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      The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

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      Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More

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      ‘Helen.’ Review: A Restless Heroine Tired of Abiding by Gender Roles

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      At La MaMa, Caitlin George’s new play uses comedy to counter the legend of Helen of Troy.The play is called “Helen.,” as in Helen of Troy, but her twin sister, Klaitemestra, is the one who steals the show.You remember Klaitemestra, albeit maybe by a different spelling: the grief-enraged mother of Iphigenia, who is sacrificed to the gods by her father, Agamemnon — a betrayal that Klaitemestra avenges by murdering him upon his return from the Trojan War.So dramatic, isn’t it? Not like the humdrum contemporary-classical domesticity that Helen, Klaitemestra and their older sister, Timandra, inhabit at the start of Caitlin George’s “Helen.,” a new twist on the ancient tale in the downstairs theater at La MaMa, in Manhattan’s East Village.Yet for a long time, the bored and restless Helen (Lanxing Fu) is the only one who has a problem with their existence. Timandra (Melissa Coleman-Reed) is placidly happy to have a husband who brings her coffee in the morning and puts socks on her feet when she gets chilly, while Klaitemestra (Grace Bernardo) is so hot for Agamemnon (Jonathan Taikina Taylor) that she can barely contain herself.“That man is melt-in-your-mouth gods-be-damned-licious,” she says. “I love every little speck of him.”The arc of their coupledom — sexual pyrotechnics, cooling affection, grisly end — is the clearest, most affecting element of Violeta Picayo’s incohesive production for the SuperGeographics, presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts.That is unfortunate news for Helen but also for the audience, because this is her story — a comic counter to the legend that she was abducted from her husband, Menelaus (Jackie Rivera), by the handsome Paris (Taylor), whereupon men waged the Trojan War over her. In “Helen.,” the catalyst for her fleeing is her own inchoate yearning.“I want to go on an adventure,” she tells her sisters. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”Spurred on by Eris (Constance Strickland), the god of discord and the show’s gold-clad narrator, Helen leaves Menelaus and their daughter, meets Paris and takes up with him. (Costumes are by James Schuette.) But the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon cannot grasp that her absence from home and family is voluntary, the way it might be for a man.“One time right after our daughter was born,” Helen says, “Menelaus disappeared for eight months. Never said anything. Although, to be fair, he did leave a note. ‘Gone out, comma, for glory. Kiss, kiss.’ I had no idea where he was. Then without warning he just rocked up one day and asked what was for dinner.”The struggle here is between a woman’s self-determination and a man’s entitled possessiveness — a world-shaping dynamic rooted in traditional gender roles. This staging mutes that essential resonance, though, with a clownish Menelaus who needs to but never does evoke masculinity. If Menelaus isn’t tethered to some kind of reality, neither is Helen’s stifling marriage. That undermines the urgency of her quest for a fulfilling life.“Helen.,” whose heightened tone sometimes recalls the plays of Sarah Ruhl and Charles Mee, is ultimately overcrowded, and the production largely lacks the ache that George has encoded in the comedy.But it does have that bleakly disillusioned Klaitemestra — and her elegantly choreographed, marriage-ending murder scene.Helen.Through Oct. 29 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ Is This Season’s Most-Staged Play

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      Heidi Schreck’s play will have at least 16 productions around the country; last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s,” came in second.“What the Constitution Means to Me,” a challenging exploration of American legal history sparked by a student oratory competition, will be the most produced play at U.S. theaters this season, according to a survey released on Wednesday.The play, written by Heidi Schreck, will have at least 16 productions around the country, according to a count by American Theater magazine.The magazine conducts an annual survey of theaters to determine which shows, and which playwrights, are most popular. Productions of “A Christmas Carol” and works by Shakespeare, which are always widely staged, are excluded. The survey covers theaters that are members of the Theater Communications Group, the national nonprofit organization that publishes the magazine.“What the Constitution Means to Me” was staged on Broadway in 2019, with Schreck starring, and it was filmed for Amazon. (The play has a three-person cast, including a young person who debates the lead actress about the merits of the Constitution.)A production is now running at the Copley Theater in Aurora, Ill.; productions just closed at Main Street Theater in Houston, Syracuse Stage in New York, Capital Repertory Theater in Albany and Ensemble Theater Cincinnati. Other productions are planned at theaters including New Stage Theater in Jackson, Miss.Last season’s most-produced play, “Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage, remains quite popular — it came in second this season, with at least 14 productions, and Nottage is the nation’s most-produced playwright, with 22 productions overall.Among the other most-staged plays this season are “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, and “The Lehman Trilogy,” by Stefano Massini.The complete lists of most-produced plays and most-produced playwrights are online at AmericanTheatre.org. More

