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      Review: Off Broadway, Jim Parsons Meets the Small Bang Theory

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      In a revival of the 2002 musical “A Man of No Importance,” the star of “The Big Bang Theory” achieves something more delicate.You couldn’t have predicted from “Ragtime,” which ran on Broadway for two years in the late 1990s, that its authors would follow up with something as vastly different as “A Man of No Importance.” Yet that’s what Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the songs, and Terrence McNally, who wrote the book, did in 2002. Their second musical is as quiet, delicate and Irish as its predecessor is loud, meaty and American. Instead of bleating big themes, it ekes feeling from repression in telling the story of a character who does the same.He is Alfie Byrne, a Dublin bus conductor and closeted gay man who in 1964 finds some measure of fulfillment — or at least companionship — among St. Imelda’s Players, the awful amateur theatrical group whose shows he directs in the social hall of his parish church. With Oscar Wilde as his spirit guide, he makes his small-scale art into a life that’s more beautiful than the one the real world gave him.Likewise the lovely revival that opened on Sunday at Classic Stage Company, starring Jim Parsons and directed by John Doyle. Trimmer than the very fine original production at Lincoln Center Theater, and staged on a minimal set (also by Doyle) consisting of a few chairs, mirrors and statuary Marys, it’s a good fit for material that was always modest. Twenty years on, it’s also a good fit for a moment in which closet stories are beginning to lose their currency.In that sense it’s an advantage that Parsons, at 49, is younger by nearly a decade than both Roger Rees, who played Alfie in 2002, and Albert Finney, who originated the role in the 1994 film on which the musical is based. With his confident voice, unlined face and television polish, he never seems hopeless or, viewed from our time, too old for a new start. And after 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory,” he knows not only what marks to hit but exactly how to hit them.A.J. Shively, left, as Robbie Fay and Parsons as Alfie Byrne in the musical “A Man Of No Importance” at the Classic Stage Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs such, Alfie’s problem is not so much “the love that dare not speak its name” as the personality that won’t shut up. He’s a classic, bossy theatrical misfit, accepted (if only he believed it) at least as much for his oddness as despite it. On the bus each day, he reads poetry to delighted riders, and tries to bring culture even to the handsome young driver he calls, after Wilde’s reckless lover, Bosie — as if the name Robbie Fay weren’t sufficient.At home, though, Alfie locks his bedroom door against the curious eyes of his older sister, Lily, who somehow has not guessed his secret. Lily (Mare Winningham) hopes to marry their neighbor, the butcher Carney (Thom Sesma), but will not do so until her brother is settled. So when Alfie takes an interest in Adele Rice, a new passenger on his bus, Lily tries to push them together, not understanding that Alfie’s interest is purely artistic. He wants Adele (Shereen Ahmed) to play the lead in his new St. Imelda’s production, Wilde’s highly inappropriate “Salome,” with its forbidden lust and “immodest dancing.”The film tells this story straightforwardly if ploddingly, as if it were a bus route. We know from the start that Carney, being a butcher and also a ham, will undermine “Salome,” in which he can only play a minor role. And we know that Adele is not the virginal princess Alfie imagines, nor Robbie fated to be the kissable Jokanaan. The musical paradoxically produces a more streamlined and unpredictable experience by giving it a more ornate frame: McNally’s book imagines Alfie’s story as a production put on by his St. Imelda Players.This allows Flaherty and Ahrens to customize song forms to suit each moment and explore genres that fit the milieu — cue the fiddle and uilleann pipes. Though this occasionally produces some stage Irish mush, it also produces some first-rate musical storytelling in numbers like “Books,” in which Lily and Carney sniff at Alfie’s suspicious habits, and “The Streets of Dublin,” in which Robbie (A.J. Shively) drags Alfie out for a high-spirited night on the town.In allowing for shorter scenes and simpler transitions. McNally’s frame is a perfect match for Doyle’s essentialist aesthetic, in which the first question asked seems to be: How little do we need? (Call it his Small Bang Theory.) As in his 2013 “Passion,” he has shrunk the cast by about a quarter (in this case, from 17 to 13) and the running time similarly. As in his Tony-winning revival of “The Color Purple,” he abjures almost all specific signs of setting. And as in so much of what he directs, particularly his cycle of Stephen Sondheim musicals, he has reduced the band by having some actors play instruments; new orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin mean you never feel cheated.Few shows benefit from all these deprivations at once, and “A Man of No Importance” does suffer slightly in its final third as it begins to reveal too much skeleton. Even if you know the story you may wonder which character an actor is now playing, or whether you’re in the church or the pub. You may also feel the lack of choreography, especially with the fine dancer Shively in the cast.But for the most part, this being a show about the possibilities of even the most minimal stage, a minimal stage makes an apt enough setting, and the style enhances more than it squelches. Doyle even manages the equivalent of a hat trick, when an actor plays a tambourine that, in turn, plays a plate.At their best, Doyle’s small triumphs of restraint and husbandry add up to something large. “The Cuddles Mary Gave,” a song whose title seems to promise sickly sweetness, becomes powerfully specific as performed across the grain, without sentimentality, by William Youmans. Nor have I heard a sound so mournful as the one produced in the show’s saddest moment by the accordion: a wheeze of despair.And with actors of such ample imagination — including Winningham, so vinegary as Lily, and Ahmed so exquisitely reticent as Adele — the circumstances informing trenchant performances need not be visible to the audience. They need only be palpable. The rest is up to us.In other words, Doyle won’t hand us emotion dead on a plate, or even on a tambourine. That approach has earned him lots of fans and detractors since his New York breakthrough with “Sweeney Todd” in 2005; they are often the same people. It’s fitting that as he steps down after six years as Classic Stage’s artistic director, he does so with such a rich example of what he brings to the table — or, rather, takes away from it. I hope he keeps doing so. To adapt a great Sondheim lyric: Give us less to see.A Man of No ImportanceThrough Dec. 18 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Chekhov’s First Play’ Review: A Play-by-Play of the Play Within the Play

