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      The N.E.A.’s New Gender and Diversity Edicts Worry Arts Groups

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      As the National Endowment for the Arts adjusts to comply with President Trump’s executive orders, “gender ideology” is out and works that “honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage” are in.The National Endowment for the Arts is telling arts groups not to use federal funds to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “gender ideology” in ways that run afoul of President Trump’s executive orders — causing confusion and concern.Black Girls Dance, a Chicago-based nonprofit that trains and mentors young dancers, was recently approved for a $10,000 grant to help finance an annual holiday show called “Mary.” Now the small company is wondering if it still qualifies for the money.It was the company’s first grant from the N.E.A., and Erin Barnett, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said that receiving it had been “a step of validation — like ‘We see you and we support the work that you’re doing.’” But she said that if the grant were canceled for running afoul of the new requirements, she would persist. “I serve a God that sits on the highest throne of all, and he’s not going to stop this show,” she said.It is unclear what the new rules will mean for groups seeking grants, or for those that already have them in the pipeline. Many arts organizations have pledged to support diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and several groups that have received funding in the past have presented works about transgender and nonbinary people.The new N.E.A. rules require applicants to agree not to operate diversity programs “that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws” and call on grant applicants to pledge not to use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” They refer to an executive order Mr. Trump signed that declares that the United States recognizes only “two sexes, male and female.”The N.E.A. did not answer questions about whether organizations that have already been told they would receive grant money would be affected.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Henry IV’ Review: Two Plays Become One

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      The relationship between Prince Hal and John Falstaff, a favorite of Shakespeare scholars, is the focus of this condensed adaptation.A young prince and an old knight walk into a tavern …So much of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” plays like a setup, either to a joke or to a significant turning point in English history. It’s perhaps the most defining, and trickiest, element of the Henry plays, which often combine the interpersonal high jinks of a comedy with the politics and knavery of a war drama, sans the typical dramatic structure.In a new production from the Theater for a New Audience, the two “Henry IV” plays are combined into a single adaptation that clocks in at nearly four hours. The script, by Dakin Matthews, condenses and restructures the material, while the direction by Eric Tucker opts for a more classic, toned-down staging. For all the successful work this “Henry IV” does to combat the unwieldy bloat of the two history plays together, it does not probe the central characters enough to uphold the stakes and maintain the tension throughout the lengthy running time. The result is a serviceable production that lacks fresh revelations.The “Henry IV” plays are part of the Henriad, the series of history plays that begin with “Richard II” and end with “Henry V.” Often considered the less glamorous section of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the plays are about the making and unmaking of kings, the burdens of the crown, revolts, betrayals and the disastrous clashing of many male egos.At the start of “Henry IV,” Henry Bolingbroke (played by Matthews) has usurped the crown with the help of the Percys, a family of English lords who now lead a rebellion against Bolingbroke for that same crown they helped him procure. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke’s son, Prince Hal (Elijah Jones), fetters away his time drinking and palling around with the crooked old knight John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders) and his reprehensible cohort. Hal and Falstaff’s trivial pursuits are interrupted, however, when they’re called to the battlefield, and by the end of “Henry IV,” Hal has renounced his old habits, brutally rebuffed Falstaff and taken his place on the throne as King Henry V.The relationship between Hal and Falstaff, a favorite of lit majors and Shakespeare scholars, is the true heart of the material. The young prince and the old knight are like father and son, mentor and mentee, but also serve as each other’s foils. They represent opposite sides of age and privilege, and their gradual dynamic shift reveals the nuances of their characters. For all his comedic purpose in the story, Falstaff emerges as a tragic figure — the niggling sideshow act in a grander story about nobility and a nation’s evolution. He’s the sacrificial lamb to Prince Hal’s ascension.Each of the three acts ends with a major scene between Hal and Falstaff, marking another dramatic crux in their story. One of the production’s strengths is how Matthews cleverly structures the script to steadily follow the arc of these two characters. However, the same nuance and decisiveness is less present in the direction and some of the performances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Night Sings Its Songs’ Review: Rare Staging of Nobel Winner Jon Fosse’s Play