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      Steven Lutvak, Whose Darkly Comic Show Won a Tony, Dies at 64

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      He wrote several musicals without attracting much notice. Then he struck Broadway gold with “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.”Steven Lutvak, a composer and lyricist whose only Broadway show, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” — a black comedy about a killer in London who bumps off the relatives who stand in the way of his becoming a wealthy royal — won the Tony Award for best musical, died on Oct. 9 at his work studio in Manhattan. He was 64.The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said Michael McGowan, his husband.Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off Off Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as “A Gentleman’s Guide.”Set in Edwardian England, it is the story of Monty Navarro, a poor man who, after learning that he is a distant relative of the rich D’Ysquith clan (and then being denied a claim to its lineage), kills the eight kinfolk (all played by one actor) in the line of succession between him and the head of the family, the Ninth Earl of Highhurst.The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years.In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood said that the score — Mr. Lutvak wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Robert L. Freedman — “establishes itself as one of the most accomplished (and probably the most literate) to be heard on Broadway in the past dozen years or so, since the less rigorous requirements of pop songwriting have taken over.”“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” was nominated for 10 Tonys in 2014 — Mr. Lutvak and Mr. Freedman were nominated for original score — and won for Mr. Freedman’s book, Darko Tresnjak’s direction and Linda Cho’s costume design, as well as for best musical.“Steve was a gifted composer, lyricist and musician, but more than anything he was a born storyteller,” Mr. Freedman said by phone. “I was able to speak to him in my own language about story, plot and characters in a way that not every composer can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      ‘Suffs’ Heads to Broadway With Hillary Clinton as a Producer

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      The musical, about early-20th-century efforts to win the right to vote for women, will open in April at the Music Box Theater.She has been a first lady, a United States senator, a secretary of state, a Democratic nominee for president, and, most recently, a podcaster and a Columbia University professor.Now Hillary Rodham Clinton is adding some razzle-dazzle to her résumé: She’s becoming a Broadway producer.Clinton has joined the team backing “Suffs,” a new musical about the women’s suffrage movement, as has Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. The producing team announced Wednesday that the show, which had an Off Broadway run last year at the Public Theater, will transfer to Broadway in the spring, opening at the Music Box Theater on April 18.“Suffs” explores the early-20th-century struggle for women’s voting rights in the United States; the dramatic tension involves an intergenerational struggle over how best to hasten political change. The musical is a longtime passion project for the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who wrote the book, music and lyrics; Taub also starred in the Off Broadway production, but casting for the Broadway run has not yet been announced.The musical is being directed by Leigh Silverman (“Violet”); the lead producers are Jill Furman (“Hamilton”) and Rachel Sussman (“Just for Us”). The show is being capitalized for up to $19.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Furman said the actual budget will be $19 million.The Off Broadway production of “Suffs” opened to mixed reviews; in The New York Times, the critic Maya Phillips wrote that “the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution.” But “Suffs” sold well, and Taub and the rest of the creative team have been reworking the show over the past year.“We’ve done a lot of work on it — we’ve listened to the critics, and we listened to the audiences,” Furman said. In the months since the Public run, Furman and Sussman added, Taub has rewritten some songs, distilled the book, removed recitative and shortened the running time. “We feel really confident in what we’ve created,” Sussman said.The lead producers said Clinton and Yousafzai would be ambassadors for the show, helping to promote it as well as offering input.Clinton is a lifelong theater fan who, in the years since her bid for president, has become a frequent Broadway (and sometimes Off Broadway) theatergoer. Last year, a special performance of “Suffs” was held to raise money for groups including Onward Together, which she co-founded to support progressive causes and candidates; Clinton attended and participated in a talkback.Yousafzai, an advocate for women’s education, also saw the show, and called it “amazing.”“Suffs” is joining what is shaping up to be a robust season for new musicals on Broadway: It is the 11th new musical to announce an opening this season, with at least a few more still expected.“The season is very crowded, and we recognize that,” Furman said, “but we think there is a market for this kind of story.” More

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      Danny DeVito, His Daughter and a Lot of Baggage (Onstage)

