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      ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

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      According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.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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      ‘Cymbeline’ and F. Murray Abraham in ‘Beckett Briefs’ Delight Off Broadway

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      Shakespeare’s overstuffed late play gets an entertaining refresh Off Broadway, where Irish Rep is also offering a program of Samuel Beckett shorts.“Cymbeline,” really? But why?That tends to be my reaction whenever I hear that the overstuffed late Shakespeare play is getting a revival. Surely there must be something to stage that’s less of a slog?Now along comes a “Cymbeline” to prove me wrong. The National Asian American Theater Company’s production, using a lucid modern verse translation by Andrea Thome, is frankly a delight: funny, absorbing, even affecting. And with not a single man among its wonderfully strong cast, it has both a sense of frolic in satirizing macho pride and an in-the-bones understanding of male menace.Directed by Stephen Brown-Fried at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater in Greenwich Village, with dramaturgy by John Dias, this “Cymbeline” is presented with Play on Shakespeare, a project dedicated to creating versions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern English. The freedom of that approach makes it a striking contrast to “Beckett Briefs,” slightly uptown at Irish Repertory Theater, where another dead canonical playwright, Samuel Beckett, retains his customary tight control to fine effect. More on that below.Thome imbues her translation with a light, graceful touch; her “Cymbeline” feels like Shakespeare, but our 21st-century ears acclimate to it faster. The plot is still, of course, ridiculous, and less about the title character, a British king (Amy Hill), than about his daughter, Imogen (Jennifer Lim), who has secretly wed her beloved Posthumus (KK Moggie). Cymbeline wanted Imogen to marry the son of his dreadful new queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras), the doltish Cloten (Jeena Yi), whose one selling point is the amusingly puckish lord (Purva Bedi) who makes up his retinue.The exiled Posthumus, tricked into believing Imogen has been unfaithful, commands his servant, Pisanio (Julyana Soelistyo), to murder her. The honorable Pisanio secretly defies him. Adventure ensues, involving Imogen’s brothers, Arviragus (Annie Fang) and the heroic Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki), who were kidnapped as tiny children 20 years earlier and raised as rustics by Belarius (again the excellent Oliveras).There is also a war with the Romans. I defy you to care about that, even here.The rest of the performance is awfully entertaining, though, despite the fact that Imogen doesn’t deem Posthumus’s attempt to have her killed a marital deal breaker. She still considers him a prize.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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      Blue Man Group’s 34-Year New York Run Comes to an End

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      After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of hairless, earless, silent, blue-and-black clad performers, who spit paint and sculpt marshmallows, gobble Twinkies and drum in primary colors, unexpectedly became a culture-infiltrating sensation.They achieved this — along with shows in more than a dozen cities across the globe, multiple concert tours, three studio albums, a Grammy nomination, many TV appearances, a book and one indelible sitcom story line — without changing much about their approach. Throughout one of the longest runs in Off Broadway history, they remained proudly on the silly side of performance art. Even without a narrative, they also connected viscerally with audiences, earning a legion of megafans. “We love the idea of a show that is sublime and ridiculous,” said Chris Wink, one of the founding performers.Blue Man Group, which has been owned by Cirque du Soleil since 2017, is not disappearing: long-running shows remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return gig is planned for Orlando, Fla. But closing the New York production, where it all began — along with another decades-old production in Chicago — is the end of a chapter. (In a statement, a spokeswoman said Cirque du Soleil was proud of Blue Man Group’s track record, and that it made the “difficult decision” to shutter after “we re-evaluated our current standings.” After declaring bankruptcy in 2020, Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based live entertainment behemoth, is controlled by private equity firms.)Paint gets everywhere, often by design and to the delight of fans.The splatter has built up on lighting equipment over the years.Emerging from the East Village arts scene, the original Blue Man Group served as a monument to possibility: D.I.Y. creativity — or unfettered lunacy — could still flourish in New York. That for 34 years it occupied the same bit of desirable real estate, near the downtown mecca of Astor Place, and across from the landmark Public Theater, gave it a stately foundation — even if its 281-seat subterranean space was, almost by design, a little dank. Photos of the bald and the blue loomed outside, part of the urban architecture.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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      Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof’