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      At Irish Arts Center, a wry, experimental iteration doesn’t do much to untangle the playwright’s unwieldy early work.If Anton Chekhov gave a name to the early play that surfaced years after his death, we don’t know what it was. This is part of the lore around that script, a relished detail in the story of its discovery: The title page was missing.The text is a mammoth, unwieldy beast, as playwrights’ juvenilia often is. Written when Chekhov was 18, or 19, or 20 — that fact is uncertain, too — it’s a stylistic mishmash that would run five or six hours, staged whole. But dramatists are drawn to it, in part because its elements are recognizable from his later work: the grand old estate, the money woes, the crowd of characters living restless, listless lives. And, of course, the gun.So adapters dive in, gather what they like and leave the rest. Michael Frayn called his rendition “Wild Honey.” David Hare’s is “Platonov,” which is the usual title for the play in English. And if you remember the amusing spectacle of Cate Blanchett, on Broadway nearly six years ago, removing her bra without taking off her dress — well, then you’ve seen the version known as “The Present,” by Andrew Upton.“Chekhov’s First Play,” at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen, is Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s wry, experimental iteration. Directed by the pair for Dead Centre — their Dublin company, familiar to New York audiences for the shows “Lippy” and “Hamnet” — it whittles Chekhov’s script down to a bare 70 minutes. That includes time for the location to shift from the late 19th-century Russian countryside to early 21st-century Dublin, and for a wrecking ball and a pneumatic drill to do some damage to Andrew Clancy’s scenery.Languor escalates into havoc for the characters — among them Anna (Ali White), the financially indebted owner of a house she can’t afford; her friend Triletsky (Paul Reid), who, like Chekhov, is a doctor with tuberculosis that he fails to diagnose; and Platonov, who arrives quite late, played by an audience member. Not that you are likely to care much about the characters, let alone the plot, as story is not exactly at the forefront here. The performance we watch is, in a sense, the play within the play.The whole experience is framed by Moukarzel’s running commentary, spoken into audience members’ ears via the headphones we wear throughout. (Sound design is by Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson.) It’s funny and often snarky; in one slightly crude line, Moukarzel sounds like a sports broadcaster giving a play-by-play of a rare Chekhov move. But Moukarzel also expounds on the themes of the play — like private property and the ravenousness of the rich — and laments that he cut so many characters from Chekhov’s script.“It was hard to decide what matters,” he says, “and who you can just throw away.”This, really, is the nub of “Chekhov’s First Play,” which had its premiere in 2015. That’s also when Irish artists were sifting through the human wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that collapsed into painful recession and left Ireland littered with abandoned housing developments.When these characters talk of cancer, it’s a metaphor for harmful, unchecked growth; their scorn for banks is rooted in reckless lending that ruined lives. Even Moukarzel and Kidd’s decision not to give the Chekhov play a proper title is significant — because of that other meaning of title: legal ownership. Historically, one name for the found Chekhov text has been “Play Without a Title.”Trouble is, the Celtic Tiger is so many crises removed from the present that it’s a little obscure, even at the Irish Arts Center, which co-commissioned the play.Similarly, the headphones would have been novel in 2015 — the year that downtown theatergoers experienced Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” that way, and the year before Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter” gobsmacked headphone-wearing Broadway audiences with its binaural sound design. Now, as a tool, they’re underwhelming.“Chekhov’s First Play” surely felt much bolder and fresher when it was new. But if you ask the question “Why this show now?” the answer seems to be that it was in the wings.Chekhov’s First PlayThrough Nov. 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: The Road Rage of Robert Moses

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      Off Broadway at the Shed, Ralph Fiennes is glorious in David Hare’s sputtering portrait of the man who paved New York.I doubt I’d have enjoyed meeting the real Robert Moses, New York’s paver of highways, evictor of minorities, eminent domain eminence and all-purpose boogeyman. But it’s a huge pleasure to meet him, in the form of Ralph Fiennes, in David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” which opened on Wednesday at the Shed.Whether the creature Hare and Fiennes create has anything to do with the creature that created modern Gotham remains, for a while, an irrelevant question. Moses’ actual demeanor and utterance, as portrayed in the nearly 1,300 pages of Robert Caro’s biography “The Power Broker,” are little in evidence at the Hudson Yards theater.Fiennes is too gloriously entertaining for that. Melodramatic in the old-fashioned sense, a hero or villain from an operetta or Ayn Rand, he crows his lines like a rooster, albeit in an accent suspended somewhere between East Anglia and Texas. With his nose pointing straight up and his chest pointing straight out, he’s a figurehead on the prow of a ship that can slice through icebergs as easily as red tape.Also through consonants: When he says “boardwalk” — a thing he despises, with its “so-called amusements” and “lox and bagel merchants” — the word has three syllables: the board, the wal and the k.So what if Moses is racist, antisemitic (though Jewish by birth) and an unabashed elitist who aims to advance ordinary people’s fortunes “without having any respect for their opinions”? Here he is wit and pith personified — and why would he not be, with lines honed by