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      ‘Franklinland’ Review: A Founding Father, but Not the Best Dad

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      Lloyd Suh’s nimble period comedy about Benjamin Franklin examines a timeless struggle: the unmet expectations that divide parents and children.Lloyd Suh’s “Franklinland,” now running at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan, finds Benjamin Franklin (Thomas Jay Ryan) at a crossroads: balancing his roles as a founding father of a young nation and floundering father to his naïve son, William (Noah Keyishian). In six tight scenes, Suh whisks us through three decades of their turbulent relationship, starting in 1752 when William is an eager young adult and ending with the men at odds in 1785.The result is a nimble period comedy — with enough spoonfuls of droll humor to help the history lessons go down — but Suh’s play is just as concerned with a more timeless struggle: the friction of unmet expectations that can divide parents and their children.“Franklinland,” developed through the EST/Sloan Project in 2011, had its premiere in 2018 at Chicago’s Jackalope Theater. It shows the playwright’s early fascination with great historical figures and movements and the personal wreckage left in their wake. These themes resurface in works like “The Chinese Lady” and “The Far Country,” a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama.Suh paints a narcissistic portrait of Benjamin. His obsession with progress — first scientific, then political — is exemplified by his purchase of 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia (the real Franklin did own land there), with the intent of building a “playground of imagination and possibility” he calls Franklinland.Though Benjamin’s inventions — harnessing lightning for electricity, creating bifocals, adding flexibility to the urinary catheter — are undeniable societal improvements, his work sessions with William consist of bullying jokes at his son’s expense. This is not your grandmother’s Benjamin Franklin. In Ryan’s mischievous hands, the old man is downright sassy — quick with an eye-roll and oozing condescension. The actor’s antics convey a man obsessed with control, but blind to the familial cost.As a young William, Keyishian is an awkward goof who begins the play unexceptional and prosaic. But by the middle of the show, Suh levels the playing field. William — now in his 30s — is appointed royal governor of colonial New Jersey, though his moments of self-empowerment are weighed down by spurts of pedantic dialogue. Veering away from the playfulness we’ve enjoyed so far, the script resorts to playing out a melodramatic truth we’ve already gleaned: life is cold in Benjamin Franklin’s shadow.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: A Reverse Angle on Arthur Miller in ‘A Woman Among Women’

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      Julia May Jonas’s compelling play, opening the Bushwick Starr’s new theater, explores how a story written about men looks from the other side.Ian McKellen sure knows how to baptize a stage. In 2007, at the recently opened Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, adhering to what he described as his tradition, he capped an evening of public conversation by kneeling to kiss the spotless new boards. Then he rose and recited a speech attributed to Shakespeare.The birth of a theater is always a miracle and a joy, never more so than when the herd is thinning. But the harder work comes after the kiss. Whose words will be spoken there? How smartly, usefully will the space be filled?The Bushwick Starr, a home since 2001 to original and often out-there work, can celebrate on both counts: It has given birth to an adorable new theater and opened it with a healthy new play.The theater, after 23 years in a dim, janky, jury-rigged space on the second floor of a former doll factory, where God forbid you had a bum knee or claustrophobia, has moved three stops farther into Brooklyn on the L train to a former dairy on Eldert Street. The place is still not fancy, but it is bright and welcoming without having sacrificed the invitation of wildness. It honors and improves on the company’s institutional past and the building’s industrial one.And though “A Woman Among Women,” by Julia May Jonas, which opened there Friday in a co-production with New Georges, is likewise a response to an older work, it is nevertheless that rare thing onstage: a fresh story freshly told.The work it responds to, but only generally, without overdrawn parallels, is Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” In that 1947 drama, a pillar-of-the-community type — “a man among men,” as Miller describes him — knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 21 pilots. The collateral damage as the blame is shifted to a business partner drives the plot; the conflict between personal and communal responsibility is the theme.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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      This N.Y.C. Theater Was a Haven for Adventurous Art. Then the Archdiocese Intervened.

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      The Connelly Theater has suspended operations after its church landlord began more carefully scrutinizing show scripts and its general manager resigned.The Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village has for years been a shabby but warm haven for adventurous performing arts: the play “Job,” which is now wrapping up a Broadway run; Kate Berlant’s “Kate,” a one-woman show that went on to London and California after selling out downtown; and the satire “Circle Jerk,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2021.But over the past few weeks, the building’s landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — began more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows whose producers were seeking to rent the space. At least three planned productions had to relocate.Josh Luxenberg, who has been the theater’s general manager for the past decade, submitted his resignation late Friday. And early Tuesday, the Catholic school that is the intermediary between the theater and the archdiocese said it was “suspending all operations of its theater.”Producers who have rented from the Connelly say they were aware that it was owned by the archdiocese, and that there was always a clause in their contract allowing the Roman Catholic Church to bar anything it deemed obscene, pornographic or detrimental to the church’s reputation. But only recently, they said, did the archdiocese seek to rigorously scrutinize scripts before approving rentals.New York Theater Workshop said it was told by a bishop this month that it could not stage “Becoming Eve,” which is adapted from a memoir about a rabbi who comes out as a transgender woman, at the Connelly early next year. It is now looking for another venue.“We had seen a range of really provocative, amazing, inspiriting, artistically rigorous shows there, so I was surprised this would be rejected,” said Patricia McGregor, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop. “And if in the East Village of New York City we are meeting this kind of resistance, where else might this be happening?”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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      Adam Driver in ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ a Satire of Sincerity

