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      A.I.-Scripted Stories, and a Counterpoint, Take the Stage Off Broadway

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      “Prometheus Firebringer” and “Bioadapted” test the waters, while the abstract “Psychic Self Defense” is a warm and pulsing counterpoint.Seated behind a plain wooden table, the theater maker Annie Dorsen is not costumed to catch our gaze, or lit dramatically. In the performance-lecture that is her A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, you might assume she’d be the boring part.Off to her right are her co-stars: a giant 3-D-printed mask of a human head with video screens for eyes, and a flock of smaller masks — faces that seem straight out of a horror film, with gaping black mouths and creepy blank eyes that are milky white windows to nonexistent souls.“It’s all made with A.I.,” Dorsen tells us. “Not what I’m saying. But the other stuff.” Jerking a casual thumb in their direction, she adds: “The masks. Their voices. What they say.”The flashy element of this production, presented by Theater for a New Audience, is a speculative version of a lost part of Aeschylus’ ancient Prometheus trilogy, created using artificial intelligence: GPT-3.5. Algorithms have been a tool in Dorsen’s work for more than a decade, but her latest piece coincides with an accelerating worry about the power of A.I. — even by some who have helped to build it — and a number of current and upcoming shows both use and scrutinize it. (Next month brings “Artificial Flavors” from the Civilians at 59E59 Theaters and “dSimon” by Simon Senn and Tammara Leites at the Crossing the Line Festival.)In the A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, Annie Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, lamenting a 21st-century tragedy in the making.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the audience settles in at “Prometheus Firebringer,” A.I.-scripted stories — or rather, variations on the same brief story — unfurl on a large electronic screen above the stage. Generated before each performance, the text at the show I saw told of “the god Zeus and the Titan Prometheus,” as one version phrased it, and a “chorus of human orphan children.”Mainly what you need to know for this show is the familiar beginning of the tale: Prometheus, a tricksy demigod, stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the grateful human race. How humans harness the technology at their disposal is the true subject of “Prometheus Firebringer,” in which Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, warning of, commenting on and lamenting a 21st-century tragedy that we are allowing to befall us.The 45-minute show, intercutting her brightly lighted talk with the moodily lit, robotic-sounding, speculative fragment of the trilogy, is less than riveting as a practical demonstration of A.I. The GPT-3.5 text at the performance I saw was blandly unremarkable, a technological party trick with ventriloquized masks. The playlet sans humans is remote and inert, inherently a simulacrum of drama.There’s a clumsiness to it, and a lack of clarity. I wondered at one point if the voice coming from the large mask had spoken the name Prometheus in error, like an amateur who says the character name before reading a line of dialogue.But Dorsen’s lecture is forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology: the cultural tendency to genuflect and acquiesce to it, reflecting a faith that it is not only superior to humans but also inevitably dominant over us. As if the tech lords were in charge of what we all become, no matter how the rest of us feel about it or what we lose.“One lesson of tragedy, then, is that we conspire with our fate,” Dorsen says.True though those words are, they are not hers. In a monologue sewn together entirely from borrowed scraps of other thinkers’ thoughts, the sentence is from the philosopher Simon Critchley’s 2019 book, “Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us.” It’s one of a legion of sources cited during the show, the author names and titles projected behind Dorsen as she speaks.This is form as provocation, courting the objection that she might as well be crawling the internet, gobbling up whatever is there and regurgitating it, dumbed down and plagiarized. But Dorsen is doing, however extremely, what artists have always done: gathering, sampling, synthesizing to create something wholly new.Susan Sontag, in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), is Dorsen’s source when she says that “even in the era of cybermodels, what the mind feels like is still as the ancients imagined it, an inner space — like a theater — in which we picture, and it is these pictures which allow us to remember.”Currently embodying that notion at Here, in Manhattan, is a show that feels like a warm and pulsing counterpoint to all things A.I.: Normandy Sherwood’s vividly trippy, richly theatrical “Psychic Self Defense.” Promotional materials describe it as part “live action screen saver,” but it is so much more a reverie.Normandy Sherwood’s nearly wordless show, “Psychic Self Defense,” at Here in Manhattan, is set within a proscenium where numerous curtains open, creating a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors.Maria BaranovaNearly wordless, this is a primal dreamscape of a show, set within a proscenium where one curtain opens to reveal another and another and another, a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors. Giant tassels with actors inside them have a dance, as if they have just wandered in from the castle in “Beauty and the Beast.” Miniatures of the proscenium set appear, and comic puppetry erupts inside them.Playful, silly, teasing, bizarre, this is a work so thrillingly human-made, from so deep in the infinite strangeness of the human mind, that its maverick creativity seems out of reach of the artificial. I hope it is, anyway.The depth of that reach is the concern of “Bioadapted,” Tjasa Ferme’s sleekly designed, thoughtfully assembled but ultimately overstuffed show at Culture Lab LIC in Long Island City, Queens.Like Dorsen, Ferme incorporates A.I. into the performance in ways that, deliberately or not, demonstrate its incompetence; a country song, generated with a few prompts from the audience, was easily the most nails-on-a-chalkboard country song I’ve ever heard. But “Bioadapted,” constructed from documentary and dramatic text, may get you thinking concretely about the ways A.I. can warp our perception of reality, surveil our very interiors, take what belongs to us.Both “Bioadapted” and “Prometheus Firebringer” ask audiences to consider what Dorsen — taking a line from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s “The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism” (2019) — calls “the fundamental ethical question, the question of knowing whether this is the world we want.”Dorsen and Ferme are nudging us to abandon our passivity, curb the excesses of A.I. and create the society we want rather than submitting to some grim techno future that we assume is inevitable.