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    ‘Mary Said What She Said’ Review: A Hypnotic Huppert

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    In this Robert Wilson production, Isabelle Huppert is everywhere onstage, all at once, reciting a nonstop script that may well touch on everything.Isabelle Huppert stands upstage center, demurely holding her hands in front of her waist, and starts to speak. She is motionless and in silhouette so we don’t see her mouth, creating a sense of dislocation as to where the words we hear are actually coming from. And as we quickly discover, the Robert Wilson production “Mary Said What She Said” interpolates live and recorded lines.But wait: After a few minutes, Huppert is standing a little closer to the audience. Moments later she is almost downstage. The entire time I could have sworn she wasn’t moving. How did she pull off that sleight of hand — or feet?Huppert is playing Mary Stuart and wearing a 16th-century-style dress, which means she can take tiny steps without the audience seeing them, as if she were on casters. This creates the illusion of stillness in motion, or perhaps freeze-framed movement — either way a neat encapsulation of Wilson’s art as a theater maker — that contrasts with the simultaneous verbal stream flowing in an almost uninterrupted manner over the course of this 90-minute monologue. (The show is in French with subtitles.)Written by Darryl Pinckney, who drew from the Queen of Scots’s letters, “Mary Said What She Said,” which is at NYU Skirball through Sunday, is inconceivable without Huppert, and she is the reason to see it.She gives a performance of rarefied virtuosity and rigor as she seemingly effortlessly handles the precise blocking and light and audio cues, the swings between immobility and fastidiously choreographed movement, the abrupt changes in tempo and pitch — and of course the dense, nonlinear text full of echoing repetitions, which must be a beast to memorize. Even when she’s not moving or speaking, she always needs to be committed to the moment. It is a marvel to behold.This is Huppert’s third collaboration with Wilson, after “Orlando” (1993) and “Quartett” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009), so at least she knows his exacting M.O. She was also familiar with the character, having played her in Schiller’s “Mary Stuart” at the National Theater in London in 1996.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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      ‘How Did I Get Here?’: 7 Days in the Life of a Busy Arts Programmer

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      Jay Wegman runs from rehearsals to lunches to shows for his job at N.Y.U. Skirball, then home for a “What We Do in the Shadows” episode or two.Jay Wegman, the artistic director of the N.Y.U. Skirball performing-arts center, likes to say that he lives in three time zones: “the present, a year from now and two years from now.”As far as the present is concerned, he monitors Skirball’s programming, with shows that in November included the Civilians docu-play “Sex Variants of 1941 — A Study of Homosexual Patterns” and “No President,” a wild experiment by Nature Theater of Oklahoma set to “The Nutcracker.”At the same time, Wegman, who moved from the Abrons Art Center to the N.Y.U. position in 2016, works out logistics for the following months and plans for events much farther in the future — a lead time of two or three years is not uncommon when bringing over the international productions that have become one of Skirball’s calling cards.Wegman, 60, kept a diary of his cultural diet during a late October/early November week. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.Wegman joined Skirball as artistic director in 2016 from the Abron Arts Center.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesMonday: The 2 Best Shows on TV?I spent most of the day on emails. We were trying to nail down travel plans for Isabelle Huppert, who is doing “Mary Said What She Said” in February. I went out to dinner with her and Robert Wilson in May, and it freaked me out because I was so aware that I was sitting there with those people. It just was like, “How did I get here?”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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      Uncovering Gay and Lesbian History in a 1941 ‘Sex Variants’ Study

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      The Civilians theater group has adapted a study of homosexuality into a work that explores the lives of lesbians and gay men in the early 20th century.In the 1930s, Jan Gay, a sex researcher and journalist, made the tough decision to publish material from hundreds of in-depth interviews she had done with fellow lesbians in a medical study written by a straight male psychiatrist.Though she had hoped her work might be used to curb the criminalization of homosexuality, the final study ended up further pathologizing “sexual deviance.” Yet Gay knew that without it, the interviews, which provide an intimate look at gay and lesbian life in the early 20th century, might never have been published at all.That history has inspired the Civilians theater company to create “Sex Variants of 1941: A Study of Homosexual Patterns,” which takes its name from the study. The show seeks to breathe Gay’s sense of humanity back into a problematic text through a blend of songs and scenes, many of them taken verbatim from the report. The piece, directed by Steve Cosson, will be performed at N.Y.U. Skirball through Nov. 24.Cosson conceived the work along with the visual artist Jessica Mitrani, and wrote the book with James La Bella. A cast of six performs the material as a sort of animated lecture, allowing for a kaleidoscopic look at the interviews as conducted, original music inspired by the lives of the subjects, and imagined stories dramatizing the creation of the study itself.“A good part of the contemporary conversation we’re having with this show is saying queer people need a history,” Cosson said in an interview. The study, he added, “became such a useful thing to make theater out of because they approached it as documenting these people’s lives, interviewing them and doing every scientific test that could be done at the time.”Jo Lampert and Robert Johanson in the show.Greg KesslerWe 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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      The Enduring Allure of ‘Showgirls’? A French Play Investigates in Song.

