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      Onstage in Brooklyn, ‘Monsoon Wedding’ Tries to Capture the Film’s Spirit

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      The director Mira Nair was standing inside St. Ann’s Warehouse last week, pointing at a marigold-covered archway that was being assembled near the entrance. Conscious of the wedding photo shoots that often happen just outside the space, she was talking about the musical adaptation of her 2001 film, “Monsoon Wedding,” at the theater, which, situated along the Dumbo waterfront and a stone’s throw from where the East and Hudson Rivers merge. “That’s what our show is about,” she said. “Confluence.”Like the film, the show centers on an arranged marriage that brings together two vastly different Indian families, wedding planners and domestic workers. In the musical, the joyfully chaotic nuptials form a mosaic of questions of genuine attraction (the bride must deal with a scorned secret lover), diaspora (the party, notably the New Jersey-born groom, assembles from all over the world) and relationships across castes and religions.First staged in 2017 at Berkeley Repertory Theater, where it received mixed reviews, the show has made a “beautiful odyssey” to New York, as Nair put it. (It’s actually a return of sorts: Rehearsals for that first staging took place in Manhattan — Anisha Nagarajan reprises her principal role as the bride’s maid, along with Palomi Ghosh as an auntie.) Since then, “Monsoon Wedding” has been retooled, with new choreography, movement direction and scenic design. An additional writer was brought in to help work on the book, and the show was workshopped for friends and family in New Delhi in 2019, where Gagan Dev Riar joined as the bride’s father. Although plans for performances in Britain in 2020 were canceled because of the pandemic, it was staged in Doha last year as part of the cultural programming for the World Cup in Qatar.“It’s about our families, but so deeply universal; it’s an essential story of understanding a whole society,” the director Mira Nair said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesAt St. Ann’s last Thursday, just two days before the musical was to begin previews, Susan Feldman, the theater’s artistic director, walked by at one point. Minding her step amid sections of a yet-assembled wedding tent, she chimed in that the production “has pushed the Warehouse farther than it’s ever been.”A visual validation of that claim might be Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set, which runs the length of the large performance space. “It’s a holistic design in the way that the audience relates to the scenery,” Ardizzone-West said during a video call earlier that day. Inspired by the domestic courtyards found in India, he added, the set is a mix of “ancient stepwell structures and modernist architecture, specifically inspired by Le Corbusier, who has a lot of buildings in India.”Nair explained that she always wanted audience members to feel like guests at the wedding, calling the new scenic design “the fruition of many a dream.”From left, Sargam Ipshita Bali, Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh in the production. “In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards,” Nair said, adding that Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set conveys that sentiment.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards, in canopies, under tents,” she said. “It’s an open door for the community to come celebrate this wedding, and that was the feeling I wanted.”The concrete stateliness of the set, which audience members must cross to get to their seats, is balanced by Arjun Bhasin’s colorful, culturally specific costumes. (“India is like Japan,” Nair quipped, “everything is coded.”) The men’s turbans are a particular shade of lilac, for example and, following tradition, the bride is never seen alone the night before the wedding. Bhasin, who worked on the film and thus considers himself “one of the oldest members of the production,” said the key to preserving its DNA was preserving its focus on character.Nair, left, with one of the show’s book writers, Arpita Mukherjee, center, and its costume designer, Arjun Bhasin, during rehearsals.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“When you eliminate the close-up and get to these tableaus, it becomes about people,” Bhasin explained. “The show is about the interactions of these people together; the upstairs versus the downstairs, the bride’s family versus the groom’s family, all these different love stories.”Work on the adaptation began in 2006, with Nair and the film’s screenwriter, Sabrina Dhawan, collaborating with the composer Vishal Bhardwaj and the lyricist Susan Birkenhead. Nair said she’d been inspired by the 2004 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a show built around cultural traditions adapting to survive. The film, like the musical, touches upon the fallout of India’s 1947 partition, brought to life in the characters’ religious, social and economic differences.