Hare in high-gloss mode?Usually that high gloss means Hare is up to some undermining; in plays like “Plenty,” “The Judas Kiss” and “Skylight,” good badinage almost always means bad faith.But in “Straight Line Crazy,” the connection is unclear, forcing you to ask why such a progressive playwright would spend even half a play valorizing a man who, among many other practical atrocities, displaced 7,000 families to clear space for Lincoln Center and 40,000 residents to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway. A clue in the script: “Moses’ life is so prodigious and his reach so great,” Hare notes, “that I have chosen to concentrate on just two decisive moments in his extraordinary career.”From left: Danny Webb as Gov. Alfred E. Smith, Fiennes and Judith Roddy as Finnuala Connell in the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesApparently, one act will try to counteract the other, so it makes sense that the production, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage for the London Theater Company, should introduce us to Moses in 1926. At that time he is merely the chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, and his antagonists are not yet sympathetic proles but out-of-touch gentry.These are the owners of Nassau County estates whose gorgeous seclusion, not to mention their orchards, are threatened by plans for the Northern and Southern State Parkways. The play’s first substantial scene is in fact with a (fictional) Vanderbilt, supplied with a big-eared butler named Fergus and an even bigger sneer.“Leave him at the end of the drive,” this Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) instructs the servant after dispensing with Moses.But of course it’s Moses who dispenses with Vanderbilt. In their scene together and in the long one that follows, at a headquarters that serves as a hive of urban planning, the power broker is shown breaking under- and overlings like twigs to get his way.I say he is “shown”; he is not dramatized except to the extent he is self-dramatized, with prompts from those underlings. (Their interruptions of “Why?” “What do they do?” and “What’s that?” amount to dramaturgy by laxative.) Perhaps because they too are fictional, and purpose-built, they have few characteristics except those that pertain to Moses: Ariel Porter (Adam Silver) is the meek one who backs off every argument, and Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) is the spunky one who stands up to him, at least on small points.It’s not until an official overling arrives that any actual drama occurs. He is Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York, a populist Democrat who is Moses’ patron and also, one begins to suspect, his patsy. That piquant combination, along with Danny Webb’s hilariously earthy take on the governor, gives the interaction between the men, needling each other among the maps and models of Bob Crowley’s set, the unlikely spin of a Mutt and Jeff comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Jimmy Durante.Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist and urban theorist, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat’s going on beneath the comedy is less funny: On the theory that no one will tear up a road once it’s built, even if they’d have forbidden it beforehand, Moses orders construction to proceed on the parkways without having obtained the governor’s approval. That this is offered as an amusing example of flair and determination instead of a warning about subterfuge and megalomania means that Hare has either fallen under the Great Man’s spell or wants to make sure the audience has.Surely, you think during intermission, as you study the weird intrusion of the mall-like Hudson Yards into the city’s urban fabric, things will turn around in the second act, which the program tells you is set in 1956. That’s when Moses’ plan to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park met with fierce resistance from a new kind of opponent: the “minstrels and artistic women with handbags” of Greenwich Village. Cue Jane Jacobs.Alas, that journalist and urban theorist, who has so far popped up merely to say hello, fails to emerge, as she did in life, as Moses’ greatest foil. It’s a strange choice to make Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) a minor character. Perhaps because of the inconvenience of history — the two never met — we are denied a direct confrontation, and with it a satisfactory climax.Instead, Hare goes uncharacteristically soggy, hauling Moses’ alcoholic wife into the conversation for pathos and having Finnuala, after decades in service to the builder’s vision, finally repudiate it. Moses loses on minor, mostly made-up points, not the knockout that Jacobs, Caro and time actually delivered.But even as the directors’ invention fades along with Hare’s — the community meetings, full of serious nodding, are especially silly — Fiennes never falters. His Moses, like his performance, becomes a car in search of a road, gunning the engine with nowhere to go.That’s no tragedy. The play is still a pleasure, and Moses is still in the doghouse. The man who, in Hare’s formulation, thinks cars are the “can opener” to the tin that is America would not recognize a Manhattan that after decades of discussion is soon to institute congestion pricing.If the efficiency of the brute is often superior to the fecklessness of democracy in getting things done, it is not always as lasting — which is reason enough to see “Straight Line Crazy.” In the midst of what feels right now like the losing fight of progressivism, it’s worth peeking at the devil, with fear and envy and a little schadenfreude.Straight Line CrazyThrough Dec. 18 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Hound Dog’ Review: A Soul-Searching Journey Strays Off Course

