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    Review: ‘Grenfell’ Sees Tower Fire Through Residents’ Eyes

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    At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.The notion of creating a safe space for an audience to experience a work of theater tends to provoke the tough-guy purists, because it sounds like coddling. Shouldn’t the stage be a place of daring, unhampered by any content revelations that might spoil the surprise?Presumably, anyone who arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to see “Grenfell: in the words of survivors,” a tense and enthralling documentary play about a 2017 residential fire in West London that killed 72 people, is aware of the potentially upsetting subject matter. But before the storytelling even starts, the actors in this National Theater production set about making a safe space with a preamble whose clear language and kind tone are not the least bit soppy.“We do want to reassure you that we will not be showing any images of fire,” one cast member says from the stage, which is surrounded on all sides by the audience. “If you need to leave even for a short break, our front of house staff will show you out, and if there’s an actor in the way when you want to leave, don’t worry, we will move.”Another adds: “If you do leave, you’re welcome to come back.”Our humanity tended to, the characters begin their recollections — nothing traumatic, not yet, just simple, sun-dappled memories. Because before Grenfell Tower, a 24-story public housing block, became a cautionary tale about the dangers of government penny-pinching and corporate corner-cutting, it was people’s home.Thinking back on the apartments that had been their sanctuaries, they miss the freedom of life above the tree line, the view of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, the quiet when they’d shut their door and leave the noise of the city outside. They miss the community of good neighbors.“When I got my flat in Grenfell Tower,” Edward Daffarn (Michael Shaeffer) recalls, “my heart told me it was going to be OK. I was really, really happy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Still,’ Confessions Doom Two Reunited Lovers

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      Despite a juicy premise, this Colt Coeur production, starring Tim Daly and Jayne Atkinson, never manages to take off.In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin hymned the bag as the proper shape for stories: it “is full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts.”One of the characters in Lia Romeo’s “Still,” a writer, carries just such a bag — a possible wink to her fellow novelist. The tote is large enough to house a ukulele, an avocado and a package of macadamia nuts — all of which are divulged in the play’s single moment of spontaneity — but its owner can’t seem to effect any Le Guinian “transformations” or “tricks.” There is a sense of stasis to the aptly named two-hander, which never ripens from a situation into a story.“Still,” a Colt Coeur production that opened recently at DR2 Theater in the East Village, begins with two characters, former flames, meeting in a bar. Mark (a suave Tim Daly) and Helen (Jayne Atkinson) are in their mid-60s and haven’t seen each other in years. Sharing a bottle of wine, they shoot the breeze about their children and recent divorce (him) and new book and cancer diagnosis (her).At first, they are content to pretend their past romance has subsided into a platonic relationship, but as the alcohol goes to their heads, they admit to carrying a torch for each other. A highlight of the show is their seduction scene: It’s the first I’ve seen onstage that unabashedly invokes the corporeal indignities of aging. The director Adrienne Campbell-Holt has Mark and Helen walk slowly toward each other while making sotto voce confessions: “I’m missing the nail on my right big toe,” “I have three fake teeth,” “I have arthritis in my knees.” Do I need to spell out what happens next?Alexander Woodward’s softly lit set spins to reveal a hotel room. Resting against each other in bed, Mark and Helen proceed, post-coitally this time, with their confessions. Mark, who lives in Colorado, is considering relocating to Washington, D.C., to run for Congress, as a “moderate” Republican. “I wish you’d told me that before we ——” Helen says, gesturing limply to the bed with rumpled sheets. She considers herself a liberal, but political differences aren’t the only thing on her mind.Part of the reason their relationship ended was because she had an abortion. Despite what Mark told her decades ago, he wanted Helen to have the baby. She, on the other hand, had felt — and still feels — that it would have been a mistake. “When we walked out of that clinic, I was — scraped out, and I was sad. But I felt so light, knowing that … all my cells were my own again,” she tells him. The stage is thus set for a real conflict.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Sally & Tom,’ Plantation Scandal Meets Backstage Farce