“As long as there is time, there is time for care,” Dorsen says.She plucked that line from the Swedish writer Axel Andersson. And he’s right.Prometheus FirebringerThrough Oct. 1 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 45 minutes.Psychic Self DefenseThrough Sept. 30 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour.BioadaptedThrough Sept. 24 at Culture Lab LIC, Queens; transformatheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Carole Rothman to End 45-Year Tenure at Second Stage Theater

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      The nonprofit, a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem, has presented acclaimed works like “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Next to Normal.”Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, will step down next spring after 45 years with the organization.The move is a major development in the world of New York’s large nonprofit theaters, several of which have leaders who have been in their jobs for three to five decades. Nationally, the field has experienced a much higher high level of turnover.Second Stage, which Rothman co-founded in 1979, is a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem. Established, as its name suggests, to stage revivals, it has long since added new plays to the mix, and focuses exclusively on work by living American writers. “No Brits. No Chekhov translations. No classics,” Rothman said in 2017.Second Stage is one of four nonprofits that operate theaters on Broadway: In 2015 the organization acquired the Helen Hayes Theater, which with about 600 seats is Broadway’s smallest house. Second Stage began programming at the Hayes in 2018, and last year its production of “Take Me Out” won the Tony Award for best play revival.Much of Second Stage’s work has been presented Off Broadway, in a former bank building in Times Square, as well as in a smaller theater on the Upper West Side. The company had a $25 million budget in fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing; Rothman’s total compensation was $369,000 that year.Rothman’s departure was announced on Wednesday not by Second Stage, but by a public relations firm representing her. That firm would not give more detail about the move, and said she would have no immediate comment beyond a written statement in which she said, in part: “I’m forever grateful to all the people who have helped make Second Stage the creative springboard it is today. I’m so proud of what we have accomplished together.”Asked for comment, the chairmen of the theater’s board, Terry Lindsay and Kevin Brockman, issued their own statement, saying: “Carole has been a driving force in American theater since founding Second Stage 45 years ago, and we’re all indebted to her for her vision, her leadership, and her unwavering commitment to championing new artistic voices and diverse new works. We look forward to the world-class productions Carole has programmed for the upcoming 45th anniversary season and to celebrating her remarkable achievements over the coming year.”The board has already formed a committee to search for Rothman’s successor, according to Tom D’Ambrosio, a Second Stage spokesman. The position is likely to be a desirable one given the organization’s strong track record and the opportunity to produce on Broadway.Under Rothman’s leadership, Second Stage has presented a slew of important shows, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Between Riverside and Crazy” by Stephen Adly Guirgis and “Water by the Spoonful” by Quiara Alegría Hudes and the Pulitzer-winning musical “Next to Normal” by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt. The theater also presented a pre-Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” which went on to win the Tony Award for best musical and to enjoy significant commercial success.This fall, Second Stage plans a Broadway production of “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that will star Sarah Paulson, and next spring the company plans a Broadway production of “Mother Play,” a new drama by Paula Vogel, starring Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jessica Lange and Jim Parsons. More

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      Something for Everyone, Even Cannibals, at the Philadelphia Fringe

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      The festival presents a violent Shakespearean interaction with fruit, dance for neurodiverse and neurotypical audiences and showers of (play) money.There is a strange kind of hunger that can overtake you at a fringe festival: so much to devour and so little time to devour it. New York has been starved of a fringe since 2019, a loss even though the fringe that we had struggled to define itself. But an hour and a half away, the Philadelphia Fringe has endured. Originally a showier event, with a goal of attracting established, out-of-town stars, it has since refocused on local artists.During a recent weekend at the festival, which runs through Sunday, I swallowed an entirely reasonable number of shows, each of which felt appropriately fringe-y, flowing comfortably beyond the mainstream. Built for small, temporary stages, these shows validate fringe festivals as places of experiment, milieus to test and explore. Of the four that I saw, three were about appetite and the mess that appetite can make. And the last was less about hunger than it was about feeding its spectators, creating a nurturing, restful space for all.