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      When ‘A Little Touch of Star Quality’ Is a Little Too Much

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      In upcoming musical revivals, world leaders both real (Imelda Marcos, Eva Perón) and folkloric (King Arthur) get an image makeover they may not deserve.Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes?I don’t mean mere antiheroes like Billy Bigelow, the “Carousel” carnival barker who sings gloriously about love yet hits his wife. Or Joey Evans, that lowlife “pal,” whose bed-hopping grift is set to a sparkling Rodgers and Hart score. Or even Evan Hansen, lying his way to love as he catches your heart with the catch in his throat.They’re all pikers, their damage largely domestic.Sweeney Todd, the liberally neck-slashing barber, is more like it. Though most of Fleet Street has been minced by the time the curtain falls on the musical named for him, he gets some of Stephen Sondheim’s most gorgeous arias, including the sinuous “My Friends” (crooned to his razors) and the erotic “Pretty Women” (whispered in the ear of the judge he’s about to dispatch). That a penny dreadful character originally meant just to shock and sicken becomes instead a pitiable victim is a testament to the power of music to make bad guys, if not good, compelling.Still, in “Sweeney Todd,” which opens next month in a Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the terror remains local because the barber has no leverage. In three other upcoming musical revivals — “Evita,” “Camelot” and “Here Lies Love” — the damage is done by people with real power. Their harm is political, epochal, even as the songs they sing, encouraging empathy that may not otherwise be earned, invite us to give them a pass.Michael Cerveris, center, as the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, second from left, in a 2005 production of “Sweeney Todd” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesExploring the humanity in flawed characters was the premise of many Golden Age musicals, which leaves them open to challenge today. “Evita” is an extreme case. Tim Rice’s book and lyrics try to keep the sins of Eva Perón, the second wife of the Argentine strongman Juan, at an ironic remove, lest the show seem to endorse her fascist tendencies and demagogic élan. The words make plain, just shy of celebrating, her manipulative genius.But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music works at cross purposes to that distancing effort. Though famously difficult to sing, the difficulty is exciting; it’s impossible not to be thrilled when a performer nails the treacherous downward arpeggios of “Buenos Aires” or the stratospheric belt of “A New Argentina.” And to the extent new productions mimic the chic of the 1979 Broadway premiere, “Evita” always seems to bank on the same “little touch of star quality” that the real Perón did.Whether that contradiction can be addressed within the confines of the musical as written remains to be seen. Sammi Cannold, whose staging for New York City Center’s 2019 gala provided more context for Perón’s ambition, seems poised to go even further in a production scheduled to run from May 14 through July 16 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It’s promising that in a TED Talk about “Evita,” Cannold reflects on “the responsibility of the storyteller.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.More honored in the breach, that notion is part of what renders many Golden Age musicals so tricky today. Some of their unexamined assumptions — about race and gender and even the primacy of pleasurable song over political impact — have been revised or shot down in the intervening decades.One musical compromised in the process is “Camelot,” a romantic retelling of Arthurian legend that opened on Broadway in 1960. Its book, by Alan Jay Lerner, has always been considered clumsy and overlong; for Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater revival, which begins performances on March 9, Aaron Sorkin has rewritten it.Though dialogue in “Camelot” explains why Arthur (Richard Burton in the original 1960 production) orders the execution of Guenevere (Julie Andrews), song makes him sympathetic, our critic writes.Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamyBut the score, with Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s music, was always able to compensate for the book’s shortcomings. Arthur’s utopian dreams were so perfectly captured in the title song that it became an emblem of the Kennedy era. The hauteur of his wife, Guenevere, and the egotism of her lover, Lancelot, were exposed and then exploded in torrents of rapturous balladry that swept away their faults.More recent concerns about the story may be more difficult to dismiss with mere melody. Indeed, melody can aggravate the problem. Though dialogue explains why Arthur behaves as he does — ordering his wife’s execution and destroying his country’s peace — song makes him sympathetic. Especially with a beloved score, the identification between audience and the characters is difficult to sever: We sing the songs in our heads as they sing them aloud.If it took six decades to see why that might be problematic for “Camelot,” just one has sufficed to raise similar questions about “Here Lies Love,” which sets the story of Imelda Marcos to a disco score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. A success at the Public Theater in 2013, it is only now transferring to Broadway, where performances are scheduled to begin on June 17.The intervening years have altered the way we look at historical characters onstage, from Alexander Hamilton to Princess Diana. Marcos presents a particular problem, because she’s not yet historical: The country’s first lady from 1965 to 1986, she’s now, at 93, its first mother. (Her son, Ferdinand Jr., known as Bongbong, became president last June.) Whether merely supporting her husband’s dictatorship or more directly influencing and maintaining it, she was part of a regime accused of looting billions from the country’s treasury and eliminating its opponents.In telling the story of Imelda Marcos, a former first lady of the Philippines whose husband’s regime was accused of corruption, “Here Lies Love” takes lyrics from her own speeches and interviews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNo wonder some Filipinos and Filipino Americans have objected to the way “Here Lies Love,” at least in the version seen at the Public, seems to sympathize with its main character. Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” described the musical as painting “a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”The show’s producers countered that “Here Lies Love” is “an Anti-Marcos show” that aims to fight disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.”But creative to what end? Though most of the show’s lyrics are taken from Marcos’s own speeches and interviews, phrases like “Why don’t you love me?” and “Is it a sin to care?” have a very different effect when merely spoken than when set to singalong melodies and danceable beats. Staging the production in what amounts to a discothèque further complicates the point of view. When song and dance bring so much pleasure, you may miss the atrocities as you’re doing the hustle.Perhaps that’s the point. As the musical has matured, artists have naturally sought to write about people who are more complicated than randy teenagers and frivolous socialites. Yet by applying the powerful tools of the form to darker and more dangerous figures, those figures are literally given greater voice, forcing us to consider the ways in which they are humans even if they may also be monsters.Does that mean whitewashing them? Obviously not; to describe domestic violence, as “Carousel” does, is not to endorse it. And yet seducing us into a kind of emotional complicity with powerful figures, especially real ones like Perón and Marcos, does have its dangers — dangers enhanced by the fundamental amorality of song, no matter what the words say.So when Evita, thrilling her public with diamonds and Dior, sings, “They must have excitement, and so must I,” it’s not that we risk forgiving her. It’s that we risk enjoying too much what we can’t forgive. More

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      With ‘Letters From Max’ Onstage, Sarah Ruhl Again Mourns a Poet’s Death

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      Through dialogue, poetry and ritual, the playwright revisits her correspondence with her former student, who died at the age of 25.About 10 minutes into “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Sarah Ruhl’s new play about her epistolary friendship with the poet Max Ritvo, something akin to a sacred rite takes place: The lights dim, a spotlight illuminates center stage, and the actor portraying Ritvo walks toward a winged tattoo artist. For a few moments, they circle each other. Then the tattoo artist-angel removes the hospital gown that the poet is wearing and lifts him with grace. With a miming gesture, he offers a compact mirror to Ritvo so he might examine the birds newly adorning his back.“It’s dope,” Ritvo says of the tattoo, looking over his shoulder. “I really love it in this light.”But that quiet exchange was not dreamed up by Ruhl. It is actually a scene from a play that Ritvo wrote for Ruhl when he was a student at Yale in 2012, four years before he died of cancer at the age of 25. (After each surgery, he would acquire a new tattoo of a bird.) Before handing in the project, he told Ruhl, “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”With the Signature Theater production of “Letters From Max,” his desire for the work is now being realized in a way he might not have imagined.Ruhl’s play, adapted from a book she compiled of their correspondence during Ritvo’s chemotherapy, boils down to a single, yearslong conversation about poetry, love, mortality, the afterlife and soup. But this is not a traditional play. Poems and live music are interspersed between the dialogue, which comes from the letters, texts and voice mail messages they exchanged.Edelman, right, as a tattoo artist-angel, helping Pais remove his hospital gown in the play. The two actors alternate in the role of Max.Ye Fan for The New York Times“I don’t think of this play as ‘show business,’” Ruhl said in an interview, “but instead an encounter for the audience.” She hopes viewers will “bring their own grief or their own need for communal sadness,” she said, adding that the theater has been a place for catharsis dating back to the Greeks. “We’ve all been through so much in the last two years.”Though Ruhl feels her own grief in this production, which opens on Feb. 27, she has also found joy in sharing Ritvo’s work, and in seeing it move people the same way he did. “He was such a present, joyful person who made everyone around him laugh,” she said. There are other small tributes to Ritvo, too: A song he composed recurs throughout, and the titles of his poems are projected in his handwriting above the stage.There were no plans to adapt “Letters From Max” upon the book’s 2018 publication. But as Ruhl read sections at events — often with an actor reading Ritvo’s words — people asked, “Is this going to be a play?”Before distilling the 309-page book into a two-hour stage production, Ruhl consulted Ritvo’s literary executor, the poet Elizabeth Metzger.