts.” Kate, who once dreamed of being a concert violinist but more recently lost the tip of a finger in a cooking class accident, muses, “What a tragedy if my dream had come true.”But the problem also derives from the network of random connections that tries to pass as architecture. Chrissy is linked to Kate by a discarded piece of paper; Kate to Brandy and Tina by a hairdresser; and everyone, we gradually understand, to a homeless woman named Trudy who wears pantyhose as a “theater cape” and a coat tasseled with Post-it notes. The play’s characters turn out to be figments of her imagination or emanations caused by her faulty neural wiring.That was always a bit twee, but today it’s also troublesome. The self-consciously cute Trudy, who claims to be chaperoning a bunch of aliens as they explore the byways of human society, may no longer be such a laughable figure, despite the umbrella hat she wears as a kind of interstellar satellite dish. Homelessness, which in Reagan-era New York City seemed to be a temporary aberration, has since curdled into something more like a structural disaster, making a permanent underclass of economic and mental health victims.Tomlin got around the problem, if it was one then, by taking a breezy approach, preserving the rhythms of the punch lines at all costs. She had, after all, become famous on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a loosey-goosey, mile-a-minute variety show.But Strong’s ability to create and sustain outré characters who nevertheless remain fundamentally believable — a skill developed over 10 seasons on “Saturday Night Live” — works against our comfort in her New York stage debut. It’s harder to laugh at her Trudy, a figure of pathos with a squinty tic and a hunched gait that never lets you forget she is shadowed by danger.That commitment to at least a nub of naturalism keeps stepping on the jokes; the night I saw the play, a majority of the laughter seemed to come in response to the uncannily timed sounds of zippers zipping, bottle tops popping and water beds sloshing. (The sound design is by Elisheba Ittoop.) Otherwise Silverman’s staging seems to suggest we are in a liminal, performative space, with no set to speak of and with Strong (like Tomlin in the original play, but not the awkward 1991 movie) changing costumes only minimally. And though the lighting (by Stacey Derosier) helps separate the emotions, Strong’s voices are not yet ideally distinct.But just as I began to wonder whether I had misremembered what Trudy calls “the goosebump experience” — the feeling you get when moved by art — “Intelligent Life” pulled itself together. Dispensing with the variety format, and giving Trudy a 30-minute rest, the second half is mostly devoted to the story of three friends living through second-wave feminism, from the founding of the National Organization for Women to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. Edie is the militant one, with “Spanish moss” under her arms. Marge is the cynic: “Honey, you couldn’t be more antiwar,” she tells Edie. “But if it weren’t for Army surplus, you’d have nothing to wear.”And Lyn is the one caught in between, trying to be both Edie and Marge while also being a wife, a mother of boys, a rape hotline operator and a power-dressing P.R. executive. As the quick-take grievances of the earlier characters, however funny, give way to the ordinary wear-and-tear on women trying to function honorably in a sexist society, the play achieves, and Strong fulfills, the promise of the premise.That promise is paradoxical: In offering a pull-no-punches satire of self-involved humans, it is nevertheless filled with pity for their disappointments. But instead of seeing that as a fault, perhaps it’s better to say that by finally realizing the need to be “more specific,” “Intelligent Life” eventually replaces the cheap kind of uplift with the real deal. Trudy calls the emotional workout of human life “awerobics.” By the time you get to the play’s killer last line, you may call it a true goosebump experience.The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the UniverseThrough Feb. 6 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Continuing ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’

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      Lily Tomlin, who first performed this comically cosmic play, and Jane Wagner, its author, discuss a new production with Cecily Strong and Leigh Silverman, its new star and director.Should you ever have the chance to converse with Lily Tomlin, you don’t have to tell her it’s an honor. “Believe me, it’s not,” Tomlin said recently in her distinctive deadpan.At 82, Tomlin is not precious about her reputation or the esteem she enjoys as a comedian and actor. But she remains fiercely proud of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” the one-woman play that was written for her by Jane Wagner, her wife and longtime creative collaborator.“Search for Signs,” which had its Broadway debut in 1985, is a comedic and philosophical whirlwind in which Tomlin Ping-Ponged across 12 roles, including the sullen teen punk Agnus Angst; the feminist activists Edie, Lyn and Marge; and the wealthy, urbane Kate. Their scenes are framed and interwoven by the character of Trudy, an enlightened vagrant who believes she is in communication with aliens.Tomlin’s performance in the Broadway production of “Search for Signs” won her the Tony Award for best actress in a play. That production ran for more than a year, and the play became an emblematic entry in the careers of its author and its star; Tomlin continued to perform it in other cities, in a 1991 film adaptation and in a Broadway revival that ran from 2000-1.Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 2000.