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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

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      Review: In ‘American Rot,’ the Painful Legacy of the Dred Scott Case

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      Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.In a greasy spoon just off the New Jersey Turnpike, two men sit down for coffee. One, Walter Scott (Count Stovall), is a descendant of Dred Scott, and the other, Jim Taney (John L. Payne), is a great-great nephew of Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who, in 1857, wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people could never be citizens.Jim requested this meeting with Walter in hopes of apologizing for “arguably the worst decision in Supreme Court history.” As a premise for a story, one could scarcely ask for richer material. But something was lost in the execution of “American Rot,” a flat-footed play by Kate Taney Billingsley, who is an actual descendant of the former chief justice.That this La MaMa production, directed by Estelle Parsons, is based on Billingsley’s fleet audio play, starring Sam Waterston and John Douglas Thompson, is especially puzzling. In just 30 minutes, that audio production, titled “A Man of His Time,” effectively dramatized two descendants of historic figures locking horns, interrogating their own biases and seeking middle ground.In expanding the story for the version now running at the Ellen Stewart Theater, Billingsley added 12 supporting characters, most of whom make up Black and white choruses, representing the woke commentariat and unreconstructed racists. Stationed in segregated sections of Christina Weppner’s barely-there diner, the two factions are served by an insufferable waitress (Suzanne DiDonna), who has placed a feather in her hair after snatching it from a Native American man in the opening sequence. She then proceeds to toss off white nationalist comments with alarming frequency, and is eager for something called “the Appropriation Festival,” which promises “feathers, fringe, fentanyl!”Run, Walter, run! Yet Walter and Jim stay put, seemingly unbothered — unlikely for a Black customer or a white man who “preaches equal rights.”“American Rot” is tonally dissonant in other ways, too. Though the historic forefathers sit onstage — Dred Scott (Leland Gantt) is upstage on a stool and a cadaverous Roger Taney (Timothy Doyle) is situated downstage — they are mostly quiet throughout the show. Occasionally they break the space-time continuum — theater’s fifth wall — to menace their descendants or buffalo them into honoring their legacies. Yet the moral seriousness of the descendants’ conversations with each other and their ancestors is too often undercut by silliness, including burlesque skits. At one point, the white chorus sings a peppy number called “The Land of the Oblivious,” with lyrics like “We like to deny what’s really going on/Throughout this country and way beyond!/Social media is where we belong!”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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      Cynthia Nixon Knows What Poem She Wants Read at Her Funeral

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      “I love ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,’” said the actress, currently performing Off Broadway in “The Seven Year Disappear.” “That one gets me every time.”Cynthia Nixon hadn’t been onstage since 2017, when she and Laura Linney alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie in “The Little Foxes.”She wasn’t expecting her comeback to be “The Seven Year Disappear,” playing an artist who also re-emerges after seven years.“It was really startling to me and a weird, uncanny echo of the play,” Nixon said. The Jordan Seavey production runs through March 31 at the New Group, and four performances, from March 29 to 31, will be live-streamed.Nixon is a two-time Tony Award winner, including one for “The Little Foxes,” but she is widely known for her work in television, including as Miranda Hobbes in “Sex and the City” and in “And Just Like That …” and as Ada Brook in “The Gilded Age.” This summer, she plans to begin shooting the third seasons of those latter two series, volleying from one to the other.“I can see in some ways it being fun,” she said. After all, she’s pulled off something like it before.“I did this thing when I was 18 where I was in two Broadway plays at the same time,” said Nixon, who ran back and forth between “The Real Thing” and “Hurlyburly,” both directed by Mike Nichols, and even made the curtain calls.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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      ‘Like They Do in the Movies’ Review: Laurence Fishburne Widens His Lens