“She asked me long ago, ‘Do you think Max would want this?’” Metzger recalled, adding that she was “very, very certain that Max would.” For Ruhl, finding “the bones” within hundreds of pages of correspondence became a process of trial and error.She realized the first act is “about a teacher and a student getting to know each other and forming a friendship,” she said, “that would then reverse the teacher-student relationship” in the second act, which opens with a dialectic on the afterlife. “I was trying to offer Max a comforting view of the afterlife when he was afraid of death,” Ruhl said. “And he ultimately said, ‘Thank you. But no.’”Kate Whoriskey, who directed the New York production of Ruhl’s previous epistolary play, “Dear Elizabeth,” also about two poets exchanging letters, signed on to direct, and the actress Jessica Hecht was game to portray Ruhl, her longtime friend and collaborator. But casting Ritvo introduced a unique challenge. “I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that he had a huge reach and people are still in mourning,” Ruhl said.She said she was moved during auditions. “It was actually beautiful to see Max’s language inside a young person’s body again,” Ruhl said. Ruhl and Whoriskey liked the idea of a third body onstage — similar to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” — who might “care-take the space” by delivering soup and poems to Ruhl and Ritvo. When the actors Ben Edelman and Zane Pais read for the role of Ritvo, Ruhl said, the team believed they “could do beautifully in both roles” by alternating nights. It turned out that Edelman plays the piano and Pais plays the guitar, so each composed music to perform while the other recites Ritvo’s poetry.“There’s some mystery, and it’s beyond words,” Ruhl said of the duality. “But it’s something about the spirit and the body, and the observer and the observed.” Not to mention, as Ruhl writes in the program note, the actors’ interchangeability demonstrates that Ritvo’s spirit and legacy is “bigger than any one actor.”“Max was many himself,” Metzger said. “Every time he read a poem, he read it differently, because he allowed the moment of the poem and the moment he was reading to merge.”When rehearsals began, Metzger texted Ruhl some guidance for the actors: “Reading the letters, the character is coming to face death,” she wrote, but “reading the poems, the character is not dying but being born, coming to life!” Metzger hoped the actors might “capture the shock of Max’s performance style, even the strange wild aliveness of the poems on the page.”Ritvo’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, has been “an incredibly staunch supporter,” Edelman said, calling a video meeting she had with the cast members “one of the most intense experiences of my life.”He and Pais didn’t study Ritvo’s mannerisms. Instead, they aimed to embody his work. “Neither of us are trying to do an impersonation of Max at all,” Pais said.Hecht and Pais onstage during rehearsals at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Marsha Ginsberg’s spare set includes a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Max Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and a theater.Ye Fan for The New York TimesTo foreground the writing, the scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg kept the stage spare. The sole set piece is a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he accepted the 2014 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America while wearing a pink kimono. At one point, during a silent sequence, the outside of the zoetrope becomes the window of an Amtrak quiet car. “We were trying to create a world where imaginative scapes could happen,” Whoriskey said. “So that a poem happens, and then suddenly, you’re seeing skeletons across a bridge, or a poem happens, and you’re seeing the shimmering of water.”Hecht didn’t work through the emotional arc of Ruhl’s character until the week before previews began. Though it’s easy to cry on command, she said, “I felt embarrassed to do that before we lived through the play for a while, and I really felt the weight of that story and that person coming into our lives.”For the past 30 years, Ruhl said, she has carried on an “intense” dialogue on life and art with Paula Vogel, her former professor. “When I met Max, it felt like he was one of those people that I would have that kind of dialogue with, had he lived that long,” she said. “It’s a comet-like thing. You might only meet those people once every … how often do comets circle?” Perhaps Ritvo made such an impact because he valued relationships. “He’s not a poet who just went inward and was exploring his own self and soul. It was always about talking to another person in a room,” Metzger said. “It was happening all the time, these little births and deaths of just being with a person in a room. I think that’s why he had so much intimacy with so many people. I’ve never met someone with as capacious of a soul.”When Ruhl attended the first preview performance of “Letters From Max, a Ritual” earlier this month, she could finally observe “how the humor landed,” how the emotional beats played out, and how Ritvo’s poetry “theatrically holds an audience.”But it wasn’t until intermission that the project came full circle. As part of the play’s “ritual,” she said, audience members sat at tables in the lobby to write letters to loved ones. A young woman approached Ruhl with an envelope addressed to her. The playwright opened it and drew out a note reading: “I have incurable brain cancer. And this production gave me hope.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Wanderers,’ Two Marriages and a Movie Star

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      Anna Ziegler’s play about an Orthodox couple in the 1970s and an unorthodox one in the 2010s explores the limits of longing.There’s no shortage of stories that explore the merits and pitfalls of arranged marriages. In the Jewish subcategory alone, we have “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and the perennial “Fiddler on the Roof.” But Anna Ziegler’s awkwardly hitched play “The Wanderers,” which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, may be the first to consider the problem of forced matches while also exemplifying it.A shotgun seems to have been involved in forcing its two incompatible tales under one roof. The first begins in 1973 with the wedding of Esther and Schmuli, members of the Satmar Hasidic community who barely know each other. Even if Schmuli (Dave Klasko) is a bit meek, and Esther (Lucy Freyer) alarmingly headstrong, they seem at first like a traditional Orthodox couple, looking forward to making a family.Nevertheless, within five years, their marriage is in ruins. Schmuli has spirited away their daughters; Esther has fled Brooklyn with their infant son, Abraham.That’s not a spoiler but the foundation for the second story, which takes place decades later and proceeds in alternating “chapters” with the first. Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is now an acclaimed 40-something novelist, having won, we are told, “a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards before turning 30.” The purple samples of his work provided suggest that the prizes were massively misjudged.Somewhat too conveniently for himself and the play, Abe is married to the daughter of another Satmar refugee. His mother and hers, best friends since childhood, raised Abe and Sophie (Sarah Cooper) to be each other’s “bashert”: their fate, their soul mates.Eddie Kaye Thomas and Sarah Cooper, on the table, portray a married couple with connections to an Orthodox couple played by Lucy Freyer, far left, and Dave Klasko, sitting at the two ends of the table.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhether they also chose that fate is an open question; for all their similarities, there are also crucial differences. For one thing, Sophie, who is biracial, grew up with a father — a Black professor of environmental science — but Abe rarely saw his after the separation. Precious about his loss, yet glib about other people’s, he has the charismatic narcissist’s ability to finagle subservience.That’s already a lot of plot for a 105-minute play, even before the lopsided interaction between the two stories, and the potential to explore generational harm through them, is overshadowed by an out-of-the-blue development. At a reading in a Brooklyn bookstore, Abe spots in the front row a well-known actress, a longtime crush who is apparently on his freebie list. Immediately afterward he receives an email that leads to a correspondence featuring thousands of others, many flirtatious to the point of virtual adultery.Unaccountably, the actress is given the name Julia Cheever, a herring so far past red it’s bleeding. As played by Katie Holmes, with whom the character shares certain biographical features, Julia is glamorous and wry but strangely underpowered. That’s in part a lack of stage authority; in this Off Broadway Roundabout Theater Company production, Holmes, though she appeared in the 2008 Broadway revival of “All My Sons” and in Theresa Rebeck’s “Dead Accounts” in 2012, is still feeling her way around a world that lacks a camera.But her indistinctness is also the result of the problem of representing virtual communication onstage. Sometimes the director Barry Edelstein has Julia sit face-to-face with Abe, or even touching, as if in the same room. Other times, she wanders about Marion Williams’s set, which consists almost entirely of books, while reciting her emails as if they were soliloquies.At least hers are down-to-earth. Abe’s are high-flown, pretentious — which is but one way this plot thread recalls the infamous electronic flirtation between the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and the actress Natalie Portman. Ziegler has said she found that correspondence, part of which was published in The New York Times, “pretty juicy,” but in repurposing it for the play, she seems to have spilled the juice everywhere. As written, and in Thomas’s crafty performance, Abe bears enough of a resemblance to Foer (who also has a mother named Esther) to make you wonder what the point is.In any case, the real governing spirit here isn’t Foer but the frequently name-dropped Philip Roth; Abe seems to aspire not just to his stature but also to his characters’ unapologetic selfishness. That Sophie tolerates this while also taking nearly sole responsibility for their two children, who could not possibly be as whiny as her husband, is something of a mystery, at least for a half-hour. But pretty soon, and with growing irritation thereafter, the explanatory twist becomes obvious, leaving the big revelation at the end of the play a letdown.Is it too much of a hint to mention that catfish is not kosher?Helpfully, Cooper, known for her comic lip-syncing of Donald Trump, has a fresh and natural energy onstage. Even so, the plot mechanics ensure that Sophie isn’t given enough playable material to make us want to stay in her story. And Abe, who thinks he is deep, is unbearable.The social strictures facing Freyer’s Esther and Klasko’s Schmuli seem impossible to alter and are thus political, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only by contrast, Schmuli and Esther are more engaging. The forces aligned against their happiness are not merely theoretical as with Abe and Sophie; they emerge from social strictures that seem impossible to alter and are thus political. This gives the emotions of their scenes more complexity, and though Freyer can’t do much else with her troubled character, Klasko is at times heartbreaking in his portrait of conflicted and hopelessly unenlightened love.The comparison between the two marriages, each undone by the search for something outside the characters’ ken, nevertheless feels specious. The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing. More authentic are the wigs by Tommy Kurzman and costumes by David Israel Reynoso; you certainly never question which world you’re in as the fur hats and wigs — the shtreimels and sheitels — give way to sweatpants.Still, “The Wanderers” feels, like its vague title, unmoored. That has not been a problem with Ziegler’s previous plays, which include “Photograph 51” (about the molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin) and “Actually” (about a campus sexual assault trial). Both feature stories in which a strong argument is developed single-mindedly through specific conflicts that point toward a crisis.It’s an irony that in trying to weld two such stories together, “The Wanderers” doesn’t enhance those elements but compromises them. Arranged or chosen, not all marriages are bashert.The WanderersThrough April 2 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Hari Nef and Parker Posey: Two ‘It’ Girls Whose ‘Humanity Peeks Through’

