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    ‘Henry IV’ Review: Two Plays Become One

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    The relationship between Prince Hal and John Falstaff, a favorite of Shakespeare scholars, is the focus of this condensed adaptation.A young prince and an old knight walk into a tavern …So much of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” plays like a setup, either to a joke or to a significant turning point in English history. It’s perhaps the most defining, and trickiest, element of the Henry plays, which often combine the interpersonal high jinks of a comedy with the politics and knavery of a war drama, sans the typical dramatic structure.In a new production from the Theater for a New Audience, the two “Henry IV” plays are combined into a single adaptation that clocks in at nearly four hours. The script, by Dakin Matthews, condenses and restructures the material, while the direction by Eric Tucker opts for a more classic, toned-down staging. For all the successful work this “Henry IV” does to combat the unwieldy bloat of the two history plays together, it does not probe the central characters enough to uphold the stakes and maintain the tension throughout the lengthy running time. The result is a serviceable production that lacks fresh revelations.The “Henry IV” plays are part of the Henriad, the series of history plays that begin with “Richard II” and end with “Henry V.” Often considered the less glamorous section of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the plays are about the making and unmaking of kings, the burdens of the crown, revolts, betrayals and the disastrous clashing of many male egos.At the start of “Henry IV,” Henry Bolingbroke (played by Matthews) has usurped the crown with the help of the Percys, a family of English lords who now lead a rebellion against Bolingbroke for that same crown they helped him procure. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke’s son, Prince Hal (Elijah Jones), fetters away his time drinking and palling around with the crooked old knight John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders) and his reprehensible cohort. Hal and Falstaff’s trivial pursuits are interrupted, however, when they’re called to the battlefield, and by the end of “Henry IV,” Hal has renounced his old habits, brutally rebuffed Falstaff and taken his place on the throne as King Henry V.The relationship between Hal and Falstaff, a favorite of lit majors and Shakespeare scholars, is the true heart of the material. The young prince and the old knight are like father and son, mentor and mentee, but also serve as each other’s foils. They represent opposite sides of age and privilege, and their gradual dynamic shift reveals the nuances of their characters. For all his comedic purpose in the story, Falstaff emerges as a tragic figure — the niggling sideshow act in a grander story about nobility and a nation’s evolution. He’s the sacrificial lamb to Prince Hal’s ascension.Each of the three acts ends with a major scene between Hal and Falstaff, marking another dramatic crux in their story. One of the production’s strengths is how Matthews cleverly structures the script to steadily follow the arc of these two characters. However, the same nuance and decisiveness is less present in the direction and some of the performances.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: ‘We Are Your Robots,’ Still Tuning Up

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      In Ethan Lipton’s musings on A.I., Mozart has a place alongside humpback whales.Are they not men? The members of the onstage combo in Ethan Lipton’s new show are, in fact, robots, despite looking like middle-aged male representatives of the human species. They may play tunes for the benefit of the audience members, but their main purpose, Lipton informs us, is to find out “what you want from your machines, so we can make your lives better.” (Lipton narrates the show and performs lead vocals.) The purpose of the evening, it appears, is for these sophisticated high-tech creatures in gray suits to undergo deep learning.And as the title “We Are Your Robots” implies, our humble servants are respectful of boundaries. “I know, for example, that it is illegal for a robot to tell a human being what to do with their own body,” Lipton says. “Because only other humans are allowed to do that.”That line is sneakily effective because Lipton’s wry delivery and hangdog mien have a way of softening blows and prompting double takes. The agreeable, light-on-their feet songs, have a similar effect, lulling us into the kind of complacent comfort that tech companies gamble on. But taken as a whole, the show, which is directed by Leigh Silverman, feels stifled by slightly monotonous whimsy.Produced by Theater for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theater, “We Are Your Robots,” which just opened at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is described as a musical. But it is closer to a loosely articulated song cycle that feels like a souped-up evening at Joe’s Pub.Over the past couple of decades, Lipton has carved an idiosyncratic niche of one in the New York theatrical ecosystem with such shows as “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space.” He is at his best with a firmer narrative structure, as in the zany western “Tumacho,” which had the tough luck of reopening in March 2020 after a short earlier run.“We Are Your Robots,” on the other hand, is held together not so much by its theme as by its retrofuturist space-age aesthetic; a clean-cut art pop redolent of They Might Be Giants and David Byrne’s literate, faux-naïf sensibilities; and Lipton’s turn as a ham-on-wry narrator. (Lee Jellinek did the set, dominated by a stylized visual that recalls both a face and a cassette tape; Alejo Vietti conceived the costumes; Nevin Steinberg handled the sound design.)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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      ‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync

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      Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Samuel Beckett left as little as possible to chance when he wrote “Waiting for Godot,” a play that, 70 years after its first production, usually looks substantially the same: the country road, the withered tree, the battered boots arranged at the top of Act II with “heels together, toes splayed.” In his stage directions, Beckett spent 195 words choreographing some horseplay involving hats.Live performance itself, then, would be the wild card. And so it proved on Saturday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where Michael Shannon is starring as Estragon (a.k.a. Gogo) opposite Paul Sparks as Vladimir (a.k.a. Didi). The two actors are old friends playing old friends, yet through the whole first act there wasn’t the faintest glint of chemistry between them.It was deadening to the production, and baffling for anyone who has admired Shannon’s and Sparks’s work separately or together, onstage or onscreen; I, for one, treasure the memory of them in Craig Wright’s “Lady” Off Broadway 15 years ago. Here their performances sprang into three dimensions only with the arrival, shortly before intermission, of a Boy (a lovely Toussaint Francois Battiste), who brings a message from Godot.I have no idea whether I caught the show on an off night, or if after merely a week of previews the production was still somewhat underbaked. But the inertness of Act I gave way to a high-energy Act II — rather denting the idea that one day in the nearly featureless void of Didi and Gogo’s existence is practically indistinguishable from another, but thank goodness anyway.From then on, Shannon and Sparks were in sync as scruffy, aimless, quarreling clowns who fail anew, by each fresh sunset, the test of being human. Buffeted by love and loathing, Didi and Gogo prefer to do their languishing together.“We always find something, eh Didi,” Gogo says, “to give us the impression we exist?”Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production for Theater for a New Audience lacks a discernible interpretation that we can grab onto, or that can grab onto us. But it does make striking use of the space, with a paved, two-lane road (by Riccardo Hernández) running downhill from the middle of the upstage wall to the back of the auditorium. The double yellow line in the center of the road — denoting a no-passing zone — could also be decoded as a no-dying zone. From the first moments of the play to the last, Didi and Gogo speak of ending their lives, but their passing is not to be.Under merciless sunlight (by Christopher Akerlind), Shannon is a crabbed and shambling Gogo, fidgety and peckish, bedeviled by ill-fitting boots. (Costumes are by Susan Hilferty.) Though Shannon does a bit of comic tumbling on the road, he also sometimes barely has to move to land a laugh, his remarkable gestural efficiency combining with a marvelous dryness of tone.Sparks, meanwhile, brings buoyancy to Didi’s roughness, and a palpable, if bizarro, human center. Inspecting the amnesiac Gogo’s legs for proof of an attack the day before, Didi is ebullient when he finds it: “There’s the wound! Beginning to fester!”A chunk of a scene in Act II, involving Didi, Gogo and their only passers-by — the vicious Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and the man he has enslaved, Lucky (a vivid Jeff Biehl) — would get bigger laughs if the blocking allowed more than half the house a view of the actors’ faces. A sightline worry throughout the performance is the road itself, whose incline puts some audience members at an awkward angle to the action.This “Godot” comes at a time so fraught that real-world resonances ambush us in the most unexpected shows, so it’s odd that that doesn’t happen here, or didn’t to me. Yet in some ways we are all Didi and Gogo, victims and onlookers — perpetrators, too — in the barbarism of the world.Weary of brutal cycles that keep repeating, they despair of their ability to alter the course.“I can’t go on like this,” Gogo says.And Didi tells him: “That’s what you think.”Waiting for GodotThrough Dec. 3 at Theater for a New Audience, Manhattan; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      A.I.-Scripted Stories, and a Counterpoint, Take the Stage Off Broadway

