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      The Belarus Free Theater Is Also a Support Network for Exiles

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      The leaders of the Belarus Free Theater, who fled the country more than a decade ago, are helping more recent refugees to rebuild their lives while putting on a new show.When the two founders of the renowned Belarus Free Theater claimed political asylum in Britain in 2011, they found themselves homeless, with few possessions and facing a bureaucratic labyrinth before they could work.It was only with help from British theater makers that the pair found places to stay and were able to restart their company from exile, using Skype to conduct rehearsals with actors in Minsk, Belarus’s capital.Twelve years later, the company’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, are using that experience to help other artists fleeing political repression.Belarus — an East European country of about nine million people that borders both Russia and Ukraine — has been ruled since 1994 by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a dictator and ally to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Belarus Free Theater’s political productions have often criticized Lukashenko’s authoritarian leadership and its troupe was long at risk of arrest. But as repression increased, the company decided it was no longer feasible for its other members to remain in Minsk. In 2021, they also fled to avoid long jail terms. Since then, Kaliada said, she and Khalezin had been helping the actors to find housing, therapy and visas.The company was also running acting classes for other Belarusian and Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Kaliada said, that had led to full-scale shows, and was providing help to some Ukrainians singers, too, who could no longer perform full time in their homeland because of the war.“The only thing we wanted was for people to not go through our experiences,” Kaliada said.Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada run the Belarus Free Theater. After their country’s 2020 election, they moved their entire troupe out of the country. Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Warsaw this summer, Kaliada and Khalezin started rehearsals for their latest project, “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera singers and video projections that will premiere at the Barbican Center, in London, on Thursday, running through Sep. 16.In interviews with eight actors, musicians and production staff at those rehearsals, four said they were struggling to adjust to life in Warsaw. The composer Olga Podgaiskaya said it was only with a therapist’s help that she’d come to accept that she wouldn’t be returning to Minsk anytime soon. In Belarus, she said, she had been a fixture on the classical music scene: “Here, I’m a nobody. I need to prove from scratch who I am.”Raman Shytsko, an actor, said he still felt like a guest in Poland — and sometimes an unwelcome one. Once in the city of Wroclaw, he said, he was sworn at in the street for speaking Russian. “A lot of people here hate Belarusians now,” he added, because of the regime’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The conductor Vitali Alekseenok and the composer Olga Podgaiskaya rehearsing with musicians from the Five-Storey Ensemble, in preparation for “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.”Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesMany of the exiled artists said that simply working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” had given them a much-needed sense of purpose.In the rehearsals, which took place at Warsaw’s main opera house, the cast helped each other learn lines and dance moves, and larked about between scenes. Yuliya Shauchuk, an actor, said that the studio was the one place where she always felt joyful.This show’s plot, which is drawn from a popular Belarusian novel and involves a group of ghostly huntsmen who terrorize a rural community, also felt analogous to what was happening now in Belarus, Shauchuk said, where every day the police track down and arrest people who have protested the president’s rule.Several Ukrainian opera singers involved in the production said the rehearsals were benefiting them, too. Mykola Hubchuk had driven overnight from Kolomyya, Ukraine, to take part. “This project is very important for me,” he said. “I need emotion and singing in my life.”Sveta Sugako, the Belarus Free Theater’s production manager, said that the company had renewed its sense of purpose in exile. Its members used to mainly “shout about Belarus,” she said. Now, the company was trying to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine, too, and about the political situation in Russia. It had become, she said, “about the whole region.”The troupe’s journey to exile began in 2020 with an election. That year, Belarus looked set for change, after Lukashenko’s landslide victory was widely dismissed as fraudulent. Members of the company took part in the subsequent mass street protests, hoping Lukashenko would be forced to step aside.Instead, he violently cracked down on opposition and in October 2021, Kaliada and Khalezin pulled the remaining members out. They first headed to Ukraine, with some members wading through swamps to cross the border, before some continued to Poland, and others to Britain.Ever since, Kaliada said, the situation in Belarus had gotten worse. Last year, Putin used the country as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine, then said he would move Russian nuclear weapons across the border into Belarus.Helping the troupe members who reached London had proved easier than those in Warsaw, Kaliada said, because of the company’s established connections in London’s theater world. Cate Blanchett and Juliet Stevenson had both provided accommodation for some members in London, Kaliada said.Shauchuk, left, and Kaliada outside the Polish National Opera. The entire company is now in exile, split between Warsaw and London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Poland, the company had few relationships with similarly generous individuals, Kaliada said, but it had secured cheap rates for some actors at a hotel on the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish government also helped, letting the troupe rehearse for free at the state-run opera house.The company has been trying to deepen its ties in Warsaw. Whenever it stages a show in the city, including recent productions featuring refugee teenagers, it invites local dignitaries, and adds Polish subtitles.With the company approaching the end of its second year in exile, Kaliada said its members would soon have to do more to support themselves. Around 100 people were working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” she said, and the Belarus Free Thater didn’t have the resources to support them all.Many of the actors in Warsaw said they were already making efforts to find their own work. One said he’d taken on dubbing. Another said they were teaching and another was working as a coder.Shauchuk said she knew she needed “to build a life” in Warsaw and was looking to improve her Polish. But, she said, she would not give up hope of returning home. “Even if I build up a family outside Belarus,” she said, “I want the right to go back.”The company will perform “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera and video projections, at the Barbican Center in London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York Times More