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      In a pairing that seems almost predestined, the actresses are sharing a stage in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a contemporary riff on Chekhov.In a show-business world full of square pegs and round holes, Parker Posey and Hari Nef are 12-sided dice.Posey, 54, has forged an unclassifiable career since her days as the “it” girl of 1990s independent cinema — mirrored in her oddball 2018 book, “You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir.” She has created a series of indelible characters in Christopher Guest comedies, including “Best in Show,” but has also memorably brought her off-kilter rhythms to high-profile gigs like the flamboyant assistant district attorney Freda Black in the HBO Max mini-series “The Staircase” and the scheming Dr. Smith on the Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.”As for Nef, 30, she landed the recurring role of Gittel in the Amazon series “Transparent” days after graduating from Columbia University, in 2015. The first openly transgender woman to receive a worldwide modeling contract, Nef also writes for various magazines, appeared in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines” in December, and has a couple of big projects arriving later this year: Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie and the HBO series “The Idol” in which she’ll appear alongside the Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp.From left, Daniel Oreskes, Posey, Amy Stiller and Nef in the New Group’s production of “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” which follows a group of theater friends who retreat to a house in the Catskills.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a meeting that seems almost predestined, the pair are now sharing a stage in Thomas Bradshaw’s “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a New Group production in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center. (It is scheduled to open Feb. 28 and run through March 26.) A contemporary riff on Chekhov set in the Catskills, the play renames the charismatic, brittle actress Irina Arkadina as Irene (Posey), while the moody, romantic Masha has become Sasha (Nef).“They’re iconic in who they are and what they bring to their work,” the play’s director, Scott Elliott, said of Nef and Posey during a phone call. “They’re able to bring themselves to the parts so there’s very little separation between the actor and the role. Their humanity peeks through.”This quality helps explain why both New York-based actresses have a similar ability to connect with a character’s pathos, while also deploying unerring comic timing: Posey’s turns in those Guest films are pitch-perfect, while Nef was praised by Ben Brantley, in his review of Jeremy O. Harris’s play “‘Daddy,’” for delivering “the production’s sharpest satirical performance.”On Being Transgender in AmericaG.O.P.’s Anti-Transgender Push: Republican state lawmakers are pushing more sweeping anti-transgender bills than ever before, including bans on transition care for young adults up to 26.At School: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.Feeling Unsafe: Intimidation and violence against gay and transgender Americans has spread this year — driven heavily, extremism experts say, by increasingly inflammatory political messaging.Puberty Blockers: These drugs can ease anguish among young transgender people and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about their long-term effects.Naturally, there are generational differences. In a chat following a rehearsal, in January, Nef mused about taking Posey to a rave while Posey reminisced about visiting classic ballroom dance halls in Berlin. And yet they connect. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I want to be known for what I do as an actor,” said Nef, who also appeared this winter in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines.” Josefina Santos for The New York TimesWhat did you know of each other before “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY”?PARKER POSEY Hari Nef — oh, she was in “Transparent.” I remembered exactly what a performance that was and how much she lit up a scene. She changed the temperature of the room. I don’t keep up with a lot of things. I don’t have a lot of social media — I forgot my Instagram password a while ago and I tried to sign on a few times with the password I thought I remembered. But of course it was the wrong password.HARI NEF I knew so much about your work. “Party Girl” is a favorite, but I’d also seen you on “Search Party,” the whole gamut. A friend of mine said that you in “The House of Yes” is probably one of the greatest screen performances he’s ever seen. And he doesn’t play.POSEY When we met for the first read-through, Thomas said, “I’ve just got to tell you, ‘The House of Yes’ was a big inspiration for me and my writing.” That [script] was Wendy MacLeod’s Yale thesis. I didn’t know that playwriting can be so subversive.NEF I was always so attracted to you and your work because you were glamorous and you were dramatic and you were cool and you were distinctive and uncompromising, but not in a way that was obvious or traditional. You are beautiful and talented, that is obvious and traditional, but you always did things your way. I knew that if I was going to make a career as an actor, much less as an actress, I would have to do things non-traditionally. I didn’t have anyone quite exactly like me to look to so I looked at your work and I looked at Tilda [Swinton] and Chloë [Sevigny].POSEY I got lucky because at a time in the culture, you could do Off Broadway and afford your $700 a month apartment. And you could do independent movies: “It’s only 22 days, yeah, I’ll do that one.” It was kind of punk rock or like being in a band. Everyone was hanging out together and it was very