“We’d made a movie that was our version, in a sense,” Nair said. “It’s about our families, but so deeply universal — this essential story of understanding a whole society and movement through a very personal story.”Marigold tapestry: The flowers are popular decorations at Hindu weddings.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesMarigolds, umbrellas and suitcases backstage at the theater.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesThat specificity meant weaving into the adaptation the concept of jugalbandi performance, a type of Indian duet. This is felt, not only in the score, which now also features lyrics by Masi Asare (a Tony nominee last year for “Paradise Square,” which similarly dealt with cultural cross-pollination), but in the placement of the band on the sides of the stage.“I think of it as a call-and-response between the music and the actors, and that has shaped it very deeply,” Nair said. “That is why the musicians are on par with the actors, and you see the sitar player and the trombone. It’s a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound, distilled and very exquisite.”Arpita Mukherjee, the book’s co-writer, was Nair’s assistant before being promoted to associate director and dramaturg during the Berkeley run. She moved to the United States from Delhi when she was 12 and brings an understanding of the emigrant experience to Dhawan’s updated book, which reconfigures the groom’s family as second-generation Indian American.The sitar player Soumitra Thakur at a rehearsal. Nair said she wanted “a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“At the time the film came out, there were still some really antiquated notions about what India was, and no understanding of what a globalized India looked like,” Mukherjee said on a video call. “There’s a great story here about what home, and belonging, means.” She continued: “The really exciting thing is all these different types of brown people who have very different experiences of brownness because of class, or upbringing.”Nair’s work has never shied away from examining cultural distinctions, as in “Mississippi Masala,” an interracial romance between an Black man and Indian American woman, or exploring her native India’s underexposed aspects, like “Salaam Bombay!,” a drama about children living in the slums.For the musical, this quest to reflect the times meant revising one of the film’s subplots about a relative’s grooming and sexual abuse of two younger family members. Where the film’s family grants the wealthy patriarch some degree of amnesty, the musical condemns.The show has new choreography by Shampa Gopikrishna, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille is the movement director.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“We’ve made a concerted effort to have the women question the patriarchy and speak up,” Nair said. “Other characters who are afflicted by this don’t shove it under the rug; they make decisions in their own lives that reflect that they will not accept this behavior, which we didn’t have before.”Mukherjee echoed that sentiment, calling the women “the stewards of a new way of thinking and being.”“They all have a voice in the show, which is looking at what the musical form can do to capture the spirit of the film, but go deeper,” she added. “Music is at the core of that; who gets to sing, who gets to have a voice? There’s a great theme of wanting things to be different from generations before, and it’s all led by women.” More

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      ‘We’ve Experienced the Stories We’re Telling’: ‘The Jungle’ Is Back.

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      ‘We’ve Experienced the Stories We’re Telling’: ‘The Jungle’ Is Back.Five years after its American premiere, the acclaimed play about migrants eking out lives in an encampment returns with a mix of new and original cast members.Clockwise from top left, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Mylène Gomera, Mohamed Sarrar and Ammar Haj Ahmad. Hesmondhalgh and Gomera are new additions, while Sarrar and Haj Ahmad are reprising their roles.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2023At the Afghan Cafe, the smell of fresh dough, soft and earthy, lingers as the bread makes its way to the oven. Boxy televisions with old Bollywood films on a loop perch in the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. The floor is hardened mulch, the menu handmade. And all the patrons are a long, long way from home.