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      ‘Infinite Life’ Review: Is There a Cure for Pain and Desire?

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      Illness is no metaphor, and neither is pleasure, in Annie Baker’s weird and great new play set at a fasting clinic.A woman collapsed in a chaise longue on a brick and breeze-block patio is trying to read George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda.” Over several days, various acquaintances also taking the sun will ask her what the book is about, a question she finds hard to answer as she keeps getting stuck on page 152. Still, she calls the novel “very weird and great.”“If I’m not reading it all the time it seems really boring,” she says, “but once I’m into it it’s like the most entertaining thing in the world.”This might be Annie Baker’s mission statement, and, sure enough, her latest play, “Infinite Life,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater Company, is very weird and great. Like “The Flick,” “The Aliens,” “John” and other previous work, it peeps at the greatest mysteries of life — in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common — through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior.Certainly, watching Sofi (Christina Kirk) try to plow through Eliot is no confetti cannon. Nor could you say that the four other women (and eventually one man) who show up on the patio do anything exceedingly dramatic by ordinary standards. You will be asked, for instance, to watch them sleep.Books of various sorts are also prominent. Yvette (Mia Katigbak) reads a memoir about a woman with Lyme disease who starts a white-water rafting company. Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen) ponders an existential question proposed in her paperback by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Elaine (Brenda Pressley) works at a coloring book. Eileen (Marylouise Burke) is in too much discomfort to do her own reading but asks the others about theirs.Buried in books or not, they are all looking for answers. The patio adjoins a clinic in a former motel in Northern California run by a Godot-like guru we never meet. This savior figure prescribes fasts — just water or green juice for as long as several weeks — to clear the toxins he says are the cause of this group’s various cancers, infections, autoimmune disorders, “thyroid stuff” and vertigo. Enervated by the treatments as much as by the extreme pain of their illnesses, his patients spend their days and nights in a kind of stop-and-go stupor, which is frequently, unlike the Eliot, hilarious.The excellent cast includes, from left: Kirk, Kristine Nielsen, Brenda Pressley and Mia Katigbak. “For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface,” our critic writes, “you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe get to know these women deeply over the course of 105 minutes. Ginnie is bossy about other people’s behavior and Yvette is a know-it-all about diseases, having had so many. (Baker gives her what amounts to an organ recital of maladies and medications, including a hymn to the “zoles”: “clotrimazole and econazole and fluconazole and ketoconazole and itraconazole and voriconazole.”) Elaine is very certain of everything she’s very certain of. Eileen, the eldest, is unfailingly kind but prim, especially when it comes to language.That’s a problem for her because the language becomes explicit as the play gradually reveals, beneath its accumulation of brilliantly observed details, a focus on varieties of desire. Yvette tells a story about a cousin who describes porn movies for the blind. (“In person?” Sofi asks.) The arrival of a shirtless and, at first, nearly wordless man (Pete Simpson) hilariously raises the temperature, as if a rooster has broken into what you suddenly realize is a henhouse. And in a series of cellphone messages we overhear Sofi leaving, we learn how pleasure and pain have begun to merge disastrously for her.Those messages — some to her husband, from whom she is separated — seem like a slight misstep; in a play that otherwise avoids exposition like a bad smell (we otherwise know only what the women tell one another) they are too on the nose. Still, they serve a purpose, besides being harrowing, in that they propel the play into its final third, in which the discussion of desire gives way to an opportunity to enact it. But if you think you see where that’s going, you will be both right and wrong; Baker’s structures are so strong and yet open that, within them, anything or its opposite may happen at any moment.Maintaining that tension between plot and anti-plot, while using it to deepen our engagement in a story that seems random but isn’t, requires the most exquisite directorial care. “Infinite Life” (a co-production with Britain’s National Theater) gets that and more from James Macdonald, who has notably staged plays by Baker in London and by the British playwright Caryl Churchill here in New York. Indeed, “Infinite Life” most closely reminded me of Churchill’s great “Escaped Alone,” in which four women sit in a garden chatting into the apocalypse.But Macdonald understands that Baker’s practice is not the same as Churchill’s. The women here (if not the man) are fully, almost floridly conceived, not just elements slotted into a formal conceit. Baker’s is a rich minimalism, as if the characters in a Tennessee Williams melodrama found themselves in an Albee one-act. Despite the difficulty of realizing that, the cast of six New York regulars is excellent: as good as I’ve ever seen any of them, and in the case of Nielsen, so wonderfully restrained, even better. For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface — the various ways the women sip from their water bottles, the shuffling or striding or creeping to their chaises — you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.That the characters also live in a world of ideas gives the play its intellectual heft and complex texture, both light and profound. The contrast is beautifully maintained by the physical production, in which even the breeze-block wall framing the patio, by the design studio dots, is on point: a tracery of concrete and air. The women’s stretchy sweats, batik pajamas and lightweight cover-ups, by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, signify comfort but also the need for it. Birdsong and road noise are the poles of Bray Poor’s bifurcated sound world. And in Isabella Byrd’s lighting design, the minute we get used to the nearly invisible night, with just a cellphone to see by, we are snapped into the harsh May sun of the following midday.They are all expressions of Baker’s refusal to reduce the world to a unitary lesson; “Infinite Life” offers moral philosophy but no moral. (If pain “means anything at all,” Sofi says, “then I don’t know if I can bear it.”) Illness, after all, is no metaphor. It has no purpose, is no judgment, cannot be done right or wrong; it is only itself, incomparable (though some of the characters compete over whose wretchedness is worse) and uninterpretable.Which does not mean it is useless to think about. (When first announced for 2021, the play was called “On the Uses of Pain for Life.”) Understanding suffering, like understanding desire, may help us when we face it, or when others do, and with any luck afterward. Which, by the way, is what “Daniel Deronda,” past page 152, is about — and “Infinite Life” is always.Infinite LifeThrough Oct. 8 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Musical to Open on Broadway This Winter