“Citrus Andronicus” is classic fringe — a cute idea, overstretched. A collision of toy theater, object theater and Elizabethan drama, it restages “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (which is saying something), using much of the produce section. In a space bedecked in a worrying amount of plastic sheeting, a college professor (Madeleine Claire Garcia) attempts to give a lecture entitled “Blistering Viscera: Revenge, Violent Tribalism, and the Subjugation of the Feminine in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” But she is repeatedly interrupted by two porters (Eli Lynn and Peter Smith), who are delivering boxes of fruit for the conference’s banquet. The professor can’t shush them, so she recruits them, replacing her lecture with a high-potassium plot summary. Many bananas are sacrificed.I’m enough of a weirdo that I might have preferred the original lecture. While the clowning, under the direction of Charlotte Northeast, is nimble, there are ultimately only so many things a person can legally do with a tangerine. Eventually, the professor also becomes infected by the pulpy, pithy madness, emphasizing how the desire for revenge, for violence, can poison us all. A few further ideas are introduced (the lights blink whenever the name of Aaron, one of Shakespeare’s rare Black characters, is spoken), but ultimately unexplored.Courtney Henry in “Rhythm Bath,” a performance installation designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences.Wide Eyed Studios“Citrus Andronicus” is presented by the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which has a mandate to make classical work more accessible. But bold, bloody “Titus” isn’t especially difficult and the goofy idea, however playfully executed, can’t sustain a full-length show. But what riches for the compost bin!Riches also animate “Make Bank,” a site-specific performance at Manufacturers’ National Bank. Audience members use an item plucked from a junk drawer to gain entry to the space, and that item can then be bartered for shells, corn husks, trinkets and yard sale detritus. A Mesopotamian spice bazaar is set up in one corner, a Dutch tulip market in another; a disembodied teller appears in a dark room; and a Meso-American deity resides next to the vault. Divided into groups, attendees assemble the items they have collected — by barter, gift or theft — into totemic sculptures while burlesque performers populate the space. One is (under)dressed as a Dutch maiden with windmill pasties, the other as a cow, presumably a cash cow. There is also a singalong to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”If “Citrus Andronicus” suffers from too few ideas, “Make Bank,” directed by Terry Guerin, produced by Meg Saligman and devised by Dylan Smythe and Lillian Mae Ransijn, has perhaps too many, though these also entail themes of greed and waste. The atmosphere, however unfocused, is one of excess. Expect to be showered in paper money. The money is fake. The sense of abundance is real.So ostensibly are the facts of the effusive, floral “Rose: You Are Who You Eat.” John Jarboe, who uses she/her pronouns, begins this autobiographical solo show by gnawing fried chicken from a bucket. Then she confesses to a murder. Apparently, she absorbed a twin in utero, a phenomenon known as vanishing twin syndrome. But that twin, who would have been named Rose had she lived, didn’t really vanish. This piece, which Jarboe describes as a “support group for gender cannibals,” is a reckoning with identity and queerness.Jarboe has long believed that she ate Rose, but as she sings toward the end of the show, it “Turns out Rose ate me.”Produced by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, with Emily Schreiner, as part of a rolling world premiere, and directed by MK Tuomanen, “Rose” is still in bud. A show about gender cannibals, adorned by tender, frisky music composed and performed by Emily Bate, Daniel de Jesús, Pax Ressler, Be Steadwell and Jarboe seems original enough. And Jarboe is an appealing performer. But as she acknowledges, the coming-out story is already a cliché. While certain moments are wholly unique, like Jarboe’s repurposing of a hockey jersey as a ball gown, others borrow overtly from artists like John Cameron Mitchell and Taylor Mac. The show seems to end twice before it actually concludes with a call-and-response section, which is then followed by a medley of covers: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Kiss From a Rose.” Some love, some pruning, and “Rose” should bloom.After so much fruit, money and flowers, so much wanting, so much appetite, it was restful to retreat into “Rhythm Bath.” A performance installation created by the choreographer Susan Marshall and the set designer Mimi Lien in conjunction with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, the dance piece is staged on an upper floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House. The ceiling is covered in white parachute fabric, which breathes in and out. Through holes in the fabric, glimpses of feathery, cobweb-like material can be seen, some of it lit with fiber optic filaments.The afternoon show I attended was a relaxed performance, as are all of their performances, designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences. The seating was flexible, the lighting (Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) subdued and the sound (Dan Trueman and Jason Treuting, who also composed the music) kept to a reasonable volume. Spectators who found it too much could retreat to a darker room with a giant bean bag. That afternoon, as 10 dancers performed elegant versions of pedestrian movement — walking, standing, leaning — I saw two young women in the audience stand up and join in. Another spectator faced the wall. A fourth watched while wearing headphones and dark glasses. All seemed to be enjoying themselves.In contrast with the excesses of the other shows, this performance was simple, even restrained. The mood was meditative. It was, in its quiet way, the most nourishing thing I saw.Philadelphia FringeThrough Sept. 24 at sites around the city; phillyfringe.org. More

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      ‘Swing State’ Review: All Is Not Well in Wisconsin

