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      Adam Driver Is to Star Off Broadway as a Country-Western Singer

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      The actor will return to the stage this fall in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.”Adam Driver, a Broadway alumnus and prolific film and television actor best known for “Girls” and “Star Wars,” will return to the stage this fall to portray a narcissistic country-western singer in a limited-run Off Broadway comedy.The play, “Hold On to Me Darling,” was written by Kenneth Lonergan, an accomplished playwright (“The Waverly Gallery”), screenwriter and film director. (He won an Oscar for the “Manchester by the Sea” screenplay.)In “Hold On to Me Darling,” the main character decides to move home to Tennessee after his mother dies. The collision of a big star and a small town fuel the comedy of the play, which was first staged in 2016 at Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit.The new production, a commercial endeavor, is to begin previews Sept. 24 and open Oct. 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. The run is scheduled to last just 13 weeks, although sometimes limited-run plays are extended.The production will be directed by Neil Pepe, who also directed the 2016 version. Pepe is the Atlantic’s artistic director.The producers of this fall’s run are Seaview, Sue Wagner, and John Johnson, who were among the producers of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” which starred Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott and had a run at the Lortel that began last fall. That show’s success helped draw the attention of producers to commercial Off Broadway, a sector of the theater business that had atrophied over time, but is now attracting more interest because the producing costs are far lower than on Broadway.Driver, 40, is no stranger to the stage. A graduate of Juilliard’s acting program, he has appeared on Broadway three times, most recently starring in a 2019 revival of “Burn This,” and he has also performed in several previous Off Broadway productions.Ben Brantley, then the Times’s chief theater critic, named “Hold On to Me Darling” among the best shows of 2016, and praised the play as “a tragicomic commentary on a culture ruled by the religion of fame.” More

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      ‘Six Characters’ Review: Making the Case Against a White-Centric Theater

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      At Lincoln Center Theater, Phillip Howze’s daring new play offers a hefty critique but takes aim at more targets than it can accommodate. Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a pre-performance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.Dustin Wills’s production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)Scott plays a cleaner and Julian Robertson is the Director in Phillip Howze’s play, a metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 work.Jeenah Moon for 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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      Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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      The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.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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      ‘Inspired by True Events’ Review: True Crime Thriller Riddled With Clichés

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      The actor Ryan Spahn makes his Off Broadway playwriting debut with an immersive, psychologically shallow dark comedy.In May 2010, Daniel Wozniak, an actor performing in a production of the musical “Nine” at the Liberty Theater in Los Alamitos, Calif., killed two people. He dismembered the body of one of his victims, and kept a portion of it at another local theater. News of the heinous acts sent shock waves through the performing arts community, and more recently led the actor Ryan Spahn to write “Inspired by True Events,” an Out of the Box Theatrics production now running at Theater 154 in the West Village.This immersive show wisely plays off our modern-day fascination with true crime, but, frustratingly, it’s missing the elements that keep the genre compelling: a clear mapping of intimate relationships, a psychological analysis of motive and a captivating villain.“Inspired by True Events” begins with the stage manager, Mary (Dana Scurlock), of Uptown Theater — the kind of scrappy local company that programs “A Christmas Carol” every winter to offset the cost of more adventurous work during other seasons — entering a green room littered with grease-stained pizza boxes and empty bottles of vodka (the scenic design is by Lindsay G. Fuori), evidence of the previous night’s opening festivities.We’re all backstage with Mary, inside the real green room of Theater 154. (The building’s traditional theater is cleverly used too.) The backstage environment, made even more intimate by the production’s 35-seat audience cap, adds multisensory layers to the show. When Mary puts on a fresh pot of coffee in anticipation of her haggard cast — Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) — we not only smell the pungent brew but also the gurgling of the coffee maker cuts into the dialogue. The sound of the water roiling effectively hints at something more sinister to come.Spahn and the director, Knud Adams, have a couple of these adrenaline-inducing tricks up their sleeves, including offstage thuds and the rustling of mice gnawing on something in the vents (sound design by Peter Mills Weiss). But the show is at its best when it lets the green room serve as a microcosm for these characters’ anxieties: Colin’s breakup with his girlfriend, Claire; Eileen’s stress over her mother being in the audience; and Robert’s laments about his horrible day. These interesting bits of character development have a meta impact, influencing how the Uptown players are preparing for their performance, and how we, the audience, come to view the Uptown players. These moments prove Spahn’s ability to weave personality into the high-concept narrative fabric, so it’s mind-boggling that he doesn’t do it more frequently.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Pre-Existing Condition,’ a Character Isn’t Defined by Abuse, or One Actress