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James will reprise the roles they played Off Broadway earlier this year.“Days of Wine and Roses,” a musical adaptation of a midcentury story about a loving marriage destroyed by alcoholism, will come to Broadway early next year starring the acclaimed stage performers Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James.The production had a 10-week run earlier this year at the Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called it a “jazzy, aching musical,” and praised its “glorious sound.”O’Hara is a seven-time Tony Award nominee who won the award in 2015 for her performance in a revival of “The King and I.” James is a four-time nominee, most recently for last season’s revival of “Into the Woods.”The Broadway production, directed by Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen”), is scheduled to begin previews Jan. 6 and to open Jan. 28 at Studio 54 for a 16-week run. The lead producers are Kevin McCollum, Mark Cortale, Lorenzo Thione and Joey Monda.“Days of Wine and Roses” began its life as a teleplay in 1958; it was then adapted into a film in 1962. The musical features a score by Adam Guettel and a book by Craig Lucas; they previously collaborated on the 2005 musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and both of them have spoken about their own struggles with substance abuse.Guettel said he’s not sure when he first encountered the film, but that it immediately resonated. “I was really streaming tears at that point,” he said. “I had a sense of how alcohol and drugs had affected my life, and even though I had escaped the clutches of all that, the vivid recognition of it really spurred me on, not to create some sort of cautionary tale, but to depict how being addicted affects your life and the people around you.”The musical, like many, has had a long and bumpy road to Broadway. Guettel said he first discussed the idea with O’Hara two decades ago, when the two were working on “The Light in the Piazza,” and that he had developed the score for her.“It seemed like the right role for her, even then, in terms of the tenderness and the strength,” he said.James joined the project in the earliest days as well; he and O’Hara are friends who performed together in “Sweet Smell of Success.”There have been others who have come and gone — at one point, John Logan was the writer; at one point, Scott Rudin was the producer; at one point, Lincoln Center Theater was going to stage the show.“The fact that it is coming through the steeplechase intact is incredible,” Guettel said. More