“The Jungle” — an immersive play about the residents of a makeshift migrant camp in Calais, France — is back at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it had its American premiere in 2018. As the story unfolds against the backdrop of the improvised cafe, the audience meets characters from Eritrea, Syria, Sudan, Iraq and Iran, who describe their harrowing journeys while confronting treacherous living conditions and impending eviction.When “The Jungle” last ran in New York (the critic Ben Brantley called it a “thrilling drama” and “a work of absorbing theater”), President Donald J. Trump’s travel ban had virtually blocked citizens of many predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, which meant three of the actors nearly didn’t make it to the stage. This time, the production — featuring a mix of new and returning actors, many of whom are former refugees themselves — hoped for a smoother entry. Julie Hesmondhalgh, who portrays Paula, a do-gooder English volunteer dedicating her life to the women and children of the camp, and Mylène Gomera, who plays Helene, a Christian Eritrean traveling solo, are new to the company; Ammar Haj Ahmad returns as Safi, the show’s Syrian narrator, along with Mohamed Sarrar as Omar, a Sudanese refugee.But the return to the Brooklyn set has been a bumpy one.“We obviously had some trouble last time, but we did find a way to get here in a sort of timely manner,” said Justin Martin, who directs the play with Stephen Daldry. “This time, we’ve actually found it a bit more difficult.”Once the show was scheduled for 2023, the visa problems began anew. Applications dragged on without explanation. One of the original cast members, Yasin Moradi, a Kurdish martial artist from Iran, is still waiting for his visa in London.Others encountered obstacles upon arrival in the United States. Gomera, who is originally from Eritrea, was held at the airport for questioning.“It took me a couple of days to let it go and shake it off,” she said.Yasin Moradi, a returning cast member, sits in London awaiting his visa.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesThe American political context may have shifted, but war, natural disaster and economic collapse continue to displace communities around the world — and the story of desperate people seeking safe harbor still resonates.“When does a place become a place?” Safi asks at the end of the first act. “When does a place become a home?”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.We spoke with five cast members about their connections to the show and where they find a sense of home. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Ammar Haj AhmadI am from Syria, and I am British, but none of it, to be honest, means anything. And maybe it’s corny to say, but it’s the truth. I am context, and I am human.Home for me now is people. After what happened to Damascus, I don’t have the same relationship to places. Anything you build you can lose. Sometimes safety comes from attitudes and thoughts. That’s where home is for me, when someone is kind in nature and has the appetite to understand.It can be tricky sometimes, because I am performing and people are clapping, and my sisters are sleeping in cars in southern Turkey — the center of the earthquake.The last time I was here, I didn’t enjoy any minute of it aside from the time I spent onstage. But I couldn’t wait to come back. The cast are amazing and the audience is there around you. There is always the potential for it to be magical.Mylène GomeraI’m Eritrean. As cliché as it sounds, I’m really a global nomad on so many levels. The role I play, Helene, is essentially my story, my route. It’s such an honor to be a voice for Eritreans, especially Eritrean women. The responsibility I feel is immense.The intention is never to leave your country. That’s what gets lost. And you figure out that it isn’t necessarily better, but it is safer. There is a constant battle of: Am I in a better place now?To be in New York, to be onstage, to have come this far, to have no connections to the industry, to come from a tiny village in Eritrea — I’m constantly asking myself how this happened.I’m new to the company, but I feel right at home. We’re all taking care of each other; this play requires that. We’ve experienced the stories we’re telling.The Afghan Cafe on the set of “The Jungle,” which integrates the audience with the cast, features catwalk-like runways throughout the makeshift restaurant.Teddy WolffMohamed SarrarI am one of the people who lived in the Jungle in Calais. I lived it in reality, and now I’m doing it again. I’ve moved on, but I go back in my mind to show others what it was like there.My homeland is Sudan. I fled when I was 25 because of what was happening in Darfur. I fled violence and evil.Sometimes, onstage, the tears come, because it’s not just about me, it’s about all of the people who are still working to come, who can’t leave.Julie HesmondhalghI’m U.K. born and bred. I come from a working class family in the north of England and I live in Manchester now, which is a city that is traditionally a city of protest and radicalism.Back in my history there is Irish heritage, so with that always comes immigration and prejudice, for sure, but my connection to refuge and migration is purely as an activist. Let’s put it this way: It wasn’t me who was taken into a side room to be interviewed.There’s always a crisis of refugees, and you have to ask the question, “Why?” And racism has to be part of that conversation. That’s why this play is so important: because it takes you right to the refugee stories, which we hear in a really real and personal way. And that’s where art steps in.It’s an honor to play this role. I wanted this job more than any job I’ve ever wanted before. Yasin MoradiI am originally Kurdish from Iran. I am still in my home in London, unfortunately. It’s been a long process.I thought with Biden in office, we would go to the U.S. more easily, but it seems like it’s harder than before. I am the only person who has been here for three weeks waiting without any explanation. No one is forced to leave their land unless it is unsafe. I lived in the Jungle in 2015 for six weeks. We Kurdish people, we don’t have anywhere.The more people see this play, the more sympathy people have. It is hard to hate someone when you hear their story or laugh at their joke.I am not there, but my heart is with them. More