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      Rebecca Gilman’s play, set in a rural farmhouse, sees an image of the decline of Americans’ interdependence in the death of wildflowers.It’s immediately clear what kind of flinty, progressive woman lives in the converted farmhouse depicted onstage in “Swing State,” the play by Rebecca Gilman that opened on Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater. Well, not so much “depicted” as “duplicated.”You can just about sense the recycling bins beneath the working sink and the Obama memoirs in the book-filled sitting room of Todd Rosenthal’s cozy set, a throwback to the hyper-naturalistic style that has for decades dominated American social drama. Indeed, as the play begins, Peg Smith, whose name alone lets you know she’s plain and real, stands cracking eggs at her kitchen island to make the homeliest food ever devised: zucchini bread.But all is not well among the baskets, birdhouses and earthenware bowls. For one thing, there’s a container of human ashes on the counter. Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) has been a widow for a little more than a year, and not doing well. She and her husband had moved to this corner of rural Wisconsin to enjoy the ancient prairie taking up 48 of their 51 acres; without him — and this being the pandemic year of 2021, without much of anyone — her life feels joyless. She is considering, as the euphemism has it, “self-harm”: The knife with which she chops the zucchini can cut both ways.The prairie isn’t doing well either, abutted by commercial farms and subjected to the runoff of their agrochemicals. A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species: bats, chorus frogs, whippoorwills, wildflowers, butterflies, nighthawks and the insects they feed on.The dying off, though real, is also, alas, a symbol. “Swing State,” as its title suggests, means to connect the land to its people: poorly stewarded and subject to dangerous fluctuations. Though Donald Trump is mentioned only once — Peg says she canceled her subscription to the local newspaper when it endorsed him — he is as much the target here as the agrochemicals. In the play’s cosmology, the debased politics of narcissism have polluted American life with the aggro-chemicals of overly heightened and disordered emotions. Democracy is a prairie.I don’t argue with that premise. Nor with Gilman’s craft; I’ve admired her since her first New York outing, the shocker “Spinning Into Butter,” in 2000. “Swing State”— frugal with themes, meticulous about motivation, minutely sensitive to the timing of revelations — could serve as a case study in dramatic construction.A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat, for me, is the problem. We have become very familiar with the workings of social-problem plays like this. If we see Peg staring nervously at the knife in the first minute, and by the second scene (out of seven) learn that a footlocker containing a Winchester rifle has been stolen from her barn, we may already discern the shape of the rest. That there are only three other characters — one of them Ryan, who has recently been released from prison — does not leave many doors open.Ryan and Peg are both outsiders, oddballs trying to survive in a system that puts a premium on conformity and offers little help, or hope of reform, to those who suffer or do wrong. They are classic lefty tropes: the do-gooder who is seen as a crackpot and the misunderstood young man who is seen as a threat. The two remaining characters — Kris Callahan Wisnefski, the town sheriff, and Dani Wisnefski, her niece and the newbie deputy — represent the over-reactive forces of conservative society, more interested in order than in goodness. Sheriff Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald) immediately accuses Ryan of the theft and sets out to prove her prejudice. Dani (Anne E. Thompson) is eager to do right but is intimidated (and undertrained) by her barky aunt.In Robert Falls’s staging, imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and presented here by Audible, every collision is clearly tuned. The scenes snap into place like machine-tooled puzzle pieces, with lighting (by Eric Southern), costumes (by Evelyn Danner) and music (by Richard Woodbury) that all but feeds the audience its emotional cues. And though Gilman does much to complicate the characters’ motives with back story that’s elaborately layered into the dialogue — so elaborately that at one point a character is forced to ask, “Why are you telling me this?” — none except Peg seem quite believable.Fisher is able to absorb the complications into a rounded performance in which they feel surprising but not synthetic. She has more to work with, of course, as she is onstage for most of the play’s 105 minutes, but also more to build on, having been a Gilman regular, like Falls, for years. (In New York she played a stalking victim in Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl” in 2001.) She seems to move through the variously depressed, angry, loving and resigned aspects of the character like a hawk gliding on thermals. You barely notice the turns.In the play overall, though, you do. And until a thrillingly staged climax that moves unusually fast, you usually foresee the corners with plenty of room to prepare. The result is a play that seems becalmed on its surface despite the powerful emotions underneath — not just the characters’ emotions but the author’s.Gilman, who now lives in the part of Wisconsin where the play is set, the so-called Driftless Area, is evidently passionate about the same things as Peg. She too has become a volunteer for the Prairie Enthusiasts, a group dedicated to protecting the Upper Midwest’s natural heritage. (In the play the group is called the Prairie Protectors or, more derisively, the Prairie Geeks.) And clearly Gilman is invested in her overarching metaphor, telling Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times that the human ecosystem, like the natural one, is “not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”If only she had dramatized that, I could be more of a full-throated warbler in praising the play. What “Swing State” actually dramatizes, sometimes movingly, is despair. Its action is driven less by any visible coarsening of America’s democratic ecosystem than by depression, alcoholism, spite and bad luck.If anything, it is about the “swing state” of individual emotion, regardless of politics. (Even the good liberal Peg is erratic and sometimes nasty.) Still, its message — because yes, there is a message in all plays featuring sinks with running water — applies to our personal as well as our national ecosystems: “You can’t give up even if you want to.”Swing StateThrough Oct. 28 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; swingstateplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      ‘Purlie Victorious’: Ossie Davis’s ‘Gospel to Humanity’ Returns to Broadway