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      “Prometheus Firebringer” and “Bioadapted” test the waters, while the abstract “Psychic Self Defense” is a warm and pulsing counterpoint.Seated behind a plain wooden table, the theater maker Annie Dorsen is not costumed to catch our gaze, or lit dramatically. In the performance-lecture that is her A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, you might assume she’d be the boring part.Off to her right are her co-stars: a giant 3-D-printed mask of a human head with video screens for eyes, and a flock of smaller masks — faces that seem straight out of a horror film, with gaping black mouths and creepy blank eyes that are milky white windows to nonexistent souls.“It’s all made with A.I.,” Dorsen tells us. “Not what I’m saying. But the other stuff.” Jerking a casual thumb in their direction, she adds: “The masks. Their voices. What they say.”The flashy element of this production, presented by Theater for a New Audience, is a speculative version of a lost part of Aeschylus’ ancient Prometheus trilogy, created using artificial intelligence: GPT-3.5. Algorithms have been a tool in Dorsen’s work for more than a decade, but her latest piece coincides with an accelerating worry about the power of A.I. — even by some who have helped to build it — and a number of current and upcoming shows both use and scrutinize it. (Next month brings “Artificial Flavors” from the Civilians at 59E59 Theaters and “dSimon” by Simon Senn and Tammara Leites at the Crossing the Line Festival.)In the A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, Annie Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, lamenting a 21st-century tragedy in the making.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the audience settles in at “Prometheus Firebringer,” A.I.-scripted stories — or rather, variations on the same brief story — unfurl on a large electronic screen above the stage. Generated before each performance, the text at the show I saw told of “the god Zeus and the Titan Prometheus,” as one version phrased it, and a “chorus of human orphan children.”Mainly what you need to know for this show is the familiar beginning of the tale: Prometheus, a tricksy demigod, stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the grateful human race. How humans harness the technology at their disposal is the true subject of “Prometheus Firebringer,” in which Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, warning of, commenting on and lamenting a 21st-century tragedy that we are allowing to befall us.The 45-minute show, intercutting her brightly lighted talk with the moodily lit, robotic-sounding, speculative fragment of the trilogy, is less than riveting as a practical demonstration of A.I. The GPT-3.5 text at the performance I saw was blandly unremarkable, a technological party trick with ventriloquized masks. The playlet sans humans is remote and inert, inherently a simulacrum of drama.There’s a clumsiness to it, and a lack of clarity. I wondered at one point if the voice coming from the large mask had spoken the name Prometheus in error, like an amateur who says the character name before reading a line of dialogue.But Dorsen’s lecture is forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology: the cultural tendency to genuflect and acquiesce to it, reflecting a faith that it is not only superior to humans but also inevitably dominant over us. As if the tech lords were in charge of what we all become, no matter how the rest of us feel about it or what we lose.“One lesson of tragedy, then, is that we conspire with our fate,” Dorsen says.True though those words are, they are not hers. In a monologue sewn together entirely from borrowed scraps of other thinkers’ thoughts, the sentence is from the philosopher Simon Critchley’s 2019 book, “Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us.” It’s one of a legion of sources cited during the show, the author names and titles projected behind Dorsen as she speaks.This is form as provocation, courting the objection that she might as well be crawling the internet, gobbling up whatever is there and regurgitating it, dumbed down and plagiarized. But Dorsen is doing, however extremely, what artists have always done: gathering, sampling, synthesizing to create something wholly new.Susan Sontag, in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), is Dorsen’s source when she says that “even in the era of cybermodels, what the mind feels like is still as the ancients imagined it, an inner space — like a theater — in which we picture, and it is these pictures which allow us to remember.”Currently embodying that notion at Here, in Manhattan, is a show that feels like a warm and pulsing counterpoint to all things A.I.: Normandy Sherwood’s vividly trippy, richly theatrical “Psychic Self Defense.” Promotional materials describe it as part “live action screen saver,” but it is so much more a reverie.Normandy Sherwood’s nearly wordless show, “Psychic Self Defense,” at Here in Manhattan, is set within a proscenium where numerous curtains open, creating a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors.Maria BaranovaNearly wordless, this is a primal dreamscape of a show, set within a proscenium where one curtain opens to reveal another and another and another, a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors. Giant tassels with actors inside them have a dance, as if they have just wandered in from the castle in “Beauty and the Beast.” Miniatures of the proscenium set appear, and comic puppetry erupts inside them.Playful, silly, teasing, bizarre, this is a work so thrillingly human-made, from so deep in the infinite strangeness of the human mind, that its maverick creativity seems out of reach of the artificial. I hope it is, anyway.The depth of that reach