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      A play by the Nobel winner Jon Fosse gets a rare staging, but New Yorkers will have to wait a little longer to see a production that captures the Norwegian writer’s haunting universe.When the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, he joined the small circle of dramatists to have received that honor, including two men he is often compared to: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.Unlike Beckett and Pinter, however, Fosse is largely unknown in the United States — outside of shows like “A Summer Day” in 2012 and “I Am the Wind” in 2014, productions in supposedly cosmopolitan New York are few and far between. This makes New Light Theater Project’s middling new take on Fosse’s “Night Sings Its Songs” at least noteworthy.Like much of his stage work, “Night Sings Its Songs” — which premiered in Norway in 1997 and was staged in New York in 2004 by Sarah Cameron Sunde, a translator and Fosse evangelist — is simultaneously elliptical and brutally precise. The main characters in these scenes from a miserable marriage are the Young Man (Kyle Cameron) and the Young Woman (Susan Lynskey). They have been together since high school, and their new baby seems to have brought buried issues to the surface.He spends his days and, apparently, nights reading on the couch, and fruitlessly submits manuscripts to publishers. She’s going stir crazy and eventually decides to head out on the town. At one point, she desultorily says of her husband: “He is nice. But he understands little about nothing.” For most of the play, the couple’s conversations revolve around variations on “you never want to go out” (she) and “who were you out with?” (he). They both suffer from a mutually soul-destroying postpartum funk, and it is grueling.In his Nobel acceptance speech, Fosse said that “in my drama the word pause is without a doubt the most important and the most used word — long pause, short pause, or just pause.” The script for “Night Sings Its Songs” includes stage directions and, yes, many, many requests for pauses, but no punctuation. Concretely, this means that a Fosse staging must hit an almost musical rhythm, inducing a kind of entranced fascination — the repeated motifs are like ostinatos in minimalist music.And that is where Jerry Heymann’s production falls short. It struggles to settle into the particular groove the play requires, and leans into a fairly naturalistic approach that not only fails to sync up with the text, but often also tussles against it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Next Hot Playwright? They Prefer the Ones Who Cooled Off.

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      In the decades when he was running the widely influential Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford would not have been the one driving to New Jersey to see a man about a tree.But his new theater company, a scrappy, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, is a more hands-on operation. So one day last month, he hopped into his S.U.V. and headed across the Hudson River to bring back a freshly felled tree — he couldn’t tell you what kind — to be used in the set of a Len Jenkin play he is producing, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”Such is the job that Sanford, 71, made for himself when he and his wife, Aimée Hayes, the former producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, founded the Tent Theater Company. Advocacy is intrinsic to its mission. Having exited Playwrights Horizons in 2021, after 25 years as its artistic director, Sanford has taken up the banner of a group of artists he sees as sidelined by an industry that thrives on discovering the latest hot playwrights, yet isn’t exactly diligent about sustaining them over their lifetimes of creativity.Kate Arrington and Fred Weller during a rehearsal for Len Jenkin’s new play, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThere is, Sanford said, a feeling afoot that older playwrights should simply make way: “That kind of, you know, ‘The baby boomers had their time. Let them all go into the ash pits.’”To him, though, age is an overlooked element of diversity — one that comes with accumulated knowledge of the human experience, and for which there is, and must be, room. It is a matter, too, of respecting these artists, whom the Tent calls elders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Off Broadway Crews Unionize, Workers See Hope, Producers Peril