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      Review: In This ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Music, Moors and Untamed Spirits

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      Emma Rice’s glorious stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel is a feat of storytelling, with a singing and dancing chorus embodying the moors.With a whip in one hand and a wind-bent tree in the other, the barefoot girl makes a taunting entrance, radiating caprice like some malicious sprite. This is Catherine Earnshaw, wild thing of Wuthering Heights, and if she is faintly ridiculous in her menace, it is menace nonetheless.Landing a first impression that distills the essence of a character is a rare art, and one of many things that the quick-witted, nimble-bodied company of Wise Children’s wondrous “Wuthering Heights” does exceptionally well. Adapted by the British director Emma Rice from Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel, this music-filled version is an embrace, an envelopment: a feat of storytelling that wraps itself around the audience, pulling us into its silliness and sorrow.As besotted with the gale-tossed Yorkshire moors as Catherine and her tormented Heathcliff ever were, it makes that landscape a playground of the imagination, pausing every so often to ensure — in a friendly, tongue-in-cheek fashion — that we’re following along. Because as a baffled stranger says, when he bumbles into this multi-household, multigenerational saga, “Everyone’s related, all the names sound the same.”Well, yes, but this is a show so devoted to clarity that it helps us keep track of each fresh death (and goodness, these people die at an alarming rate) by chalking that character’s name on a blackboard the size of a small tombstone and walking it slowly across the stage. That’s also our clue that the next time we see the actor whose character has died, that cast member will most likely be playing someone else — possibly the dead person’s child.Also, the moors in this production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, performed last winter at the National Theater in London, are not just the locale, which Vicki Mortimer’s rough wooden set suggests mainly with the low gray clouds moving past on an upstage screen. (Video design is by Simon Baker.) The moors are embodied, too, by a chorus that sings, dances and possesses opinions — particularly the Leader of the Yorkshire Moors (a wonderful Nandi Bhebhe), who wears a headdress of brambly magnificence and takes on some of the vital background-providing function that the old family retainer Ellen has in the novel.Anyway, no need to brush up on your Brontë. You’ll be fine.Foreground from left: Liam Tamne, Tama Phethean and McCormick.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the heart of it all are Catherine and Heathcliff, two halves of the same soul who are just scamps when her father finds little Heathcliff parentless on the Liverpool docks and brings him home to join the family at Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, takes an instant loathing to the newcomer and treats him viciously, feeling his birthright threatened by the presence of this boy whose skin is darker than his.“Gypsy,” Hindley calls Heathcliff, and pummels him whenever he gets the chance.For Catherine, Heathcliff is a best friend and partner in mischief. Their youngest selves are played initially by puppets, then seamlessly succeeded by the adult actors Lucy McCormick and Liam Tamne, who bring a roiling chemistry to what will become Catherine and Heathcliff’s desperate mutual obsession. But as they gambol about the moors in those early years, it’s the joy they take in each other, and the freedom they feel together, that forms a bond so unbreakable it transcends death.Like the other inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate Thrushcross Grange — home of the laughably effete Linton siblings, Edgar (Sam Archer) and Isabella (Katy Owen, the show’s brilliant comic powerhouse) — Catherine and Heathcliff are formed and deformed by their environment, a place where it’s easy to be solitary, to nurse a grudge, to wreak revenge.As beastly as Catherine generally is, and as enormous as her eventual betrayal of Heathcliff is, it’s the men who, beginning as boys, do great violence to one another, both physical and psychic, and spend their lives perpetuating it. Heathcliff, of course, is the prime example, growing from an ingenuous child