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    ‘Bad Kreyòl’ Review: Dueling Cultural Identities Make for a Weighty Comedy

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    Dominique Morisseau’s new play explores the tensions between a Haitian American woman and her Haitian-born cousin.Concluding a four-show run as one of Signature Theater’s writers-in-residence, Dominique Morisseau looks beyond her usual American petri dish in the comic and contemplative “Bad Kreyòl.” It’s the second world premiere of her seven-year tenure (stretched from five because of the Covid pandemic) with the company, which has staged her explorations of 1940s jazz (“Paradise Blue”), campus race relations and slavery (“Confederates”) and the aftershocks of revolutionary movements (“Sunset Baby”).In “Bad Kreyòl,” Morisseau follows a Haitian American woman’s trip to the island, where she intends to work with nongovernmental organizations and reconnect with her cousin following their grandmother’s death. Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, this co-production with Manhattan Theater Club deftly tackles diasporic identity, as well as personal, familial and national duty.If that sounds like a serious undertaking, it never feels that way here. Morisseau is incredibly skilled at weaving her ideas into compelling human dramas, and “Bad Kreyòl” finds the writer at her funniest, operating in the digestible vacation comedy genre.When Simone (Kelly McCreary) arrives at the upscale Port-au-Prince boutique her cousin Gigi owns, her appearance is instantly assessed. Gigi (Pascale Armand) is a tough-love type, and their odd couple dynamic represents most of the play’s humor and duel of national mentalities. As opposed to Simone’s relaxed athleisure, Gigi is impeccably dressed in colorful fabrics (costumes by Haydee Zelideth). She is the picture of the hard-working Haitian who can’t understand why her American cousin lets things like personal happiness get in the way of a lucrative career in finance.Another point of contention: whether Pita (Jude Tibeau), their family’s longtime housekeeper, is more like their slave. Born into poverty, he was essentially sold to Gigi’s family in exchange for room and board through an underground Haitian practice called restavèk. Simone says it violates international labor laws, Gigi compares it to American foster care.In this case, Gigi says, it’s worked out for the best: In their homophobic country, the flamboyant Pita, who is gay, also finds protection in their home. Simone, of course, lives out a liberal fantasy by nudging him to join a queer activism group, an idea the fiercely protective Gigi knows could bring harm. But, again, Morisseau balances this gravity by making Pita the play’s beating heart, and often the source of its funniest lines.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

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      Review: In ‘Three Houses,’ a Dark Karaoke Night of the Soul

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      It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.It’s only fitting that a bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday at the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, after all, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the show’s linked monodramas. And hung over is how it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters at the end of a dark karaoke night of the soul.You may feel that way too: lost in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, each having radically relocated during lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) found herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch home in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, where a life-simulation game akin to Animal Crossing was her only companion. Having holed up in a “red brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) soon turned into an Amazon shopaholic.As each now takes the open mic at the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic,” it becomes clear, though, that more was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not incidentally called Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they reveal to us, and perhaps to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the only threat to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.A recent seismic breakup is part of all their stories. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to another state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine kept “messing up” household routines with her spontaneity. Beckett did not feel safe letting his wife, Jackie, see fully “the darkness within” him. That these accusations are so transparently thin does not weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, because we recognize the behavior, as storytelling.But Malloy’s attempt to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute stories with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s easy enough to write off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a kind of light rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of red currant wine in Susan’s tale that become eight cases of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The point is that people drink heavily in isolation.The meaning of the more ornate linkages is less clear. Each segment includes an obligatory puppet — a Latvian house dragon, a video game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels more like a stab at theatrical variety than an expression of a relevant human need. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as various loving grandparents, indistinguishable despite their accents. But all the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.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

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      ‘Orlando’ Review: A Virginia Woolf Fantasy That Plays With Gender