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      In his solo show, the screen and stage star shines a light into his formative dark corners and on the people who made an impression.When Laurence Fishburne wants to get closer to audiences of his one-man show, he lowers himself into a deep squat near the lip of the stage. Hands clasped and knees spread wide, the actor — who has become an avatar of inscrutability during his half-century screen and stage career — seems to be trying to shrink himself down to life-size.Fishburne’s indomitable presence is the muscle behind “Like They Do in the Movies,” which opened on Thursday night at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan. His vigor and gravitas are unwavering, even as Fishburne, the 62-year-old “Matrix” star, softens to reveal difficult details from his childhood and to portray others whose vulnerability made a personal impression.Part memoir and part ethnography, the show opens with Fishburne, who played a schemer in the 2022 Broadway revival of “American Buffalo” and a Supreme Court justice in the 2008 one-man play “Thurgood,” as you’ve likely never seen him before: draped in sequins (the flowing black robes are credited to Jimi Gureje). Addressing the audience in griot fashion, Fishburne briskly sketches his early years, introducing his mother, Hattie, a charm-school matron turned abusive stage mom. Using the refrain “but more on that later,” he indicates open questions he’ll return to, including how his father fits into the picture.These recollections have a clipped momentum, like listening to a celebrity narrate a tell-all at 1.5 speed. If the pacing makes him seem a bit guarded, it also serves a practical purpose: The production, written by Fishburne and crisply directed by Leonard Foglia, runs nearly two and half hours with an intermission. Greater economy would pack a more decisive punch, but the show rarely goes slack and Fishburne’s performance is thoroughly engrossing.That’s especially true as he slips into the more familiar territory of playing other people, in a series of vividly drawn monologues book ended by his own reflections. The play’s title may suggest a tour through Fishburne’s own Hollywood résumé, which includes an Oscar-nominated turn as Ike Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” But here, Fishburne plays a truck packer for The New York Daily News, a Hurricane Katrina survivor and a homeless man who washes cars, among others.Stalking Neil Patel’s sparse set — a stage with only a long table and a pair of chairs — Fishburne nimbly dons each persona with a keen and easy sensitivity. The assembly of character studies, mostly everyday New Yorker types, lacks an obvious sense of cohesiveness, though Fishburne himself emerges as the common thread.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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      ‘Dead Outlaw,’ a Mummy Musical, Is So Strange It Can Only Be True

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” reunited to tell the story of an outlaw whose body toured carnivals for decades.When the composer David Yazbek approached his “Band’s Visit” collaborator David Cromer in 2019 about directing “Dead Outlaw,” a high-energy song cycle that he was developing into a musical, Cromer wasn’t sure he was the right fit.“One of the first things he said was ‘I don’t tend to go out just to hear music; I want more than that,’” said Yazbek, who envisioned a show with an onstage band, interstitial narration and a minimal set. “‘And so maybe I’m the wrong person for this.’”“No, no, no,” Yazbek reassured him. “That makes you the right person. We’ve already got the rock-band-sounding-great part nailed down.”Unlike “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town that takes place over a single night, “Dead Outlaw” is a rollicking thrill ride about a bumbling turn-of-the-20th-century outlaw whose body becomes a traveling, decades-long sideshow exhibited across the country.It also happens to be true.“It’s what I’ve been calling documentary musical theater,” Itamar Moses, who wrote the books for “The Band’s Visit” and “Dead Outlaw,” said over dinner in Greenwich Village with Yazbek, Cromer and Erik Della Penna, who wrote the music and lyrics for “Dead Outlaw” with Yazbek.The rockabilly musical, which is scheduled to run through April 14 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, tracks the ineffectual, booze-filled career and subsequent death, in a 1911 shootout, of Elmer McCurdy, whose involuntary second act has inspired books, plays and a BBC documentary.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 Charles Busch’s ‘Ibsen’s Ghost,’ a Widow’s Work is Never Done