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      Inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film, “Showgirl” considers what it means to be an actress who gets naked.Las Vegas was a hot location for movies in 1995. Nicolas Cage battled his demons in the character study “Leaving Las Vegas,” with Elisabeth Shue caught in the crossfire. Sharon Stone was a shrewd hustler turned mob wife in the Martin Scorsese drama “Casino.” All three actors landed Oscar nominations (Cage won), and even when certain critics didn’t care for those films, they at least respected them.That cannot be said of the third major Vegas movie from that year: Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17-rated “Showgirls,” the flashy, brash, somewhat bonkers tale of a dancer named Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) who claws her way to the top of the seminude entertainment heap — or volcano, as the case may be.And yet it is that film that has inspired a documentary, drag tributes, musical spoofs, memes, academic essays (some of them collected in the recent anthology “The Year’s Work in ‘Showgirls’ Studies,” from Indiana University Press) and even a poetic retelling in sestinas. The latest entry in this ever-evolving galaxy is Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet’s “Showgirl,” a French play with an original techno score that will be performed at N.Y.U. Skirball on Friday and Saturday.‘It Doesn’t Suck’Saldana discovered the movie fairly early, catching it on VHS a couple of years after its release. She watched it like most people did around that time: for a laugh.“As I started doing more and more dance, I realized it’s a cult film in that world, like ‘Flashdance’ or ‘The Red Shoes’ — something else was going on,” Saldana, 45, said in a video interview from France.“I genuinely love this film,” she added. “Every time I watch it, I discover something new.”The various takes on “Showgirls” nowadays cover a wide spectrum in which serious-minded dissections counterbalance the midnight-screening crowd’s laughter and the drag satires. The movie is “revered both at the ‘low’ end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the ‘high’ end by academics as a critical fetish object,” Adam Nayman wrote in his book “It Doesn’t Suck: ‘Showgirls.’”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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      ‘Counting and Cracking’ Review: One Family’s Tale Fit for an Epic

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      No theatrical wizardry is needed for this compelling drama about a woman’s journey to Australia from war-torn Sri Lanka and the generations that follow.Some shows use an extended running time to challenge the audience and its perceptions. Pulling viewers into a trance state and testing their endurance is the ultimate artistic gambit.Then there are the shows that are long simply because they have a lot to tell.Such is the case with “Counting and Cracking,” which fills its three and a half hours with an absorbing tale of family ties and national strife, from Sri Lanka to Australia, across almost five decades. When the first of two intermissions arrived, I had barely recovered from a head-spinning plot twist. And the production, which is at N.Y.U. Skirball in partnership with the Public Theater, had more in store. It’s that kind of good yarn.Written by S. Shakthidharan, who drew from his own family history and is also credited with associate direction, “Counting and Cracking” starts in 2004 Sydney. The show opens with Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera) briskly instructing her son, the 21-year-old Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar), to disperse his grandmother’s ashes in the Georges River, and then immerse himself in the water, as required by tradition.“In Tamil we don’t say goodbye,” Radha tells Siddhartha. “Only, I will go and come back.”As the show progresses, we gradually realize what these words really mean to her, and to her family and community. In 1983, when she was pregnant and living in her home country of Sri Lanka, Radha was told that her husband, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), had been killed in the budding civil war between the minority Tamil and the majority Sinhala. She fled the violence and settled in Australia, where she gave birth to a child who would grow up largely unaware of his heritage.At a steady clip, Shakthidharan and the director Eamon Flack (also credited with associate writing) hopscotch between Sydney and Sri Lanka, from the 1950s — when the South Asian nation was still known as Ceylon — to the 1980s and 2000s and back again. Even the language is in constant movement as the 16 actors juggle English, Sinhala and Tamil, providing instant translation when necessary.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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      Working on a Sri Lankan-Australian Epic, He Learned His Family’s Past

