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      ‘The Confessions’ Review: A Mother’s Tale, Told With Empathy and Care

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      A new play by Alexander Zeldin recreates his mother’s winding, painful path to a life of her own.Minutes into “The Confessions,” a new production by the British playwright and director Alexander Zeldin, the main character, Alice, says demurely, “See, I’m not interesting. I have nothing of interest to tell.”How many women have said as much before sharing piercing experiences? Thankfully, Zeldin didn’t take the woman on whom Alice is based — his mother — at her word. Instead, in “The Confessions,” which runs through Oct. 14 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, he recreates her winding, painful path to a life of her own. (The show transfers to the National Theater, in London, and to the Comédie de Gèneve, in Geneva, later this fall.)While Zeldin is best known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, which explored the damage that government austerity policies have inflicted on ordinary British people, he has increasingly turned to his own origins for inspiration. “A Death in the Family,” a French-language production he created in 2022, was partly inspired by the deaths of his father and grandmother. “The Confessions,” which is performed in English, is even more personal: In the final few scenes, Lilit Lesser plays a younger version of Zeldin, named Leander here.Not that Zeldin’s modus operandi has changed. Just as he interviewed social workers and homeless families for the “Inequalities” plays, according to an interview in the playbill, he recorded lengthy conversations with his mother as the source material for this production.“The Confessions” fits into an intriguing trend. Over the past few years, prominent male writers in France have been telling their mothers’ stories. In 2021, Édouard Louis published a short volume about his working-class mother, “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations.” The same year, the playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who is at the helm of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, delved into his family’s exile from Lebanon from a similar point of view in “Mother.”Alexander Zeldin, known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, chose to draw on stories from his own family for “The Confessions.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin states in the playbill that he, like Louis, was inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, and “The Confessions” openly reckons with the harm that patriarchal norms have inflicted upon women. The expectations of others keep thwarting Alice, an initially shy girl from Australia who inherited her father’s love of painting. Her art studies are deemed a failure, and her mother encourages a quick marriage to a stilted sailor. Alice eventually finds the courage to divorce and pursue her dreams, but then a prominent art historian corners her in an artist’s studio and rapes her.The scope of “The Confessions” has led Zeldin to take a step back from his usual naturalistic style. The sets are less true to life, and two actors play Alice at different ages. The older Alice, Amelda Brown, acts as a discreet witness, often sitting in the orchestra seats along with the audience and wistfully closing and reopening the stage curtains between some scenes.The younger Alice, Eryn Jean Norvill, first appears on a stage within the stage, where the character and her friends hide behind curtains as naval cadets chase them. An early scene with her father, who clearly wishes to support his daughter yet fails to help her, skillfully exemplifies how young working-class women are encouraged not to “get above themselves,” as Alice’s mother reminds her.The storytelling then settles into an efficient pattern, going from episode to episode in Alice’s life, with Norvill subtly manifesting the character’s changes — skittish, then increasingly self-reliant. Yet it takes the traumatic encounter with the art historian for “The Confessions” to move into a higher gear.Eryn Jean Norvill plays the role of the younger Alice, a character based on Zeldin’s mother.Christophe Raynaud de LageArrestingly, Zeldin doesn’t show us what happens. We see the man following Alice into the bathroom with the tacit approval of the artist hosting them, and a long silence ensues before she staggers out of the room, looking dazed.It’s more chilling than any literal depiction of violence could be, and the unusual form of reparation Alice then seeks elevates “The Confessions” further. While Alice’s well-meaning friends in the art world advise her to simply move on, she asks to stay alone with her aggressor at a party. Then she orders him to undress and get into a bath with her.Movingly, the scene is played by Brown, the older Alice, as her younger counterpart looks on. Suddenly vulnerable, forced to recognize the humanity of the woman in front of him, the man grows flustered, then cries softly.“Mom, I had no idea,” someone says from the audience after that encounter. It’s the younger Zeldin, also acknowledging what his mother went through — an event that led her to leave Australia for Europe, where she met Zeldin’s father, a Jewish refugee. Brian Lipson beautifully embodies his kind awkwardness, up until his death when Zeldin was 15, but the focus remains on Alice — a woman whose “ordinary” life was anything but.And there is hope in seeing Zeldin, like Louis and Mouawad before him, look back on his mother’s experiences with such care and empathy. “I feel like forgiveness is near,” the older Alice says at the end. The first step may be for men to listen, as Zeldin did. More

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      Garry Hynes Brings Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy to Life