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      In this revival of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the Woolf novel, now starring Taylor Mac, the flashes of comedy can’t make up for the loss of poetry.There’s a slight pause and a knowingly raised eyebrow — enough to provoke laughter from the audience — when the title character of “Orlando” begins to introduce himself with this line: “He — for there could be no doubt of his sex.”But the play is set in a universe in which there is, in fact, doubt. And this Orlando is played by the protean writer and performer Taylor Mac, who delivers the line while cutting a resplendent androgynous figure in shiny red boots and white, vaguely Elizabethan garb.Sarah Ruhl’s play, in a revival that opened on Sunday at Signature Theater, is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s fantasy of the same title. Published in 1928, the book has traversed the decades as seemingly unscathed by time as its protagonist. When it starts, Orlando is a 16-year-old boy during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. About halfway through, he abruptly wakes up as a woman, and continues on, barely aging, until the story ends in the Roaring Twenties. Orlando might still be at it somewhere, for all we know.In an era of questioning and rethinking gender norms, you can see why this tale would particularly resonate — and indeed we just can’t seem to quit it. In the past few years alone, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado explored his path as a trans man through the mirror of Woolf’s novel in his film “Orlando, My Political Biography,” Emma Corrin starred in Neil Bartlett’s 2022 stage adaptation, and in 2019 the director Katie Mitchell and the playwright Alice Birch offered their own take.Ruhl’s version premiered Off Broadway in 2010, and casting Mac, a shape-shifter of the highest order, in this revival’s main role is certainly a coup. Will Davis’s production, however, seems to think that’s enough.The show gets off to a clunky start, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and using that device as a crutch. This may be an attempt to echo Woolf’s own distancing technique (she styled the novel as a biography), but it just comes across as broad, as if Davis didn’t trust that the text’s humor would still charm us. Mac is also a little tentative at first, which is odd for a performer known for boundary-crossing fearlessness. (Mac’s most recent creation, the musical epic “Bark of Millions,” paid tribute to queer figures.)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

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      ‘Sunset Baby’ Review: Don’t Let Nina Be Misunderstood

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      Moses Ingram makes her New York stage debut in Dominique Morisseau’s love poem to Nina Simone.Dominique Morisseau’s characters are, as the post-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon once described himself, often paralyzed “at the crossroads between nothingness and infinity.” Her plays craft realistic depictions of marginalized people inextricably caught in the tide of history.In her 2013 piece “Sunset Baby,” receiving a potent revival at Signature Theater, Morisseau lays bare both a romantic relationship and a father-daughter drama while also exploring the effects of revolution, the deferment of dreams and the bind of being a Black woman in America.The play’s complexities find their avatar in its hardened protagonist, Nina (Moses Ingram, making a strong New York stage debut). As a drug dealer and (as conjured by the costume designer Emilio Sosa’s tiny dress and thigh-high boots) a honey pot eking out a living in Brooklyn, Nina’s life is a far cry from the dreams envisioned by her Black revolutionary parents, who named her after the singer-activist Nina Simone.After the death of her mother, Ashanti X, from a slow, ugly slide into addiction, Nina’s estranged father, Kenyatta Shakur (Russell Hornsby), reappears to collect a stash of letters her mother had written to him while he was a political prisoner.Kenyatta seems earnest in his attempt to reconnect. But having prioritized the good fight over his family — and Nina’s poverty being the very thing he’d set out to combat — he is seen by Nina only as an absentee father, and she refuses to budge. (She had already rebuffed cushy offers from universities and publishers wanting to purchase the correspondences between her parents, adding to the list of forces — family, history, the government — seeking to take from her.)Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson), Nina’s devoted partner in love and crime, who thinks of the two as a righteous Bonnie and Clyde, adds relationships to that list. He finds in Kenyatta a kindred sense of anti-establishment disruption and, knowing some cash could take them out of the projects, tries to change her mind.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

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      Review: ‘Letters From Max’ Is a Sacrament of Grief, and a Comedy