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      In Charles Busch’s satire of Henrik Ibsen’s plays, a widow faces a rather catty fight to save her husband’s legacy.Like “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola’s hysterical take on Mary Todd Lincoln, Charles Busch’s “Ibsen’s Ghost” follows a notable woman of yore — Suzannah Ibsen, the wife of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen — whose corseted unknowability is mined for mischief. Subtitled “An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy,” this Primary Stages production, in association with George Street Playhouse, at 59E59 Theaters takes what few details are known about Suzannah, a driving force in the playwright’s productivity, and turns her into a campy diva.The show opens with a widowed Suzannah, saucily played by Busch, mourning the loss of a “conjugal partner of inexhaustible pyrotechnics.” She soon learns how inexhaustible he really was: Hanna (Jennifer Van Dyck), one of Ibsen’s many apparent lovers, emerges and announces her intention to print her scandalous diaries.Let the catty turmoil commence.An affair is one thing, but Suzannah can’t abide Hanna’s claim that she — not Suzannah — inspired Ibsen’s feminist icon, Nora Helmer, in “A Doll’s House.” Hanna’s plan also interferes with Suzannah’s attempt to publish 50 years worth of the couple’s personal letters. But, in another blow, Ibsen’s publisher (Christopher Borg) finds their domestic contents too boring to print.Busch, a master of clutching pearls and fluttering eyelashes, has great fun playing varying states of dismay. Manic, glitch-like tics betray his Suzannah’s matronly composition, and she shocks herself with her indignity. As Hanna’s crusade moves forward, Suzannah becomes even haughtier, hurling vintage insults (“You brazen jezebel!”) across Shoko Kambara’s tasteful, turn-of-the-century drawing room set.Ibsen’s dramas, heavy on ruinous secrets his characters try to conceal, turn out to be perfect for Busch to cherry-pick in sketching this show. There’s a little bit of “Ghosts,” with the appearance of an illegitimate child (Thomas Gibson) and a bawdy, scene-stealing maid (Jen Cody) whose spinal disorder causes her to walk with a ridiculous pelvic thrust.Even Ibsen’s lesser known “Little Eyolf” receives some love when Borg returns as another character, a mysterious figure known as the Rat Wife. Pulling from Suzannah’s actual biography, Busch turns her stepmother (Judy Kaye, beautifully at home with Busch’s affected dialogue) into a vamp, a calculating governess who puts the moves on Suzannah’s father. And between the maid’s almost Transylvanian accent, Hanna’s British lilt and the publisher’s Swedish Chef garbles, a treasure trove of tonal absurdity fills the air.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: An Affair to Dismember, in the Gory Musical ‘Teeth’

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      A cult horror film about a teenage girl with a surprise set of chompers gets another surprise: the song-and-dance treatment.So unexpected, contrarian and maximalist are the musicals of Michael R. Jackson that I spend a lot of time between them wondering what he’ll do next. First came “A Strange Loop,” about a “fat, Black, queer” man stuck in a cycle of shame by his faith. Then came “White Girl in Danger,” about soap opera characters so privileged and confident they feel total freedom to do what they like.Now, in collaboration with Anna K. Jacobs, comes the remix, “Teeth,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. It too is a show about faith and shame, but as experienced by an alpha white girl in the most biting ways.Literally.“Teeth,” with music by Jacobs, lyrics by Jackson and a book by both, manifests all three elements of the Jackson formula. Based on the 2007 cult horror film by Mitchell Lichtenstein, it is a parable set in motion by a young woman’s discovery of vaginal incisors that spring shut when sexual violence is done to her. Living in a paternalistic faith community, where men believe (as one lyric has it) “the weaker sex has weakened us,” such violence is never far away — and so neither is dismemberment.Well, if you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?Perhaps for Jackson’s provocative mix of high-mindedness and low satire. Both are fully evident in Sarah Benson’s production, even if they never blend into a satisfying whole.The low satire, mostly in the setup, is the more successful tactic. It offers a winking subversiveness and plenty of laughs, especially in the catchy pop-rock tunes with their sharp, smutty rhymes. About the only ones I can repeat here are “gravity/cavity” and “zucchini/weenie.”But the elaborate ideological superstructure is also rewarding at first. It puts the tale in the context of current culture wars between those who seek to restore male dominance and the supposedly castrating women they call tools of the “feminocracy.”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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      ‘The Effect’ Review: Dissecting the Science of Desire

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      In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage at the Shed, where the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting production of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday night. By the time its content — a human brain — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of desire.What begins as the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into more slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the participants. As they circle each other, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the mind or the other way around.The simplicity of a brain plopped in a pail for scientific research becomes something of a mordant sight gag.Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of the study’s architects calls “nothing short of a revolution in medicine”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic aspect of the self. Lloyd’s production, which premiered in August at the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal plane that feels both cosmic and atomically intimate.During the experiment’s intake, we learn that Connie (Taylor Russell) gets sad but isn’t depressed (“when I’m sad, I’m sad,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the study’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a game and frank Michele Austin), while she asks about his medical history.Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, left, and Austin (with Essiedu and Russell seated onstage) portray the two psychiatrists running the pharmaceutical trial. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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