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      At NYU Skirball, Druid’s marathon production depicts the beginning of a free Irish state through the voices of the working class.In the back room of a hotel cafe in Lower Manhattan, the Irish director Garry Hynes was talking about Sean O’Casey, the laborer turned playwright whose frequently funny, sometimes blood-chilling, canonical 1920s tragicomedies are set amid the tenements of Dublin.Mostly, Hynes called him O’Casey, but a few times she called him Sean, and the warmth of that familiarity melted away any sepia encrustation that has accumulated around his name. Hynes, 70, the artistic director and a co-founder of the Druid theater company in Galway, Ireland, imagines O’Casey was “a bit of a joker,” “grumpy” and given to provoking people “just for the sake of provoking.” Not easy, in other words, but playful.She has long believed O’Casey, who died at 84 in 1964, in his adopted England, to be miscategorized as a playwright — lumped in with the naturalists when really he is up to something richer than that.Steeped in him of late, she has brought his famous Dublin trilogy to New York in the acclaimed production DruidO’Casey. A five-star review in the London Observer called the marathon experience of it “revelatory,” and said it “probes the ambiguities and indeterminacies of O’Casey’s texts,” bringing “his impoverished characters to rumbustious life.”Together the three plays tell a story of the beginning of a free Irish state: “The Shadow of a Gunman” (1923), set in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence; “Juno and the Paycock” (1924), set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War; and “The Plough and the Stars” (1926), set in 1915 and ’16, leading up to and during the Easter Rising against the British.Home is the locus of each play, all first staged at the Abbey Theater in Dublin when the historical events in them were recent memories.The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey bore witness to Ireland’s rebirth a century ago.Bettmann/Getty Images But combat seeps into every crevice of the lives of O’Casey’s Dubliners — characters who, as the Druid Ensemble member Rory Nolan said by phone, “aren’t even aware that they’re going through gigantic societal changes and through moments in history that will echo down the ages to where we are now.”Hynes has interpreted O’Casey for New York audiences before: in “Juno,” a musical adaptation of “Juno and the Paycock,” starring Victoria Clark, for Encores! in 2008. A decade earlier, she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing — in 1998 for “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” on the same night that Julie Taymor won for “The Lion King,” but a few minutes sooner.For years she had wanted to direct a single company of actors in the entire Dublin trilogy, much as she did with her lauded play cycles DruidSynge, DruidShakespeare and DruidMurphy. A cast of 18 will perform DruidO’Casey from Wednesday through Oct. 14 at NYU Skirball in New York, then Oct. 18-21 in Ann Arbor, Mich. Audiences can see single shows or, for the cumulative effect, the full marathon in one day.Hynes chatted about DruidO’Casey one morning last week over coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Why are you doing the marathon chronologically in order of the action of the plays rather than of the dates when they were written?We discussed it a lot. You can see O’Casey develop as a writer over the three plays if you do them in the order in which they were written. Then somebody said to me, “But do we want six and a half hours of theater — of some of the greatest theater that this country’s produced — to end [as ‘Plough’ does] with two British soldiers singing in a Dublin house, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ or do you want the trilogy to end [as ‘Juno’ does] with two women walking into a future that they have no idea what it is?”Aaron Monaghan and Anna Healy in “The Plough and the Stars,” one of three works being performed as part of DruidO’Casey.Ros KavanaghThat’s the argument.That’s the argument, yeah. Like when the last scenes of “Juno” were played for the first or second or third time in the Abbey Theater in the 1920s, nobody knew what the future would be. But when we do them, we know.What do you hear in O’Casey’s voice that he’s saying to the present?It is pretty shocking for us to realize that the struggles that are going on in Ireland through those three plays are homes, houses, health, which are the things that are happening in Ireland now. You know, O’Casey did not agree with the Rising in 1916. He was politically against it. He thought that the whole movement was beginning to be less about what the people’s needs are, and more about historic deeds: fighting for the freedom of Ireland rather than fighting for the freedom of Irish people to live in proper homes.Why did you want to stage the trilogy?I did “Plough and the Stars” [with Brendan Gleeson] as the first production I directed in the Abbey when I became artistic director there. And then I did a “Juno” with Michael Gambon. But one of the things I felt is that, as well as being great plays, they were talked of as naturalism, and increasingly, my experience of the plays was that they’re not naturalism — that O’Casey’s whole experience of the theater was coming from the music hall, and coming from [the 19th-century Irish melodramatist Dion] Boucicault.O’Casey gave to very poor people great passions. Because he did that, he was regarded as a naturalist, but I believe the plays are far more interesting than that. They’re an extraordinary sort of mix whereby you can be laughing one moment and crying the next. We want to provide an ability for the plays to be performed as pieces of theatrical writing that were asked to be performed, not asked to be endured.O’Casey’s plays endure because they get “inside your head, inside your heart,” Hynes said. “He fiercely believed in people being treated properly. And he never abandoned that even when others abandoned it.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesO’Casey roots them in the inescapably domestic.What is so wonderful is that the domestic is constantly reflecting on what’s outside. So you’re hearing about all the things going on out in the streets. They’re marching. They’re striking. They’re killing people. They’re doing all these kind of things out there on the street. And it’s like it’s [solely] out there. But actually it’s not, because inside they’re fighting. So the two things are playing off each other in counterpoint all the time.And these are war plays that have women in them. He doesn’t erase the fact of who else is living through that history.Yeah, absolutely.Tell me about him and women.About Sean and women? Well, he dedicates “Plough” “To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave.” He created wonderful characters all through. But his women were the mainstay of life, you know?He sees them as whole humans.He absolutely does. But I don’t think he hero-worships them either.He doesn’t do that with anyone. A striking thing is his absolute refusal to valorize violence. He presents all sorts of characters who do that, but he is not doing it himself.It’s marvelous because the argument about what is valorous or not, what is worthy or not, is being had there on that stage, constantly.Why does O’Casey matter?O’Casey matters because he wrote plays that can get inside. Inside you. Inside your head, inside your heart. He fiercely believed in people being treated properly. And he never abandoned that even when others abandoned it. He was never not completely true to what he believed, although he had many opportunities to not be. I know if I knew him, we’d probably row. But he is a hero of mine. More