is the concern of “Bioadapted,” Tjasa Ferme’s sleekly designed, thoughtfully assembled but ultimately overstuffed show at Culture Lab LIC in Long Island City, Queens.Like Dorsen, Ferme incorporates A.I. into the performance in ways that, deliberately or not, demonstrate its incompetence; a country song, generated with a few prompts from the audience, was easily the most nails-on-a-chalkboard country song I’ve ever heard. But “Bioadapted,” constructed from documentary and dramatic text, may get you thinking concretely about the ways A.I. can warp our perception of reality, surveil our very interiors, take what belongs to us.Both “Bioadapted” and “Prometheus Firebringer” ask audiences to consider what Dorsen — taking a line from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s “The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism” (2019) — calls “the fundamental ethical question, the question of knowing whether this is the world we want.”Dorsen and Ferme are nudging us to abandon our passivity, curb the excesses of A.I. and create the society we want rather than submitting to some grim techno future that we assume is inevitable.“As long as there is time, there is time for care,” Dorsen says.She plucked that line from the Swedish writer Axel Andersson. And he’s right.Prometheus FirebringerThrough Oct. 1 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 45 minutes.Psychic Self DefenseThrough Sept. 30 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour.BioadaptedThrough Sept. 24 at Culture Lab LIC, Queens; transformatheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: A Lack of Passion Keeps Tennessee Williams’s ‘Orpheus Descending’ Earthbound

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      Erica Schmidt’s revival of this Tennessee Williams play for Theater for a New Audience downplays the melodrama.Clad in a snazzy snakeskin jacket and carrying a guitar, Val Xavier steps into a small town’s mercantile like a handsome troubadour dropping by to serenade the locals. But he is a stranger whose car has broken down, and in the South of the 1950s, the local women are going to talk and the local men might just stalk.And then there is Lady Torrance, who runs that dry-goods store and whose interest is piqued by the new arrival.A few minutes into Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending,” we know that emotions will run operatically high. Or at least they do on paper, because Erica Schmidt’s revival for Theater for a New Audience, which opened Tuesday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and stars Maggie Siff as Lady Torrance, is maddeningly earthbound. The word “melodramatic” is usually deployed in a pejorative way to suggest an affected, exaggerated fervor designed to draw attention, or to describe something that defies conventional rules of propriety. But it is that heightened exaltation that makes Williams’s work glorious, and it is woefully missing in this cautious, bloodless production.“Orpheus Descending,” which had a short Broadway run in 1957, is not among Williams’s most famous pieces; critics tend to place it on the B list. The play, a reworking of “Battle of Angels,” from 1940, is a bit of a rambling mess, but it is also passionate and fascinatingly peculiar — the plot is loosely inspired by the story of Orpheus, after all.That mythical figure is Val (Pico Alexander), and it’s easy to see why he fascinates Lady (Siff). She is dressed in black when we first see her, but she is not, technically speaking, a widow: Her older, tyrannical husband, Jabe (Michael Cullen), has cancer and is hanging on by a thread spun of bile and loathing. For most of the play, Jabe is heard rather than seen, making his presence felt by imperiously knocking on the floor of the couple’s quarters, which are above the store.Like Val, Lady is different, which also puts her at odds in the community. She is Italian, for starters — though Siff’s bizarre accent is Sicilian by way of Eastern Europe — and she is also burdened by a tragic past: Her father was killed in a fire set by the Ku Klux Klan for selling alcohol to Black people.Williams writes that Lady “verges on hysteria under a strain,” but Siff (best known for the Showtime series “Billions”) evokes neither. Siff’s ability to project composure and intelligence was central to her terrific performances in two previous Theater for a New Audience productions, “The Taming of the Shrew” (2012) and “Much Ado About Nothing” (2013). Here it is a hindrance, as she can’t quite give in to the forces pressing down on Lady. Siff imbues the character with a convincing inner strength — the life force is evident — but less clear is the fact that Lady is stuck in a hell that is within and around her.It might have helped if Siff had a sturdier partner, but Alexander’s wan emo sensibility lacks the haunted charisma of a sexy drifter attempting to move on from his past. When Val tells Lady, “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted,” Alexander is much better at suggesting the second part of that sentence than the first. But the role needs both. (The 1960 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” starred Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, which gives an idea of the intensity the play should aim for.)Tonally the production is similarly unmoored. The play alludes to fantastical elements, as with Val’s entrance, which looks as if he