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      Melis Aker’s new play with music, presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo., follows a musical prodigy without drive or passion.The young woman nicknamed Hound Dog might have studied musicology at Harvard, but all the panel members at her Royal Academy of Music audition seem to care about is that she’s from Turkey.“It’s like if Joni Mitchell had a bit of an orgy with a few Turkish folk musicians, and then had a very confused baby,” one of the panelists says of Hound Dog’s song. Another detects an “Americana” influence, “which is … surprising.” The first one wishes that she’d use “the traditional Turkish instrument,” though it’s unclear what that would be.What’s jarring about this scene is not so much that educators at the Royal Academy of Music would have such clichéd assumptions, but that their phrasing would be so clunky and vague — they’re deciding on admission to a prestigious institution, not a neighborhood after-school program. Unfortunately, this lack of focus and attendant lack of bite are fairly representative of Melis Aker’s new play with music, “Hound Dog,” which is being jointly presented by Ars Nova and PlayCo.When we meet her, Hound Dog (Ellena Eshraghi) is back in her hometown, Ankara, pondering whether to attend the conservatory (yes, she ended up being admitted), though the reasons for her hesitation are unclear. Complicating matters is her fraught relationship with her widowed father (Laith Nakli), with whom she is staying.Intertwined with his frustration and impatience with Turkey as a whole, Baba is a big rock ’n’ roll fan, with a particular fixation on Elvis Presley. Hound Dog sniffs at his taste with the dismissiveness of the newly enlightened. “I took a class called ‘Sound in the Uncanny Valley’ with this crazy professor,” she informs her childhood bestie, Ayse (the crackerjack Olivia AbiAssi, making the most of an underwritten role), before deriding “the appropriation and commercial simplicity” of her dad’s favorite bands.The dogmatism is amusing and on point. It is also contradicted by what we hear from Hound Dog’s own music. Her folk-rock audition number, “Only in Time” (performed, like the others in the show, by a live band headed by the coolly composed singer Sahar Milani), does sound like a Joni Mitchell pastiche, complete with vocal mannerisms, so who’s appropriating what now?But it’s hard to tell why Hound Dog writes in any particular style or even what animates her in general: This supposed prodigy is portrayed as lacking drive and passion. Mostly Hound Dog gabs with Ayse over some joints, argues with Baba, visits her dopey high school music teacher, Mr. Callahan (Matt Magnusson), and mopes as she attempts to deal with her unresolved grief over her mother’s death a year earlier.Aker had a promising subject in a woman who is deeply ambivalent about her life’s calling, and, by extension, herself. Hound Dog tries to navigate notions of authenticity and identity as she looks for her place in her family and in the world. The last is evoked by brief references to the ways social, political and cultural forces have long hurled against one another in Turkey, including an encounter with a cop who asks Baba, “Your folks never tell you about playing foreign music outside ’round here?”Because Hound Dog’s soul-searching remains blurry, Aker and the director, Machel Ross, can never quite make her equivocations compelling to watch — an ambiguous situation since the character is partly autobiographical, with stage directions that use the first-person singular whenever Hound Dog (referred to as “Me” in the script) is involved.Yet more unfulfilled promise comes from the musical numbers, written by Aker and the brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who are credited as the Lazours. One wonders, for example, whose feelings the band’s frontwoman is meant to voice. She could be Hound Dog’s siren-like alter ego, or perhaps she is a half-fantasized vision of her late mother. Or a mix of both. No matter: It’s hard not to feel that Hound Dog is stuck on the outside of her own story, listening in.Hound DogThrough Nov. 5 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      How a Pro-Nazi Camp on Long Island Inspired a New Play

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      YAPHANK, N.Y. — On a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, the playwright Bess Wohl stood on the shores of a lake in this Long Island hamlet about 60 miles from Manhattan. She admired the surface pleasures of the scene — the water, the leaves, a sky the blue of a faded Tiffany’s box, an obliging swan.“But I also see history,” she said. “I see what happened here.”What happened here was a summer camp, operated in the 1930s by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization. Its teenage participants swam, hiked, competed in archery and went to dances, all the while absorbing Nazi ideology.“On the surface,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of a book on the German American Bund, “it was like any other camp, except it was filled with swastikas.”The flower beds and rose bushes, he noted, were planted in swastika patterns. And there are photos of the camp of rallies that look like smaller, more rustic versions of Nuremberg.The camp finally closed in 1941, not long after the United States entered World War II. And the town erased it from memory. At the lake the local historical society sponsored a display board, detailing the history of Yaphank. The 1930s and Camp Siegfried were elided.Wohl has salvaged that history in “Camp Siegfried,” an intimate two-character play directed by David Cromer. It’s in previews now, and opens on Nov. 15 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. Over the course of a summer, a nameless boy, 17, and a girl, 16, fall in and out of what isn’t exactly love. It’s a play about seduction, Wohl believes — by bodies, by beliefs, by stories.The entrance to the camp.Bettmann, via Getty Images Former camp grounds in Yaphank. “If we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them,” the playwright Bess Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesShe learned about Camp Siegfried about two years ago, during the first summer of the pandemic. She and her husband, the public relations executive Steven Rubenstein, had booked an Airbnb in nearby Bellport. One morning, while Googling area attractions that she could visit with her three young daughters, Wohl stumbled on a site that gave the history of the camp and then she stumbled further, finding photos and archival film.“I was like, this can’t have happened right in my backyard,” she said. “It honestly seemed like a mistake at first, that these pictures were pictures of America.”This was an anxious summer, with both the coronavirus and President Trump’s re-election campaign raging. Wohl found herself driving, alone, through the private roads of what had once been the camp and the nearby bungalow community, with streets named for Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. (Those names have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.) On those drives, she was looking for evidence of what this place had been and how its past had been.On that Sunday in October, we took a similar drive, past Bach Court and Schiller Court, past signs that announced the community as private and the roads as having no outlet. There were no swastikas anymore. American flags and Trump flags had replaced the Nazi ones. A handful of buildings and bungalows from the 1930s remained. Otherwise the community looked aggressively normal, if strangely deserted, which had been Wohl’s experience.