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      The pair, starring in Theresa Rebeck’s Broadway comedy “I Need That,” have a chemistry that “comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations.”The first time Lucy DeVito acted onstage — an electrifying turn as an ant in a second-grade play about insects — her father, Danny DeVito, watched proudly from the back of the room. (DeVito, who had already starred in the television series “Taxi” and appeared in films like “Terms of Endearment” and “Throw Momma From the Train,” didn’t want to pose a distraction.)Now, as Lucy makes her Broadway debut, he has the best seat in the house: right onstage with her. Starring together in Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy, “I Need That,” they are playing the roles they know best: father and daughter.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the play, in previews at the American Airlines Theater, centers on the widower Sam, a recluse and hoarder facing eviction. His daughter, Amelia, and his best friend, Foster (played by Ray Anthony Thomas), beg him to give up and give in — give up the stuff; give in to some help — much to his chagrin, over the show’s 90 minutes.In Midtown Manhattan recently, the DeVitos sat in a rehearsal space, the detritus from a deli breakfast spread out on a table in front of them. The improvised set was a disaster, a small kitchen surrounded by piles of junk: board games, record players, plastic bins, garbage bags, clothing, shoe boxes. At one point in the show, Danny’s character unearths a television set from several layers of trash.Ray Anthony Thomas, left, Lucy DeVito and Danny DeVito, whose character, a hoarder, is facing eviction if he doesn’t clean up his property, in “I Need That.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe script was still pliable, and both of them were grasping to achieve the fullness of their characters. Danny was memorizing his lines, looking up toward the heavens every time he drew a blank. (When he focused, he curled into himself, hunched into a hug, his bottom lip out in consternation.) His riffs bejeweled every line: When the script called on him to invite his daughter in for breakfast, he instead laid out a menu. “You want breakfast? Coffee? Cereal? Eggs? Fruit? I got a really ripe plum!”Lucy, on the other hand, was more studious and probing. During her character’s apex in the show, the plea for her father to change his life, her voice curdled from sadness into a resigned anger. While running those lines, Lucy pulled over to ask for directions from von Stuelpnagel: Where is her character, emotionally, right now? Should she remain hard or retreat back into softness? They talked it through, Lucy smacking a tiny Rubik’s Cube into her palm to punctuate her points. Her father looked on, silent and smiling.“She works a lot. She’s really, really in there — she’s in there, digging, and that’s part of the whole idea,” Danny said a few weeks later during a break from rehearsals. “She never lays down on it. She’s always on it.”Danny, 78, began his acting career on the stage. Eager for something to do after graduating from high school in Summit, N.J., he began working at his sister Angie’s beauty shop. She encouraged him to train as a cosmetologist at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and once he was immersed in the world of professional theater, he decided to try out acting for himself. After he graduated in 1966, DeVito acted in productions in New York, and in 1971 garnered attention for his role as Martini in the Off Broadway production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He also reprised the part in the 1975 film.He soon became a bona fide star playing Louie De Palma, the tiny-but-mighty dispatcher on the sitcom “Taxi,” which ran for five seasons from 1978 to 1983. By the time the show ended, he had met and married Rhea Perlman, known for her role as Carla Tortelli on “Cheers.” Lucy, their first child, was born in 1983. (The couple, now amicably separated, have two other children, Jake and Gracie.)“They have exactly the sort of chemistry you’d expect a father and daughter to have, and that comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations,” said the show’s director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLucy, 40, performed in school productions throughout her childhood, acting in plays like “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,” by Christopher Durang. In college, she said she finally admitted to herself that she wanted to be an actor. She did not expect it to be easy; if anything, she prepared for the opposite. Growing up so close to the industry, she said earlier this month, she was “very much aware of the hardships and how much disappointment there can be, how rough the business is.”After graduating from Brown University in 2007, Lucy moved to New York