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      The Signature Theater production is based on correspondence between the playwright Sarah Ruhl and a student of hers, who died of cancer at 25.The poet Max Ritvo, who was 25 when he died of cancer in 2016, knew exactly the impression he did not want to make if he and the playwright Sarah Ruhl ever cobbled together a book of their correspondence. He recoiled at the possibility that it would come across like “a Lifetime movie story of poor cancer boy and his wise, brilliant, loving mentor ministering to his heart and mind through every mortal peril and petty crisis.”Not to worry. “Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship,” published in 2018, is never for an instant maudlin. And “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Ruhl’s warm and literary new play adapted from the book, is in no way a pity narrative. It’s a theatrical act of remembrance and a sacrament of grief, but it’s also a comedy. Because in their emails and texts, in their voice mail messages and face-to-face conversations, the character Sarah and the character Max make each other laugh.Jessica Hecht, a Ruhl veteran from “Stage Kiss” nearly a decade ago, here nimbly becomes the playwright — wonderfully comical, and as gentle as the soft, soft blue of the blazer she wears. This Sarah has a confiding rapport with the audience and an expansive sense of playwriting potential.Teaching an undergraduate course at Yale, she decides to admit 20-year-old Max, even though he has never written a play — “because,” she says, “funny poets are my favorite kind of human being.” When Max’s banished childhood cancer recurs, Sarah treats both him and his work with compassion, and a friendship begins to put down roots.In Kate Whoriskey’s witty, sensitive production for Signature Theater, the role of Max is shared by two actors, alternating performances. Ben Edelman, so excellent opposite Hecht in Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” is the more raucous Max, with a bigger personality that gets bigger laughs. Whatever is behind that facade, though, remains hidden from us. Zane Pais’s loose-limbed Max is the one who brings the tenderness, which cracks the play open emotionally and also, somehow, poetically. Skinny and floppy-haired, with a restless intensity and a searching intelligence, he is at once irrepressible and unavoidably vulnerable.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This slender play has some of the spareness of poetry, which Sarah and Max periodically speak aloud. If, at a scant two hours including intermission, the production seems sometimes to be moving too fast, it also has interludes when it slows down — as in an exquisite scene between Max and a winged character who is both an angel and a tattoo artist, and is played by Edelman or Pais, whichever of them isn’t embodying Max at that performance.In that third role, Edelman (on piano) and Pais (on guitar) each also play underscoring music that they wrote with the sound designer, Sinan Refik Zafar. The last music the audience hears, though, was composed by Ritvo. The effect of it all, in tandem with the other design elements, is a sense of ethereality. (The set is by Marsha Ginsberg, costumes by Anita Yavich, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and projection and video by S Katy Tucker.)Ruhl’s plays are sometimes mistranslated from page to stage — rendered less poetic than they are, and more earthbound. Like Les Waters with “Eurydice,” Whoriskey is the rare director who grasps the ineffable in Ruhl, and knows how to make sense of it in three dimensions. For all its talk of this world and corporeality, “Letters From Max” exists on a slightly other plane.Ruhl and Ritvo’s conversation was as much about the life of the mind, and the work of an artist, as it was about the life of the body and the existence of the soul. Ruhl has fashioned from it the kind of play that makes you want to dig in afterward: into the letters between them, into her plays, into his poems. Since the closure of Signature’s thoughtfully curated lobby bookstore — a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic — no production there has made me miss it as powerfully as this one.In my mind I can see the bookshop display that might have been: the volume of their correspondence; Ruhl’s many published plays, particularly “The Oldest Boy,” which affected Ritvo powerfully, and her epistolary plays “Eurydice” and “Dear Elizabeth”; his poetry collections “Four Reincarnations” and “The Final Voicemails” (which you can buy at Signature, along with their book of letters, but only at some performances); and “Words in Air,” the letters between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that inspired “Dear Elizabeth.”If “Letters From Max” were any other play, I would think dreaming up a fantasy bookstore display — which is essentially a fantasy reading list — was a strange response. But it feels like a natural extension of the conversation pinging back and forth between Sarah and Max. Theirs is so much wider and more voracious a discussion than any stage could hold.So go see the play, and feel their relationship alive and tingling. Then open some of those books. Bliss.Letters From Max, a RitualThrough March 19 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: Rude T-Shirts and Rude Awakenings in ‘A Bright New Boise’

