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      ‘Primary Trust’ Review: Sipping Mai Tais, Until Bitter Reality Knocks

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      In Eboni Booth’s new play, William Jackson Harper performs with astonishing vulnerability as a man alone and adrift.Maybe you’ve seen him tucked into the corner of a dive bar, muttering to himself now and then, empty glasses multiplying on his table. And perhaps you’ve thought — though, it’s just as likely you haven’t — What’s up with that guy?In “Primary Trust,” the playwright Eboni Booth zooms in on one such man: He lives in a fictional suburb of Rochester, N.Y., where mai tais are his drink of choice at an unlikely tiki bar named Wally’s. He is alone and adrift in this tender, delicately detailed portrait, though surely he has not always been. Listen, and he’ll tell you about the moment he almost drowned and how he learned to keep his head above water.“Primary Trust,” which opened at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan on Thursday, finds Kenneth (William Jackson Harper, of “The Good Place”) approaching 40 when the bookstore where he’s worked for 20 years closes shop. (The owner, played by Jay O. Sanders, needs cash for surgery.) But Kenneth has never found a job on his own; social workers helped him get his current one some years after he was orphaned.Much of this back story Kenneth relays himself, addressing the audience, in the director Knud Adams’s graceful production for Roundabout Theater Company, from what resembles a miniaturized model of a provincial square. (The scaled-down set is by Marsha Ginsberg, and the elegant lighting is by Isabella Byrd.) In 15 years, Kenneth explains, all this will be leveled and replaced by condominiums. The municipal motto — “Welcome Friend, You’re Right on Time!” — feels laden with uncertain melancholy: It could be a salutation from the threshold of death.Harper, right, with Jay O. Sanders and April Matthis, who, our critic writes, turn small roles into four-course meals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMordant subtext and typically empty sentiments are among the ways Booth demonstrates that language can convey deep pain one minute and ring utterly hollow the next, usually in the service of capitalism. In contrast to Kenneth’s confessional narration are the rote greetings of a carousel of servers at Wally’s (all played by April Matthis, including one who becomes a fast and flirtatious friend) and the sales pitches Kenneth later lobs at customers (also played by Matthis) after he lands a teller position at a local bank. (“Primary Trust” doubles as the name of Kenneth’s new employer, and an abbreviated metaphor for what was lost when his mother died.)As in her superstore dark comedy “Paris,” presented by Atlantic Theater Company in 2020, Booth again probes the half-dread of working-class Black characters in a one-freeway-exit corner of the Northeast. And though Kenneth’s Blackness is an underlying aspect of his experience, it is not the acute source of his alienation. His foundational trauma, and his longtime coping mechanisms, are gradually revealed (early on it becomes clear that Bert, his near-constant companion played by Eric Berryman, is imaginary), and he begins to reach through the cracks of his isolation to discover good, decent people.Harper, who is onstage for nearly all of the production’s 95 minutes, performs with astonishing ease and vulnerability, particularly given the depths he is asked to plumb in monologues directly to the audience; he lends the currents flowing through Kenneth’s interior life extraordinary subtlety and immediacy. Booth’s one-man study is wonderfully vivid, but there’s only so much emotional engagement that the unburdening of feelings, rather than their enactment or discovery, can inspire. Her other characters are far more loosely sketched: Sanders and Matthis turn small roles, rich with concise, sideways detail, into four-course meals, paradoxically making them feel underused.The production’s play on perspective and proportion, with people as tall as buildings, enhance the undertones in Booth’s work that question who, and what, we pay attention to and why. Do New Yorkers, for example, who Kenneth remarks “step over human beings sleeping in the street,” think about places like this, or about why someone might be drinking for two at happy hour and talking to no one?Throughout the production a bell, like the ones that summon unseen workers from behind service counters, dings repeatedly, sometimes seemingly incessantly, variously marking the reset or passage of time. It feels like a disruption — an unexplained and overused device that interrupts the flow of life. Maybe it’s actually a wake up call, and not just for the man who’s been living in a daze.Primary TrustThrough July 2 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      He Made a Show About Grief. She Saw Herself in It.