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Search for Signs” has become a treasured work to performers like Cecily Strong, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and directors like Leigh Silverman (“Well,” “Violet”). As Silverman, 47, said, “This play gives us a sense of purpose and a meaning while telling us all the time how meaningless it is. It holds us up and supports us and loves us. It cherishes the audience in a way that no other theater experience I’ve ever had does.”Now Silverman is directing Strong in a new production of “Search for Signs” that will be presented at the Shed. This incarnation, which is choreographed by James Alsop, begins performances Dec. 21 and opens Jan. 11; its limited run is scheduled to end Feb. 6.While they are still working through the play’s ambitious and ample material, Strong and Silverman said their preparations are testing them to their fullest extents. “There’s no plan to this,” Strong, 37, explained. “I said nobody else bug me until February — all of my time and my brain and my heart and my soul is here, and that’s where it has to be.”Tomlin and Wagner, who are executive producing, are content to observe these rehearsals from afar, weigh in when needed and reflect on what the play has meant to them. (Or simply to kibitz affectionately, as in one moment when Tomlin turned to her wife and audibly observed, “We’ve lived a long time, sister.”)Wagner, 86, said she was confident in the approach that Silverman and Strong were taking. “I have such a feeling of security, really, with the two of them,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I’ll start feeling pressured again, I’m sure.”Tomlin, Wagner, Strong and Silverman gathered earlier this month for a video interview in which they spoke about their individual and collective journeys on “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Lily and Jane, can you recount the origins of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”? How was it created?JANE WAGNER I was in a New Age phase. I was reading some philosophy and I began to be aware that I was being aware. [Lily Tomlin laughs.] That’s an insight that I hadn’t even thought about having.LILY TOMLIN I was on the road a good part of that time.WAGNER Which was very good for us.TOMLIN She would send me a load of pages every now and then. I remember the first packet I got, I was playing in Lexington and she sent me a huge stack of papers all about Trudy. Every line, one after another, was so observant and perceptive. I read them at a show one night and there was a raucous and wonderful response. When I read Trudy saying, “Frankly, I think they find us quite captivating,” I knew where the play was headed. But I had no idea how she was going to get there.Tomlin, right, and Jane Wagner in 2001 with their Tony Award nominations for the revival of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”Henry Ray Abrams/Agence France-PresseCecily and Leigh, how did you each discover the play?CECILY STRONG The first time I encountered it was in my library in high school, looking for monologues. I was very serious about being an actor and I remember finding this cover with a long crazy name. What could this show be? I looked at a couple of Trudy monologues and I wanted to do something like this. This is a stupid thought, but I had it: I’ve got to marry a writer. I need to have someone write this show for me. I certainly never thought it would be a possibility to do this.LEIGH SILVERMAN I saw it at the Kennedy Center [after the show’s original Broadway run]. I was 11. My mother took me and we were sitting in the front row. It really sent me on a journey to see a performance like Lily’s. It was radical — written by a woman, performed by a woman who played all kinds of characters. Lily was so masculine, androgynous, highly feminine — she was all of it, the full package. I felt like my whole being was rearranged and maybe for the first time put into place.Lily, you continued to perform the play for many years in different settings. Does it remain in your body from production to production?TOMLIN You have a lot of muscle memory from it. When you start working on it again — this doesn’t feel right, I must have moved over here — then it falls into place. It comes back to you very quickly.WAGNER I’ve gotten by as a writer with no muscles. All my life, I’ve never had muscles.TOMLIN She’s at an age where the muscles would come in handy.Would the play change depending on the time and place where you were doing it?TOMLIN In 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, we opened in San Francisco. Jane used to collect a lot of old Whole Earth Catalogs from her hippie days, and she cited this quote from Whole Earth Catalog. I used to end the production in San Francisco with this same quote because I felt it was so meaningful. It’s anonymous: “Humans are finally the bits of earth that leap up from the planet’s surface, tell what they see to each other, and then die. The sum total of all this seeing and telling is the story of one planet waking up to itself.” We loved that. That’s how we felt at that time.Did you get protective when other people would ask to put on the play? There were solo shows and versions with larger casts playing all the characters.WAGNER We did once we saw one of the productions you just described. It was pretty awful.TOMLIN In the old days, the requests would come in and I would deal with the agent. He’d say it’s a good theater or whatever, and we’d let them do it. Sometimes they would send us a film of what they’d done.WAGNER That’s where it went wrong, I think. [Laughter.] I’m more easily beaten down than she is.TOMLIN That’s why we keep her from the theater. She stays locked in a hotel room and I go, “I’ll be back in three or four hours”WAGNER I’m thinking about us doing it when we had no producer.TOMLIN I was the producer!WAGNER Well, I didn’t know that. I’d send you pages and you’d do them or toss them.TOMLIN Very often in the development process, I’d come in from a night at the theater and I’d talk to Jane about some monologue. I’d say, “If you can just make it — blah blah blah.” Instead of just adjusting some small phrase, she’d just write another monologue. I had like six or seven drafts of some monologues in my head, and I would move sections around, trying to find what the key would be. I was so steeped in it, I was able to just put it out and fly with whatever I could fly with. That’s what an actor really hopes for.“Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin?” said Strong, who’s been rehearsing with Silverman at the Shed. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesLeigh, what got you interested in reviving the play?SILVERMAN When we were in the darkest moments of the pandemic, I was feeling so lost. I have done a lot of solo plays in my career. Most recently I did “Harry Clarke” with Billy Crudup. We were actually supposed to do it again during the pandemic and it was canceled. I had this moment where I thought I never want to do another solo show, ever, ever, ever again. I had a conversation with the Shed and they said, “We want to reopen and we’re looking for the right theatrical experience to do that with. Do you have any ideas?” I said no. And then I had a second call and I said, “I really don’t want do another solo show. But I do think this play should be done, and this is the time.”How was Cecily chosen? How did everyone get comfortable with that choice?SILVERMAN When we were talking about people, very serendipitously, there was the finale of “S.N.L.” last season and I was watching Weekend Update, where Cecily dove headfirst into a giant box of wine and drank her way out. Watching that, I had this moment where I was like, she can do it. She had the combination of the stamina, the skill, the courage and deep, deep empathy. The wild curiosity to just be outrageously funny.STRONG Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin? But you hear Leigh talk about it and you start tearing up. It’s like, yes, yes, let’s do this. Just the way the show feels, physically — I get to go through this wonderful catharsis every time we run it.WAGNER Lorne [Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live”] has an uncanny ability to understand talent, and he believed in you so much. You wouldn’t have been on “S.N.L.” if you weren’t pretty great.TOMLIN I was totally for it because I wanted Jane’s authorship to stand. So often, I’m thrown into the mix as her collaborator. It’s just not true. Jane is a solitary writer and that’s all there is to it. She writes pages and pages, and if you asked her now to write about this bottle of water, she’d probably come up with 2,000 words.Cecily, you recently performed a Weekend Update character, a clown named Goober who tells jokes about abortion, that felt like she could have fit into this play. Was that piece inspired by your work on this show?STRONG Not consciously writing it. It came from, I’m going to take Ambien and I’m going to write essays to myself every night, or I’m going to remain frustrated and do weird things. Obviously this is something I wanted to get out. I kept posing it to people — I’m thinking it’s about a clown talking about her abortion — and everybody was like, okaaay. I certainly felt scared, and then I felt like I came closer to earning this show. [Speaking to Tomlin] To your bravery, your courage, and what a bombastic, badass thing it is.Jane and Lily, were you ever criticized for your depictions of feminist characters in this play? They are affectionately rendered but still allowed to be laughed at and joked about.WAGNER Oh, yeah. We heard that a little bit.TOMLIN What was there?WAGNER Do you want me to name names?TOMLIN No, you don’t have to name names.WAGNER There are always people that say you shouldn’t. One time somebody insisted we shouldn’t have a monologue that was a half an hour long.TOMLIN Oh, yeah, well, that’s old stuff. You have to make those decisions yourself. Don’t be influenced.WAGNER When I went to a consciousness-raising session — and I only went to one, because I was kind of in shock — I knew that I had to talk about it. People looking at their genitalia and everything like that, there was something satirical there that you could use. I still love the movement and believe in the movement.Cecily and Leigh, how do you begin to tackle a play like this, where one actor is responsible for this much material?SILVERMAN There’s so much that you put down one coat of paint and then you keep going.STRONG I don’t think I’ve ever taken on anything like this, where I’ve been so challenged. How do I put on a coat and I’m trying to sing and I’m trying to quote Buckminster Fuller? It’s so many things but the minute we get one thing right it just feels so good. I feel like my brain is changing a little.Do you allow yourself to have favorite characters within the play?STRONG Something new tickles me every day. Leigh just gave me a big cart of stuff and was like, put it somewhere. What do you do with this thing? It was a great way to enter into Trudy. The other day, I was talking to a plant. I was like, ooh, I like the sound of how that plant shakes.Do you seek notes or input from Lily and Jane? Do they just weigh in when they want to, like the voice of God?STRONG I’ll take anything I can get.WAGNER We like the voice of God concept. [Laughter.]TOMLIN We’re trying to come [in person].WAGNER I have trouble with my leg. Loss of muscle memory, I guess. SILVERMAN We send them video and they’re with us always. There’s a line in the play where Trudy says that she puts some time aside each day to do “awe-robics,” and I will say that so much of working on the play is an exploration of “awe-robics.”WAGNER They’re wonderful, the way you communicate. I think you’re going to do something that actually makes our brains crack. Which could be good for the run of the show. More