“What shocked me the most was how mundane and pretty and sort of regular everything seemed,” she said. “It’s part of what prompted me to write the play, because if we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them.”For much of its running time, “Camp Siegfried” resembles a romantic drama, a coming-of-age story. That’s a queasy proposition, considering the play’s setting. In this boy-meets-girl, the girl lives on Hitler Street. Wohl — who has Jewish ancestry, a Jewish husband and is raising her daughters in the Jewish faith — is mindful of this, anxious even.“I find her very nervous about these risks,” Cromer, who is also Jewish, said during a phone interview, “beautifully nervous and not self-congratulatory about them at all. But that doesn’t stop her from taking them. It is difficult for her not to take these big risks. And then she executes them with rigor and thoroughness and depth. She does irresponsible things really responsibly.”Back in the 1930s: Adolf Hitler Street ran through Camp Siegfried.Bettmann, via Getty Images And now: Streets named for Hitler, Goebbels and Goering have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWohl’s theater has always involved a certain amount of risk, of contradiction. Her plays often begin as thought experiments or personal dares. Could you write a play (“Small Mouth Sounds”) that is largely silent? Could you write a play (“Make Believe”) with a first act populated exclusively by children? What about a musical (“Pretty Filthy”) about the porn industry? Or a show (“Grand Horizons”) about the sexual and romantic lives of retirees?“She always goes just to the left of where you think she’s going to land on something,” said Leigh Silverman, who has directed two of Wohl’s plays, the Tony-nominated “Grand Horizons” and the early comedy “American Hero.” “She’s always going to embrace the weird, she’s always going to embrace the strange choice. She’s always going to keep pushing herself to do something different. She refuses to repeat the same genre, the same idea.”Recently, she has further expanded her command of genre and medium, writing and directing the psychological horror film “Baby Ruby,” slated for release next year by Magnolia Pictures; writing for the forthcoming Apple TV+ climate change anthology series, “Extrapolations”; and adapting “The Children’s Hour,” a 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, for television.Yet there are continuities among these works. Most of them operate with ample surface charm. (Wohl — funny, frazzled, wildly incisive, with a doll-like prettiness — operates that way, too.) “Small Mouth Sounds,” to take one example, is screamingly funny. But the screaming is the point. An author’s note that begins the play reads: “Everyone in the play is in some kind of agony. In this way they are not unlike the rest of us.”Rachel Chavkin, who directed “Small Mouth Sounds,” saw Wohl herself in that note. “I always think about Bess talking about the most tragic thing, and her heart simultaneously breaking as she’s laughing,” Chavkin said. “She’s holding the tragedy and the comedy in equal measure.”Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in a version of the play in London at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan Wohl didn’t disagree. She likes to write plays and characters that arrive in familiar containers. “And then I lift the lid and there’s just nothing but agony,” she said. “The humor in my plays comes from deep, deep agony. Like really deep agony. That’s the rub that interests me.”This dual register — charm on top, existential anguish all the way down — attracts actors to her work. “That’s all you hope for,” said Samantha Mathis, who starred in “Make Believe.” “Comedy comes from extremes of emotion. So you just have to tap into the extremity of pain that these people are in and the truth of what she’s talking about, which is how excruciating it can be to be a human being sometimes.”Brad Heberlee, who has known Wohl since their days as actors at the Yale School of Drama and has starred in three of her plays, echoed this. “Her writing requires actors to bring their entire humanity,” he said. “The only way it can live is if you attach yourself to the depth of pain these people have, the truth of that.”Both of the “Camp Siegfried” characters are in deep pain — and really, what teenager isn’t? — which becomes more evident as the play goes on. “Camp Siegfried” balances sympathy for them with a horror of their situation and the hope that they may yet escape it.Wohl wrote the first draft swiftly, intuitively, in snatched moments during the summer of 2020, in a sweltering room at the top of the rental house while her children slept or watched “CoComelon.” A version of this draft was staged in London at the Old Vic in 2021. The critic for The Independent described it as “a consummately clever and insightful piece about the frightening psychological appeal of fascism.”“Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Wohl wrote a new draft, with six characters, and then another, which shrank it back down to a two-hander, its central couple now deepened, the camp around them more convincingly imagined. The trick, she felt, was to balance the ordinariness and seeming wholesomeness of the setting — the swimming, the cookouts — with the genocidal ideas that circulated there. That moral danger had to be apparent, but not immediately. Indoctrination doesn’t usually happen all at once.“They don’t say to you, Hey, do you want to, like, kill an entire race of people?” Wohl said. “They say, You want to feel good, don’t you? You want to be part of a community? You love your country? You want to be a good person?” Indoctrination is stealthy, and so the play is stealthy, too, seducing the audience as the characters are seduced and then helping the viewers to shake off that seduction.“Camp Siegfried” joins several other current shows — “This Beautiful Future,” “Remember This,” “Leopoldstadt” — in exploring the roots and devastations of Nazism. But those plays all concern what happened in Europe. “Camp Siegfried” is local, set less than an hour’s drive from Second Stage, which makes the play a more precarious prospect here than in its London staging.“This is a deeply American play. It’s about America,” she said. “It feels very alive to do it right here.”Cromer wasn’t sure how American audiences would receive the play and its characters. “I’m scared if they love them,” he said. “If they hate them, I worry about that.”Yet “Camp Siegfried,” he thought, was worth the worry. Wohl believes that almost any play about this time and these events would be. Because if we know our history, maybe we won’t repeat it. Maybe we’ll have fewer genocides, insurrections, groundless invasions. Maybe not. But it’s the job of artists to try.In the parked car that same afternoon, Wohl looked out at what had been Hitler Street. “Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” she said. “Just keep telling and telling and telling the story. That’s how you keep it alive.” More