into a glowering adult who spins all the considerable evil ever done to him — much of it based on race and class — into justification for his long game of retribution.From left: McCormick, Tamne, Phethean and Katy Owen, a font of mirth in a variety of characters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet Rice — a longtime St. Ann’s favorite for productions including “Brief Encounter” and “Tristan & Yseult” — makes certain that this beguiling “Wuthering Heights” is no carnival of gloom. Owen, especially, is a font of mirth, not only as Isabella but also as her extravagantly spoiled son, Little Linton, a creature so enfeebled by his cosseted upbringing that he’s practically boneless. Frances (Eleanor Sutton), the fragile nitwit who has the poor taste to marry Catherine’s brother, Hindley (Tama Phethean), is also a delicious source of comedy — as are assorted bitey dogs: puppets made of skulls on scythes.Hindley has kindness solely for Frances, and when she dies he crumbles squalidly. Yet as cruel and falling-down drunk as Phethean is as Hindley, he is equally gentle — which is not to say saintly — as Hindley’s son, Hareton, who has been beaten down by both his father and Heathcliff, but chooses not to emulate them by targeting victims of his own. It is a gorgeous performance, its agility and tenderness of a piece with this production’s.Stalked by Catherine’s perambulating ghost, and infused with live music by Ian Ross that feels somehow like earth and air, this is a show with a gloriously untamed spirit. On this first stop on its American tour, it is better — deeper and sexier — than the excellent version I saw in London early this year.At nearly three hours, including the intermission, it asks an investment of time that’s absolutely worth it. I, for one, want to go again.Wuthering HeightsThrough Nov. 6 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Who Can Play the King? Representation Questions Fuel Casting Debates.

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      Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.TriStar PicturesWhile many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world.‘Coda’: The Oscar-winning film showcases deaf actors and lives. But some deaf viewers found its hearing perspective frustrating. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.The casting of Mr. Hughes in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain was hailed as the first time the company had cast a disabled actor in the title role.Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanySome of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by themThe remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”Ms. Gurira, left, said her approach to Richard aimed to get at the “psychological reason for what he becomes.” She appeared with Daniel J. Watts, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”Harriet Walter, with hands outstretched, in a 2013 production of “Julius Caesar,” in which all of the roles were played by women. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”Gregg Mozgala, left, an actor with cerebral palsy, says he has to bring his “full humanity to every character I play.” He appeared with Jolly Abraham in 2017 in a production of the play “Cost of Living.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.” More

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      Little Amal, a Refugee Puppet Who Traveled Europe, Will Visit New York

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      Last year, the 12-foot-tall Syrian girl trekked from Turkey to Britain to find her mother. This fall, she’ll visit all five boroughs.Little Amal, a 12-foot-tall puppet depicting a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, has seen about a dozen countries, visited London’s Royal Opera House and other sightseeing destinations, and even met the Pope.But this fall, Amal will embark on an entirely new adventure, crossing the Atlantic for the first time in a trip to New York intended to promote an open embrace of refugees and immigrants.Amal is scheduled to arrive at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 14, with plans to travel to all five boroughs, visiting with children, artists, politicians and community leaders along the way, according to an announcement on Thursday from the Walk Productions, which is co-producing the visit with St. Ann’s Warehouse.Her original 5,000-mile journey from Turkey to England last year — which included visits to migrant camps — was designed to highlight the plight of millions of Syrian refugees in Europe who traveled long distances across the continent to flee the country’s civil war. The project was supposed to end there, said its artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, but about two-thirds of the way through the journey, the creative team realized that Amal could have a future beyond those specific geopolitical circumstances.