organic. It was a little pocket of time that didn’t last that long.NEF I’ve been able to spend my entire fall and winter doing Off Broadway shows because I did Fashion Week before this and that visibility brings other opportunities. You can get paid three, four, five times what I’m going to make for both these plays combined by going to one dinner and being photographed there in an outfit. I post images of the films I like on Instagram not just because I find them inspiring and beautiful — I do — but it’s me going, “I want to be in movies like this.”POSEY You’re having the best of both worlds because to be online and have a social media presence is kind of to be your own magazine. I need to learn. But that time is a different time; it is your generation’s time right now.NEF You’re literally from the last moment where it was possible to be cool. Looking at that capital-C definition of cool all the way back to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, there’s talent, there’s glamour, there’s drive, there’s darkness. But there’s also a mystery and a specificity, and you lose that mystery and specificity by existing online. Because of the money thing and the rent thing, it has become essentially untenable to be cool, to be mysterious, to have that allure being an indie legend.Do you think it’s one thing to be perceived as cool and another to be taken seriously as an actor?NEF So much of my entry into this industry and this practice was around “Transparent.” I was riding on this flotilla of discourse about things that had nothing to do with what I could do as an actor. I thought I had to sing for my supper just for a seat at the table. Maybe I was right, to a certain extent, but it became like, “Do I really want people to know me by what I say or what I am or what my private medical history is?” No, I want to be known for what I do as an actor.POSEY Cool is when there’s something original or unexpected, or seems to have some kind of luck around it. Which your appearing on that show was: the unexpected, something new, something fresh. And that is not orchestrated — that’s luck. I see that now. I look at life and the path of an actor as having that luck. And I think that’s very enviable.NEF I’ve been very lucky. I remain lucky. The play I did before “Daddy” was my senior thesis in college: I played Arkadina in “The Seagull.” I had gone through what I had gone through in college and I never thought that I would get to go onstage to do Chekhov, much less play her. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to play a role like that again for many, many years — not because of age but because of the size and the heft of the role. I haven’t played a role like Arkadina since then, but I’m back doing “The Seagull” and that is more than was promised to me at that moment in history.“It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women,” Posey said of her character, Irene, a showbiz mom in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY.” “The misogyny is on fire, still.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesParker, what drew you to Arkadina/Irene?POSEY What attracted me the most to this part was the narcissistic mother, and the power that a mother has over her son. And she’s a showbiz mom, someone with a lot of heart and theatricality and all that. I’m so lucky as a middle-aged woman to be playing this part. It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women, how fun it is to see the worst. People love to call someone a bitch. I mean, the misogyny is on fire, still.NEF I play a lot of bitches.Why do you think that is?NEF Well, I’m no ingénue. I write, and a lot of the bitches I’ve played are also writers, thinkers. Smart. “Bitch” is often a fill-in for intelligent, for articulate, for opinionated, queer, not conventionally feminine or not conventionally beautiful. I think the “Barbie” stuff happened because I didn’t play bitchy and I didn’t play dumb and I didn’t play plastic in the audition.POSEY Having been cast as a female Dr. Smith, that was such a coup, I was so grateful for that gig. If you can live in Hollywood, it’s a lot easier to get cast and be a part of that world. But I wanted to walk around and see other people.NEF What is your relationship to the word “scene-stealer”? It’s the word that really follows me. It’s not a bad thing: It means I’m doing good work in small roles.POSEY That is a character actor making strong choices. When you have a small role in something big, you have to fill it in a certain way, and that’s its own thing.NEF If you’re a bold flavor — which I know I am — it’s more intuitive for people to see you as seasoning to the steak. I’d like to be the steak someday, but I know I have to earn it. So many of your iconic roles have been supporting and I’m wondering if you ever felt minimized by it.POSEY [long pause] Your 20s are really intense and then the culture changes and you’re, like, “Where am I going to fit in? I’m going to be in ‘Blade: Trinity’ playing a vampire? Never thought I’d see the day but yeah, I want to work and that’ll be interesting.” And then it’s the 40s. It’s heartbreaking when you become aware of just how intensely male-dominated our stories are, especially when you mature as a person and as a woman.NEF The shifts in the culture are by and large cosmetic when it comes to power and who gets the green light and who gets the sign-off for studio things. I can’t control the way I’m cast or how people see me.POSEY But you can see and acknowledge where you are. You’re in the mix. We’re so lucky to do what we love to do. A lot of people don’t.NEF That’s the bottom line of gratitude right now. This sounds corny but every day I’m so grateful to be here with you, to be here with everyone, to work through this winter onstage. It’s not guaranteed for anyone, much less someone like me or you. More

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      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      She Went Viral Mocking Trump. Now Sarah Cooper Is Taking on a New Role.