had been manifested out of thin air by Uncle Pleasant, a character who is also referred to as “conjure man” (Dathan B. Williams), or when Jabe’s baleful pounding sounds like the emanation of an enraged poltergeist. But Schmidt (“Mac Beth,” the musical “Cyrano” starring Peter Dinklage) does not exploit those opportunities. Also failing to make an impact is the outsize, fascinating character of Carol Cutrere (Julia McDermott), a lost soul who staggers in and out of the play in runny eyeliner, and is a key third outcast in the story.Amy Rubin’s atmosphere-free set does not help: If the store is meant to be a representation of hell on Earth, its blond wood, neat interior and tidy lines make it feel more like a furniture shop in a hip Hudson Valley town.Occasionally, Lady and Val wander to liminal spaces off to the side of Torrance Mercantile but still within view of the audience. There is a beguiling mystery to those brief scenes, allusions to life and love outside the bounds of the infernal prison. Oh, what could have been.Orpheus DescendingThrough Aug. 6 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Maggie Siff Stars in a Rare Revival of Williams’s ‘Orpheus Descending’

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      “Orpheus Descending,” a rarely revived play about the treatment of outsiders, has only become more meaningful for its star and its director.After Maggie Siff’s husband died of brain cancer in 2021, the last thing she wanted to do was a play about a woman with a husband dying of cancer.But then, after initially pondering whether to commit to the show in 2019, she reread the script — and reconsidered her hesitation.“I was like, ‘Oh, no, I have to do it,’” Siff, 49, said of starring in the Theater for a New Audience’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Now in previews, the play is scheduled to open July 18 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.Williams’s play — a modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which a man has the opportunity to get the woman he loves back if he can just follow one simple rule — is set at a small-town dry goods store in the Deep South. The writing was revelatory to Siff, especially after she had attended to her own sick spouse, Paul Ratliff, for a year.“It has that quality of living at the edge of what’s real and realistic, and what’s mysterious and beyond our comprehension,” she said.Siff, who is best known for her starring turn as the strong-willed psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series “Billions,” plays Lady Torrance, a middle-aged storekeeper’s wife who becomes infatuated with a wandering young guitar player, Val, as her elderly, bigoted husband lays dying in a room upstairs. As the two lovers navigate their doomed tryst, they confront the ecstasies of reawakened passion, the racism of an insular community and the gradual erosion of sensuality into newfound resilience.“It’s like sitting at the deathbed of a loved one,” said the play’s director, Erica Schmidt, who directed a New Group production of “Cyrano” for the stage in 2019, and then for the screen in 2021, both of which starred her husband, the actor Peter Dinklage.Members of the cast rehearse “Orpheus Descending.” Pico Alexander, center, plays the roaming musician who attracts the attention of Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe show, which is a rewrite of Williams’s 1940 play “Battle of Angels,” was first staged on Broadway in 1957. It was a flop, running for only 68 performances. (The New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a “second-rate play” by Williams, though he praised the “lyric intensity” of its dialogue and “tender writing that recalls the delicacy of ‘The Glass Menagerie.’”)“Orpheus Descending” has rarely been revived, but Schmidt, who saw the 1989 Broadway revival and a 2019 production at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London as well as the 1959 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” said she was drawn to its exploration of how outsiders are treated in the United States. She felt the theme would resonate in 2020, when the play was originally set to be staged before the pandemic forced a postponement — even more so now, amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide.“That’s possibly why it hasn’t been so successful in the past,” Schmidt, 48, said at a rehearsal on a sweltering Wednesday last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “It’s grappling with these issues that maybe we don’t want from our Williams.”In a conversation during their lunch break, Siff and Schmidt — unintentionally twinning in all black — discussed the play’s appeal, how it speaks to the modern moment and what has surprised them in their now years of wrestling with the work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to do this play?ERICA SCHMIDT The play is shot through with desire; this need to really live life and to cling to what matters to you with both your hands until your fingers break, as Carol [an eccentric aristocrat character] says. It reminds me of when Thornton Wilder says in “Our Town,” “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”MAGGIE SIFF I was drawn to it because of the size of life and the dark, liminal space of the world. I was also incredibly scared of it. It felt like an undeniable piece of work that one would need to throw oneself into. And then a