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      The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.If I were reviewing “The Pursuit of Happiness,” produced by a “low-budget-no-budget” troupe called Good Company, I might note that the subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which it approaches the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come as quite a surprise. After all, Good Company is best known for “politically charged,” “finger-waggy” provocations like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault” — work that leaves audiences running for the exits while casts bid them farewell with the bird.But “The Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t real: It’s the play within Suzan-Lori Parks’s backstager “Sally & Tom,” which opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater.Still, my review stands — except for one thing. The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction.Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”Luce (Sheria Irving) feels compelled to say so because her boyfriend, Mike, the show’s director — and also its Jefferson — wants a happier ending than the one she has written. As a proper white ally, Mike (Gabriel Ebert) understands that love is, at best, a problematic notion when one of the lovers is owned by the other. Even after 30 years together, Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will.But would it be so awful, he wonders, to make more money and draw a wider audience — which Luce mishears as a “whiter” one — by introducing just a bit of recognizable romance at the curtain? Can the not-yet-third president and the teenager who would soon bear six of his children at least hold hands?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Symphony of Rats’ Revival, a Darkness Goes Underexplored

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      The Wooster Group’s staging of Richard Foreman’s play operates like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another.A president losing grip with reality. Warnings of environmental disaster and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that originally starred Kate Valk, who directs this production along with Elizabeth LeCompte, invites dark topical readings. It’s an election year, after all.So why does this production feel so sweet and escapist?For one thing, the vaudevillian madness onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, highbrow with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — does not build on its political subject matter. It’s only the surface of a far weirder, digressive production whose obsession is not with the real world but what is underneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) does not stand in for any specific politician, and can come off as an ordinary figure overwhelmed by events. In one of the show’s many dreamy lines, he says, “I seemed to have returned from a profound experience of elsewhereness.”This is what it felt like to return from a new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new shows a decade ago. And for the theater fans who mourn his loss from the cultural landscape, this Wooster Group show operates like a delightful love letter, from one giant of experimental theater to another.Foreman didn’t break traditional rules of narrative or character so much as invent his own. His surreal shows existed in their own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs were bisected by wires that turned the stage into a web. The mood was somehow both menacing and playful, its meaning ineffable and the overall effect entirely singular. Asked in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked and then said exactly what you would want the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We are living in decadent times, surrounded by nothing but trash.”“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is presented as a puppet (even his bowel movements are performed with assistance), and the stage is filled with rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the size of the wonderful actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic flair project an otherworldly deadpan.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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      There’s a Bright Spot in New York Theater. It’s Not Where You Think.

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      Commercial Off Broadway, a long-dormant sector of the city’s theater economy, is having a banner season. But can it last?Broadway is struggling through a postpandemic funk, squeezed between higher production costs and lower audience numbers just as a bevy of new shows set sail into those fierce headwinds. At the same time, New York’s Off Broadway nonprofits, long essential seedbeds for many of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, are shedding staff, programming and even real estate.But there is an unexpected bright spot this season. Commercial Off Broadway, a small sector of New York’s theatrical economy and one that has for years been somewhere between difficult and dormant, is back in business.“Oh, Mary!,” a madcap comedy that imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a daffy alcoholic, is selling out nightly at a 295-seat theater in the West Village, and is likely to transfer to Broadway this summer. Eddie Izzard’s solo “Hamlet” did well enough at a 199-seat theater in Greenwich Village that it relocated to a 349-seat house in the East Village, and next is planning runs in Chicago and London.A commercial revival of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” an early John Patrick Shanley play about two misfits who meet at a Bronx bar, had a profitable run downtown this season thanks to its two stars, Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott. A new play, “Job,” featuring two “Succession” alums, rode word-of-mouth to profitability, and is also exploring a Broadway transfer.Ticket seekers waited in the cancellation line before a recent performance of “Oh, Mary!” at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesAnd a pair of good-time musicals, “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Titanique,” have settled in for open-ended Off Broadway runs.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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      With ‘Succession’ Complete, the Roys’ Next Takeover Is the Stage