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      ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

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      Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.There is an absurdity to the bleakness of “A Little Life,” a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More

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      ‘He Must Have Superpowers’: Asi Wind and His Sublime Card Tricks

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      With a new one-man show, deploying a single deck of cards, the performer’s 20-year run as magic’s best-kept secret may be nearing its end.“Every now and then, this fails,” said Asi Wind, pausing for a suspense-maximizing moment during his new one-man magic show, “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle.” “This could fail. If it does, remember all the fun we had before.”There is little chance anyone took this whimsical disclaimer seriously. By the time it was offered, Wind, a 43-year-old Israeli-born New Yorker with the effervescent wit of a good dinner party host and the cunning of a master jewel thief, had already pulled off so many seemingly impossible feats that only a sucker would have bet against him. If he’d told us that we were all about to start floating around the room, half of the audience would have reached for a Dramamine and braced for lift off.Detailing what happens during this giddily mystifying 70-minute production — which opened last month and runs at the Gym at Judson, next to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, until Jan. 1 — would spoil more than a few surprises and much of the fun. Suffice to say, the entire show revolves around a single deck of playing cards, and the cards behave in ways that defy reason and, occasionally, the laws of physics.But Wind’s niftiest trick, honed over more than 20 years and thousands of private events, is his ability to eliminate any sense that he and his audience are locked in a contest. He does it with a combination of charm and humility that peers say is just one reason he ranks among the great magicians of our time.“When he was in his late 20s, I was describing him as one of the finest close-up performers in the country, and I think he’s been at the top of the magic world ever since,” said Jamy Ian Swiss, author of six magic books and co-producer of the long-running show Monday Night Magic at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. “Very often a performer has a big personality onstage or he’s got great technical chops or he’s just inventive. And you can get by on any one of these qualities. Asi has all three. He’s the complete package.”For “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle,” audience members are asked to write their first and last names on blank playing cards, which are then spread on a round table where Wind conjures his mischief.Joan MarcusMany magicians imply that they are performing miracles and dare onlookers to divine their methods. Wind turns that approach on its head. He tells spectators that he can’t do magic and then makes any other explanation seem inconceivable.And he does it with ease and self-deprecating humor — “C’mon,” he said at one point, faux-pleading for a big reaction, “in Israel that’s a miracle!” — that will disarm even the most ardent Card Trick Columbos, those spectators too busy trying to bust the performer to enjoy the performance.Though a star among insiders, Wind has remained a relative unknown to the public. He had an Off Broadway show in 2013 called “Concert of the Mind,” and there was his wickedly bamboozling appearance on the competition television show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in 2019, which has been viewed on YouTube nearly 14 million times. That video and a few other clips are about the only glimpses available of the man at work. He’s maintained a surprisingly low profile, earning his living at corporate shows and consulting with David Blaine, a producer of “Inner Circle” who calls Wind “my favorite magician.”“Fame is not his goal,” Blaine said in a phone interview. “What interests him most is answering the question, ‘How can I make magic a great experience for my audience?’ That’s what he’s chasing.”Wind’s status as magic’s best-kept secret may end with “Inner Circle,” which is built around a simple, ingenious premise. Before the action begins, ushers ask audience members to write their first and last names on blank-face playing cards that all have identical backs. The cards are then spread on a round table where Wind will sit and conjure his mischief.So every trick is performed with a deck missing any of the standard suits, faces or numbers, and that changes every night. A card might start off as “Zach Alexander” then transform, in Zach’s hands, into “Rachel Silver.” Rachel may then open a sealed envelope she’s been guarding, only to find “Zach Alexander” inside.“A playing card has information on it, but to most people, the six of hearts, for example, means nothing,” Wind said one recent afternoon. “But if a spectator puts his name on that card, suddenly it is significant. It’s not a card. It’s a person.”Wind was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, a place that has a cameo in the show — a spectator is dispatched here to ask a stranger for a random number — and a key role in his origin story. In 2001, he flew to the United States, intending a quick visit with his brother, but fell hard for New York City and tore up his return ticket. With no job prospects, let alone a work visa, he took a regular deck of cards to this park and performed for tips for anyone who could be convinced to stand still for a few minutes.“It was hard, and I failed,” he recalled, with a smile. “But it taught me a valuable lesson — that magic is about connecting to people. It’s about them.”Wind was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, a go-to outfit that he augments for performances with a dark sports jacket, a look that says TED Talk more than “I do magic.” During a two-hour interview, he was animated, funny and candid about his struggles, which include a somewhat debilitating streak of perfectionism that he described as a curse.