lot of life happened — my husband passed away, and I didn’t think I would be able to do this play, but I picked it up again, and these are people who are living right on that line. It’s heaven and hell, living and dying. Being alive but dead inside. And then being alive, but coming into life.What has surprised you about the text?SCHMIDT Williams is very prescriptive in his stage directions and his punctuation, but there is an emotional size or participation that is necessitated by this play in certain moments. The question is how you get there without just being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic.SIFF The thing about the play that always made me the most anxious was the hysteria. For the longest time, whenever I’d read it, the third act, I was just like, “I don’t know how this happens.” And the surprise to me in working on it is how organically it happens. While it’s very difficult to earn those states of being that are so heightened and so large, it’s really masterfully built into the play.The other surprise is that while the play is very grim, dark and tragic, there’s so much in it that is really life-affirming and joyful to perform.SCHMIDT The subtext of the play is live, live, live.After rehearsals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the play has now begun previews at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe original was a flop. What are you doing differently in this production?SCHMIDT Williams talks a lot about the vast expanse of darkness outside the door. When you look at “Battle of Angels,” the hanging tree and cotton fields are described as being right outside the door. So this is the hell that Orpheus — Val — is descending into, Two Rivers County, Mississippi, this vast, racist, sexist 1950s hell. And so, working with the set designer, Amy Rubin, we decided to put the store in the middle of the stage so we can create the vast expanse. And that’s not something I’ve seen in other stagings. Why is now the right moment to revive this?SCHMIDT The play demands that you pay attention to how complicit and complacent you are. Lady is essentially sleeping next to the man who wears a white hood in the night. And the legacy within the play of the Choctaw Indians who were driven from Mississippi in the Trail of Tears and the crimes of the slave trade and the legacy of all that blood on the ground. In our current cultural moment, it feels like only by looking at the past — by really looking at it — are we able to understand it and move forward, hopefully. We can’t pretend there isn’t blood on the ground.SIFF The play takes a mythic frame that it puts on top of a very political setup.SCHMIDT How we get out of hell?SIFF What is hell? What is the nature of heaven?SCHMIDT Can one person save another?SIFF Can people change? What does it mean to be corrupt in your soul? Is love redemptive?SCHMIDT Is love real?SIFF These are the questions that galvanize the play, and they’re questions we’ve been asking for centuries. And he’s not afraid to be like ‘Yes, I’m going to take these,’ and he throws all of those things at the wall. Maybe too many!“She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat,” Siff said of her character, Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMaggie, what do you admire about Lady Torrance? And what frustrates you about her?SIFF She reminds me of some of the women in my family. She’s such a survivor — I want to say tensile, is that the right word? It’s also the thing that’s her undoing — her pride.SCHMIDT [Reading from a dictionary app on her phone] Tensile, relating to tension, capable of being drawn out. A tensile rod.SIFF I think of it as like the thing that supports bridges, right? She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat.SCHMIDT Oh, it is a feat.She’s reminiscent of Williams’s other strong female characters who try to bring about change in a male-dominated society but fail. Or even your “Billions” character, Maggie, who’s similarly sharklike.SIFF She would be a mean — I don’t know, what would she be in this day and age?SCHMIDT The owner and proprietor of a really fancy club, like some kind of massively successful Italian wine garden.SIFF She might also be a singer.SCHMIDT Yeah, and a mandolin player.SIFF She’d be some kind of fabulous diva.What do you hope people walk out of the theater thinking?SIFF Like all great pieces of theater that have tragic endings, I hope an audience will be able to walk out and still feel somehow more expanded, rather than “Oh, why did I put myself through that for three and a half hours?”SCHMIDT Oh, no! It’s not three and a half. It’s going to be two and a half, with intermission. And it’s funny.SIFF There’s a lot in it that’s very life-affirming. More

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      ‘Des Moines’ Review: Drowning in the Drink