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      A country music star embodies the clichés of celebrity in an Off Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 comedy.Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket there.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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      In ‘Vladimir,’ a Russian Reporter’s Fight Is an Apt Election Season Tale

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      The writer Erika Sheffer takes a big swing in a Manhattan Theater Club production examining “the point at which a society finds itself on the brink.”For Raya Bobrinskaya, a hard-nosed newspaper journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, being poisoned is a hazard of the job. She almost expects it to happen to her at some point.When at last it does, along with the gushing blood and wrenching pain comes instant regret — not over her reporting, but over her 20-something daughter having to witness the attempt on her life.“I’m so sorry,” Raya says. “I didn’t want you to be here for this, I really didn’t, I promise.”Until this whoosh of oxygen to the plot, Erika Sheffer’s new play, “Vladimir,” is a very slow burn. From the end of the first act on, though, the drama crackles, full of tension, intrigue and poignancy.Directed by Daniel Sullivan for Manhattan Theater Club, it is an apt play for this election season: a palimpsest meditation on hijacked democracy. In a program note, Sheffer mentions her distress at the “most recent rise of extremism and violence in American politics.” She began reading about Putin’s ascension, she adds, “and became interested in the point at which a society finds itself on the brink.”“Who chooses to fight and who stays silent?” she asks.In “Vladimir,” at New York City Center Stage I, the choice between courage and complacency tends to be an easy one for the restless, witty Raya (Francesca Faridany). Infuriated by Putin, driven by a love of her country, Raya cannot will herself to avert her gaze from abuse of power, however much safer that would be.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 Enduring Allure of ‘Showgirls’? A French Play Investigates in Song.

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

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      Political Theater: 7 Shows That Wrestle With Cultural Issues

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      These productions are grappling with climate change, reproductive rights, the Arab Spring and accusations of sexual assault.The stage has always been a political setting, whether explicitly or implicitly. The lights go down, and confrontation and conflict ensues. With the U.S. presidential election around the corner, and the political fractures of society on full display, recent theater productions have grappled with these difficulties head-on. Here are a few of the current and upcoming productions tackling loaded and thorny issues.‘The Ford/Hill Project’Oct. 16-20 at the Public TheaterThat this verbatim play was staged at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington on Oct. 7, the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term, should make its political mission clear enough. As for the play itself? The actors onstage were re-enacting the accusations of sexual assault and harassment leveled at two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Bret Kavanaugh.“The Ford/Hill Project,” which begins performances on Wednesday at the Public Theater in Manhattan, interweaves real excerpts from the Senate hearings in which Anita Hill recounted her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas and, 30 years later, Christine Blasey Ford recounted hers against Kavanaugh. The replication of verbatim quotes allows the audience to attend these seismic political events themselves, draws attention to the very public nature of these proceedings and the theatricality of politics, and highlights the connection between our past and present.In a recent video call, Lee Sunday Evans, the play’s director and co-creator, discussed how the performance breaks from being pure re-enactment. Hill and Ford “were extraordinarily alone when they gave their testimony,” she explained, but in the piece, “they’re able to stand side by side.” She added that she hopes the play helps people see their stories as more related and “creates a space where they don’t have to be alone.”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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      York Theater Artistic Director Out After ‘Hurtful’ Diversity Comments

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      James Morgan, who has been with the small New York theater company for 50 years, blamed the effects of a stroke for his behavior.The longtime leader of the York Theater Company, a small New York nonprofit known for its emphasis on musical theater, is acknowledging making “hurtful” comments about diversity that he says prompted his abrupt departure from the organization.James Morgan, who has served as producing artistic director of the York since 1979, and who has been with the company for 50 years, issued a letter on Monday saying that he had suffered a stroke in 2022, and attributed his behavior to that medical incident.“During a recent staff meeting, I responded to a colleague’s concerns about the diversity of our audiences in a way that was inappropriate and hurtful,” Morgan wrote in the letter. “The words came out — at a raised volume that has been one of the side effects of the stroke — differently than I intended them.”The York is a niche company, founded in 1969, that operates out of a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. During fiscal 2023, it had an annual budget of $2.2 million, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service; Morgan was paid a salary of $95,000.On Friday at 5 p.m., the company issued a news release saying that Morgan had “resigned from his duties, effective immediately.” Jim Kierstead, the board’s president, raised the diversity issue in his statement in the news release, saying, “We will soon be announcing plans for a future filled with diversity, talent, and musical theater in order to continue our long legacy of supporting artists of all backgrounds.”It quickly became clear that Morgan’s departure had been preceded by the resignation of Gerry McIntyre, the theater’s associate artistic director.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