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      in Music

      Alicia Keys Steps Into a New Spotlight

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical inspired by the singer-songwriter’s teenage years in New York, is set to open Off Broadway.One night this summer, Alicia Keys fell asleep listening to show tunes.She was on vacation following a five-week concert tour, but her mind was still at work: For 12 years, she has been developing “Hell’s Kitchen,” a musical based on her adolescence in a then-gritty New York neighborhood, and at the top of her to-do list was writing a new song for the actress playing the main character’s mother.So she took a nap with her headphones on, listening to a playlist of theatrical mom songs (think “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy” and “Little Girls” from “Annie”). When she woke up, she could feel the rhythm. She could hear the chords. She could see the title.She ducked into a closet and began to sing into her phone. She hopped online, doing a little research to strengthen her lyrics. And then, when she returned to New York, she began to write, in the wee hours after the meetings and the calls and the rehearsals, noodling at an upright piano in her Chelsea recording studio.“This is occupying a lot of space in my mind,” Keys said about the musical, considered but candid as she was driven to a downtown rehearsal hall, tuning out the traffic and focusing on getting where she wants to go.Maleah Joi Moon is making her professional stage debut as the show’s protagonist, the 17-year-old Ali.Elias Williams for The New York TimesThat day, where she wanted to go was the Public Theater, the celebrated but pandemic-weakened nonprofit where “Hell’s Kitchen” is to begin an Off Broadway run on Oct. 24. Even though Keys is not in it, demand is high: Each time more tickets go on sale, they are snatched up.“I am thinking a lot about ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and obviously the goal for it to be tremendously beloved and really something that comes into the world in a way that is just like a storm, an incredible storm,” Keys said. “And the goal, obviously, is to transfer to Broadway. So that’s heavy on my mind.”With 15 Grammys, five No. 1 albums and about 5 billion song streams, Keys is an unusual figure in the music world — a classically trained pianist turned R&B singer-songwriter who signed a recording contract as a teenager and remains, at 42, determined, driven and resolutely in control of her creative and commercial life.Her musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is unusual too, in ways that seem promising. Unlike many biographical jukebox shows chronicling childhood to celebrity, this one is both focused and fictionalized, depicting a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali.“This is not Tina Turner, this is not the Temptations, this is not MJ, this is not Carole King — although all of those are phenomenal,” Keys said, referring to shows about pop stars. “It’s really so much more about relationships and identity and trying to find who you are, which I think is a continuous theme in all of our lives: Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who are we becoming?”In “Hell’s Kitchen,” Ali, like Keys, is the daughter of a white mother and a Black father and is growing up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized housing development just outside Times Square where 70 percent of the units are for performing artists. The supporting characters — a hyper-protective single mother, a life-changing piano teacher, an older boyfriend and an unreliable father — are based on figures in Keys’s own upbringing.At its heart, “Hell’s Kitchen” is a mother-daughter love story, featuring the stage veteran Shoshana Bean, left, during a rehearsal with Moon.Elias Williams for The New York Times“We’ve highly fictionalized the specifics,” said Kristoffer Diaz, a playwright and librettist who has been working with Keys on the show for more than a decade. Along the way, Keys and Diaz have been joined by the Broadway veteran Michael Greif, who directed “Dear Evan Hansen,” and by the choreographer Camille A. Brown, an in-demand dance-maker.In some ways, the show’s narrative structure resembles that of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans”: It is a coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager with a fractured family; it ends with the protagonist’s trajectory unclear, but audiences can fill in the blanks based on what they already know about the author’s accomplishments.Keys resisted suggestions that the musical give audiences a road map to Ali’s future — a future in which she might, like Keys, become a big star. “Sometimes they would push: ‘And how about we…?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘No,’” she said. “You just need to know that she is going to find something. Everything else is irrelevant.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is, in the eyes of its creative team, a mother-daughter love story. And, in an era when many musicals market themselves as love letters either to Broadway or to New York, this one falls squarely into the latter camp: Keys’s identity, as a person and as a songwriter, was shaped by the city in the 1990s, and that informs the show’s sounds (like bucket drumming) and movement (with echoes of social dances like the Running Man).The score, played by a band that will include a pianist visible to the audience even when actors pretend to be tickling the ivories, features Keys’s best-known hits: “Fallin’,” “No One,” “Girl on Fire,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” and, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z that has become an inescapable New York City anthem. Keys said she has written four new songs for the show, but that even existing songs have a new sound because they have been rearranged.“I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love,” Keys said, reflecting on her initial aspirations for “Hell’s Kitchen.