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      In a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, a woman rehearses how she would escape her building if Israeli forces were to strike.There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israel Defense Forces attacked it.“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.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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      9 Best Theater Moments of 2024

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      “The Outsiders,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ragtime” were among the productions with stage moments that stood out this year.Climate protesters disrupting a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” the outdoor walking scene in “Sunset Boulevard” and the giggles prompted by a character’s reaction to a hunky celebrity’s glutes in “Hold On to Me Darling”: The rewards of live theater were aplenty this year. Here, nine other stage moments that especially stood out, listed chronologically. NICOLE HERRINGTONExpert FloppingSutton Foster does some playful mugging in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSutton Foster’s performance as the unorthodox Princess Winnifred in “Once Upon a Mattress” was full of playful mugging. But it was in the show’s indelible scene that her best physical comedy shone through: sprawling atop a tower of mattresses stacked on a pea, flailing, flopping, hopping and then propped, rear-end up, like a fitful child protesting bedtime. It’s the kind of clowning that few can pull off with Foster’s ease and charm. MAYA PHILLIPSCoroner’s Cabaret ActAndrew Durand, left, and Thom Sesma in the musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beguilingly strange new Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” retold the true tale of an Old West bank robber whose mummified corpse landed, in 1976, on the Los Angeles autopsy table of Thomas Noguchi, coroner to the stars. Noguchi is this dark comedy’s conscience — and in Thom Sesma’s performance, a fabulous showman, too. Grabbing the dangling microphone intended for postmortem notes, he delivered a slab-side nightclub number, boasting of celebrities he had cut up. Suddenly, surreally, death was a cabaret. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESVirtuosic ViolenceA balletic rumble in “The Outsiders” is stagecraft at its best. 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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      Best Theater of 2024

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      Broadway roared back, but the kitties were downtown and the prayer service was in Brooklyn.Broadway always looks its healthiest around the holidays, and indeed, right now, most of its 41 theaters are lit, with the rest soon set to load in new tenants. Box office grosses, if not quite back to prepandemic levels, seem likely to meet or exceed last year’s $1.6 billion. But the real health of the commercial theater, for me, is demonstrated by how much it offers its audiences, not its investors. That’s why, most years, my list of best shows is top-heavy with the provocative work being brewed Off Broadway. If my latest list tilts the other way, perhaps that reflects Broadway’s liberal borrowings from the noncommercial sector — borrowings and often improvements. My Top 10, listed chronologically and covering the period from December 2023 through the end of November, are therefore mostly shows that, wherever they started and wherever they wind up, put a premium on provocation, sure, but also entertainment. That’s what I call healthy.‘Appropriate’ by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsSarah Paulson, center, in her Tony Award-winning performance in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost plays about racism dramatize the damage done to its victims. But “Appropriate,” which opened last December in a Second Stage Theater production, looks instead at the sickening effects that hatred can have on its perpetrators — and their heirs. On the surface a “dividing the estate” play, with the children of a good ol’ boy squabbling over their inherited real and unreal estate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s uproarious tale of family guilt (directed by Lila Neugebauer and with a blistering, Tony-winning performance by Sarah Paulson) was in effect a corroded mirror reflecting America’s worst (and worst-kept) secrets. (Read our review of “Appropriate” and our profile of Paulson.)‘Terce: A Practical Breviary’ by Heather ChristianThe new year brought with it a new prayer, if you were willing to go to a former Sunday school in Brooklyn to find it. At the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, a large cast of “caregivers and makers” offered an unusual liturgy, performing Heather Christian’s ritual of praise for “the divine feminine.” The visionary composer’s typically catholic musical references — plainsong, gospel, electronica, soul and New Orleans funk — short-circuited rational analysis, inviting transcendence in much the way the rituals of the established church do. But this time, in Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s richly welcoming staging, the transcendence was for everyone, of any faith or none. (Read our review of “Terce.”)‘Dead Outlaw’ by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar MosesAndrew Durand, in the coffin, as the title character in the Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe afterlife of a mummy sounds more like an “I dare you” literary project than a hook for a good-time musical. But the mostly true story of Elmer McCurdy — wastrel, roustabout, schnook and sideshow attraction — got a brilliant coda in this Off Broadway show at the Minetta Lane Theater. The lovingly serious direction by David Cromer tempered the absurdity of the tale with sweetness and humor, and the cast, let by Andrew Durand as McCurdy, responded to the tumbleweed of a score with gorgeous singing. It’s the kind of musical you’d never find on Broadway — except that you might, next year. (Read our review of “Dead Outlaw” and the story behind the show.)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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      Marvin Laird, Musical Presence on and Off Broadway, Dies at 85