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      in Television

      Aubrey Plaza Has Found Her Scene Partner

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      “Oh, put it down. Down the hatch,” Aubrey Plaza said while eating pizza for breakfast, in a downtown Los Angeles restaurant that was otherwise deserted on a late-August Friday morning.Her colleague, Christopher Abbott, was assessing the spread of carbs, dairy, prosciutto and espresso on the table, declaring it a “nightmare for the gut.”“You have your fiber pills in the car. Why don’t you go get them?” Plaza said, teasingly, unleashing objections from Abbott before she hastily backpedaled. “They’re mine, they’re mine. I take them.”Four years after meeting on the set of the comedic thriller “Black Bear,” the actors are working together again, this time on an Off Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s play “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” in which they will portray strangers who become lovers after meeting at a dive bar in the Bronx.Plaza is making her theatrical debut in the two-person play, which begins performances on Oct. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village, and the only person she could see herself sharing it with was Abbott, an experienced stage actor with whom she shares both an artistic symmetry and a knowing, playful rapport.After years spent proving that she could be much more than versions of April Ludgate, the comically unaffected, scowl-prone intern in “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza, 39, has become one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. Her performance as a jaded lawyer in Season 2 of the HBO series “The White Lotus” was an audience favorite, and her role as a budding scammer in the big-screen thriller “Emily the Criminal” was praised by critics for its ferocity and nuance.“I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously,” Plaza said. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAt the same time, she has reached a level of celebrity where, to some, she has become less known for her association with any particular character than for just being herself: an internet darling known for impassively delivering outlandish, sometimes sinister commentary that can leave late-night hosts unsure if she is joking.In Abbott, 37, who played a lovelorn boyfriend with a dark turn in the HBO comedy “Girls,” Plaza has found a co-star who seems to know exactly when she’s joking, gamely joining in on the weirdness with which she has become associated.While mulling the menu, Abbott responded with an exaggerated Italian accent when Plaza assumed one, later testing aloud his gruff Bronx brogue for the play. (“Do you wanna hee-yuh what I’m wuh-kin on?” Abbott blurted. “I’m going for an Andrew Dice Clay kind of thing.”)“He cares but he also doesn’t care; it’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner,” Plaza said, resembling a mid-20th-century movie star with her shoulder-length hair loosely curled and dark-rimmed sunglasses propped atop her head. “It’s fun and it’s also good and it’s also safe. I like to just throw things out the window also and laugh and mess around and not take it so seriously. It’s a hard combo to come by.”The feeling is mutual. “We’re both unafraid to be ugly and weird and strange,” said Abbott, who started his professional acting career 15 years ago in an Off Broadway production of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s “Good Boys and True,” about a scandal at a prep school.Plaza’s first play as a professional actress is not a tame one. Her character, Roberta, is a lonely divorcée who is both desperate for love and confident that all she deserves is punishment; Abbott’s character, Danny, is a lonely brute who will start a fight over the most minor of slights. Together, they fall into a cycle of screaming, crying, slapping, choking and expletive-laced bickering. There is also kissing, cuddling, tender touching and musings on fairy-tale love.PLANS FOR THE PLAY were solidified well before Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, resulting in the industrywide shutdown. Over a year ago, Jeff Ward, an actor (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) who is directing “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” pitched the idea to Abbott, a friend and former roommate. Abbott immediately agreed, and in reading the short description of Roberta in Shanley’s script, he thought of Aubrey.“I don’t want to paraphrase it,” Abbott began, “but it was something like — —”“Sexy…,” Plaza suggested. “Beautiful … broken?” (In fact, it was Roberta’s “nervous bright eyes” that made him think of Plaza for the role.)If not for the strike, Plaza would have spent much of the summer filming a movie, “Animal Friends,” alongside Ryan Reynolds and Jason Momoa. Abbott would have been traveling to the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of the surreal comedy “Poor Things” (where it would go on to win the Golden Lion) and Ward would have been in Japan promoting the live-action manga series “One Piece.” It just so happened that amid the strike, the actors and their director had time to simply talk about the play and what they might do with it.“It feels like the secret ingredient to this whole thing might be time,” Ward said. “A little extra time.”Abbott “cares but he also doesn’t care,” Plaza said. “It’s the best recipe for me for a scene partner.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPart of what they are working through is an idea that Ward said came to him years ago, when he and Abbott were living in Bushwick. They met about 14 years ago at an audition for a play: Abbott got the job, while Ward was hired as his understudy. At parties, Ward, an experimental dance enthusiast, noticed that Abbott was a good dancer, and thought they might one day collaborate on something involving movement.Then last year, while thinking about ways to incorporate choreography into a production of “Danny,” Ward picked up a copy of the script with the work’s full title: “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea: An Apache Dance.”The subtitle is a reference to a French dance style, developed into a popular cabaret act in the early 1900s, that mixes a seductive kind of tango with a violent domestic battle in which the dancers fling each other around in between loving détentes.It was a common pop cultural reference in the 1950s and ’60s, when Shanley was growing up in the east Bronx. The dance appears in old movies like “Can-Can,” with Shirley MacLaine; cartoons like “Louvre Come Back to Me!,” featuring Pepé Le Pew; and sitcoms like “I Love Lucy.” In that show’s first season, Ethel Mertz describes it as the dance “where the tough Frenchman grabs the girl by the hair and throws her over his shoulder and slams her down on the floor and steps on her.”A reader of the script will quickly see what Shanley meant with the subtitle. After Danny and Roberta meet, their encounter swings between desperate affection and uncontrollable, instinctual aggression. (Shanley based Danny’s proclivity for fistfights on his own teenage tendencies.)