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“The songs that you think you know,” she said, “you never heard like this.”Making a musical might seem like a swerve for Keys, but the truth is the overlap between the recording industry and musical theater is substantial. There is an ever-growing inventory of jukebox musicals biographical (“MJ,” about Michael Jackson) and fictional (“& Juliet”), as well as shows with original scores written by pop stars (“Here Lies Love”).Keys is a lifelong theatergoer who has dabbled in acting — she played Dorothy in a preschool production of “The Wizard of Oz” and had a cameo on “The Cosby Show” at 4 — but her passion was always music. She studied piano from age 7, was performing in a girl group and wrote her first song at around 11, and signed that recording contract at 15. Childhood moved fast — she skipped two grades and moved out at 16.“She knew a lot before she should have,” said her mother, Terria Joseph. (Mother and daughter both use stage names.)When Keys was a child, Joseph was a struggling actor — that’s how she qualified to live at Manhattan Plaza — who took survival jobs, particularly as a paralegal, while trying to find work as a performer. (Keys’s father, a flight attendant, did not live with them and was mostly not around; though Keys was close to her paternal grandparents, she was often estranged from her father. Now, she says, they are good.)Keys would tag along to auditions and rehearsals when her mother couldn’t afford a babysitter; when there was enough money, they would stand in line at the TKTS booth and buy discount theater tickets. Her mother recalls an early trip to “Cats,” and Keys remembers “Miss Saigon,” but the show that stands out most is “Rent,” in part because it’s about AIDS, which hit Manhattan Plaza, with its high population of gay artists, quite hard. “Rent,” like “Hell’s Kitchen,” was directed by Greif.She was valedictorian of her graduating class at the city’s Professional Performing Arts School, and attended Columbia University for a month before dropping out to pursue music. In 2001, with the release of “Fallin’,” and boosted by an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” her career took off.Keys has continued to see theater when she can, and in 2011 she co-produced a Broadway play, “Stick Fly,” about an affluent Black family wrestling with race and class. According to her mother, who is always trying to take her to more theater, Keys has long been thinking about developing her own show. “It was on her bucket list for some time,” Joseph said.“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” the Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said of Keys (above, at a rehearsal). “There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Stick Fly,” Keys said, “ignited this desire in me, across all mediums in regards to storytelling, to be able to start to hear, feel and see stories that I know exist, but in so many ways the world doesn’t see.” And when she started cooking up “Hell’s Kitchen,” she had audacious goals.“Because I have all the experience with seeing theater since a kid, I just was really ready to reinvent theater, too,” she said. “I just felt like there was so much to bring, so many worlds to collide and cross. I almost felt obligated to create that piece that would be something that people who absolutely can’t stand musical theater would love.”Hang on! There are people who can’t stand musical theater? Apparently, yes, and one of them is Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, a renowned hip-hop producer.“He’s not a fan,” Keys said, laughing. “Do not bring him to the show where in the middle of the sentence they break out into the song. He falls asleep. He cringes. He can’t take it.”So one goal, Keys said, is simply to create a show her husband will like. (The two make up a power couple, with multiple homes and a significant contemporary art collection; they have two children together, and are also helping to raise his three children from previous relationships.)And what about reinventing theater? When I ask her about that word, she qualifies it — mindful of how it might sound and wary after two decades talking to journalists. Keys said she thinks about her project differently now, because she believes that over the last decade, Broadway has made strides.“I don’t want you to now quote me and say I’m reinventing Broadway,” she said. “I want to be clear that there’s so many pieces that exist now that really do challenge, I think, what we were seeing. There of course needs to be more diversity on Broadway. Is there more already? Hell yeah. And we still need more.”I write about the business of Broadway, so one thing that has struck me, as I’ve been working on this profile, is Keys’s ownership — economic as well as artistic — of “Hell’s Kitchen.” Rather than finding Broadway producers to finance and shepherd the show, thus far she is doing so herself, retaining the rights to its commercial future.“I want to own my story,” she told me. “And I deserve to.”She consults, and is heard, on every strategic and creative choice: writing, casting, staging, marketing.Keys has been shuttling between her recording studio in Chelsea and the rehearsal space, while fine-tuning the show’s sound.Elias Williams for The New York Times“People know her centrality to decision-making matters to her,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public. “She’s been as involved as any artist I’ve ever worked with — she gets involved on a level of granularity that’s just astonishing. It’s not just music, but every sentence, every relationship, every actor. There’s nothing of the absent star about her.”Maleah Joi Moon, who at 21 is making a professional stage debut playing Ali, was taken aback to realize that Keys, whose music was a staple in Moon’s childhood home, would actually be involved on a day-to-day basis.“When I saw the project, I was like, no way was she really attached to this,” Moon said. “And to find out, once I got into the rehearsal room, that she was going to be so heavily involved — it was insane.”Keys radiated warmth as well as intensity during a rehearsal, a novel (“The Vanishing Half”) at her elbow while she bounced in her chair to the beat and tapped out ideas on her phone. “She’s very specific with her notes,” said Shoshana Bean, the actress playing Ali’s mother.She teaches songs to the ensemble. (“You’ve never been to a more charged, lively and thrilling music rehearsal than when she’s running them,” Greif said.) She instructs the stars on vocal technique. (“She has expressed herself about what parts of my voice she wants me to use,” said Brandon Victor Dixon, who plays Ali’s father.)She even attended auditions for understudies, and she told me she was relocating a piano in her studio to try to replicate the sonic environment of the theater, thinking she would record the songs in the show and give demos to the band “so they get the feel, they get the swing, they get the idea, they get the energy.”