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      The stars Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young and the director Kenny Leon discuss the revival, and why its satirical take on racism is still so timely.Ossie Davis’s satirical play “Purlie Victorious” opened at the Cort Theater in September 1961 with Davis as the charismatic preacher Purlie Victorious Judson and Ruby Dee, his artistic collaborator and wife, playing Purlie’s green but soon-to-be-wise sidekick, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins. Six decades later, Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”) and Kara Young (“Clyde’s,” “Cost of Living”) are stepping into those roles in the play’s first Broadway revival, directed by Kenny Leon at the Music Box Theater.Set in the 1940s on a plantation in the segregated South, the story follows Purlie’s return home to Georgia to claim a $500 inheritance, which he wants to use to buy and integrate the local church. To prevent Cap’n Cotchipee, the white plantation owner, from usurping his family’s birthright, Purlie has to trick Cotchipee — a plan that will also involve recruiting the unsuspecting Lutiebelle to stand in for his recently deceased Cousin Bee, who is the rightful inheritor of the money. In other words, Purlie’s strategy hinges on Cotchipee’s inability to differentiate one Black woman from another, and in so doing, the play uses comedy to expose racism as absurd, arbitrary and detrimental to Black life.That pointed critique of racism, and Davis’s clever use of language, is why the play was so well received. “Although his good humor never falters,” the Times critic Howard Taubman wrote at the time, Davis “has made his play the vehicle for a powerful and passionate sermon.” It ran for nearly a year, and the activists W.E.B. Du Bois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X all saw it. A film adaptation, “Gone Are the Days!,” followed in 1963, and then came the 1970 Broadway musical, “Purlie.”Davis and Dee’s children, Nora Davis Day, Guy Davis and Hasna Muhammad, remember watching all of those versions. The siblings, who are the executors of their parents’ estate, had personal reasons for reviving the play. “It resonates with us because it is my dad’s specific language,” said Guy Davis, who composed the revival’s incidental music. “My sisters and I just wanted to revisit that part of our lives.”“This soars as a true work of art,” said Kenny Leon, the show’s director. “Everything about being American, definitely about being Black in America, you can find in his play.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Purlie Victorious” itself was inspired by Davis’s childhood. “Dad grew up in the deepest part of Georgia, and had cause to be irate about the conditions there,” Day recalled. “He tried to write a play that was full of anger, vitriol, and righteousness, but it just didn’t work until he began to look at it and laugh and say, ‘This is ridiculous, that one group of people feels like they can control and own other people.’”But Dee had reservations about Davis’s use of satire.“She didn’t like it,” Muhammad said. “She thought it was stereotypical. How could he have these characters? And then he read it aloud to her, and then she was laughing and realized the power of the language and the value of the piece.”Now Leon, Odom and Young say they are excited to share a work that they consider a classic with new audiences. During an interview last month before a rehearsal, they discussed their history with the play, the power of its satire and what it means to stage this production today. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The Davis-Dee children, from left: Guy Davis, Nora Davis Day and Hasna Muhammad, who together helped bring the revival to Broadway.Elias Williams for The New York TimesHow did this production come about?KENNY LEON Our producer Jeffrey Richards, whose mom [Helen Stern Richards] was the original company manager of the play and the general manager of the musical, began talking to me about this seven years ago. But I also spent time with Ossie and Ruby when they came to the rehearsals for my first Broadway show, “A Raisin in the Sun” [in 2004]. When Jeffrey approached me about possibly doing this on Broadway, I said, “I’m your guy,” because I love Ossie Davis. And I love this piece. I directed the musical [in 2008 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta]. It’s an exciting play and an outrageous comedy that is somewhere between rage and hope.LESLIE ODOM Somebody had shoved the script in my hand as a young theater student. It was one of those plays that you should look at for an audition or a scene study class. The musical was also done in Philly when I was a kid, at the Freedom Theater, where I started acting as a 13-year-old.LEON But Leslie is what made this production a possibility — being that anchor. I found out that he always loved the play, so to have him want to be in it and produce it with Jeffrey Richards made it a reality. KARA YOUNG I was really surprised that Ossie Davis wrote a play like this. At that time, and this is just my imagination, because “A Raisin in the Sun” was so prolific, he really had the chance to change the world and the way that people thought about Black life. [Dee starred in the original 1959 Broadway production with Davis joining the cast later that year.] He dissected the absurdity of the social and racial structures of this world, and America in particular, and the legacy of slavery in this country. It is Ossie’s gospel to humanity. There are just so many amazing lines here that are the voices of a million people and a million spirits.LEON I don’t want people to shortchange Ossie Davis’s craftsmanship and his writing an outrageous comedy that embraced different styles, like vaudeville, broad comedy, and a little bit of the drama from “A Raisin in the Sun.” Look at this penmanship, poetry, movement and song. Many times, I think for an African American work, they have a different set of rules to gauge its greatness. But this soars as a true work of art.In addition to Young and Odom Jr., the cast includes Vanessa Bell Calloway, far left, and Heather Alicia Simms, far right. Elias Williams for The New York TimesHow do you think it will land at this moment?ODOM I’m curious, too. When I think about the last incredible experience I had in this town with a piece of work [“Hamilton”], and I think that if that piece of work had been written five years before, it might not have done the thing. So, I am excited to discover why now, and I am along for the ride.YOUNG I feel like the timing is almost perfect.LEON We were talking earlier about how every generation has to fight for democracy. We have to fight for true freedom and beauty, and what better time to be reminded of that than right now as we engage in the 2024 election? As we think about those things that Ossie Davis talks about, we got to stay in truth.YOUNG And remember our history.LEON What’s that line Purlie says? “Give us a piece of the Constitution.”ODOM “We want our cut of the Constitution and we want it now: and not with no little teaspoon, white folks. Throw it at us with a shovel.”How do you balance the play’s humor and its politics?ODOM