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      An early play by Samuel D. Hunter finds the author developing his voice by lending it to the lost souls working at an Idaho Hobby Lobby.For most who attempt it professionally, playwriting is a hopeless job, with few opportunities to break in and fewer to advance. So it’s a pleasing irony that the playwright Samuel D. Hunter, the reigning bard of American economic dead-endism, has managed such a vibrant career.His trophy case is crowded with prizes: Obie, Whiting, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, MacArthur. The film adaptation of his 2012 play “The Whale” is up for three Academy Awards at next month’s ceremony. Even more impressive is that, at just 41, he’s had 11 New York City stage premieres in 12 years, from the jumbly satire of “Jack’s Precious Moment,” his local debut in 2010, to the sublime heartbreak of “A Case for the Existence of God” in 2022.“A Bright New Boise,” also from 2010, was the first of Hunter’s plays to achieve widespread notice, and with good reason. It introduced the radical sympathy of his voice and the quietly despairing people who evoked it. These were characters that few playwrights paid attention to: low-wage earners, many working at local branches of national chains, mostly in Hunter’s native Idaho. They struggle with the fallout of economic devastation and the emotional kind so tied up with it. Searching for faith, they must face its insufficiency.So interpret with caution the title of “A Bright New Boise,” which opened on Tuesday in a taut Signature Theater revival directed by Oliver Butler. It takes place in the break room of a local Hobby Lobby, on a deadly accurate set by Wilson Chin featuring a malfunctioning microwave on the counter and soporific motivational programming on the closed-circuit television. That the programming is occasionally interrupted by surgery-cam videos — a scalpel probing an ear is how this production begins — baldly warns us that we are in for something deeper and more upsetting than mere corporate uplift can obscure.The focus of that upset, we understand at once, is Will (Peter Mark Kendall), a man nearing 40 who is interviewing for a cashier’s position at $7.50 an hour. In 2010, when the play is set, that’s just 25 cents above the federal minimum wage, yet he accepts it willingly. Why?More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The proud, efficient and bilious store manager, Pauline (Eva Kaminsky), is all business; her upswept hair is a pincushion of pens. But Will is clearly in some kind of trouble. He answers her questions haltingly, the holes in his speech and his résumé suggesting the damaged places in his soul. When asked for an emergency contact, even one that “doesn’t have to be local,” he has none to provide.Peter Mark Kendall as Will, and Anna Baryshnikov as Anna, spend evenings reading and writing in the break room after hours.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA bit too methodically, Hunter introduces three of Will’s new co-workers, and here the play, though slightly revised since 2010, begins to betray some early-career awkwardness. One co-worker is Anna (Anna Baryshnikov), a skittery young woman drawn to Will in part because most of the men she meets “are pretty much terrible.” In Will she thinks she recognizes a kindred spirit; they both hide out at closing time — she among the silk flowers; he in scrapbooking — so they can spend evenings reading and writing in the break room.But even though Anna has real grit and sadness to her, she feels peripheral to the deepest currents of the story: a shore bird, not a fish. So, too, is Leroy (Angus O’Brien), a bro-y M.F.A. candidate at Boise State who makes T-shirts featuring aggressive phrases like “You will eat your children” and wears them to work as performance art. (The costumes are by April M. Hickman.) Though it’s Leroy who precipitates the play’s crisis by uncovering Will’s past, the comic and tensioning purposes to which he’s put don’t blend, making him more of a convenience than a character.Only the third co-worker, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), is as central to Will’s story as he is to his own. To say how would be to spoil the plot, but Alex is quite a creation: a sullen high school student who has panic attacks, listens to Villa-Lobos on his iPod and is looking for something — in life as in himself — that isn’t a lie or a letdown. When we learn that Will is suffering a terrible disappointment of his own, a disastrous evangelical past he’s trying to shed, we see the crash coming.It’s a mark of Hunter’s patient construction that these Big Issues are usually rooted deeply in the plot, not sprinkled on top of it. In one of the play’s best scenes, Alex, freaking out over a $187 discrepancy Pauline has discovered in his register receipts from the previous day, allows Will to help him search the receipt rolls for the error. There’s no obvious reason that such a dull project — it takes several minutes — should make dangerous, believable, feelingful theater but it does.Actually, the believable part is no mystery; Hunter’s first job was at a Walmart in Moscow, Idaho. Nor is the dangerous part really so surprising: As a teenager Hunter attended an evangelical school for more than four years. He writes about the intensity of fellowship offered by charismatic leaders as vividly as he does the threat to individuality that comes with it. For Will, who came of age in that world, mainstream churches are little more than Hobby Lobbys — national chains selling discount goods.That he engages your sympathy instead of (or along with) your repulsion is the essence of Hunter’s gift. It’s a gift not just of human connection, but of theatrical compaction, a nuclear pressure he applies to people in distress. In that, “A Bright New Boise” anticipates the more sophisticated dramaturgy of his more recent plays, which less and less require extra characters. “A Case for the Existence of God” has only two until its coda.But “A Bright New Boise” sprawls. Despite Butler’s swift and confident staging and the fine work of the cast — and the hilariously corporate lighting, sound and video design — the play sometimes seems like a game of marbles, its five characters, each energized by trouble, banging up against one another in patterns that seem both random and overdetermined.It’s still a compelling play, worth seeing in itself and as a map of what would follow. Also as a map of what didn’t. When Leroy, explaining the philosophy behind his T-shirts, says he’s “forcing people to confront words and images they normally avoid,” you hear him ventriloquizing for Hunter. In a short time, though, the confrontations became invitations, and the T-shirts great theater.A Bright New BoiseThrough March 12 at Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      With ‘Letters From Max’ Onstage, Sarah Ruhl Again Mourns a Poet’s Death