“I’m very, very anal,” she said, “and I know how I want everything to sound.”Control has been a central theme of Keys’s career. While still a teenager, she successfully extricated herself from the contract she had signed with Columbia Records, chafing at efforts to mold her image and sound.“It’s important for me to properly express how I feel at the moment and not have it filtered through other people,” she told Oprah at age 20. Now she preaches self-determination. “If you don’t know what you want for yourself, then you’ll never, never get there,” she told me. “You’ll always be deterred.”Several times, as we talked, she circled back to her concerns about the way the music industry treats artists, and she said one of her long-term goals is “redesigning the industry.”“I feel like as a young artist, we get very taken advantage of, and it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in these circumstances that do not benefit us to the level that it should,” she said. “And I’m lucky. I am in control of all of my music and all of the things that I’ve created. But let me tell you, that’s not the normal story. And I had to fight for it.”Maintaining creative and financial control has become “a mission,” she said, and with “Hell’s Kitchen,” she believes the lessons she has learned are paying off.“For the first time in my life,” she said. “I’m doing something exactly right.”That startled me, given her success. “Really?” I asked.The score is a mix of new songs and Keys’s best-known hits, including, of course, “Empire State of Mind,” her 2009 collaboration with Jay-Z.Elias Williams for The New York Times“I really do,” she said. She explained that with previous projects, “I didn’t start out right, but kind of ended up right.” But this time, she said, “I didn’t want to go out and get too diluted and get too many partners. We have all the right partners, all the right minds. It’s the right mixture of experience and also newness that I think is important to continue to create a new world.”One night in mid-July, I took the subway to Barclays Center to watch Keys do what she is best known for: perform. For 90 minutes she entertained a rapturous crowd of 11,894 — strikingly more diverse, and younger, than most theater audiences. Her sparkling Yamaha piano was in the center of the arena, on a rotating stage, with runways extending out so she could work the crowd.Just before the concert, as she often does, she presided over what she calls a Soulcare Session, promoting her skin care line (“I call them offerings, not products — products is too transactional”), talking up empowerment (“The theme today is reminding ourselves to own our own power”), and posing for pictures with superfans who had paid a steep premium for up-close access (“You can talk to me about anything you want,” she said). Her staff sprayed the patrons with a “reviving aura mist” and invited them to select keys (get it?) with words of affirmation; attendees sat on embroidered pillows, black beanbags and purple cushions and asked Keys about her wardrobe, her writing process, her childhood. Some spoke about how her songs had helped them endure disease or emotional hardship.Keys has long had an entrepreneurial streak — she started a babysitters club when she was 11 — and it is ever-expanding. “I’m really interested in business at this point,” she told me when I asked about what’s next.She’s all-in on “Hell’s Kitchen,” of course. She intends to further build up Key SoulCare. And she’ll make more music.“I feel like I’m in a place where I can express myself clearly,” she said. “I am clear about what I want, what I don’t want. Who I want to do it with, who I don’t want to. I’m unafraid to be very vocal and verbal about that, and I feel like I’m in a place where I can do anything, anything. And I haven’t even begun yet.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ Review: A Shop Where Everybody Knows Your Mane

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      Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesn’t get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and more — tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.That will come in abundance, but don’t in the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, it’s telling you something too.What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late — almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A kind of “Cheers” or “Steel Magnolias” for today, “Jaja’s” is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the beauty shop’s interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, the director, Whitney White, keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.David Zinn’s beauty shop set receives applause as do the wigs designed by Nikiya Mathis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnlike the Ghanaian private school students in Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Dreams,” the stylists at Jaja’s are independent contractors. I don’t just mean financially, though they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping down to make room for the next.That’s fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shop’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. “When I get my shop, there won’t be any eating of smelly foods like this,” she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients. Meanwhile — and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salon’s television — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminata’s husband, the men we actually meet — all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos — are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.It’s her birthday: Kalyne Coleman as a customer who asks for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” braids at the salon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNever really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. Without White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t imagine this working. Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.If the entire play had been nothing but byplay — the women in one another’s hair both figuratively and literally — I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “School Girls” as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.But instead she has seen fit, again as in “School Girls,” to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Though abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the last of the play’s six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.“OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. “But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? ‘Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.Jaja’s African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Only Murders In the Building’ Season 3 Finale: The Show, and Deaths, Go On