“She became an excuse for communities to come together and be kind to a foreigner,” Zuabi said, “and by doing that, understand something about themselves — understand what there is to celebrate in their communities.”The towering puppet — which is operated by three people, including one person on stilts — will visit St. Ann’s, and several other New York cultural institutions will be involved in her trip, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center and the Classical Theater of Harlem. The visit, which has a budget of over $1 million, is planned to conclude in early October with a trip to the Statue of Liberty.In 2018, St. Ann’s presented an Off Broadway play, “The Jungle,” that inspired the character of Amal. First staged at the Young Vic Theater before transferring to the West End, “The Jungle” is based on what its writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, observed when they set up an interactive arts center in a migrant camp in Calais, France. The play will be returning to St. Ann’s next February.Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s, said she first saw Amal’s effect on the public during a trip last year to an elementary school in a Paris suburb, where the students started screaming and following her around as soon as they laid eyes on her.“She became a bit of a Pied Piper,” Feldman said. “It was very magical.”Although Amal’s presence is not overtly political, Feldman said she felt that the visit to the United States would send an important message in a country where immigration has become a “political football” and migrant children have faced perilous living conditions.To Feldman, Amal’s visits in Europe felt like a parade of innocence and hope. “To have that in the streets in a very visible way could be very beautiful,” she said.Designed by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, Amal is quite delicate — her arms and upper body are made of bamboo canes — and has needed plenty of maintenance over her months of travel, Zuabi said. Earlier this year, she visited young Ukrainian refugees in Poland.But New York is not likely to be her last journey: Amal has had requests to visit countries around the world, he said, and there are plans in the works for trips elsewhere in the U.S. next year. More

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      Review: In ‘Who Killed My Father,’ an Inquest and an Indictment

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      Édouard Louis grew up scorned by his family for being gay. Now he sees homophobia as part of the portfolio of “humiliation by the ruling class.”It’s natural to wish harm on those who do harm. When “something heavy” falls on Eddy Bellegueule’s father at the factory where he works, leaving his back “broyé, écrasé” — “mangled, crushed” — it may seem a kind of justice. The father has, after all, left his son in approximately the same condition: mangled by homophobia and crushed by unrequited love.Or at least that’s how I felt after reading the takedowns of toxic masculinity, and of the French provincial culture that produced it, in two memoirs by the boy who grew up to be Édouard Louis. “The End of Eddy” details his harrowing childhood in Hallencourt, a village about 100 miles north of Paris, where his father fumed at his son’s femininity, his schoolmates beat and used him sexually, and even his mother used a gay slur to mock him. In “History of Violence” we learn that the capital city, for all its sophistication, offered little shelter from the same forces; after picking up a man on Christmas Eve, Louis writes, he was robbed and raped.But a third memoir, “Who Killed My Father,” implicitly asks readers, and now playgoers, to rethink who’s responsible and reassign the blame. Published in 2018, this one argues that homophobia — like racism, misogyny, transphobia and “all kinds of social and political oppression” — is not a personal failing but a cultural norm enforced by the state. Less a narrative than an indictment, it also brings the receipts.I don’t know that the one-man stage adaptation of “Who Killed My Father” that opened on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn — a production of Berlin’s Schaubühne and Théâtre de la Ville in Paris — will ultimately persuade you, though. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, and featuring Louis himself, it is too eager to show off its avant-garde chic to maintain the prosecutorial force of the narrowly argumentative book.That makes for a strange brew, both riveting and soporific. First comes the soporific: When we enter the theater, Louis is already at a desk, uplit by a laptop, muttering as he types what is evidently this script. On a screen behind him, English translations of the French he speaks share space with grainy, moody imagery, often depicting a ride on an endless, misty highway.At first you may fear that the entire 90-minute play will resemble that ride, and if you saw Ostermeier’s excellent production of “History of Violence,” which St. Ann’s presented in 2019, you will recognize his bag of alienation tricks. Microphones, music, videography and random movement — Louis darts from the desk to two other areas of the stage as he recites — are used not merely to break the audience of lazy theatergoing expectations but also to delay gratification so that