City, where she played an autistic girl in an Ensemble Studio Theater production of “Lucy,” by Damien Atkins, and starred in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Seattle, at the Intiman Theater. In 2009, she co-starred alongside her mother in a run of “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” the play adapted by Nora and Delia Ephron from Ilene Beckerman’s memoir. (Lucy joined the show’s rotating cast first.)In Hollywood, nepo babies, or celebrity children who coast off their family connections to get work they may not deserve, rule the screen. In New York, they’re passé. When she first began acting, Lucy fantasized about changing her last name, not wanting her parents’ reputations to precede her. (It doesn’t help that she is a perfect, even split of her parents’ faces, walking proof of the Punnett square.)She never got far enough to decide on a name, though her father had some suggestions. Why not Nicholson? “De Niro, even,” Danny quipped.“Lucy has always done the work,” Danny said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when either of us ever picked up a phone.”The Roundabout Theater Company has now given both DeVitos their Broadway debuts. In 2017, Danny starred in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” for which he received a Tony nomination. (Danny had to, among other things, wolf down a hard-boiled egg while speaking his lines during every performance.)Rebeck’s play is not their first time playing father and daughter. In the 2022 animated FX series “Little Demon,” Danny was the voice of Satan and Lucy played his daughter, the Antichrist.DeVito starred with Mark Ruffalo, left, and Tony Shalhoub, right, in a 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” He provided comic relief, making a meal of his Tony-nominated performance, our critic wrote at the time.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I Need That,” scheduled to open on Nov. 2, will be the pair’s second production directed by von Stuelpnagel. In 2021, they collaborated on the audio play “I Think It’s Working Pointing Out That I’ve Been Very Serious Throughout This Entire Discussion or, Julia and Dave Are Stuck in a Tree,” written by Mallory Jane Weiss, for the theater podcast and public radio show “Playing on Air.”Lucy asked von Stuelpnagel to keep them in mind for future projects, and he connected the family to Rebeck. After a few long consulting meetings on Zoom, Rebeck wrote “I Need That” with the family in mind, even integrating small details from their lives.Von Stuelpnagel said their interplay in rehearsals, in the same mold as their characters’ relationship, sharpened the production. “Lucy knows her father’s inclinations for certain choices he might make and she nudges him to come at it in a different way, and he listens with great respect,” he said. “That kind of collaboration is a special thing to witness.”In one scene, Amelia shows up at her father’s house to discover that he has fallen and hit his head. She rushes to grab a bag of frozen peas for his head, checking his pupils, moving with the love of a mother and the brusqueness of a drill sergeant. It felt like both a role reversal of a familiar scene and a preview of the future: Who takes care of whom?Though their real-life relationship inspired the play, Danny and Lucy see the differences between them and their characters, agreeing that, as a real family, they are less eccentric and less prone to yelling.The DeVitos have played father and daughter once before. In the FX animated series “Little Demon,” Danny was the voice of Satan and Lucy played his daughter, the Antichrist.OK McCausland for The New York Times“You’re a very capable human being, and Sam doesn’t leave his house,” Lucy said to her father during the interview. “You’re one of the most social people I know. There’s a different kind of fear and exhaustion that comes from that.”Danny agreed that he had “different problems” than Sam. “I feel blessed that I have kids who care about me enough not to write me off,” he said.During the rehearsal process, the DeVitos sought to create a homey environment in a few ways, including, most importantly, by bringing in what Lucy called “amazing snacks.” Recent holidays on set have included cannoli Sunday, chocolate Monday and taco Tuesday.“I’ve been on a diet since I was 10 years old, and I’m trying to figure out how to make everybody a little fatter than I am,” Lucy said. “If you’re around me, usually I’m bringing a sandwich or a nice hunk of provolone with some anchovies and some bread.”In rehearsals, it’s hard to tell whether Lucy is talking to her father or reading lines. “They have exactly the sort of chemistry you’d expect a father and daughter to have, and that comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations,” said von Stuelpnagel. “That familiarity breeds a really deep, dynamic relationship.” More