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      A new production of Denis Johnson’s final play showcases many of his signatures: deadpan absurdism, misfit characters, heavy drinking and statements on the bleak fact of human mortality.Here’s how you make a depth charger: Pour some beer into a jar or mug of your choosing until it’s about halfway full and then drop in a shot glass of whiskey. Then gird your loins, because this isn’t a drink for the delicate.And yet the odd characters in “Des Moines,” which had its New York premiere on Friday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, can’t even use the depth chargers (as they call the drink) that they consume as an excuse for their peculiarities. The play, written by Denis Johnson and presented by Theater for a New Audience with Evenstar Films, drops a cast of characters into the depths and doesn’t try to reel them back in. Instead, we’re often the ones lost at sea.Written before he died at 67 in 2017, “Des Moines” is Johnson’s ninth and final play. A celebrated novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet, he is best known for the novel “Tree of Smoke” and the short story collection “Jesus’ Son.”“Des Moines” showcases many of his signatures: deadpan absurdism, misfit characters, heavy drinking and drug addiction, deception, and statements on the bleak, incontestable fact of human mortality.In one scene in the play, Dan (Arliss Howard), a 60-something cabdriver in present-day Des Moines, sits at an oval table in the center of a rustic wood kitchen, where he asks his pastor Father Michael (Michael Shannon) to do him an unusual favor. “It’s an experiment,” Dan says. “I just want you to suddenly yell at me to wake up — that I’m dreaming.”Though “Des Moines” unfolds across an evening and a morning in the Iowa home of Dan and his wife, Marta (Johanna Day), it may or may not be taking place in Dan’s imagination — or in a bizarre dream shared among its characters. Before the pastor appears, Dan recounts to Marta how he picked up a heavily made-up Father Michael for a ride outside a gay club on a Friday night, and how a woman named Mrs. Drinkwater (Heather Alicia Simms) keeps visiting him at work. She is a widow whose husband recently died in a plane crash nearby.Nef and Michael Shannon in “Des Moines.”Travis Emery HackettBut Dan and Marta seem as though they’re having different conversations: He’s jumping among the encounter with Father Michael; his conversations with Mrs. Drinkwater, whose husband Dan drove to the airport the morning of the crash; and the virtues of butter over margarine. She’s waiting for the chance to tell him about a serious diagnosis she has received.Father Michael, Mrs. Drinkwater, Marta and Dan, along with the couple’s granddaughter, Jimmy (Hari Nef), a trans woman whose botched gender affirming surgery has left her using a wheelchair, all join together in seemingly endless rounds of depth chargers. This party turns from karaoke to table-banging, thrashing and sex in a kind of otherworldly bacchanal of troubled souls.The dialogue is imbued with an uncanny disconnect; the characters feel so aloof that when they speak to one another, it’s as if they’re just shooting random phrases from the separate worlds each inhabits. In the middle of a conversation about Des Moines farmland, Father Michael says to Jimmy and Mrs. Drinkwater, “Sometimes the horror of my youth is so vivid — so near, so accessible, that I feel as if I just got plucked from it one minute ago.”That’s Johnson’s phlegmatic dread, so casual yet biting. But “Des Moines” also lacks the precision of Johnson at his best; there’s a vague emptiness and mourning that underscores every bit of the play.A program note mentions that Johnson and Arin Arbus, the director of this production, met in 2015 to workshop “Des Moines.” When asked if he would clarify the “mysterious and difficult” work, Johnson refused.Arbus’s direction accommodates Johnson’s vagaries and quirks, so watching the production feels as if we’re being taken on a long, slow ride to a remote destination — only to arrive, unceremoniously, at nothingness.There’s a tediousness to the production that somewhat diminishes its charms, the main one being the talented cast. Howard’s Dan is both disgruntled and likable despite himself and his low-key racism and homophobia; he rambles on about his dreams but refuses to dig any deeper, too frightened to address the hurt that he and others around him carry.Day keeps Marta taut with an underlying sorrow and resentment that perfectly counter Dan’s uneasy evasions. As Jimmy, Nef brings more color to the character than is written; with a bit of boldness and mischief, she incites some of the night’s mania but then fades into the background. Simms’s performance is a constant surprise, full of buttoned-up restraint, and then wild desperation and touches of something like joy — or as close to that emotion as a woman thrown askew by grief can muster.Shannon is hilariously awkward as Father Michael, lumbering around the stage with a flat-footed shuffle, his shoulders rounded and his pants pulled up an inch or two too high. He plays the pastor like a naïve child stuck in a grown man’s body, equally uncertain of his place in the play’s offbeat and mundane moments.In Riccardo Hernández’s set design, the entrances and exits are what often draw the eye: Stage right, the kitchen side door leads out to a small landing and stairs that allow us to hear every entrant before we see them. At stage left, an interior hallway, we get brief peeks into the characters’ dispositions, as when Marta gently braces one hand against the wall — just the slightest hint of difficulty. And upstage, behind the kitchen, French doors open to reveal Jimmy’s space, a jamboree of multicolored Christmas lights and beaming ornaments in stark contrast to the rest of Dan and Marta’s demure home décor.At some point in the midst of the show’s madness, Mrs. Drinkwater exclaims: “Everything is so ridiculous. It’s incredible.” It’s true — everything is ridiculous, and after an hour and 40 minutes, “Des Moines,” like a night spent drinking at home, ends with a stubborn lack of resolution. What do you get after getting sloshed one evening in the company of ridiculous weirdos? An incredible, senseless hangover.Des MoinesThrough Jan. 1 at Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Remember This’ Review: Finding Strength Amid Moral Failure