It’s a romp. It’s a real hoot. We’re having a ball. As joyful and as light-filled as this experience is, he realized it was too painful to ask an audience to sit through it. It’s already an act of great generosity and grace that he decided to put it together in this way. He wanted us to be able to witness these people that he grew up with, this country that he grew up in, this farm that he knew so well, but he wanted you to be able to stand it and to tolerate it. LEON We’re telling it in a joyous way and dealing with some real stuff.YOUNG There are just so many gems about the violence of our just existing. There is a line I said the other day that reminds me of gentrification. Lutiebelle says, “The whole thing was a trip to get you out of the house.” I’m a Harlemite, and I’ve been feeling the violence of gentrification for years. I know that’s not what the play is about, but these things are dropped in the story, and because it is so dramaturgically sound, they can live on their own.LEON That’s so beautiful because that, to me, is what artists are supposed to do. We’re supposed to revisit the work from the previous generation and say, “How does that relate to me now?” I treat revivals like they’re new plays. Everything about being American, definitely about being Black in America, you can find in his play.Is that why you changed the structure from three to two acts, without an intermission?LEON I read plays five times to inform me of what I will do with them. After the fifth reading, I came away with the idea that it is about getting to that last page and scene. And getting to that last scene meant it’s about the rhythm of what’s happening onstage and people in the audience not thinking about time. I don’t want the outside world to come in. I just want them to get lost in this world.Kara and Leslie, what is it like to invoke the spirit of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis onstage?YOUNG I’m a huge fan of Ruby, oddly also as a Harlemite. Ruby and Ossie are great examples of what it means to be organizers and activists and to be a force of change. But what it means to step into a role that Ruby Dee originated, I can’t quite put that into language. But this is also a role about a young woman and her journey, about finding a sense of self and her importance in the world for the first time and standing in that. It feels like a very universal story for a Black girl.ODOM The thing about these drama schools around the country is that they train you in the classics. My training prepared me for this. But I think my responsibility as an artist is to choose the projects that I’m a part of thoughtfully, collaborate with people that I respect, and work on things at the highest level. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. It takes a while to get there. We’re doing this play as written in 1961, but people will be so surprised at how hip it is and how much it stands up. The more we learn, the more we build trust with Mr. Davis and his words. It rises to support us. How do you want people to feel after leaving “Purlie Victorious”?LEON That this feels like a new play. I think that’s what Ossie would want: us to introduce this to live human beings whose lives are affected daily.YOUNG The irony of racism. When you really break it down, the construct of racism is just really absurd. But, even in those power structures, these characters need each other. We need each other.ODOM Recently, I read Clint Smith’s book “How the Word Is Passed.” He paints a more honest picture of chattel slavery and the truth of that in this country. “Nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts,” he says. “And somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion.” Man, did that strike me. I want this “Purlie” to feel like a memory. I hope that it feels like the facts need emotion. More

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      Melissa Etheridge Is Ready to Rewatch ‘Barbie’

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      The singer, who brings her autobiographical show to Broadway this month, on her longtime love for the Kansas City Chiefs and what she’s looking forward to in New York.Melissa Etheridge has lived a lot of life. So much so that the early version of her autobiographical show was four or five hours long.“I had to snip out a lot of the story lines,” Etheridge, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “And then even more so for Broadway. It was taking out some of my really early childhood stuff, tightening up some of the stories.”But there was one moment in the show, “Melissa Etheridge: My Window” — which will have its Broadway opening on Sept. 28 after a well-reviewed run at New World Stages last year — that she knew she couldn’t cut, even though it’s the toughest part to get through: Her son’s death at 21 from a drug overdose.“I’m still working through it,” the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter said of losing her son, Beckett Cypher. “But that’s how I knew I had to wrap it up — show people what I’ve learned about myself, and being a mother, and about addiction and not taking guilt on.”Before relocating to New York to begin “My Window” rehearsals, Etheridge shared her cultural essentials, including the album that made her a fan of Taylor Swift and her love for the Kansas City Chiefs. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Lululemon PantsI was a jeans girl, and then the pandemic hit, and I became a sweatpants girl. Now my daughter and my wife have got me hooked on Lululemon. I found this pair of pants — they’re sweatpants, but they’re really thin, but not like yoga pants that are like “Oh, here’s my ass” — and I was like, “These are fantastic.” Once you get into your 50s, it’s all about comfort.2Kansas City ChiefsI was born and raised in Leavenworth, Kan. I was 8 when we won the Super Bowl in 1970 and have been a fan ever since. I’m beyond crazy about the Chiefs. My house is kind of a Chiefs shrine — I have a pool table with the team logo on it and a Chiefs guitar strap.3XeriscapingWhen we had our huge drought in Southern California, I looked at my big, beautiful yard with all this grass and I’m like, “Why do I have big, thick grass in a desert? And why am I watering it constantly?” So I turned to xeriscape, which is going back to native, drought-tolerant plants.4Quinton HypertonicI’m always looking for ways to get enough electrolytes and magnesium. My tour manager, who’s even more of a health nut than I am, said “These are great, try this.” Plus, it makes my water taste really soft.5Esther HicksWhen I went through cancer 19 years ago, it