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      Audiences are flocking to shows with Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and other alums of the acclaimed HBO series.There seems to be a secret ingredient to stage success this season: a stint on “Succession.”So many “Succession” alums are onstage in New York and London that the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, has been dashing from theater to theater, trying to catch the work of his colleagues. On a recent trip to New York, he saw four shows featuring “Succession” alums, including a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” one of the hottest tickets on Broadway thanks to its star performer, Jeremy Strong, and “The Effect,” an Off Broadway play written by Lucy Prebble, who is also among the producers and writers of “Succession.” In London, Armstrong saw “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a critically-acclaimed, one-woman adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic starring Sarah Snook, and is booked to see “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” starring Brian Cox.“We took a lot from New York theater,” Armstrong said, nodding to the many stage actors and playwrights who helped make “Succession” a success, “and I hope this season we are giving something back.”Arian Moayed, who played the investor Stewy Hosseini in “Succession” and starred in a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” last year, theorized that the show had some theater-like attributes. “Part of what was cool about the show was that we shot it in a very one-act-y kind of way,” said Moayed. There are so many “Succession” alums onstage that one small downtown theater company in New York, Bedlam, advertised its current show, “The Assassination of Julius Caesar as told by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw,” as “STARRING NO ONE FROM SUCCESSION.”Here is a look at where the Roys and their retainers are onstage now.Brian CoxBrian Cox as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” left, and as the distant patriarch Logan Roy in “Succession.”From left: Johan Persson; Graeme Hunter/HBOIn “Succession,” Cox played Logan Roy, the merciless media mogul at the heart of the series. Cox, a veteran stage actor (his résumé includes five Broadway shows), is now starring in London’s West End in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”Jeremy StrongJeremy Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann in “An Enemy of the People,” left, and as Logan’s ambitious, wounded son Kendall in the HBO series.From left: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; HBO, via Associated PressWe 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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      For Len Cariou, Dying Onstage Each Night Has Been ‘Invigorating’

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      In “Tuesdays With Morrie,” the 84-year-old actor was eager to tackle “a rich role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death are not the end?’”Chris Domig was ready to throw in the towel.After a year-and-a-half-long search, a church chapel in Gramercy Park was the only affordable space Domig, the artistic director of the Off Off Broadway company Sea Dog Theater, had been able to find to mount a production of “Tuesdays With Morrie.” Chairs would have to be arranged on a set of risers on the altar. The props would be a piano, a couple of chairs, a walker and a wheelchair.The company also had almost no advertising budget.But it did have Len Cariou, an elder statesman of the theater who in 1979 won a Tony Award for originating the role of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. He would play Morrie, a former sociology professor who, after receiving a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., reconnects with one of his students in what becomes a series of weekly meetings.Cariou, also known for his turns in musicals like “A Little Night Music” and “Applause,” had been taken with the character of Morrie ever since he read the 1997 memoir by Mitch Albom on which the 2002 play is based.“I said, ‘One day, I’d love to play that part,’” Cariou, 84, said last month during a joint interview with Domig at St. George’s Episcopal Church, where the recently extended “Tuesdays With Morrie” is set to run through April 20. “It’s such a rich role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death are not the end? What if there’s something more?’”Chris Domig, left, and Cariou in the Sea Dog Theater production of “Tuesdays With Morrie.”Jeremy VarnerBut one major hurdle remained, Domig said: How were they going to pull off the play with only a handful of props?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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      ‘Bathhouse.pptx’ Review: A Fever Dream, Both Poetic and Mystifying