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      Workers say the move is overdue, but theater companies fear it will drive up costs in a wounded sector that has yet to recover from the pandemic.A unionization wave sweeping across Off Broadway is poised to reshape the economics of theater-making in New York — for workers as well as producers.Striking stage crews have idled the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company — the birthplace of the musicals “Spring Awakening,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which all transferred to Broadway and won Tonys. The strike, which began last month, comes amid a drive to unionize stage hands and crews at Off Broadway theaters.Nonprofit companies and producers fear that the unionization push could drive up costs at a moment when many are running deficits and staging fewer, and smaller, shows. Second Stage Theater and Soho Rep both recently moved out of their longtime venues and opted to share space with other companies. Another measure of the sector’s shrinkage: In 2019 there were 113 shows eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor Off Broadway work; there are just 59 eligible shows so far this season, which, for the Lortels, closes at the end of March.Many workers see the unionization of stage crews as long overdue, noting that the sector has come a long way from its scrappy origins. Now that many Off Broadway theaters have become mature institutions with elevated production values, workers say, it is time for them to pay better wages and offer benefits to their crew members.“The stakes are incredibly high,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, which represents theater owners, managers and producers, “not just for those directly involved, but for the future of this vibrant sector, which has always been a cornerstone of New York’s cultural identity.”“Grief Camp,” a new play by Eliya Smith, had begun previews at Atlantic when it was shut down by the strike. It has since been canceled, along with Mona Pirnot’s “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Urinetown’ Review: More Than Toilet Humor

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      The Encores! revival of the musical from Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis seems even more relevant today.About halfway through the first act of “Urinetown,” the characters Hope Cladwell and Bobby Strong reveal their emotions and desires in “Follow Your Heart.” Their names could have been lifted from a Depression-era musical, and the song itself evokes such romantic classics of that time as “I Only Have Eyes for You.”“We all want a world / Filled with peace and with joy,” Hope (the comic revelation Stephanie Styles) and Bobby (an effortlessly charismatic Jordan Fisher, fresh from a stint as Orpheus in “Hadestown”) sing in the Encores! revival that opened Wednesday night at New York City Center. “With plenty of water for each girl and boy,” they continue.You see, our lovebirds, whom Fisher and Styles portray with a precisely calibrated mix of earnestness and goofiness, live in a dystopian world where water is scarce. Exacting payment for the privilege of peeing has become a profitable business for Hope’s tycoon father, Caldwell B. Cladwell (Rainn Wilson, not quite villainous enough), the head of the Urine Good Company corporation.Bobby, on the other hand, is very much from the downtrodden side of the tracks. More specifically he’s the assistant custodian at the public toilet known as Amenity No. 9, run by the imperious Penelope Pennywise (Keala Settle, amped up to 11 as if rehearsing for Norma Desmond).The jarring reference to a commodity perhaps more essential than peace and joy in such a lovely number confirms that the “Urinetown” team of Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics) was not just a new version of Harry Warren and Al Dubin, the bards of 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. A bespoke pastiche of a specific vintage style, “Follow Your Heart” also contains a streak of modern sarcasm and political commentary that helps explain why “Urinetown” has aged so remarkably well since its premiere a little more than a quarter of a century ago.The show, which started life at the International New York Fringe Festival in 1999, had an Off Broadway run in the spring of 2001 and reopened on Broadway on Sept. 20 that same year. It won the Tony Awards for best book, original score and direction of a musical, and ran for two and a half years. The inclusion of “Urinetown” — an unlikely hit but nevertheless a hit — in Encores! underlines the mission drift of a series that used to be dedicated to flops and obscurities but nowadays simply “revisits the archives of American musical theater.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Urinetown’ and Other Plays and Musicals to See in February