“I put that in there to give some guidance as to how the play might be done,” Shanley said of the subtitle in a phone interview. “It’s really about the interior life of these two people and how they meet and explode by touching each other.”Shanley, who has won an Oscar (for “Moonstruck”) and a Tony (for “Doubt: A Parable,” which is receiving its own starry revival on Broadway in February), gave Ward, a first-time director, his blessing to revive “Danny.” It premiered in 1984 at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., with John Turturro and June Stein, before transferring to New York. (In his New York Times review, Mel Gussow wrote that the play “is the equivalent of sitting at ringside watching a prize fight that concludes in a loving embrace.”) Shanley is also allowing Ward to develop movement beyond the script’s stage direction, though he said he would make his feelings known if he disliked the additions.Those additions will be choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, whose gestural, sometimes pedestrian movements have depicted the inner lives of a couple, with an intimacy that almost makes observers feel as if they’re witnessing something they shouldn’t.For Abbott and Plaza, whose dance background consists of Irish step dancing as a child, a sense of voyeurism is exactly what they want the audience to feel as Danny and Roberta fall into mad, improbable love.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” said Abbott, who looked character-appropriate in a white T-shirt and chain necklace, a fishing hook tattoo visible on his forearm. “We want to entertain the audience, but I personally want to entertain Aubrey.”“I guess I like to entertain him as well,” Plaza said, adopting a voice like a hostage reading from a script before breaking into a smile.“We’re doing this play every night for an audience, but I think you also have to do it for each other,” Abbott said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesPLAZA AND ABBOTT both grew up far outside the Hollywood machine: she in Delaware, he in Connecticut. Both developed their love for movies working in video stores, and after deciding that she wanted to become an actor as a child, Plaza started out in entertainment as a “Saturday Night Live” set design intern and an NBC page. Abbott discovered acting later, in a drama class at a local community college, which led him to drop out and move to New York to study it more seriously.More than 15 years later, both actors have become recognizable faces onscreen and have gradually broken free from the association of the roles that made them famous.Since “Girls,” Abbott has taken on complex, often tortured parts in films like “James White,” about an unemployed man facing the weight of his mother’s terminal illness, and “Sanctuary,” about a hotel scion determined to break up with his longtime dominatrix. In one of his most prominent roles, he starred as the spiraling Air Force bombardier John Yossarian in the 2019 television adaptation of the novel “Catch-22.”“He has an explosive side to him,” Shanley said of Abbott. “There’s always a feeling of instability and danger.”Since “Parks and Recreation,” Plaza has hosted “S.N.L.,” received her first Emmy nomination for her performance in “White Lotus,” and taken on producing roles to gain more control over scripts she feels particularly drawn to, including “Emily the Criminal” and “Ingrid Goes West,” in which she plays an Instagram-obsessed stalker. She has stepped away from the comfort of dark indie comedy to take on a glamorous, gun-wielding action film role in this year’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” and she recently fulfilled a dream of working with Francis Ford Coppola on his long-awaited epic “Megalopolis.”“Black Bear,” a movie within a movie set in the Adirondack Mountains, was one of those scripts that Plaza leaped at, becoming both a producer and lead actress opposite Abbott.“Unfortunately we can’t really talk about that movie,” Plaza said, citing the continuing strike by SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, that prohibits actors from promoting films and TV shows that have already been completed. (Plaza picketed last month alongside a miniature horse named Li’l Sebastian, a local celebrity in the Indiana town where “Parks and Recreation” is set.)But contained in that psychological thriller are hints of what could take place onstage in “Danny,” including Abbott’s wrestling, sometimes messily, with his character’s masculinity, Plaza’s talent for portraying the unhinged, and moments of crackling intimacy between them.Their characters’ relationship in “Black Bear” is shape-shifting: At first, Abbott, a soon-to-be father, can’t suppress his attraction to a houseguest (Plaza) despite the presence of his pregnant girlfriend. In the movie’s second half, the women’s roles are flipped, and Plaza is a wife tortured by jealousy, eventually descending into a drunken fit of rage and hopelessness.“From ‘Black Bear,’ it was clear that it was going to be electric. There was no ‘getting to know you’ section,” Ward said. “There’s just something about the way they match up.”“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesTHE TWO ACTORS encountered “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” in acting school — not uncommon since the play, with a surplus of opportunities to emote, is a favorite of theater classes and auditions. The actor Sam Rockwell, one of the revival’s producers, recalled doing snippets in auditions for “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (he got the part) and “The Godfather Part III” (he didn’t).Abbott approached Plaza about the role unsure if she would be open to it. Although she had acted in community theater as a child — “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Cinderella,” in which she played a stepsister — and trained in improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, this would be something new altogether.But after Plaza read “Danny,” she knew they had to do it.“I cried. I laughed. I loved it,” she said.Despite its ubiquity, the play has had only one other Off Broadway production since its premiere — in 2004, starring Adam Rothenberg and Rosemarie DeWitt — and there has never been a Broadway production.In a phone interview, Rockwell said he suggested the production keep it that way, at least for now, even though Abbott and Plaza’s name recognition could potentially rake in ticket sales on Broadway. “I think a lot of plays have failed on Broadway because they were really meant to be Off Broadway,” said Rockwell, who is working on the show with his producing partner Mark Berger. “They had that funky quality.”After all, “Danny” is not the kind of inspirational, affirming fare that is likely to prompt theatergoers to buy T-shirts or bring their children. It’s about two damaged, shame-ridden people trying to find a way out of their own misery.“There are all different kinds of love stories, and this is just one of them,” Plaza said. “And I don’t like the idea that every piece of art that’s out there has to have some kind of social commentary or political message. It’s a play. They’re characters.”Over the remaining slice of pizza, Abbott agreed — “the ‘why now’ question is always like, ‘why not?’” — and explained that like Plaza, he had learned over the years to care about the work without caring how that work was going to benefit his career.“I don’t know — I just want to do it,” Abbott said. “I’ve let go of the question of what is it going to do for me.”Plaza squinted down at the crumb-covered pizza peel. It had hearts and the phrase “Happy Galentine’s Day” carved into it, a reference to a bit from “Parks and Recreation” that has caught on to the point of becoming a full-fledged holiday.“Is this a joke?” she asked, turning around to see if anyone might have been behind this. “It’s like I can’t escape. I’m trying to do a play. Can’t I just do a play without somebody reminding me that I was on network television?” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney to Lead Geffen Playhouse