it’s richer when it arrives.Yet there’s something to be said for those lazy expectations, including a desire for pleasure even in unpleasant things. Ostermeier gives us tiny appetizers in the form of interstitial dance breaks, when Louis, between heady sections of text, dons a wig or pulls a skirt over his pants to lip-sync the songs he loved as a boy. If “My Heart Will Go On,” “ … Baby One More Time” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” once enraged his parents, they now signify a kind of liberation. And Louis makes a delightful Celine Dion.His father is granted no such liberation. After the accident, his life collapsed; unable to work, and yet forced to work anyway to maintain access to welfare, his health deteriorated drastically. By 2017, when the story is set, his heart “doesn’t want to beat anymore.” He is just past 50 and even speaking exhausts him.Louis occasionally curls up in a recliner, meant to represent his absent father.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot that we hear him speak, of course; this being a solo act, whatever the father says is refracted through the son — and again through the surtitles, if you’re not a Francophone. Indeed, one of the play’s cagey stratagems reduces the father further, to a piece of furniture: an empty recliner with a blue-check blanket, which Louis, now 29, occasionally talks to or curls up in. This representation of the longed-for parent is sweet but also somewhat creepy: He is deliberately kept out of the play.That was true of the book as well, but narration works differently onstage than in prose. In subsuming his father’s voice, Louis eliminates him. Is he, in effect, the killer of the title?In any case, it’s a complex Oedipal complex, and the play’s navel-gazing doesn’t help. Roughing it up with real instead of stagy difficulty eventually brings it to fuller life, as when Louis switches to English to tell us a story he says is too important not to share in the audience’s primary language. Whether because I simply understood him more directly, or because he, an otherwise indifferent actor, had to work harder to deliver the text, this passage was more thrilling than any that preceded it.Notably, the passage concerns vengeance. As we hear how young Eddy revealed a secret to his father that he’d sworn to his mother to keep forever — thus causing family havoc that delighted the boy — we begin to sense the shape of a larger argument. As Louis frames it, family is the template for, and the creature of, the state, with its brutal leadership, its sycophantic enablers, its goons and its subversives. If he got back at the Bellegueules in his previous works, he proceeds in this one to get back at France.I won’t say too much about how, except that in the final section of “Who Killed My Father” Louis offers specific answers, with detailed evidence, to the title question that is not even a question. Provided with magical powers for the occasion, along with a cape and a bowl of bang snaps, he creates a shrine to the country’s evildoers — the politicians of all stripes who made policies harming the poor and unwell — and, in a kind of childish exorcism, symbolically destroys them.However weird and stunning this is as a theatrical gesture, it left me confused about the play’s underpinnings. Having convincingly explained his father’s medical predicament as a result of anti-proletarian politics — “humiliation by the ruling class,” he calls it — Louis tries to connect his father’s homophobia to the same source.Here the logic becomes murky, and by the time Louis offers a formula connecting the two — “hatred of homosexuals equals poverty” — I felt he was doing anything he could to absolve his father of personal responsibility for his prejudices. And though it’s surely a son’s right to exonerate the man who helped ruin his childhood, those of us who took Louis’s earlier books to heart may not feel as forgiving.That’s the real drama here: Louis’s struggle to rationalize, within his politics, the irrational desire to forgive. Still, “Who Killed My Father” is a strange way to do it, especially if you know (as neither the book nor the play tells you) that his father, despite the title, is alive. Just not onstage.Who Killed My FatherThrough June 5 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Book of Mountains & Seas,’ Puppets Embark on Mythic Quests