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      Tuesday’s finale of “Only Murders in the Building” wrapped a season that was a love letter to Broadway musicals, not least because it was a little silly.This notebook contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building.”Everyone loves a Broadway hit. It’s possible that we enjoy a Broadway catastrophe — “Carrie,” “Diana, the Musical,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” — a little more. Few productions have been as cataclysmic as Oliver Putnam’s “Death Rattle Dazzle,” a misbegotten gothic about murderous infants, re-conceived as a glittery musical. Think “Ruthless” but skewed younger and set at a Nova Scotian lighthouse.This musical was the centerpiece of Season 3 of the Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building,” which brought the amateur detectives played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short out of their luxury apartment complex and into a sumptuous Broadway theater. (The theater is actually the opulent United Palace in Washington Heights, subbing for a space more than 100 blocks south.) “Death Rattle Dazzle” bore only the vaguest sequined resemblance to a real Broadway show, while demonstrating deep love of the form. Think of the season as a love letter to Broadway, written in lipstick and blood.On the original opening night, the leading man, Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy, was killed. Twice. Once with rat poison and again down an elevator shaft. Theater has its own violence. A good show “kills,” it “slays,” it “knocks them dead.” But this was s a bit much.Amid rehearsals for the original play’s transformation into a musical, several members of the cast and crew were accused of his murder. In the meantime, there were in-jokes about superstitions, spike tape, stage fright, Schmackary’s Cookies and the cavalier use of accents. The accent jokes were made at the expense of Meryl Streep. Matthew Broderick also showed up for some method skewering.During the season finale, which arrived on Tuesday (spoilers follow, so many), the murderers were finally revealed. The uberproducer Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) had poisoned Ben to protect her son Cliff’s investment in the show. Then her son (Wesley Taylor), defending his mother and his ego, pushed a revived Ben down an elevator shaft.Was the motive love? Or money? Or artistic integrity? Yes? I think? Motive is never big with the “Only Murders Gang.” (Personally, I plumped for the documentarian Tobert (Jesse Williams), mainly because it’s hard to trust a man named Tobert.)This season didn’t often mirror what actually happens on Broadway, even as it assembled a crack team of Broadway composers — Justin Paul, Benj Pasek, Marc Shaiman, Michael R. Jackson and Sara Bareilles — to supply the songs. “Death Rattle Dazzle” was, even by Broadway’s variable standards, too inane, too sparkly. Perhaps the most delirious fiction, beyond the dancing crab people, was the notion that a single negative review, delivered here by the critic Maxine (Noma Dumezweni, deadpan and delectable), could be the precipitating event for a murder.The series’s madcap commitment was one of the most realistic aspects of “Death Rattle Dazzle,” which included singing shellfish and three babies suspected of murder.Patrick Harbron/HuluThankfully (and I write this as someone who covered Broadway for decades), critics don’t have quite that much power, but then again Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage described Maxine’s assessment as “a pan, a massacre.” And also: “The harshest review in the history of theater. A complete bloodletting.” After attending the musical’s opening night, Maxine has warmer feelings: “This dusty old chestnut has been Botoxed, bedazzled and brought back to life.” A complete about-face? Yes, that’s fiction, too.But what did feel real, just a smidgen, was the madcap commitment to the bit that putting on a musical requires. Most musicals, even those that eschew babies and shellfish, are at least a little silly. Unless you’re attending a theater camp, humans don’t spontaneously break into song, and there isn’t often a full orchestra backing them or a chorus that just happens to sing along in harmony while executing the occasional pas de bourrée. It’s ridiculous to think that a few lights, some spangled costumes and a set that’s mostly plywood will transport an audience to some far-off world.And yet, that’s what happens. Which is why we have and have had long-running musicals about, say, cats or trainee witches or the wildlife of the African savannah. Those crab people should feel right at home.A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to the United Palace for an “Only Murders” pop-up event. Guests wandered the lush surroundings, sifting evidence with specialized flashlights. “Only Murders” is a TV show about a podcast, which this season was about a Broadway show. This event was also a strange hybrid of forms — gallery exhibit, immersive happening, escape room, a live-action watch party, Botoxed and bedazzled. Also you could get your makeup done, which seemed fun. And they gave you a puzzle on the way out.The best part, for me anyway, was a quiet moment in which I was able to sit in the orchestra and look up at the stage. In that plush seat, I could imagine all of the wonderful, outrageous, demented shows that had played there before and dream about what might come next. More

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      Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

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      A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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      In ‘Big Trip,’ an Exiled Russian Director Asks: What Makes Us Human?