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      The prominent Los Angeles nonprofit chose the playwright to oversee its artistic programming at a time of crisis for American theaters.Tarell Alvin McCraney, an acclaimed playwright who won an Oscar for writing the story that became the 2016 film “Moonlight,” has been named the next artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse, a prominent nonprofit theater in Los Angeles.The Geffen, like many regional theaters in the United States, has been hit by a downturn in the field — as of this spring, its subscriptions were 40 percent below prepandemic levels. But it was among the more innovative theater companies when theaters were closed during the pandemic, producing some popular virtual shows, and it is now in better shape than many.McCraney, 42, said he was fully aware of the crisis facing the field, which he said was the impetus for him to decide to step into leadership.“We’re at a place where, if I really love this, if I really want to effect change, I have to get in,” he said. “I can’t just sit on the sidelines. Across entertainment and across the arts there is a strong shift for everybody. Everybody is feeling this new something — that something else is coming — and I could wade through it, or I could be helpful by being in leadership.”McCraney, an important figure in the American theatrical landscape, won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013, and he recently wrapped up six years as chairman of the influential playwriting program at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. He is also a member of the ensemble at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain.His play “Choir Boy,” about a gay adolescent at an elite prep school, was staged on Broadway in 2019 and has been performed in theaters around the country, including at the Geffen. Among his other plays are “The Brothers Size” (a part of his “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy), which has been discussed for a possible Broadway production, and “Head of Passes.”“Moonlight” was adapted from a script McCraney wrote called “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue”; in 2017 he and Barry Jenkins shared the Academy Award for adapted screenplay.McCraney said he would keep writing his own work, for the Geffen and for other theaters, even as he assumes this new role, in which he will choose the productions staged at the Geffen and oversee their artistic development.Stepping into a leadership role, he added, is not as much of a swerve as it might seem. “It’s been something that’s been with me for a long time,” he said. “As a young person in Miami, I always imagined I would run the Coconut Grove Playhouse, which has been shuttered for years.”The Geffen, founded in 1995, has two stages — the 512-seat Gil Cates Theater and the 149-seat Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. The Geffen has 45 full-time staffers (and another 150 part-timers) and a $12 million annual budget. McCraney succeeds Matt Shakman as artistic director; Gil Cates Jr., whose father founded the theater, serves as its executive director and chief executive.McCraney currently lives in Miami, which is where he grew up; he said he would relocate to Los Angeles. He has worked in Los Angeles, not only on “Moonlight,” but also in the writers room for the television show “David Makes Man,” and for a variety of other projects, including a production of “Head of Passes” at the neighboring Center Theater Group.“Los Angeles is a city that is reminiscent of Miami,” he said, “and it has a theater scene that is often thought of as secondary, but I always thought it had a rich community of artists who were hybrid, and that’s exciting for me to connect to folks who have those multi-hyphenate careers.”Building stronger relationships with U.C.L.A., which is across the street from the Geffen, will be among his priorities, he said, as well as nourishing playwrights in a way that he felt nourished by nonprofit theaters early in his career.“We don’t necessarily take care of our artists,” he said. “I want to be more intentional about that.” More