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      He conducted Broadway shows and worked with Bernadette Peters. But he was probably best known for writing the music for the darkly comic “Ruthless!”Marvin Laird, a conductor for Broadway musicals and for performers like Bernadette Peters who also composed the music for “Ruthless!,” the campy, award-winning Off Broadway show about a girl who will do anything — including kill — to star in a school play, died in a hospital on Dec. 2 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 85.His partner in marriage, Joel Paley, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of an infection.Mr. Laird was the assistant musical director for a summer stock production of “Gypsy” in Lambertville, N.J., in 1961 when he met Ms. Peters, who was 13 and was playing two small roles.“He was just the most energetic, charismatic fellow you’d ever want to meet,” Ms. Peters said in a phone interview.He later conducted the orchestras for her concerts and for two Broadway revivals in which she starred: “Annie Get Your Gun” in 1999 and “Gypsy” in 2003. When Ms. Peters appeared in a revival of “Follies” in 2011, he was the associate conductor.“The orchestras loved him,” Ms. Peters said. “He had a great sense of humor and they respected his musicianship.” She added: “He knew what I was going to do before I did it. I don’t sing a song the same way twice; it’s whatever happens to the song. And Marvin could get the whole orchestra to breathe with him.”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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      Artists, Then (as in the 17th Century) and Now

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      “The Light and the Dark” dramatizes the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, while “300 Paintings” was born during the fever dreams of Covid.Quick! Which 17th-century female artist fought her way into the male-dominated art world, prevailed in a rape trial and alchemized her struggles into revolutionary art? If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.Heavy emphasis on “introduction.” Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.There are two Artemisias in the show: the historical Baroque painter and a docent-like narrator. Both are played by Hamill, who has unwisely asked the narrator to ride shotgun to the artist. Under the slack direction of Jade King Carroll, “The Light and the Dark” often feels more like an art history lecture than a play. The first act, especially, hews much too closely to biographical exposition. Standing next to a blank canvas on a set that evokes of an artist’s studio, Artemisia talks to us about the art of composition before taking us back in time to her youth.As a child, she idolizes first the work of her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, posed like an off-duty Greek statue), then Caravaggio, whose works of fleshy realism crack the world open for her. The entrance of Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldivar), a papal painter who frequents Orazio’s studio, spells trouble. He contrives to spend more time alone with Artemisia; during one of his visits, after he has bribed the Gentileschi’s serving woman (a versatile Joey Parsons) to vacate the room, he rapes Artemisia.Strangely, no mention is made of her three younger brothers, who also trained as apprentices to Orazio and who might have served as dramatic counterpoints for the young female artist.More consequentially, Hamill, who is one of the most produced playwrights in the country, departs from the historical record in a trial scene. Court records of the rape trial preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Rome show that Artemisia averred that she threw a knife at Tassi after he raped her the first time; in the play, she simply lets it drop by her side. “I am not a heroine of some old story. I cannot hold the knife,” she says meekly.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