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      Dmitry Krymov’s two shows at La MaMa thrillingly stress the porosity of the line between life and storytelling.The Russian theatermaker Dmitry Krymov’s “Big Trip,” two shows in repertory through mid-October at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is in love with the very essence of theater: how we tell stories, how we make art, how we live.The productions have no sets to speak of. The costumes and props look as if they have been sourced from thrift shops and Home Depot — one piece makes extensive use of cardboard. Yet we are far from the usual Off Off Broadway seen at incubators like the Brick. The framework here — Pushkin, Hemingway and O’Neill — is drawn from high art, or at least classics some might deem musty. Flares of whimsy, as when the actors don red clown noses, might feel rather European to locals more accustomed to irony. It is safe to say there is nothing else like this on New York stages right now.This is all very much of a piece for Krymov, but also new territory for him.Back in Moscow, this acclaimed writer, director and visual artist had access to fairly generous budgets, presented work at fancy institutions and taught his craft to avid students. He earned accolades and traveled the world, including to our shores to present “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (2013), “The Square Root of Three Sisters” at Yale University (2016) and “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. After that last production’s run ended in spring 2022, Krymov refused to return home because Russia had attacked Ukraine.Now living in New York, he runs Krymov Lab NYC, an iteration of his Moscow workshop, and collaborates with an English-speaking ensemble. “Big Trip,” their first official outing, consists of the distinct pieces “Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in Our Own Words,” a retooling of one of his Moscow productions; and “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” based on two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” and scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Krymov does not so much stage classic works as filter them through prisms like memory, notions of cultural heritage and identity, and the very process of theatermaking. (It’s mind-boggling that, according to Tatyana Khaikin, a lead producer of Krymov Lab NYC, none of the city’s established companies have invited him to do a show.)In “Onegin,” the stronger of the two works, Russian immigrants (Jeremy Radin, Jackson Scott, Elizabeth Stahlmann and Anya Zicer) guide the audience through a retelling of Pushkin’s 19th-century masterpiece about high-society youths facing the demands of love.Kwesiu Jones, left, and Tim Eliot in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” in a segment that adapts Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Steven PisanoThey begin by explaining the basics of theater then re-enact scenes from “Eugene Onegin” while essentially annotating the text (throughout both shows, Krymov repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to stress the porosity of the line between life and theater). The central character is a dandy afflicted with spleen, which “is like having American blues,” we are told. “But even worse — it’s having the Russian blues.” (Reflecting on such differences is a Krymov forte: His astonishing memory play “Everyone Is Here,” which is on the streaming platform Stage Russia, intersperses scenes from “Our Town” with the impact a touring American production had on him in the 1970s.)The issue of watching an exiled Russian director’s work while his country is waging war against Ukraine is actually raised in “Onegin,” which is interrupted by a harangue directed at the cast: “You can’t hide behind your beautiful Russian ‘culture’ anymore. Your culture means destruction and death, and all of your Pushkins, your Dostoevskys and Chekhovs cannot save you.” The show resumes, but the trouble among theatergoers feels real, and so are the questions that have been raised. Should Thomas Mann not have been able to publish in America after he fled Nazi Germany, for example?The outburst is also representative of the constant interrogation of the source material, all the while reaching deep into its core and extracting the marrow — what makes us human.The trickiest of the three segments in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad” is O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” which will be cryptic for those unfamiliar with the play’s premise and characters. Yet the action is magnetic because of the director’s ability to create absorbing theater in an elemental way, often through deceivingly simple devices. The father and son Ephraim and Eben (Kwesiu Jones and Tim Eliot), using stilts, tower over Abbie (Shelby Flannery), the woman who has upended their lives. It’s a stark representation of power and its often illusory appearance that peaks in a stunning visualization (that I won’t spoil) of Abbie and Eben’s tortured relationship.In the same show’s “A Canary for One,” the unrolling of a painted sheet suggests passing scenery seen from a train. It’s easy to get lost in the action, despite the fourth-wall breaking. Introducing “Desire,” Radin wondered where the train was. A whistle blew. “It’s very far away, and behind you,” he told us. I knew the train could not possibly be there, and yet I turned around and looked. I’d bought it all. More