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      ‘Water for Elephants’ Musical to Arrive on Broadway Next Spring

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      The show, with a group of circus artists as part of the cast, is adapted from Sara Gruen’s best-selling novel.“Water for Elephants,” Sara Gruen’s novel about a Depression-era veterinary student whose life is transformed when he joins a circus, became a surprise best seller after it was published in 2006. Five years later came a film adaptation, and next spring, a spectacle-rich stage musical version will open on Broadway.The musical, as befits a show set primarily at a circus, will feature seven circus performers, who make up about one-third of the onstage cast. As in the novel, the story is told through the recollections of the main character in his older years.“Most people think of the story as about this young man who jumps on a train and joins the circus, but I’m really compelled by his older self, looking back on the chapter that changed the course of his life forever,” said the musical’s director, Jessica Stone, who also directed “Kimberly Akimbo,” the winner of this year’s Tony for best musical. “The show is about the kind of person you are when you lose everything, and it’s also about chosen family, and the choices you make with the time that you have.”“Water for Elephants,” a big-budget musical that has been in development for about eight years, had an initial run in June and July at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. After some reworking aimed at strengthening the storytelling, it is scheduled to begin previews on Feb. 24 and to open March 21 at the Imperial Theater.The musical is set largely in 1931; its book is by Rick Elice (“Jersey Boys,” “Peter and the Starcatcher”) and the score is by PigPen Theater Co. The circus design is by Shana Carroll, who is an artistic director of The 7 Fingers, a prestigious Montreal-based circus collective; Carroll is also collaborating on the choreography with Jesse Robb.The show is being capitalized for up to $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could make it the biggest-budget production of the current Broadway season.The producing team is being led by Peter Schneider, a former Disney animation executive who played a key role in bringing “The Lion King” to Broadway, and Jennifer Costello, a former executive at the John Gore Organization, where Schneider is the chairman of the board. The other lead producers are Grove Entertainment, Frank Marshall, Isaac Robert Hurwitz and Seth A. Goldstein. More

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      Echoing Federal Theater Project, 18 Towns Plan Simultaneous Events