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      Stars like Edie Falco and Deirdre O’Connell bring a communal quality to Marin Ireland’s play about the aftermath of domestic violence.Most actors will tell you that when they take on a role, they want to own it. If it’s a classic or a play based on a movie, they like to say that they avoid watching earlier performances so they can go in free of preconceptions.The women taking turns playing A, the central character in Marin Ireland’s new play “Pre-Existing Condition,” went for a communal quality. “When you’re seeing a person perform, it has the DNA of all the other people because we’ve watched each other,” the director and actress Maria Dizzia said.Tavi Gevinson, who starts her stint as A on July 23, said, “I think it definitely helps eliminate this illusion that there is some ideal performance that you’re trying to unlock and do an imitation of — it’s something that you’re co-creating with the piece every night.”The show, whose run at the Connelly Theater Upstairs was just extended through Aug. 17, is structured as a series of brief vignettes involving A, who has endured domestic violence. In addition to Dizzia and Gevinson, the past, present and upcoming actresses playing A include Tatiana Maslany, Julia Chan, Deirdre O’Connell and Edie Falco, who recently joined the cast.In the aftermath of the breakup with the man who hit her, A is seen interacting with different people in her life: her mother, the leaders of a support group, a lawyer, prospective dates, friends — all played by Greg Keller, Sarah Steele and Dael Orlandersmith, who appear at every show.Greg Keller and Julia Chan in the play, which has been in development for about 12 years. Emilio MadridWe 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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      How a Ballroom ‘Cats,’ a Gay Kiss and a Black Marine Reclaimed Old Musicals

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      How a Black lieutenant, a gay kiss and a catless ballroom are helping reclaim Broadway classics.Ten years ago, I cringed through an Encores! performance of one of the most odious musicals I’d ever seen. That’s not to throw shade on Encores!, the concert series that dredges up both diamonds and dirt from the musical theater dustbin. But “Irma La Douce,” a 1960 Broadway hit about jolly prostitutes and the men who keep them, was perhaps a dredge too far. Did I mention that it involved penguins?In a way, it was a relief that the show was so bad: There was nothing to regret in consigning it to my personal catalog of cancellation.Most of the most offensive musicals of the past are like that, providing their own incontrovertible arguments against revival, except as carefully labeled historical exhibits in some deep-future Encores! season.On the other hand, the best vintage musicals need no excuses. They should be performed as long as enough people want to see them, and perhaps even longer, until the time is right again.But between the disposables and the treasurables lies a range of works, middling to excellent, that can still be powerful despite certain problems. Often the problems arise from ways of looking at race and gender that, however progressive in their day, do not meet contemporary expectations. Who, if anyone, has the right perspective to address such works most authentically?A good answer might start with artists who represent the group that’s objectionably depicted (or gratuitously ignored) in the show itself. And though I’m not a proponent of narrow identity matching, which can shrink a capacious story to a hall of mirrors with just one person inside, I’ve seen several examples recently in which the story is instead expanded. This happens when directors and performers from the communities in question thoughtfully reappropriate material that was once appropriated from 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

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      With a Killer Onstage and a Body Part in the Back, the Show Went On

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      Fourteen years ago in Orange County, Calif., Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions.Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.”Wozniak performed twice in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose savings he wanted. Investigators found Herr’s torso inside the theater where Wozniak and his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, had performed in the show. Buffett was later convicted of lying to the police about the murders.What kind of person would gamely act between gruesome acts? That’s the question Ryan Spahn set out to explore in his darkly comic new play, “Inspired by True Events,” running through Aug. 4 at Theater 154 in the West Village, in an Out of the Box Theatrics production.Directed by Knud Adams, the show takes place inside a community theater’s intimate green room, where Mary (Dana Scurlock), a mama bear stage manager, helps the actors Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) prepare for the play-within-the-play. The audience of 35 (seated on chairs inside the theater’s green room) watches the humdrum thrum of a dressing room: Mary makes coffee, Colin showers, Eileen puts on her wig, Robert steams his costume. That is until Robert finds a duffel bag that reeks of Colin’s gym clothes — and it’s no spoiler to say that what’s in the bag are not Colin’s gym clothes.Dana Scurlock, left, and Jack DiFalco in the Out of the Box Theatrics production.Thomas BrunotWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Life and Trust,’ the Details Are in the Devil

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      What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included.That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company.In a brief introduction, which is set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show then ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium.“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a canvas of this size,” said Teddy Bergman, the director of “Life and Trust.” “It just keeps going.”Making this deal with the devil took space. And time. And quite a lot of money. How much money? The producers wouldn’t say, though Jonathan Hochwald, a producer at Emursive, said the final amount was comfortably in the millions.A company of performers, including Marla Phelan, above left, and Mia DiLena, plays 30 characters in 250 overlapping scenes, which loop twice each evening.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