was a big wake-up call about health and life. I came across her early law of attraction stuff — the idea that we’re creating our reality and that our joy and our happiness creates more joy and happiness — and it really spoke to me. It makes more sense than any religion.6My Gibson Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 Replica Murphy Lab GuitarI recently went down to Nashville with my band and my crew, and we all went to the Gibson Garage. They took me back into the vault, which dazzled me. They said, “Here, you can borrow this guitar for your tour,” and I started playing it and was like, “OMG, this is the greatest thing! I have to have it.” I think I’ll use it in the last few numbers of the show.7Smoking With Strangers OutdoorsI love that cannabis is finally legal in New York City. The last time I was there over the summer, looking for a place to smoke, I saw some women sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park smoking, and I asked, “Do we just sit and smoke now?” And she was like, “Yeah, it’s great.”8Taylor SwiftIt was my daughter who got me hooked — I used to drive her up to boarding school, and we’d listen to the whole “1989” album. Then I went to a show in Chicago with her in June, and I looked around at the audience and said, “This is amazing.”9Springbok PuzzlesI’m a huge puzzler. It started 20 years ago when I was undergoing chemotherapy and didn’t have the energy to do anything else. It helps keep my mind sharp and relaxed. I love Springbok puzzles not only because they’re from my home in Kansas City, but because the pieces are unique — I don’t like the puzzles where all the pieces look the same — and the quality is fantastic.10Dine-In Movie TheatersI love this new trend of really fancy theaters. Here in Westlake we have one called Cinépolis where they bring you dinner in the theater — and this is actual real food; you can get a hummus platter or a nice salad. I saw “Barbie” on the road recently at a dine-in theater in Lexington, Ky. I loved it! It made me laugh so hard. I’m ready to see it again. More

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      Michael McGrath, Tony Winner and ‘Spamalot’ Veteran, Dies at 65

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      He clanged coconuts in the Monty Python stage musical in 2005; seven years later, he won a Tony for “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”Michael McGrath, who won a Tony Award in 2012 for his work in the musical “Nice Work if You Can Get It” and was a regular on Broadway, Off Broadway and regional stages, known especially for comedic roles and for his ability to conjure the likes of Groucho Marx, George M. Cohan and Jackie Gleason, died on Thursday at his home in Bloomfield, N.J. He was 65.His family announced the death through the publicist Lisa Goldberg. No cause was provided.Mr. McGrath was one of those stage actors who might rarely be recognized on the street yet worked steadily for decades, drawing good notices throughout. He did much of his early work at Theater by the Sea in Matunuck, R.I., where he appeared regularly from 1977 to 1991, including in the title role of a 1989 production of “George M!,” the musical about Cohan, the famed song-and-dance man.“Exuding confidence and manic energy,” Michael Burlingame wrote in a review in The Day of New London, Conn., “McGrath struts and crows like a bantam rooster.”By the late 1980s he was appearing in New York shows, including “Forbidden Christmas,” a 1991 holiday edition of the long-running parody revue “Forbidden Broadway”; in one sketch he was Luciano Pavarotti, “wearing,” as Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “a white shirt as big as a bedsheet.”A year later he made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of “My Favorite Year,” a backstage musical based on the 1982 movie about the golden age of television. That show closed after a month, but it was the start of regular Broadway work for Mr. McGrath — sometimes as an understudy or standby player, sometimes in featured roles.Mr. McGrath, left, as Patsy and Tim Curry as King Arthur in the 2005 Broadway musical “Spamalot.” Mr. McGrath played three roles and earned a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe played three different parts in “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the hit 2005 musical based on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” including Patsy, the servant who banged coconuts together to imitate the sound of a galloping horse. His performance earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical.His Broadway run continued with “Is He Dead?” (2007), “Memphis” (2009) and “Born Yesterday” (2011). Then, in 2012, came his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a musical that showcased the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara got most of the attention in the lead roles, but it was Mr. McGrath (as a bootlegger) and Judy Kaye (as a temperance leader) who earned the show’s two Tonys, for best actor and actress in a featured role in a musical.Mr. McGrath with Judy Kaye in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” for which they both won Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore recently on Broadway, Mr. McGrath was in “She Loves Me” (2016) and “Tootsie” (2019), among other shows. In between Broadway roles, he worked Off Broadway and in regional houses. He also continued to perform in productions of “Forbidden Broadway” and, in 1996, a movie-themed offshoot, “Forbidden Hollywood,” in which he imitated both John Travolta’s character in “Pulp Fiction” and Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump.That same year, he tapped his inner Groucho in “The Cocoanuts,” a revival of an ancient Marx Brothers show mounted at the American Jewish Theater in Manhattan. Mr. McGrath had always been known for doing a bit of ad-libbing from time to time. (“It’s gotten me in trouble with authors,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with The Times. “A lot of them don’t like you going off the script.”) But in “The Cocoanuts,” ad-libs, Groucho style, were expected.