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      The theme “No Place Like Home” will drive shows and festivals in both large cities and rural locales of this country on July 27, 2024.One night in the fall of 1936, with Fascism rising in Europe, theaters in 18 cities and towns across the United States staged productions of the dystopian play, “It Can’t Happen Here,” under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, which was created to provide Depression-era artists with work.Now, inspired by that moment, organizations in 18 American cities and towns are planning a contemporary version of that endeavor: On a single day next summer, they will each present a participatory arts project responding to a more hopeful prompt, “No Place Like Home,” from the “Wizard of Oz.”Given the atomization of American culture, the communities will not present a single show — in fact, many of them are not staging shows at all — but they will each come up with ways to express something that connects notions of home with culture and with health on July 27, 2024. In Chicago, the city will establish artist apprenticeships at mental health clinics; in Tucson, Ariz., Borderlands Theater will create a “theatrical showcase” including a play about mental health and healing.The initiative is the brainchild of Lear deBessonet, a New York-based director who created Public Works, a program of the nonprofit Public Theater that develops musical adaptations of classic works and stages them with a combination of professional and amateur actors. The Public Works model has been adopted by theaters in other American cities, and in London.“Art, by necessity, must look different in every place, to reflect its own community,” deBessonet said. “Our projects are not exclusively theater, or even predominantly theater, but really are reflecting the unique voice and character of the people in each of these places — they are making things that only they could make because they’re making them in direct relation with the people of their place.”DeBessonet, who is now the artistic director of the Encores! program at City Center, is working with Nataki Garrett, who just wrapped up a fraught run as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Clyde Valentin, who previously led Ignite/Arts Dallas at Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. They are the artistic directors for a program called One Nation/One Project, and are calling the initiative “Arts for EveryBody.”“How do we solve these problems that are happening within these large-scale organizational structures that are not moving in the direction that we need them to move in?” Garrett asked. “One way that you do that is, you go meet the people at their source — you go where they are and you engage with them in the way that they have been engaging outside of our museums and theaters and other spaces.”The endeavor, which is inspired by a “Wizard of Oz”-based prompt, has been designed with a belief that participating in the arts can improve health outcomes.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesThe program has set a goal of a $14 million budget. Unlike the Federal Theater Project, which was government-sponsored, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the current initiative is being supported primarily by contributions from foundations and individuals and is sponsored by the Tides Center, a nonprofit philanthropic organization that supports social change. Many of the projects are collaborations between arts groups, local governments and community health centers.The endeavor, working with the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, has been designed in the belief that participation in the arts can improve health outcomes, and the organizers have commissioned studies to research that connection.The 18 communities chosen to take part are a mix of urban and rural, large and small, from Honolulu to the South Bronx; the National League of Cities helped with site selection and project design. Valentin said one priority was to “not have it be something that’s just in the coastal elite cities — geographically we think there’s profound diversity.”Three cities — Chicago, New York and Seattle — that were in the 1936 project are taking part. Some of the communities are planning work that will call attention to local challenges: Phillips County, Ark., will highlight issues with the local water supply; Oakland, Calif., will focus on housing costs; and Utica, Miss. is seeking to generate conversation about food insecurity associated with the lack of a local grocery store.“I think this is a much needed departure from the divisiveness we see,” said Carlton Turner, a co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, which will be organizing a food and wellness festival, with lots of music, in the rural community of Utica. He added, “This opportunity to bring these 18 communities together is a way to heighten our commonalities, versus homing in on the things we disagree about.” More

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      in Movies

      Rachel McAdams to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Mary Jane’

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      The play, by Amy Herzog, is about a mother caring for a chronically ill child.The film star Rachel McAdams will make her Broadway debut next spring in an acclaimed and heart-wrenching play about a mother caring for a small child with a serious illness.McAdams will star in “Mary Jane,” a drama by Amy Herzog that debuted at Yale Repertory Theater in 2017 and was followed by an Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop that same year. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the play “a heartbreaker for anyone human” and “the most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.”McAdams, who became famous playing Regina George in the 2004 movie “Mean Girls,” performed regularly onstage while growing up in Canada and studied theater at York University in Ontario. But she has not performed onstage professionally since she was a student. In a telephone interview, she said her initial career aspirations were to perform as a theater actor.“I had dreams of going to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and hadn’t really entertained Broadway — that was so far off, and even now I’m pinching myself,” she said. “I’ve been looking for a play forever, but kind of casually — not fully committed to it — and this came along, I read it, and I just was so taken with it.”She said she found the play “beautifully written” and “couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was already inside of me.”“It’s shedding light on the difficulties, but also the resiliency, of families with children with special needs,” she added. “There’s actually a lot of comedy to the piece as well — she’s drawn an amazingly positive, resilient character in Mary Jane, and really well-drawn, supporting characters around her.”McAdams was nominated for an Academy Award for the 2015 film “Spotlight.” She also starred in the 2004 film adaptation of “The Notebook”; a musical adaptation of that same story is scheduled to open on Broadway in March.McAdams said her decision to come to Broadway was not related to the dual strikes by screenwriters and actors that have largely idled Hollywood. She said she had committed to “Mary Jane” before the strikes began. And though apprehensive about returning to the stage, McAdams is also looking forward to it.“There’s no editor — you’re really so naked and vulnerable,” she said. “I hope my training will support me, but it was such a long time ago.”“I think it might be like riding a bike,” she added. However, she said, “there’s a little bit of the unknown about it. And I think also just having emotional stamina — you really don’t know until you’re there if you’re going to be able to fill your vessel up enough to keep you going. So it’s just all those ‘I won’t know until I get there’ things, but I’m excited to do the work.”The Off Broadway production won three Obie Awards, for Herzog’s playwriting, for direction by Anne Kauffman, and for a lead performance by Carrie Coon. There have since been several productions at regional theaters; one is now running in Santa Rosa, Calif.The nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club will present the Broadway production, also directed by Kauffman, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Previews are scheduled to begin on April 2; an opening date and the names of the other cast members have not yet been announced.Herzog, whose play “4000 Miles” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, has recently turned her attention to revising classic works: She adapted Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” for a Broadway production starring Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed that ran earlier this year, and she is adapting Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” for a Broadway production planning to open next spring with Jeremy Strong in the title role. More