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      Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece at St. Ann’s Warehouse borrows from traditional Chinese tales.The giant is immense and craggy-limbed, like some primordial creature hewed from the earth or forged from lava. His name is Kua Fu, and in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece “Book of Mountains & Seas” he is a puppet, towering above his team of puppeteers. When thirst strikes, he lies prostrate to lap up a whole river of white silk, which slips down his gullet and disappears.This is splendid puppetry, imbued with poignancy and the pulsing, drum-driven drama of mythic quest. A figure from Chinese legend, Kua Fu desires one thing above all, and he will chase it as far as he has to: He wants to capture the sun.We should be rooting against him, then, if we want the planet to survive. But at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday night, as “Book of Mountains & Seas” made its American premiere, I found myself solidly on Kua Fu’s side — and feeling consequently like I had aligned my sympathies with Thanos, the ultra-bad guy in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies, which also borrow from mythology to tap into something ancient in us.Originally scheduled for January at the now-postponed Prototype festival, “Book of Mountains & Seas” is the aesthetic opposite of that blockbuster film franchise — live and handmade, harnessing the power of music, puppetry and human gathering. With a dozen choral singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and six puppeteers — excellent, all — the show retells four Chinese tales borrowed from “Shanhaijing,” a text that is often called in English “The Classic of Mountains and Seas.”If you’re not already versed in those legends, or fluent in Chinese, you may be lost if you don’t read up on them in advance. The physical program provides two pages of clear, concise synopses. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, the performance is sung half in Mandarin and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention, without English supertitles. Projected Chinese titles give the full text of the stories, but the English text is much briefer — occasional plot updates that generally do the trick if you’ve absorbed those program notes.For non-Mandarin speakers, it makes for an impressionistic experience, your mind allowed to drift a bit as the vocal tones wash over you. Huang Ruo has said that the combination of song and percussion is as old as humankind, and certainly it feels that way in the first slender myth, about the birth of Pan Gu, who created the world: Out of the primal darkness come the voices, and softly lit faces, of the singers, with percussion sounding from both sides.Twist, the production’s director and designer, keeps the puppetry minimal in that opening scene, but the pieces he uses to make Pan Gu’s enormous visage — rice-paper lanterns; large, rough pieces of what look like driftwood or fossils or bones — recur throughout the evening. They are building blocks of this show’s world.The performance is sung half in Chinese and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe second myth, “The Spirit Bird,” is about a princess who drowns, transforms into a bird and becomes consumed with her attempt to get revenge on the ocean. But the puppetry — a silken bird, a silken sky that becomes a silken sea — is too simple in its repetition. When an undulating sea creature (made of those driftwood-like bits) swims by, the variety is welcome.This is also the one section of the show where the precision of Ayumu Poe Saegusa’s otherwise extraordinarily meticulous lighting gives way, allowing an errant shadow — of a singer, possibly? — to break the illusion of the ocean.The last two myths are where “Book of Mountains & Seas” gets exciting. That’s partly because they, unlike the others, have built-in drama There is no conflict in the creation of the world, and the fight between the princess and the sea feels nebulous. But “The Ten Suns” and “Kua Fu Chasing the Sun” have stakes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow is it that the 10 puppet suns — rice-paper lanterns bobbing high in the air on long, slender stalks — are quite so charming and mesmeric? Glowing cherry-red when they first appear one by one, they are a happy band of siblings who share the duty of lighting the planet. Their fatal error is to go out together one day, which wreaks disaster. Twist makes it a menacing confrontation, with the suns aggressively approaching the audience — the show’s one real echo of climate change. Yet when nine of the suns are killed to save the Earth (the program, too, gives this away), the music and the moment have a mournful beauty.The pièce de résistance, though, is the appearance of Kua Fu, the giant we see awakening in the final myth. Never would anyone confuse this stony-looking creature with the mammoth King Kong puppet we saw on Broadway, yet as Kua Fu looks around, getting his bearings, that’s exactly who he resembles.With propulsive, high-tension music to match his urgency, Kua Fu runs in place at center stage, as the sun, a rice-paper lantern, moves around him, out of his long arms’ reach. It is mysteriously gripping: this huge, wordless being so filled with longing for what he cannot and should not have; this giant who, if he keeps going, will drink all of the fresh water of the Earth.He fails in his quest, of course; the program tells you that as well. But here the projected English text, at least, hedges a bit. Because in the legend, when Kua Fu dies, forests of peach blossom trees grow from his walking stick.The puppet has no walking stick, and no puppet peach blossom trees grow. But wouldn’t they have been magnificent?Book of Mountains & SeasThrough March 20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More