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      Through dialogue, poetry and ritual, the playwright revisits her correspondence with her former student, who died at the age of 25.About 10 minutes into “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Sarah Ruhl’s new play about her epistolary friendship with the poet Max Ritvo, something akin to a sacred rite takes place: The lights dim, a spotlight illuminates center stage, and the actor portraying Ritvo walks toward a winged tattoo artist. For a few moments, they circle each other. Then the tattoo artist-angel removes the hospital gown that the poet is wearing and lifts him with grace. With a miming gesture, he offers a compact mirror to Ritvo so he might examine the birds newly adorning his back.“It’s dope,” Ritvo says of the tattoo, looking over his shoulder. “I really love it in this light.”But that quiet exchange was not dreamed up by Ruhl. It is actually a scene from a play that Ritvo wrote for Ruhl when he was a student at Yale in 2012, four years before he died of cancer at the age of 25. (After each surgery, he would acquire a new tattoo of a bird.) Before handing in the project, he told Ruhl, “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”With the Signature Theater production of “Letters From Max,” his desire for the work is now being realized in a way he might not have imagined.Ruhl’s play, adapted from a book she compiled of their correspondence during Ritvo’s chemotherapy, boils down to a single, yearslong conversation about poetry, love, mortality, the afterlife and soup. But this is not a traditional play. Poems and live music are interspersed between the dialogue, which comes from the letters, texts and voice mail messages they exchanged.Edelman, right, as a tattoo artist-angel, helping Pais remove his hospital gown in the play. The two actors alternate in the role of Max.Ye Fan for The New York Times“I don’t think of this play as ‘show business,’” Ruhl said in an interview, “but instead an encounter for the audience.” She hopes viewers will “bring their own grief or their own need for communal sadness,” she said, adding that the theater has been a place for catharsis dating back to the Greeks. “We’ve all been through so much in the last two years.”Though Ruhl feels her own grief in this production, which opens on Feb. 27, she has also found joy in sharing Ritvo’s work, and in seeing it move people the same way he did. “He was such a present, joyful person who made everyone around him laugh,” she said. There are other small tributes to Ritvo, too: A song he composed recurs throughout, and the titles of his poems are projected in his handwriting above the stage.There were no plans to adapt “Letters From Max” upon the book’s 2018 publication. But as Ruhl read sections at events — often with an actor reading Ritvo’s words — people asked, “Is this going to be a play?”Before distilling the 309-page book into a two-hour stage production, Ruhl consulted Ritvo’s literary executor, the poet Elizabeth Metzger.“She asked me long ago, ‘Do you think Max would want this?’” Metzger recalled, adding that she was “very, very certain that Max would.” For Ruhl, finding “the bones” within hundreds of pages of correspondence became a process of trial and error.She realized the first act is “about a teacher and a student getting to know each other and forming a friendship,” she said, “that would then reverse the teacher-student relationship” in the second act, which opens with a dialectic on the afterlife. “I was trying to offer Max a comforting view of the afterlife when he was afraid of death,” Ruhl said. “And he ultimately said, ‘Thank you. But no.’”Kate Whoriskey, who directed the New York production of Ruhl’s previous epistolary play, “Dear Elizabeth,” also about two poets exchanging letters, signed on to direct, and the actress Jessica Hecht was game to portray Ruhl, her longtime friend and collaborator. But casting Ritvo introduced a unique challenge. “I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that he had a huge reach and people are still in mourning,” Ruhl said.She said she was moved during auditions. “It was actually beautiful to see Max’s language inside a young person’s body again,” Ruhl said. Ruhl and Whoriskey liked the idea of a third body onstage — similar to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” — who might “care-take the space” by delivering soup and poems to Ruhl and Ritvo. When the actors Ben Edelman and Zane Pais read for the role of Ritvo, Ruhl said, the team believed they “could do beautifully in both roles” by alternating nights. It turned out that Edelman plays the piano and Pais plays the guitar, so each composed music to perform while the other recites Ritvo’s poetry.