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      She is making her professional stage debut in the Off Broadway drama “The Wanderers,” and fulfilling a childhood dream. “It’s transformative,” she said.Way back in 2020, when Donald Trump was still in office and many Americans were stuck at home, Sarah Cooper became Internet-famous in a most idiosyncratic way: by lip-syncing some of the president’s more inartful musings.Using tools she had at hand — her wit, her phone — she built an enormous audience for her short-form videos mocking Trump’s remarks on everything from the coronavirus to crustaceans.The exercise was a bit of a lark, and a bit of a coping mechanism. But for Cooper, an actor-writer-comedian who had had little luck breaking into the entertainment world, it was also a game-changer: She finally signed with an agent (at William Morris Endeavor, one of the biggest talent agencies); she starred in her own Netflix special (“Everything’s Fine,” created with Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph); she adapted one of her books, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings,” into a pilot (it did not get picked up, but was still “an amazing experience”); and she shot a Jerry Seinfeld film (“Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story,” currently in postproduction).Now, at age 45, she is at last doing the thing she has dreamed of since she was a child: performing in a play. She is making her professional stage debut in “The Wanderers,” a drama by Anna Ziegler that is in previews Off Broadway at the Roundabout Theater Company, with the actress Katie Holmes also in the cast.Cooper, who last performed in theater as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, has had a circuitous path back. Born in Jamaica, she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 3, and at first found little family enthusiasm for her artistic aspirations. “They didn’t think that I’d be able to support myself as an actress,” she said, “which, you know, they had a good point.”At college she switched her major from theater to economics; after graduating, she worked in tech design. At 30, she quit to try her hand at acting; when that wasn’t going well, she turned to standup comedy, “and then,” she says, “I went broke.”She wound up managing a design team at Google, but quit that to write. And then came the pandemic, the videos, and all that followed.“Those videos absolutely changed my life,” she said during a recent interview at her apartment high above Downtown Brooklyn, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Cooper is playing a woman who is struggling with her identity as a mother, a wife and a writer in Anna Ziegler’s “The Wanderers,” a Roundabout Theater Company production that is now in previews.Tim Barber for The New York TimesWhat is “The Wanderers” about?“The Wanderers” is about two couples. One couple is very much an arranged marriage, in the Orthodox Jewish community, and the other couple is not arranged. On the surface, it looks like one couple has all of these freedoms and the other one doesn’t. And yet the struggles are very similar between the two.Tell me about your role.I play Sophie, and I am half-Jewish/half-Black. I had a huge failure earlier in my career, but my husband is very successful. When we meet Sophie, it’s about 10 years into their marriage, and she is struggling with her identity as a mother and a wife, and how that is affecting her longing to be a writer. And she’s really feeling distant from her husband.You had a marriage end during the pandemic. How does taking this role resonate for you?It’s very personal: I’m a writer as well; I have a lot of impostor syndrome as well; I question my talent on a nightly basis. I just relate to this character so much.It’s been three years since your first Trump video, which you called “How to Medical.” How do you see that chapter of your life?Right afterward I was very scared of just being known as the Trump Girl, and felt like I wanted to distance myself from it. But I meet people who just come up to me and they just go, “You made me laugh when it was so hard to laugh.” It’s just made me appreciate it a lot more. Those videos helped so many people, and they also helped me. So I’m thankful for it now, even though I know that if I die right now, my obituary would have the name Donald Trump in it, which is not great, but what are you going to do?Do you ever feel tempted to do it again?People ask me to do it all the time, and I have no desire. I like the idea that it exposed the meaninglessness of his words, but I think now that it’s been exposed, there’s nothing left to really do with it.And you’re not going to turn it into a cycle with other characters?I’ve noticed I am very good at lip syncing, so I’ll never say never. But right now I’m really enjoying acting, which is really what my childhood dream was.So what is it like, being in a play?We did a table read, and table reads are always very scary because you think if you do it wrong, you’re going to get fired immediately. And then we moved very quickly to getting on our feet in the rehearsal space for four weeks, which was such a gift. And then you get on that stage, and the lights hit you, and you’re in a costume, and you’re looking at this man who is just this actor but now he’s your husband — it’s transformative. Oddly I feel it’s where exactly I need to be and where exactly I belong.What are you learning?I’m working on my voice, mainly. I’m learning to breathe while I’m speaking, learning how to project, learning about my diaphragm, doing morning and afternoon exercises. I have to say the name of a Philip Roth book, “Sabbath’s Theater,” so all I do every day is say “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater.” It’s not that easy. I got a lot of opportunities by not using my voice, and so now I really have to figure out what that means to use my voice.Have you been seeing theater?I have seen “Take Me Out” four times. I just love that play. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jesse Williams are so great. And masculine vulnerability is just wonderful to watch. I also saw “Tina” twice — I see a play and I have to go see it again. I don’t know what I will see next but if I love it I will see it multiple times.I’m having a hard time figuring out the overlap between “Tina” and “Take Me Out.”Well they both start with T! Actually, I don’t know what it is. With “Tina,” it was the contrast between that forward-facing, “I’m doing this amazing performance; I’m making you happy; I’m making you dance” and then, a second later, “I’m beaten by my husband.” Showing how those two things could be happening at the same time — this awful, awful struggle and this amazing performance — that was incredible to watch. And also, Adrienne Warren — her voice and her presence was just so amazing.So what do you hope is next for you?I am writing a memoir that’s coming out in October. And I want to tell stories. That’s really what I want to do, and whether that’s through writing, through acting, through standup, I want to be able to do whatever it takes to tell stories.Why a memoir?My very first book was “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” and I look back now and realize that a lot of that was inspired by my father, because my father always looks very smart. My memoir is about embracing looking foolish. The more foolish I can allow myself to look, the better, because that’s exposing who I am more, and not conforming to what I think people want to see.Do you miss Trump?In 2020, he said some brilliantly stupid things. You can’t write that stuff. The stuff that he said, it was gold. So I don’t want him back, but making those videos was a lot of fun. More

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      ‘The Smuggler’ Review: A Barman’s Rambling Yarn

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      The one-man show means to draw the audience into a moral quandary pitting immigrants and the American poor against each other.“I am/An Amerikan,” says Tim Finnegan, the Irish bartender-cum-storyteller in Ronán Noone’s “The Smuggler: A Thriller in Verse.” “Worked hard to be/A citizan,” he continues in a Dublin accent, the words purposely misspelled in the script. He cheekily punches the last syllables, emphasizing what the play’s subtitle already warned us about: We’re seeing a thriller in rhyme.This is the tone that this unkempt play, produced by the Irish Repertory Theater, strikes throughout: pat, masquerading as playful.It’s 2023, in a bar in an affluent Massachusetts community. Tim’s serving up drinks while telling us his story. He needed money for his family: his ever-exasperated wife and their ill toddler. Desperate, Tim found an untapped market to exploit: the homes of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are involved with lucrative illegal enterprises like human smuggling. Defending himself with weak arguments about moral subjectivity and telling us he’s just a good guy in tough circumstances, perhaps even a kind of Robin Hood, Tim says he robbed the immigrants for the down payment on a new home.Some other things happen: a car crash, a toppled tree, a beating, a murder, though many serve as diversions that needlessly overextend the storytelling. (A bonkers basement battle with a herculean rat, however, is the most suspenseful, and comical, portion of the play, in part because it’s so random.)“The Smuggler,” a one-man show, means to draw the audience into a moral quandary about Tim’s actions and the unfair status of immigrants and the citizen have-nots of America. But the play never demonstrates enough of Tim’s character to make him an interesting figure. Nor does it indicate it has a nuanced political statement — just transparent generalizations meant to be wise aphorisms about the American dream. (“You do what you need to do/To become what you want/To be.”)Michael Mellamphy is affable enough as Tim, like a regular about town, but he’s neither as charming nor as menacing as his narration would have us believe. Under Conor Bagley’s awkward direction, Mellamphy especially struggles in the transitions between scenes and characters: the accents muddled, the gestures, postures and voices forced. His movements around the space — circling, pacing around the bar — are more choreographed than natural.The immersive set design, by Ann Beyersdorfer at the intimate W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, provides color and detail. The walls of the theater are littered with quintessential Irish dive décor: ships, anchors, Irish flags. (“The Smuggler,” which won the 2019 best playwright award at New York’s 1st Irish Festival, was also staged in Washington, D.C., that year in an actual bar.)The play is loaded with “cheap” rhymes — as Noone himself describes them in his script — questionable metaphors, odd meter and endless nudge-and-winks to the form (“And maybe at this point/You’re getting bored/With the exposition”). Still, “The Smuggler” has more issues than how violently it strong-arms the word “hyperbole” into an exact rhyme with “today.” (And that’s very violently, by the way.) The play has several glaring blind spots: The few women mentioned are unlikable, often nags, and the various brown immigrants all seem to be criminals, primarily because the playwright has failed to engage with the deeper issues of gender or race.If “The Smuggler” aims to be about the price of the American dream and the moral cost of being a successful American citizen, it takes more than a few measures of doggerel from a black-market bartender to do so.The SmugglerThrough Feb. 26 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More