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      Also onstage in February: Calista Flockhart in a Sam Shepard revival, boldface names in Joy Behar’s “My First Ex-Husband” and a marionette made of ice.Let some brilliant theater artists — like Jeff Hiller in “Urinetown,” Susannah Flood in “Liberation” and Tonya Pinkins in “My First Ex-Husband” — tell you a story this month. Here are 10 shows to tempt you, Off Broadway and beyond.‘Urinetown’If you are allergic to bathroom humor, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann’s Tony Award-winning musical satire probably is not for you. Winkingly Brechtian, with echoes of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” it’s set in a dystopia where private toilets are illegal and public facilities charge for use — a situation ripe for rebellion. Directed by Teddy Bergman (“KPOP”) for New York City Center Encores!, this brief revival stars Jordan Fisher, Rainn Wilson, Keala Settle and Jeff Hiller. (Through Feb. 16, New York City Center)‘Anywhere’Ashwaty Chennatt as Antigone with a melting Oedipus in Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Anywhere” at Here.Richard TermineA marionette made of ice plays a wandering, melting, disappearing Oedipus accompanied by his daughter Antigone in this puppet piece by the French company Théâtre de l’Entrouvert, which uses bits of text from Henry Bauchau’s novel “Oedipus on the Road.” Conceived and directed by Élise Vigneron, whose interest in ephemerality has led her to work repeatedly with ice puppets, it is presented with the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival as part of Basil Twist’s Dream Music Puppetry program. Recommended for ages 11 and up. (Through March 2, Here)‘My Man Kono’The New York Times once described Charlie Chaplin’s longtime assistant, Toraichi Kono, as “the keeper of his privacy.” An immigrant from Japan who made fleeting appearances in Chaplin films, this “combination valet, bodyguard and chauffeur” is the title character of Philip W. Chung’s historically based play, which follows Kono’s fortunes as he is suspected of espionage and imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for Pan Asian Repertory Theater. (Through March 9, A.R.T./New York Theaters)‘Grangeville’This new two-hander by the Obie Award winner Samuel D. Hunter (“A Case for the Existence of God”) stars Brian J. Smith and Paul Sparks as estranged brothers with different fathers, discrete wounds and far-flung lives — one in their Idaho hometown, the other in a city thousands of miles away. But they have a shared filial task: caring for their sick mother. Jack Serio (“Uncle Vanya”) directs for Signature Theater. (Through March 16, Signature Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Tennessee Williams-Marlon Brando Tango, and Other Riffs on Classics

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      Three new plays onstage in Manhattan, “Kowalski,” “Mrs. Loman” and “Nina,” mine treasures of theater history.In the summer of 1947, when Marlon Brando was young, beautiful and not yet famous, the director Elia Kazan gave him $20 to get himself to Provincetown, Mass., from New York to audition for Tennessee Williams.Less than three years after bestowing “The Glass Menagerie” on the world, Williams had a new play on the fast track to Broadway: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which needed a Stanley Kowalski. But Brando, at 23, was in no hurry to get to Cape Cod. He pocketed the travel funds, hitchhiked there and turned up at Williams’s rented beach house days late.Enticing little anecdote, isn’t it? Gregg Ostrin has taken that historical reality and run with it in “Kowalski,” a diverting new comedy that blends fact with speculation. Brandon Flynn stars as a rough and clever Brando opposite Robin Lord Taylor as a Williams whose default setting is high dudgeon.“Let me make something clear,” the playwright tells the actor in a Southern lilt that stays, thank goodness, well this side of sorghum. “You can be late for Thornton Wilder. You can be late for Bill Inge. You can even be late for Arthur Miller. But you cannot be late for me.”Directed by Colin Hanlon at the Duke on 42nd Street, “Kowalski” neatly sidesteps the largest trap lying in wait, because neither Taylor nor Flynn is doing an impersonation. Each is after an essence of his character, and finds it, satisfyingly.That’s a crucial achievement, since mining treasures of theater history to make new work is always a double-edged endeavor. Audiences, like artists, love the prospect of a show that speaks a language we have already learned; familiarity helps at the box office. But our preexisting notions of who the characters are — whether because they were real-world celebrities or because they are borrowed from canonical dramas — can make us awfully tetchy about other artists’ riffs on them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More