“There’s some mystery, and it’s beyond words,” Ruhl said of the duality. “But it’s something about the spirit and the body, and the observer and the observed.” Not to mention, as Ruhl writes in the program note, the actors’ interchangeability demonstrates that Ritvo’s spirit and legacy is “bigger than any one actor.”“Max was many himself,” Metzger said. “Every time he read a poem, he read it differently, because he allowed the moment of the poem and the moment he was reading to merge.”When rehearsals began, Metzger texted Ruhl some guidance for the actors: “Reading the letters, the character is coming to face death,” she wrote, but “reading the poems, the character is not dying but being born, coming to life!” Metzger hoped the actors might “capture the shock of Max’s performance style, even the strange wild aliveness of the poems on the page.”Ritvo’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, has been “an incredibly staunch supporter,” Edelman said, calling a video meeting she had with the cast members “one of the most intense experiences of my life.”He and Pais didn’t study Ritvo’s mannerisms. Instead, they aimed to embody his work. “Neither of us are trying to do an impersonation of Max at all,” Pais said.Hecht and Pais onstage during rehearsals at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Marsha Ginsberg’s spare set includes a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Max Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and a theater.Ye Fan for The New York TimesTo foreground the writing, the scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg kept the stage spare. The sole set piece is a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he accepted the 2014 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America while wearing a pink kimono. At one point, during a silent sequence, the outside of the zoetrope becomes the window of an Amtrak quiet car. “We were trying to create a world where imaginative scapes could happen,” Whoriskey said. “So that a poem happens, and then suddenly, you’re seeing skeletons across a bridge, or a poem happens, and you’re seeing the shimmering of water.”Hecht didn’t work through the emotional arc of Ruhl’s character until the week before previews began. Though it’s easy to cry on command, she said, “I felt embarrassed to do that before we lived through the play for a while, and I really felt the weight of that story and that person coming into our lives.”For the past 30 years, Ruhl said, she has carried on an “intense” dialogue on life and art with Paula Vogel, her former professor. “When I met Max, it felt like he was one of those people that I would have that kind of dialogue with, had he lived that long,” she said. “It’s a comet-like thing. You might only meet those people once every … how often do comets circle?” Perhaps Ritvo made such an impact because he valued relationships. “He’s not a poet who just went inward and was exploring his own self and soul. It was always about talking to another person in a room,” Metzger said. “It was happening all the time, these little births and deaths of just being with a person in a room. I think that’s why he had so much intimacy with so many people. I’ve never met someone with as capacious of a soul.”When Ruhl attended the first preview performance of “Letters From Max, a Ritual” earlier this month, she could finally observe “how the humor landed,” how the emotional beats played out, and how Ritvo’s poetry “theatrically holds an audience.”But it wasn’t until intermission that the project came full circle. As part of the play’s “ritual,” she said, audience members sat at tables in the lobby to write letters to loved ones. A young woman approached Ruhl with an envelope addressed to her. The playwright opened it and drew out a note reading: “I have incurable brain cancer. And this production gave me hope.” More