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      As the acclaimed “Counting and Cracking” makes its North American debut, the playwright describes the work as “my soul on a plate.”The playwright S. Shakthidharan has lived in Australia since he was a toddler, but when he speaks of his homeland, he means Sri Lanka.That’s where he was born, where he spent his first birthday, where his ancestors were rooted. Then in 1983, the South Asian nation descended into what would become a 26-year civil war. His family, part of the country’s Tamil minority, had the means to flee to safety. So they did, going to India, Singapore and finally Australia, in 1984.“I do think of Sri Lanka as my homeland, but I think of Australia as my home,” he said the other day, his accent redolent of Sydney, where he grew up. “I think I carry the two simultaneously. Sri Lanka lives somewhere in my chest. Always. Wherever I am.”He was saying this in New York, after a rehearsal of his epic play, “Counting and Cracking,” in which the personal and political are inextricably entwined. Jet lag had a hold of him, but he was game to talk about the show, which has a largely South Asian cast of 19 and a running time of three and a half hours (intermissions included).Shiv Palekar, center, and other performers at N.Y.U. Skirball. Multiple trips to Sri Lanka and India were involved in assembling the cast.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAn autobiographically infused hit in Australia, where it had its premiere in 2019, it is now in previews at N.Y.U. Skirball in Greenwich Village. Produced by Belvoir St Theater and Kurinji, and presented by the Public Theater and N.Y.U. Skirball, it’s a multigenerational saga about a Sri Lankan-Australian family and the dangerous fragmenting of a society that can drive people to leave their beloved country and risk trying to forge a new life elsewhere.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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      Nadia Boulanger, Music’s Greatest Teacher, Wrote an Opera

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      Nadia Boulanger’s “La Ville Morte” was repeatedly thwarted by death and World War I, then nearly lost. Finally, it is having its American premiere.In March 1912, the famous violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe visited the home of his fellow musician Raoul Pugno in Paris. At the piano, Pugno played and sang through “La Ville Morte,” an opera he was writing with Nadia Boulanger, a mentee-turned-collaborator 35 years his junior.“Of this very private performance,” Ysaÿe wrote to Boulanger later that month, “I keep the most profound and happiest impression.” The opera, he told her, was “so beautiful, so sound, so poignant.”“La Ville Morte” was the most ambitious project of Boulanger’s young composing career. And once it took shape, with a piano-vocal score completed that summer, she wrote under the final measures, “Alleluia!!!!”But one thing after another kept “La Ville Morte” from reaching the stage. In 1914, Pugno, an essential partner in selling it to the public, died. World War I broke out, delaying the planned premiere, not for the last time. Several years later, Boulanger’s dear sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, died, too, and Nadia virtually stopped writing or promoting her own music.Robin Guarino, center, the director of “La Ville Morte” for Catapult Opera, rehearses with the singers. Guarino said she was amazed by the score and the “feminism sizzling under the surface.”Ava Pellor for The New York TimesBoulanger would instead go on to become one of the greatest music teachers in history — a formative figure for titans of the 20th century, like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter, and other legends, including Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach and Philip Glass.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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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis in Close-Up at Jazz Concerts

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      Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.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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      ‘Nosferatu, a 3D Symphony of Horror’ Review: A Lip-Smacking Scare

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      This creepy Halloween show is the latest visual feat from Joshua William Gelb, presented by Theater in Quarantine and produced in a closet.“Are you alone?” a disembodied voice asks softly. “Are you in a dark room? Have you locked your door?”The questions could be seen as caring, initially, but they are threatening. I hear footsteps. The voice gets nearer, intimate and chilling: “So close, we could almost touch.” The murmur suggests a terrifying prospect: The words are coming not from inside the house, but from inside my mind.Vampires are not rare onstage, but “Nosferatu, a 3D Symphony of Horror,” a Halloween show livestreamed by Theater in Quarantine and NYU Skirball, is the first theatrical tale of bloodsucking that has really creeped me out. (Like previous offerings by the company, this one will be available on YouTube, but not until three months after the live run, which ends Oct. 31.)The piece is the latest feat from Joshua William Gelb, a man who loves a challenge: He created Theater in Quarantine in 2020, when physical venues were shut down in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and livestreams his work from inside a small closet in his apartment. Half of the pleasure of watching a Theater in Quarantine creation comes from the jaw-droppingly inventive problem-solving on display.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More