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      David Strathairn is remarkable in a solo show about Jan Karski, who was profoundly changed by what he witnessed during World War II.There are catastrophes so terrible that the mind struggles to comprehend them. Here is Jan Karski’s description of his visit in 1942 to a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, during which he saw dead bodies lining the streets and starving women nursing their babies from sunken breasts: “This is not a world,” he observed. “It is not humanity.” But this was humanity. And Karski, an agent of the Polish government in exile during World War II, was tasked with reporting it.Theater for a New Audience’s “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” originally produced by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, is a dignified and affecting solo show. Starring a masterly David Strathairn, and adapted from Karski’s own words by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, it brings Karski’s recollections to anguished life. With limited instruments — lights, sound, a table, two chairs, a single suit —the play evokes not only the contours of Karski’s own eventful biography, but also the horrors and privations of the war, with a particular emphasis on the failure of Allied governments to acknowledge and intervene in the murder of Europe’s Jews.A Catholic diplomat recruited by the Polish underground, Karski reported on the changes the Nazis had wrought, entering first the ghetto, and then a transport camp. “I become a tape recorder. A camera,” Strathairn’s Karski says. Later, he elaborates: “I understand my mission. I am not supposed to have any feelings. I am a camera.”The forerunners to “Remember This” are not necessarily or essentially theatrical. (Though Victor Klemperer’s “I Will Bear Witness,” which played Classic Stage Company two decades ago, is a kind of antecedent.) The more significant influence seems to be documentary film. Karski was featured in two documentaries by Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah” (1985) and “The Karski Report” (2010), though Goldman, the laboratory’s artistic director and the director here, also drew on other documents, including Karski’s 1944 memoir and a 1994 biography. Here there is frequent underscoring — the sound design and original compositions are by Roc Lee — which gives the show a cinematic feel, emphasized by Zach Blane’s evocative lighting.Strathairn delivers an expert and unshowy performance as Jan Karski, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhatever its form, “Remember This” serves as a remarkable showcase for Strathairn, who moves fluidly among characters and time periods. He leaps onto a table at one point and off it at others. Throughout, he manages to communicate both Karski’s extraordinary moral strength and his passionate reactions to what he sees. Because Karski has feelings. He is, as Strathairn depicts him, much more than a camera or a stylus — he is a man profoundly changed by what he witnesses.Strathairn delivers an expert performance, but it is also an unshowy one, never calling attention to itself at the expense of the content. This restraint renders “Remember This” perhaps most affecting and effective in the tension between the coolness and expertise of its form and the hot horror of its subject. It is in the space between these poles that the particular evil of the Holocaust is conveyed and understood, that unimaginable suffering is imagined. Allied leaders — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anthony Eden — wouldn’t be convinced of the truth, despite Karski’s efforts. But we in the audience are, which grants us a squirmy moral superiority, even as the show asks us, gently, to examine what we are doing in our own lives to oppose hate.This is most likely the lesson the title refers to. And Strathairn’s Karski articulates it this way: “There is no such thing as good nations, bad nations. Each individual has infinite capacity to do good, and infinite capacity to do evil. We have a choice.”Karski, who became a celebrated professor at Georgetown and received, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died in 2000, which means that he lived long enough to see Holocaust minimization and outright denial come back into vogue. But this doesn’t seem to have worried him. “These voices are weak,” he says in the play. “They have no future. As I tell my students, we have a future because we are speaking the truth.”But truth seems to have become an increasingly fungible concept. Faced with our current culture of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, I wonder what particular advice Karski might have for us now. How would he have recorded this?Remember This: The Lesson of Jan KarskiThrough Oct. 9 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

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      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More