“It’s never being satisfied, never being super happy with something,” he said. “It really takes a toll on me, emotionally.”Wind in Washington Square Park, where he used to perform for tips.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesHe pronounced himself “60 to 70 percent” pleased with the show during this talk in late September, and said he’d never stop refining it. For years, he’s kept vampiric hours in his Upper East Side apartment, spending all night practicing sleights and polishing routines. “Inner Circle” includes effects that Wind has been fine-tuning for decades. There’s no hint of methods in the show, let alone the daredevilish risks he takes through the evening, because he’s spent thousands of hours rendering his techniques invisible.When he’s in the mood for more visible handiwork, he paints watercolors. Many are portraits of his magic heroes, several of which are projected onto the round table at the end of “Inner Circle” during a monologue about those who have influenced him.“Harry Houdini,” he said, introducing the first image. “He understood that it’s not enough to fool people with magic. You have to make them care.”Wind began his life as Asi Betesh in Holon, a city near Tel Aviv. An uncle showed him the first tricks he ever saw, and the owner of a magic shop later scrambled his brains with a card trick that he can still describe in detail.He left Israel after developing a comedy-magic act inspired by Steve Martin and lived with his brother in Brooklyn while working the lowest rungs on the entertainment ladder — twisting balloon animals for tips at a Toys “R” Us in the Bronx or performing at kids’ parties dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants, in a costume that once gave him scabies.“Oh my God, was that hard to get rid of,” he said. “I had to take so many showers and take every sheet, every fabric in my apartment to the laundromat.”He started landing gigs at parties and, eventually, a spot at Monday Night Magic, which first let him perform during intermissions and seven years later, in 2008, as a headliner. As his reputation grew, Penn and Teller tried to coax him on to “Fool Us” and succeeded only after agreeing to let Wind perform without having to dupe the hosts.“For all his talk about not wanting to compete,” said Penn, a bit grumpily, “he did a trick backstage that had one purpose — to fool me. So shut up, Asi.”Today, and for the run of “Inner Circle,” Wind has a theater of his own, a bespoke and painstakingly fabricated 106-seater that is based on a venue for magicians in Munich. Judging from audience reactions, the design yields an intimacy that makes the effects astonishing from every vantage point.“I was sitting there thinking that all the people he was calling on were shills — and then he called my name,” Wendy Rogers, a public-school teacher from Brooklyn, said after the show. “He must have superpowers or something because what he does isn’t possible on earth. And yet he does it.” More

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      Lars Eidinger Might Be the Greatest German Actor You’ve Never Heard Of

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      He might be the greatest Shakespearean actor you’ve never heard of. At last, New Yorkers will get to see his no-holds-barred portrayal of Hamlet in Thomas Ostermeier’s production at BAM.The German actor Lars Eidinger could not have been more easygoing at the photo shoot for this article. After arriving sans entourage in front of the Plaza Hotel, he clambered up a couple of stacked N.Y.P.D. concrete barriers, precariously posing like a gigantic besuited stork. As the photographer eyed a gurgling fountain nearby, Eidinger casually asked: “I go in?”It was a chilly, drizzly October afternoon in New York, but he took off his socks and shoes, pulled up his pants and waded into the water. Afterward, he stripped down to his underwear and changed into the sweats he’d brought along (just in case), unfazed by gusts of wind and gawkers on the street.That go-with-the-flow spontaneity won’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Eidinger onstage. His Richard III at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017, for example, was a chaotic-evil rock ’n’ roll goblin, the performance simultaneously illuminating and unhinged. This monarch was “a bogeyman guaranteed to haunt your nightmares for weeks to come,” Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review of Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne theater company.Now New York theatergoers will be able to take in another Eidinger tour de force when he and Ostermeier bring their “Hamlet,” also from the Schaubühne, to BAM on Oct. 27. (The short run concludes Nov. 5.) By the end of the gripping, delirious show — which includes a hip-hop interlude, cross-dressing and Eidinger stuffing dirt into his mouth — you might be tempted to call an exorcist on this prince of Denmark.Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne company debuted in 2008, and finally arrives in New York with its star ready to wear the upside-down crown.Arno DeclairYet the actor does not set out to get a rise out of audience members. Rather, he uses a good old technique to draw them into the world of the play by creating a highly physical, no-holds-barred performance.“This has much to do with my love for Bertolt Brecht,” the jovial 46-year-old actor said in between sips of a latte outside a Midtown cafe. “Brecht said, ‘Zeigt, dass Ihr zeigt’ — ‘Show that you are showing.’ I’m all the time showing that I’m an actor onstage in a play. It’s the opposite of the understanding of a Method actor: I never become somebody else.“The only thing I try to achieve is to become myself,” he continued. “Maybe I’m more myself when I’m onstage as Hamlet than I am right now talking to you.”Eidinger has toured the world with the Schaubühne, and his charisma and all-in approach have earned him far-flung fans. This may help to explain why in recent years he has become a familiar presence on international screens — chances are you’ve seen that really tall guy with the wide jaw line and narrowly set blue eyes without knowing who he was. He has played his share of extremists, including an industrialist plotting against the Weimar Republic in the Netflix series “Babylon Berlin” and an ice-cold Nazi officer in the BBC alt-historical show “SS-GB.” He has also effectively mined restraint in naturalistic dramas, most notably as a newly separated dad visiting his parents in the German film “Home for the Weekend,” and as an actor dying of cancer in the affecting Swiss film “My Little Sister.” (In that film, his character portrays “Hamlet” in a staging by a director played by … Ostermeier.)“Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said of the actor who starred in the HBO series “Irma Vep.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesTellingly, our conversation took place while Eidinger was in town for the New York Film Festival, where he helped introduce Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, “White Noise,” in which he stars alongside Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver. The in-demand actor then had to leave our interview in a mad rush because he was running late for a meeting with the director Shawn Levy, for whom he has been starring in a series adaptation of the Anthony Doerr best seller “All the Light We Cannot See.”One of Eidinger’s recent (and most memorable) screen turns was in the HBO series “Irma Vep,” in which he portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons. “I liked the idea that Lars carries the torch of the madness of 1970s German cinema,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said this summer in a video chat about his show. “Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage. It’s stuff I grew up on and I think that’s something that’s missing in contemporary cinema.”It’s missing on contemporary stages, too, giving Eidinger’s self-aware hyper-theatrical performances a unique power. But if they resonate with theatergoers past the initial shock to the system, it’s because he never loses sight of his characters.EIDINGER GREW UP in Berlin, where he still lives with his wife and daughter, and studied theater there. He became a salaried member of the Schaubühne ensemble in 1999, though he admits that it took him a while to find his bearings as a professional actor. A production of “Troilus and Cressida” with the British director James Macdonald, in 2005, proved to be a turning point. “I was really lost as Troilus, and I asked James, ‘Can you please help me understand his situation?,’” Eidinger recalled. “He said, ‘Lars, just the words. Just the words.’”Eidinger with Alicia Vikander in “Irma Vep.” He portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons.Carole Bethuel/HBOEidinger confessed that at the time he didn’t quite get what Macdonald meant. It hit him a few years later, when he started to rehearse “Hamlet,” which premiered in 2008 and has been touring on and off ever since.“Suddenly I thought, “OK, he was absolutely right — it’s just about the words,’” Eidinger said. “Just try it at home: Say the line ‘To be or not to be’ and try to understand what it means for you. I guarantee that there will be an emotion coming up. I don’t have to go onstage with any kind of preparation for the way I go into a mood or to a certain kind of emotion. I go onstage and try to be as open and blank as possible, and then it’s just about the words.” (Eidinger is so attached to “Hamlet” that a forthcoming documentary about him is titled “To Be or Not to Be.”)While it takes some preparation to achieve that state of readiness, Eidinger claims that he doesn’t start from high concepts. “There’s a very nice quote from Helene Weigel: ‘If you have an idea, forget it,’” Eidinger said, quoting Brecht’s wife and the director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble. “I believe in the genius of creation out of the moment. You invent something out of an impulse because you are open-minded, but you are not aware how meaningful it is. For example, in ‘Hamlet’ I wear the crown upside down,” he continued. “We tried several crowns and then we had one that was a bit too big for my head and always fell off. So I put it on the other way around, and then it worked.”It probably helps that he and Ostermeier seem to have a complicated relationship that involves trust but also a degree of one-upmanship. Speaking about their rehearsals in a video conversation, the director said: “We were constantly competing on who has the more crazy idea, who is more funny, who is more inventive, who is more creative. Because we know each other so well, it’s often, ‘OK, but I know even better, it can be even more crazy.’”“I’m aware of everything,” Eidinger said of his acting onstage. “I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAnd this does not stop once a show reaches the stage. Jenny König, who plays Gertrude and Ophelia in “Hamlet” and Lady Anne in “Richard III,” knows all too well that acting with Eidinger requires being constantly on alert. “I think he’s really good at creating an illusion that it’s happening the first time right now — he can’t just play the scenes like he did it a hundred times before,” she said in a video chat. “It’s always this special moment where something else could happen. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s the risk, but the aim is to be in the moment and to experience real reactions.”Onstage, Eidinger is in a heightened state of consciousness that allows him to experience a hyper-awareness of his environment. That, in turn, helps him modulate and adjust his performance on the spot. “Some actors describe acting like being a tunnel, but it’s the complete opposite for me: I’m aware of everything,” he said. “I’m standing onstage, maybe I’m emotional and crying real tears, but at the same time I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. I can think about bringing my daughter to school. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”This openness to his surroundings is also expressed into an interest in exploring other mediums. Eidinger, who mentions music as a primary inspiration, released a trip-hoppy album, “I’ll Break Ya Legg,” in 1998; quotes the rapper Tyler, the Creator as freely as Brecht; and has been deejaying for decades, including regular gigs at the Schaubühne. (“I’d say his taste of music is much too commercial,” Ostermeier sniffed. Someone needs to write a play à clef about these two.) He also loves taking photographs and has directed a few shows — this fall he is reprising the adaptation of “Peer Gynt” that he hatched with the artist John Bock and starred in.“For me, there’s not a big difference in how I express myself, so I’m completely satisfied just doing photography, I’m completely satisfied just directing or doing music,” Eidinger said. “Acting is something I stick to because maybe I’m most talented. In all the other art forms, I feel limitations; when I act, I feel no limits. And that’s very attractive, of course.” More