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      How Her Ancestors Reignited Her Return to Theater

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      Quiara Alegría Hudes is back with a new work, an Off Broadway production of “My Broken Language,” adapted from her 2021 memoir.In 2018, the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes announced that she would be taking a pause from the theater. The art form she loved so much had become a source of heartbreak: She was tired of the industry’s lack of cultural diversity, the disinterest those in power had in changing the status quo and the anxiety she felt leading up to opening night (the unexpected hiccups, the uncertainty of how a work would be received by critics and audience members).When it came to producing works by playwrights of color, she began to feel as if her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Water by the Spoonful,” about a Puerto Rican war veteran recently returned from Iraq, and “In the Heights,” her Tony-winning musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, were exceptions more often than the rule. During the 2018-2019 season, for example, only three writers of color had their work produced on Broadway.In order to heal, Hudes went on an inner retreat. Turning to her memories, she sought out the people who taught her how to tend to her body and spirit. This soulful journey resulted in “My Broken Language,” an impressionistic coming-of-age memoir published in 2021 that detailed the shame she felt over being fluent in her Jewish father’s native English, but not her Puerto Rican mother’s Spanish. It was that same sense of incompleteness that led her to take a break from the theater.While recording the audiobook, Hudes noted her prose sometimes had the rhythm of a monologue. “It was the one-woman play,” she said. That realization, combined with her wanting to step up as a community leader, ignited her desire to return to theater — despite the heartbreak. “Let me get some real bodies and spirits on this,” she recalled thinking during our video chat. Now, Hudes’s stage adaptation of her book, also called “My Broken Language,” is running at Signature Theater through Nov. 27.From left, Samora la Perdida (seated), Zabryna Guevara, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yani Marin and Marilyn Torres in “My Broken Language.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesOnstage, she is embodied by five people, including one of her frequent collaborators, Daphne Rubin-Vega, all of whom play different shades of the author. Hudes, now 45, had moments of not recognizing the person on the page. She made peace with it by realizing, “it was all the identities of mine, but it was also all the identities of all the women who raised me and who I love.” “My Broken Language,” in all its forms, is also partly a celebration of her ancestors, and how often unintentionally they inspired her to become a writer. “Our archive is in us and of us,” she wrote in the script for the play. On a practical level, in tune with changing what once made her turn away from the theater, Hudes wanted to ensure the production contributes to moving the industry forward in terms of representation in casting. In the script, she insists, “these are Philly Rican roles” for Latina actors.Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hudes comes from a long line of Puerto Rican women who excelled at building community and developing strong spiritual values. Her mother, Virginia Sanchez, who features prominently in the book and the play, is a renowned santera, who instilled love and respect for their Taína-Lukumí-Boricua legacy, as well as a fascination with words. One of Sanchez’s favorite possessions is a 19th-century Spanish dictionary that she uses to search for words people may have forgotten.“The book smells like our elders, it has its own soul,” Sanchez said over a video call, “it contains one of our identities.” In spite of her daughter’s “broken language,” Sanchez said she believes “Quiara always had a gift for words, she knows how to transform her experiences into a form of teaching.”Bill Heck and Liza Colón-Zayas in “Water by the Spoonful,” which had its New York premiere in 2013 at Second Stage Theater.Karli Cadel for The New York TimesLin-Manuel Miranda, center left, and Karen Olivo in the musical “In the Heights” at the Richard Rodgers Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed, the playwright extracts wisdom from experiences she had growing up, such as seeing her mother possessed by a spirit. “To do that literally onstage would be vulgar,” Hudes explained. So she transformed her memories into words and then into physical movements that would make sense onstage with the help of the choreographer Ebony Williams. The goal is to create actions that evoke the feeling of being in between universes.The play also marks Hudes’s directorial debut. She describes the work of a director as one of “community care,” and compares it to a gardener choosing the seeds, planting them, and then nurturing them toward excellence. “Directing is the process,” she said.“Her rehearsal room feels like home,” said Samora la Perdida, who plays one of Hudes’ alter egos, describing “walls decorated with altars to our ancestors, tables with guava and cheese empanadas from her favorite spot in Washington Heights, a stereo blasting Frankie Ruiz.”Of Hudes, Rubin-Vega added, “She leads with openhearted professionalism.”Rethinking the meaning of community and how to affect it is what led Hudes to resume her theater work. After publishing her memoir, she discovered a new community in a world of readers who reacted emotionally to her stories and reminded her of her purpose.“Quiara is giving our community the opportunity to talk about the raw pain we’ve inherited, not only as women or immigrants but as people,” Sanchez said. “My daughter is a keeper of our lineage, a witness of our experience.”Although they work in different fields, Hudes said she believes she and her mother have overlapping journeys. “We break through the vines with our machetes, finding our own way, sharing strategies and celebrating triumphs,” Hudes added.“Quiara accepted her tongue for what it was in order to create a language of her own,” la Perdida said, “a language that shamelessly dances with both her Latina roots and Western canon influences. A language with the rhythms of Chopin and Juan Luis Guerra, inspired by the poetic prose of both Shakespeare and José Rivera.”After five years away, Hudes said she is enjoying the various pleasures that come with working in the theater again, like being in a room full of Latino artists, her community. She finds it to be utterly therapeutic. “I often crunch up in my seat, kind of like a ball, and then pop up, it’s so much fun to live all these old habits again,” she said. More

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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More