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      Jesús I. Valles’s prizewinning play gets a stage at the Flea, but the ambitious work about queer history proves too difficult to wrangle.In “Bathhouse.pptx,” Jesús I. Valles investigates the fading history of gay bathhouses, bringing to life both the marginalized people who reveled in them and the forgotten people who cleaned them. The play — selected as the winner of the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize by Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) — laces historical fantasy with melodic prose, loosely stringing together Valles’s ramblings like an epic fever dream. But if, like most such dreams, it’s far more captivating to the storyteller than to the audience, the work offers enough lyrical beauty to keep viewers listening, if not fully understanding, and yearning for more.The story begins with an anxious 10th-grader whom Valles has called “Presenter” (Sam Gonzalez), a queer Latino student who is delivering a PowerPoint lecture (hence the title’s “.pptx”) about the history of bathing. Cleanliness, we are told, has dirty beginnings: It didn’t take long for humans to weaponize filth as a tool of shame against the poor and foreign. Presenter then tries to connect this to the topic he actually cares about: the commercialized bathhouse.To do so, he elicits help from fellow students, but their presentation is derailed by unlikely apparitions: a conquistador, a small child, Laura Linney. To manage this unruliness in the play’s first half, the director, Chay Yew, over-relies on the same gimmick: Interlopers scurry out from the right or left side of the audience in a continuous loop. The act mirrors Valles’s spiraling language, but it’s repeated so often that we begin to anticipate the disruptions, rendering them less impactful.Still, certain characters manage to stand out, including Chela (Claudia Acosta), an overworked cleaner at the North Hollywood spa that is the play’s other primary setting. Here, Chela has witnessed enemas, orgies and more — some of which we also witness. (The play acknowledges its theatricality by having the actors confess they aren’t teenagers performing these acts, but adults of consenting age.) But for Valles, Chela is more than just the help; she’s the winner in a daily “war of dirt and bleach and sickness and steam,” a paradox of service and control.Like the rest of the dexterous six-person ensemble, Acosta plays several roles. But as Chela, she finds the tiny pockets of vulnerability, longing and humor that poke through this woman’s calloused personality. While the male strangers in the spa stumble into one another, sharing brief stories, desires and memories, Chela stands out as a fully realized character, embodying a depth that resonates beyond the surface. That Valles chose to honor the fullness of a Latina sanitation worker in a play so focused on Latino gay men does not seem incidental, but rather like a nod to those that even queer history overlooks.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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      A British Scandal Intrigued J.T. Rogers, Then He Went Down the Rabbit Hole

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      The playwright thought News International’s phone-hacking scandal could make for a sweeping thriller. Twelve years later, here it is.A now-faded note card taped above my desk reads: “Art, like light, needs distance.” Years ago, I wrote down that line from William Gass’s “On Being Blue,” and over the last few months it was a comforting reminder as I finished my new play “Corruption.” What was to be a history play about a media scandal in Britain has become a political thriller about some of the forces that seem to be upending our own country right now.The inspiration came in 2012, while reading “Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain,” a book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Watson, a former member of the British Parliament, and Hickman, a former reporter for The Independent, had written of how Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers and tabloids, including News of the World, were illegally hacking the phones of thousands of citizens — from celebrities to former prime ministers and even a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found dead — all to get sensational stories that would sell newspapers. As the book made clear, more papers sold meant more profit; more profit meant more power to influence the levers of government.The further I read, I realized that this could be a remarkable play. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” “Dial M” told a riveting story in granular detail about the use and abuse of power as a small group of vivid characters seeks to expose crimes that threaten their very democracy. Onstage it could become a sweeping tale in which the main characters take huge risks for their beliefs.In an effort to adapt the book, I sent the authors two of my plays — “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts” — that are also about politics and power. Then I flew to London, and went down the rabbit hole.Most of the key players would talk to me off the record only if they were certain that the Murdoch machine was unaware of our meeting. Even though News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s media empire, was under investigation and Rupert and James Murdoch had apologized for their company’s actions in testimony before Parliament, people were afraid of speaking out because of the fear of retribution.Many public figures and politicians who spoke out against Murdoch’s papers have revealed that those same papers tried to destroy their careers and ruin their lives. One such case involved a member of Parliament named Chris Bryant. During a parliamentary hearing, he got Rebekah Brooks, then the chief executive of News International, to acknowledge that News International had made payments to the police for information. Soon after, a rival paper published a photograph of him in his underwear that he had posted on a dating site, and then the Murdoch press ran with the story.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