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      Audible Theater’s leader and the creator of “Sorry for Your Loss” hope the autobiographical comedy helps others learn to talk about grief.Things are not necessarily as they appear. In Michael Cruz Kayne’s “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about grief, that is a prominent theme.When the producer Kate Navin caught the show last year at Caveat, a comedy theater on the Lower East Side in New York, she knew the instant he displayed a photo of himself with his wife and two children what he wasn’t telling the audience: that this wasn’t the full picture of his family, that it couldn’t be, because one of his three children had died.“In that moment I felt — I don’t want to use the word ‘seen’ because it can be cliché, but that’s the best word,” Navin said recently at a cafe in Greenwich Village.Her own family photos work the same way. Her first son, Jack, was 2 years and nine months old when he died in a fire with his grandmother, Navin’s mother-in-law, 10 years ago this August. Ask Navin what Jack was like and she’ll tell you he loved the movie “Cars,” prized raspberries above all foods and was remarkably kind — unusual for a toddler, she knows, having had two more.“You’d give him a bowl of raspberries and he’d hand them out to everybody in the room first before he’d start eating,” she said. “That was Jack. He was unbelievable.”Navin was deliberately not going to produce shows about grief when she joined the audio entertainment company Audible in 2017 to head its theater division.But when Daniel Goldstein, a writer-director who is a mutual friend of Navin and Kayne, took her to see “Sorry for Your Loss,” thinking that she might have a professional interest in it, he was correct. She thought the embrace of its humor could help other “lost parents,” as she calls them.Michael Cruz Kayne, pictured with his family in “Sorry for Your Loss,” a comedy show about reckoning with the death of his son.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show running through June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Audible Theater’s Greenwich Village base, is the latest iteration of “Sorry for Your Loss,” with shinier production values than Kayne, a staff writer on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” is accustomed to having at comedy clubs. Here he ponders the mysteries of permanent absence and lingering presence, and pokes at the culture’s deep discomfort with the inevitability of death and loss.Kayne, who hosts a podcast called “A Good Cry,” performed the first version of “Sorry for Your Loss” not long after a tweet he sent in November 2019, marking the 10th anniversary of the death of his son Fisher, from sepsis at 34 days old.Kayne had grown tired of not talking about that central fact of his life, which he said in a separate interview had become “the elephant in the room of my whole brain.” After the tweet went viral, he took that conversation to the stage, making a funny autobiographical show that allows sadness in.“I’m still at a point with it where I am happy to be identified with the story of my son,” Kayne said. “If that means that for a while, or forever, I am Grief Boy, things could be worse. This subject isn’t the only thing I want to contribute to the universe. But if it stopped here, I would feel like I got to say the thing I really wanted to say most of all.”These were not, by the way, maudlin interviews. But Navin did tear up when she recounted how terrified she had been of grocery shopping after Jack died, because she wouldn’t know what to say if she ran into one of his friends and they asked where he was.In the experience that Kayne articulates in the show, she recognized her own surreal isolation.She wants no one’s pity. But mention a child who died to someone who didn’t know, she said, and the conversation may not recover, because no matter how long ago it happened, people react as if your grief is fresh, and as if you are broken.“The mood shifts,” she said. “And it’s hard to be the person who caused the mood shift.”Kayne and Navin would like people to be less awkward about grief, which would let those who need to talk about it stop keeping it to themselves. “Sorry for Your Loss” provides one space for that.When I asked Kayne if he believes that art can heal, he quoted the W.H. Auden line “poetry makes nothing happen,” which he said he thinks about a lot.“I do think it’s possible for art to at least make you feel like you are not alone,” he allowed. “It’s so much to know that I’m not the only person who feels this way. If that is healing, which I think it is a little, then yes, I think art can heal people.”Navin, for her part, is certain that Kayne has changed her in a way that feels good, making her “less sheepish” about telling people that she has three children, and less worried about people’s reaction.“That’s a huge gift,” she said. “And he just makes me feel less damaged. Truly I feel less damaged than I did a year ago.” More

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      Summerworks Festival Opens With “Work Hard Have Fun Make History”