“There are a lot of guys who do better Grouchos,” Mr. McGrath told The Times, “but Groucho and I share the same sense of humor, so I find it very easy to ad-lib as him. I wouldn’t say my timing is as great, but we’re in the same ballpark.”He brought another famed figure back to life in 2017, when he played Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason’s role, in a musical version of “The Honeymooners” at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.If Mr. McGrath wasn’t an A-list star, he sometimes went on in place of one. On Broadway he understudied Martin Short twice, in “The Goodbye Girl” in 1993 and “Little Me” in 1998. A Times reporter was in the audience of “Little Me” in December 1998 when Mr. McGrath stepped in for Mr. Short, who had a cold. Many might have been disappointed at first not to be seeing Mr. Short, but by the show’s end, The Times reported, the theatergoers “gave Mr. McGrath the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.”Mr. McGrath understudied Martin Short in the 1998 musical “Little Me.” One night when he stepped in for Mr. Short, The New York Times reported, the audience gave him “the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.” Ruby Washington/The New York Times“They rose to their feet, screaming, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’”Michael McGrath was born on Sept. 25, 1957, in Worcester, Mass. After graduating from high school there, he studied briefly at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, but he left after three months to start his acting career.Among his fellow players in the “Forbidden Broadway” series was Toni Di Buono. In a 1988 version of the show, he parodied Joel Grey’s “Cabaret” character; she did the same for Patti LuPone, belting out “I Get a Kick Out of Me.” Ms. Di Buono and Mr. McGrath later married.She survives him, as does their daughter, Katie Claire McGrath.In a 2012 interview with The Cape Codder of Massachusetts, Mr. McGrath talked about Cookie, the character he played in his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”“There is a little bit of Gleason in everything I do,” he said. “For Cookie, I’ve also incorporated elements of Groucho Marx, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, Skip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys, and even a little Bugs Bunny.” More

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      When the Wig Is a Character: Backstage at Jocelyn Bioh’s New Play

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      The styles in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” in previews on Broadway, require a wig designer, several braiders, some synthetic hair and lots of patience.Known for her amusing scripts and plaited hairstyles, Jocelyn Bioh can count only three times when she was without braids. “There’s a real freedom in getting your braids done,” she said. “Then you don’t have to worry about your hair for the next few weeks.”The playwright’s lifelong commitment to interwoven hairdos inspired “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a Broadway comedy about a day in the life of a hair braiding salon. It’s most likely the first Broadway play to shine a spotlight on Black women’s hair, and what it takes to style it.Set in Central Harlem, around 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (where many of these salons are clustered), “Jaja’s” presents a spirited group of West African hair stylists as their designs take shape and they juggle the uncertainties and perplexities of their new lives here. Because these women are rarely part of conversations about immigration, Bioh felt it was important for audiences to hear their stories.In writing the play, Bioh (“Nollywood Dreams,” “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”) sought to put a face to something that was likely to be unfamiliar to many theatergoers. “I want to take them into this really unique, funny, crazy, exciting, in some ways mundane space that holds women who all have incredible stories,” said Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana. “That’s what I’m trying to unpack in my play. What’s the other? What’s in the other?”A mock-up of the wig, one of the play’s more colorful hair designs.Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis. Cast members, who braid hair onstage, practiced during rehearsals on wigs she designed for the performance.“There are so many moving pieces to the show that involve hair, and it’s not just me backstage,” Mathis said. “It’s also the actors onstage, it’s what Jocelyn has written, and it’s what Whitney will be helping us to reveal.”“Part of that,” she continued, “is going to be the magic of figuring out how we’re going to construct the wigs and how to potentially take them apart.”The show is running about 90 minutes, without an intermission, yet these hairstyles can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day to complete. There’s also the art of the craft. Creating a single braid starts with a cluster of hair: fingertips planted against the scalp, grasped at the roots of three sectioned tufts, deftly and repeatedly crocheted until a pattern emerges. The options are endless. The humble braid can stand alone, of course, but when woven loosely, it becomes the box braid. Woven against the scalp, it becomes the cornrow. Woven infinitesimally, it becomes the micro.Building wigs that mimic these looks is labor intensive, and audiences are just beginning to see how the production, in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, pulls it off. This summer we followed along on the assembly and design of one of the flashier styles, a wig known as Jaja’s Strawberry-Swirl Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, worn by the actress Kalyne Coleman in the show.Sew, Braid, Dye: One Wig, Many HandsThe wig-making process begins when a gallon-size poly bag is fitted on the actor’s head to make a mold. Once the measurements are taken and the hairline is drawn, the bag is removed, and the mold is filled with polyester fiber and placed on a canvas wig block. Lace is secured to the frame, which serves as the wig’s foundation, and finally strands of hair are sewn in one by one.The show’s hair and wig designer, Nikiya Mathis, dyes the wigs in a solution of water and semi-permanent color. The more saturated the water is with dye, the deeper the pigment. She then agitates the hair to ensure all the strands attain the desired hue.The hair design team builds the look together, with each stylist completing one braid at a time. Human hair is woven into the lace infrastructure, then small pieces of synthetic hair are added to give each braid length and fullness. More synthetic hair is bunched and teased at the ends of each braid to create volume for the puff.Before the fitting, Kalyne Coleman’s real hair was braided into cornrows, which sit close to her head, so that the wig would fit over it easily. Then a stocking cap is placed over her head and secured with pins. The wig is then applied, and baby hair is pulled out. The edges are curled with gel to complete the look. More