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      ‘Melissa Etheridge: My Window’ Review: Musings on Life and Music

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      On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy.In 1979, when Melissa Etheridge was an aspiring rock star getting ready to leave Leavenworth, Kan., for music school in Boston, she got a 12-string guitar. Her father made a macramé strap for it — a sturdy, intricate piece of knot work that was a portable souvenir of his love.“And this is it,” his Grammy Award-winning daughter said during her Broadway show, turning around to give everyone a view of the strap that held up her instrument.It was a charming moment, and in our high-definition, multi-screen world, refreshingly analog: just Etheridge, life-size and in three dimensions, sharing the room with us.Share it she does, superbly, in “Melissa Etheridge: My Window,” which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square Theater, just one block east of where an earlier version of the show ran Off Broadway last fall. On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy, as if Etheridge had shrunk an arena to fit in the palm of her hand.A stage stretches across one end of the space, floor seats and a center aisle are where the theater’s thrust stage would usually be, and a tiny satellite stage sits behind them. Circle in the Square never struck me as a warm, embracing theater, but Etheridge makes it one, paying graceful, diligent attention to every section of the 726-seat audience, and occasionally coming down off the stage to sing and stroll.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed once again by Amy Tinkham, this musically gorgeous, narratively bumpy show starts with Etheridge’s hit “Like the Way I Do,” ends with “Come to My Window” and fits 15 husky-voiced songs in between, including a trippily comical “Twisted Off to Paradise,” an arrestingly beautiful “Talking to My Angel” and a winking ode to her current gig, “On Broadway.” (Sound design is by Shannon Slaton.)On a set by Bruce Rodgers whose spareness serves the complexity of Olivia Sebesky’s projections, this is a visually slick production, with abundant jewel tones in Abigail Rosen Holmes’s saturated rock-show lighting, and Etheridge looking glamorous in costumes by Andrea Lauer.The show is shorter, more polished and more assured than it was Off Broadway — though Etheridge still seems undefended when she doesn’t have a guitar strapped across her or a piano in front of her. She also doesn’t speak memorized lines but rather tells versions of stories mapped out in the script. It’s a valid approach that sometimes leaves her fumbling for words.Kate Owens plays the small, clowning role of the Roadie, a character whom the audience loves but who I wish would desist from upstaging Etheridge with antics.Etheridge herself is very funny, and she knows how to handle a crowd. Such as when she got to the point in her life story when she fell for a woman who was married to a movie star — “a for real, for real movie star,” she added, for emphasis.“Who?” a voice called out, not that the performance is meant to be interactive.“Look it up,” Etheridge said, shrugging it off.Unlike her recently published memoir “Talking to My Angels,” which opens with a recollection of “a heroic dose of cannabis” that changed her understanding of herself and the universe, “My Window” proceeds chronologically, starting with Etheridge’s birth. (Projections show baby Missy with fabulous hair.) So the talk of what Etheridge calls “plant medicine” comes later.This is a passion of hers, so it belongs in a show about her. But the performance devolves into speechifying every time it comes up, except when it morphs into an enactment of experiencing an altered state — which, despite some vividly kinetic projections, can be as tiresome to watch onstage as it would be off.Surprisingly, the most starkly powerful part of the show Off Broadway — Etheridge recounting the death of her son Beckett, at age 21, in 2020 — works less well on Broadway.I cannot fault Etheridge for her stiffness in that delicate section at the performance I saw, or for reaching for words — like her blunt assessment, “He was difficult” — to convey her memories. But this is where relying on the script’s gentler, more contextual language could assuage what must be a terrible vulnerability.Logistics also undercut that scene. While Etheridge speaks from the large stage and the auditorium is plunged in darkness, a guitar is placed on the satellite stage by a technician who crosses in front of many people. No distraction should break the connection between Etheridge and her audience in that moment.She is, throughout “My Window,” a marvel with that audience.Back when her fame was rising, she told us in Act II, she started playing arenas and stadiums.“Thousands and thousands of people,” she said, “and the funny thing is, the more people there were, the further away y’all got.”On Broadway, they’re near enough again for her to commune with. And so she does.Melissa Etheridge: My WindowThrough Nov. 19 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More