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      Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival opener, written by ruth tang, rages against the machines and examines human alienation.Like a dog nosing around in the background, a robot vacuum cleaner is a guaranteed scene stealer. Late in the new play “Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” the unfailingly compelling actor Susannah Perkins shares the stage with one: a whirring black disk busily roaming the industrial carpet, bumbling into walls yet never toppling over edges, at least not the night I saw the show.Perkins plays a phone service representative named Annie, on a call with a frantic customer whose new android assistant, an iWhip 2.0, has turned menacing.“What’s the command to make it go away?” the caller pleads.“‘Blades down, iWhip,’” Annie instructs.Perkins gives the line a perfect comic spin, but our eyes are on Annie’s own insensate labor saver. Unleash a robot and havoc may follow. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?“Work Hard Have Fun Make History,” whose title echoes an Amazon motto, is not at all on the side of the machines, but it is acutely unsettled by their rampancy in our increasingly fractionalized, disembodied culture. Written by ruth tang (who lowercases their name) and directed by Caitlin Sullivan, this is the first production in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks festival, an annual showcase for off-kilter experimentation at the Wild Project in the East Village.There is, unfortunately, a nagging sense that a tumult of tenuously related ideas and a diffuse crowd of characters have overwhelmed this thought-provoking, plot-free comedy, which above all is about human alienation: from the body, from physical presence, from other people.It is about labor, both the kind that brings home paychecks and the kind that brings babies into the world, and about out-of-control greed disguised as genius; thus a couple of amusingly dim tech-bro characters called Jeff (Sagan Chen) and Elon (the performer who goes by b). It is about gender identity, and sex, and coupledom, and the pain of parental rejection. It is about climate change, and artificial intelligence that gets ever smarter while remaining, in elemental ways, extremely dumb. It is about containers — shipping boxes figure heavily — and the spilling over of that which cannot be contained.Which is a lot to fit into a 75-minute show. On a utilitarian set by the design collective dots, under warehouse-stark lighting by Isabella Byrd, “Work Hard” is told in a series of fragmentary scenes that aren’t always as taut as they might have been. Elon and Jeff, for example, ramble.With much doubling by the cast of three, and some dialogue in voice-over (sound design is by Lee Kinney), the show has a progression that can be cumulative, as with a grumpily funny baby (Chen) whom we first meet in utero and follow into life. But this sharply observant, sometimes poignant, grimly comic play is too scattershot to gather force as it goes on.Work Hard Have Fun Make HistoryThrough May 30 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘Demons’ Review: Grief Is the Thing with Red Fur

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      A family processes its bereavement in the midst of a demonic haunting in Keelay Gipson’s new play for Bushwick Starr.When Danily, a red-furred, purple-lipped beast, appears onstage, his giant eyelids fluttering and huge maw flapping, he is irresistibly adorable, like something from Jim Henson’s dreams.And did I mention he’s a demon?In “Demons,” presented by Bushwick Starr at the Connelly Theater, a family grieving the recent death of its complicated patriarch becomes the target of a haunting by a puppet ghoul, the unexpected star of an otherwise disorderly production.The story begins when a family gathers for a funeral. The loud, combative Sissy (Paige Gilbert) and her brother, the reserved Bubba (Donell James Foreman), are home, their respective partners in tow, to tend to their God-fearing mother (Gayle Samuels) and to mourn their late father. Mama and Sissy are always fighting, and Bubba is forced to swallow his mother’s homophobia, even in front of his partner (Ashton Muñiz). To top it off, Bubba must also contend with the death of a father who never recognized his son’s queer identity.The play, written by Keelay Gipson, who also directs, is divided into five parts, based on the stages of grief. Each section consists of three scenes, showing the relatives chatting, watching TV, playing spades, all while struggling to communicate their real feelings to one another. When the family’s unspoken secrets come out into the open, our demon appears to exacerbate the conflicts, watching with a pair of glowing eyes in the dark, or pulling poltergeist-like shenanigans during a late-night TV session.You could say Danily is more human than the human characters around him (the fantastic puppet design is by Cedwan Hooks, and Jon Riddleberger directs the puppetry). Because otherwise, Gipson’s two-dimensional direction leaves the cast’s performances transparent. Mama, as the stern but loving matriarch, is a stock character, and Sissy is written unsympathetically and almost exclusively speaks in the tenor of a whine. Sissy and Bubba’s partners aren’t even named.Minjoo Kim’s lighting design, however, is impressive, from the angular splash of light strewn over white roses in a vase to the hazy spotlight over a character’s face replicating the glow of a TV set.But other production elements muddle rather than clarify the storytelling. The set design, by Yu Shibagaki, with its black-and-white floral couches and slate-gray textured walls, works for a funeral parlor, but it can’t pull off doubling as Mama’s home. And the television switches between channels depicting “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Labyrinth,” a trailer for the 2001 movie “Kingdom Come” and then later a “Real Housewives” special, seeming to intentionally nod to several different decades and making the setting unclear.By the end, at least one character has faced his demons, literal and figurative. As for the play, much still bedevils it.DemonsThrough June 3 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards

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      The screenwriters’ strike threatened next month’s broadcast, a key marketing moment for the fragile theater industry. That’s when leading dramatists sprang into action.Martyna Majok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was revising her musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” after a long day in a developmental workshop when she heard the news: The union representing striking screenwriters was not going to grant a waiver for the Tony Awards, imperiling this year’s telecast.So at three in the morning, she set aside her script to join a group of playwrights frantically writing emails and making phone calls to leaders of the Writers Guild of America, urging the union not to make the pandemic-hobbled theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood dispute. “I had to try,” she said.Surprising even themselves, the army of artists succeeded. The screenwriters’ union agreed to a compromise: it said it would not picket the ceremony as long as the show does not rely on a written script.“Theater is having a very hard time coming back from the devastating effects of the pandemic — shows are struggling and nonprofit theaters are struggling terribly,” said Tony Kushner, who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest living playwrights, and is, like many of his peers, also a screenwriter. “Ethically and morally, this felt like a recognition of the particular vulnerability of the theater industry. It’s the right thing to do, and costs us nothing.”Kushner, who is best known for the Pulitzer-winning play “Angels in America,” is a fiery supporter of the strike who freely denounces the “unconscionable greed” of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began. But he spent a weekend calling and writing union leaders in both New York and Los Angeles, urging them to find a way to let the Tony Awards happen, arguing that canceling them would have been far more damaging to theater artists than to CBS, which broadcasts the event.He was among a number of acclaimed dramatists — including David Henry Hwang and Jeremy O. Harris — who spent a weekend phoning and emailing union leaders. At least a half-dozen Pulitzer winners joined the cause, including Lynn Nottage (“Sweat” and “Ruined”), Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful”), David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) and Majok (“Cost of Living”).“Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, is nominated for best new play. Majok joined other playwrights lobbying the writers’ union to allow the Tonys telecast to proceed. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMajok, who is a first-time Tony nominee herself this year for “Cost of Living,” said, “I approached them with respect and gratitude for all they have done for me,” she said, “but this decision was impacting so many of my colleagues and friends deeply, in an industry that is still financially struggling.”Writers are never the main attraction at the Tony Awards. The annual ceremony centers musical theater, hoping that razzle-dazzle song and dance numbers will inspire viewers to get up off their couches and come visit Broadway. The telecast often struggles with how to represent serious drama.But playwrights say they treasure the Tonys, because the ceremony introduces new audiences to theater. “In one way or another, it’s all connected,” Kushner said.And for once playwrights actually had power, because in recent years, as the number of scripted series on television and streaming services has exploded, many of them have also taken jobs working in film and television, which pays much better than the theater industry. Many of the playwrights concerned about the Tony Awards were also members of the Writers Guild — some quite successful, like Kushner, who wrote the scripts for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “Lincoln,” “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans,” and Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote “The Waverly Gallery” for the stage and “Manchester by the Sea” for the screen.“Most playwrights are W.G.A. members, because they have to make a living and get health insurance,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, which is a trade association of theater writers. “And yes, there was a great deal of lobbying of the W.G.A. by many of them to find a way to get the broadcast on.”The screenwriters’ union was torn over whether to assist the Tony Awards, with its eastern branch, filled with playwright members more sympathetic than the affiliated western branch, which is more Hollywood-oriented. It did not go unnoticed that many theatrical workers have been vocally supporting the writers’ strike, including Kate Shindle, the president of the Actors’ Equity Association, who has brought members of her union to the picket lines and who spoke with the heads of both branches of the screenwriters’ guild.