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      ‘All the Devils’ Review: Patrick Page Investigates Evil

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      In this Off Broadway production, the actor is most fascinated by human fallibility and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it.The events of the world trail us into the theater always. There is no separating a live performance from the moment in which we experience it, not even if the words an actor speaks were written hundreds of years ago.What a powerful time, then, to encounter Shakespeare’s Shylock in Patrick Page’s solo-show investigation of evil, “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain.”Because Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who infamously demands a pound of flesh in “The Merchant of Venice,” is, if a villain, a complicated one: persecuted, spit upon and scorned by Christians for being a Jew. But even in his bitterness, he recognizes that he and they are similar in almost every respect, because they are all human.“And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” he says. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”It is impossible, or it was for me, not to think of the horrors in Israel and Gaza with Page embodying Shylock there before us. In that context, Shylock’s words hit hard — yet his argument, like his “ancient grudge” born of humiliations, might have belonged to an ordinary person on either side of that conflict. Such is the prismatic nature of theater, that great instrument of empathy, and such is the capaciousness of Page’s performance.Rest assured, though, that most of “All the Devils” is much less fraught, and a lot of it is fun. Page, whose resonant bass helped make him such an entrancingly sinister Hades in “Hadestown,” practically twinkles here between scenes of malevolence.Directed by Simon Godwin at the DR2 Theater in Manhattan, Page begins the show by channeling a bloodthirsty Lady Macbeth. But when the monologue ends and the lights go up, Page snaps back to himself, looking absolutely delighted.“Do those words frighten you?” he asks, his inviting warmth immediately banishing my fear that “All the Devils” might be a tough-guy exercise like the British actor Steven Berkoff’s “Shakespeare’s Villains,” a solo show that once traversed some of the same terrain.Page is a friendlier guide, charmingly unintimidating and even a little dishy about Shakespeare, tracing the playwright’s game-changing development as a writer of psychologically complex evildoers. Referring to a leg injury he suffered while taking a bow early in the run — Page has been temporarily using a cane — he jocularly blamed the curse of “Macbeth,” a superstition much cherished in the theater.On a set by Arnulfo Maldonado that blends the lush and the austere, “All the Devils” doesn’t always have the precision that it might. As Page slips into role after role, depth sometimes goes missing.But the show, an earlier version of which was presented online in 2021, is smartly structured and frequently fascinating, as in a scene between Othello — honorable, deep-voiced — and Iago, feigning guilelessness, whom Page gives a lighter tone. His Malvolio, more narcissist than villain, is comic, then moving; his Ariel, not villainous at all, is ethereal and excellent.Hamlet’s murderous uncle, Claudius, appears in his most conscience-stricken moment; Angelo, from “Measure for Measure,” in a confrontation that, to my mind at least, is utterly conscience-free.“Who will believe thee, Isabel?” Angelo says to the young woman whom he is trying to power play into having sex with him.Page is interested in the intersection between evil and sociopathy, which he began considering when he first played Iago. But human fallibility — and Shakespeare’s nuanced understanding of it — grips him even more.Quoting the line from “The Tempest” that gives the show its title, Page says: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”At that “here,” he places a hand softly on his heart. Where there is evil, it lies within.All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The VillainThrough Jan. 7 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; allthedevilsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘The Lights Are On’ Review: Catastrophizing About the Future

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      Time — and a whole lot more — stands still in Owen Panettieri’s static drama about a doomsday prepper.Owen Panettieri’s play “The Lights Are On” offers a dispiriting preview of what many of our homes may look like in the future.The muddled play, a co-production of New Light Theater Project and Embeleco Unlimited, takes place in the living quarters of Liz (Danielle Ferland), a doomsday prepper who spends her days pacing about her storm-boarded house, examining sundry supplies and sorting jars of canned food. Five years earlier, Hurricane Prudence ravaged her home. “Afterwards, there wasn’t a lot worth saving. It all had to go,” she matter-of-factly tells her neighbor Trish (Jenny Bacon).The play begins when a discombobulated Trish visits Liz because she thinks someone may have broken into her home. The two haven’t spoken in seven years, yet nothing in Sarah Norris’s direction conveys a sense of estrangement. Instead, simply hearing Liz’s voice seems to lower Trish’s blood pressure by several degrees, and soon they are chatting as easily as if Trish had stopped by for a coffee chat after Sunday services.Initially, the pair present a study in contrasts: Trish, with her silk top and expensive haircut, comes from inherited wealth, whereas Liz, with her loosefitting flannel shirt and mom jeans, is working class. Yet as they catch up and catastrophize about the world, certain selfish similarities between the two women emerge. Trish has always been too preoccupied with her own life to consider the needs of her neighbor; during Hurricane Prudence, she refused to admit Liz and her son, Nathan (Marquis Rodriguez), into the safety of her home. For her part, Liz has turned her house “into a prison” for herself and her son, Trish notes.An ambient sense of the uncanny pervades the play, but the purpose is unclear. What to make of the fact that only Trish can hear something pawing at plaster? Why is a knob on a cabinet affixed to the wrong side? Why do characters refer to nonexistent “food on the stove” and mistake tea for wine? And any tension the play accrues is repeatedly dispelled by retirement-ready stereotypes of the hysterical woman (Trish) and ball-and-chain mother (Liz).Panettieri’s vision of capitalism is also cartoonish, whether the absurd “Transformers”-sounding names of the giant corporations Trionics and Meglamax or the fanciful notion that Liz herself has a capitalist streak. She has a side hustle selling provisions at “very reasonable” markups, according to Nathan, but we never see her take orders from customers, print packing slips or prepare items for shipment. The range of stuff overtaking her kitchen like kudzu does not appear to be for sale, but stockpiled in case of an apocalyptic event. Which might as well have arrived at the end of the play’s 95 molasses-slow minutes. While Panettieri’s drama has no trouble imagining the end of the world, imagining convincing characters is a tougher task.The Lights Are OnThrough Nov. 11 at Theater Row, Manhattan; newlighttheaterproject.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More