“There was no master strategy involved — we were just standing up for the writers,” Shindle said. “But I’m happy with the way that it seems like a decision came about: writers talking to and debating with each other, which feels like the right thing.”The Tonys seem likely to be a rare exception. In the days following the greenlighting of the theatrical awards, this year’s Peabody Awards, which honor storytelling in electronic media, were canceled, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor work on television, were postponed.Asked about the decision, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the screenwriters’ guild’s eastern branch, offered an emailed statement that said, in part, “we recognize the devastating impact the absence of a Tonys would have on our New York theater community. Here in W.G.A. East, we have many, many members who are playwrights, and we are deeply intertwined with our sister unions whose members work in the theater.”Playwrights were not actually the first choice of Broadway boosters strategizing about how to save the Tonys — at first, industry leaders thought they might look to prominent politicians and famous actors to make their case. But they quickly realized that playwrights, because of their ties to the W.G.A., were better positioned to influence the discussion. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” and Gina Gionfriddo (“Rapture, Blister, Burn”) rallied writers to the cause, along with the agent Joe Machota, who is the head of theater for Creative Artists Agency.This year, they argued, would be an especially unfortunate time to downgrade the Tony Awards.Ariana DeBose, who hosted last year’s Tony Awards, is expected back this year, but it’s unclear what a ceremony without a script will look like.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway attendance and overall grosses remain well below prepandemic levels, and new musicals are struggling — four of the five nominated shows are losing money most weeks.Unlike the Oscars, which generally take place after the theatrical runs of nominated films, the Tonys take place early in the run of most nominated musicals, so they can translate into ticket sales. The Tonys matter for plays in a different way: nominations and wins have an enormous impact on how often those works are staged, read and taught.“People that don’t work in playwriting don’t always have a meaningful understanding of how important Broadway is to Off Broadway and to regional theaters — they’re really a beacon for the community at large, and even if you don’t care about the glitz and the glamour, if they start to lose money, it has impacts all over the country,” said Tanya Barfield, a playwright and television writer who is the co-director of the playwriting program at Juilliard.After she heard her union had denied a waiver for the Tony Awards, a “heartbroken” Barfield joined a picket line with a homemade “I ❤️ the Tony Awards” sticker on her WGA sign. And she wrote union leaders. “We wanted to make sure theaters did not become a casualty,” she said.Another concern: this year’s Tony Awards feature an unusually diverse group of nominees, reflecting the increasingly diverse array of shows staged on Broadway since 2020. Five of this year’s nominated new plays and play revivals are by Black writers; four of the five nominees for best actor in a play are Black; the best score category for the first time includes an Asian American woman; and the acting nominees include two gender nonconforming performers as well as a woman who is a double amputee.“We need to showcase what we’ve been seeing with the diverse talent and rich storytelling of the past few years,” Majok said.The Tonys will be different this year. The event will take place, as planned, at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, with a live audience, live performances of musical numbers from nominated shows, and the presentation and acceptance of awards. But there will be no scripted material (a draft script had been submitted, but will not be used) and no scripted opening number (Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to write one). Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress who had been named its host for the second year in a row, is still expected to take part, but it is not clear what role she will play.One new element that is expected at this year’s ceremony? Shout-outs to the striking screenwriters. Hwang, a W.G.A. member who called and emailed union leaders asking them to rethink their position on the Tonys, said, “I anticipate that there will be a lot of speeches that express our appreciation and support for the guild on Tony night.” More

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      Arian Moayed Plays Creepy Men for Thoughtful Reasons

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      In roles in HBO’s “Succession” and “A Doll’s House” on Broadway, politics are never far from mind for the Iranian American actor.The actor Arian Moayed has an old passport photo that he usually keeps in his wallet: a black-and-white image of a small, darling boy with big dark eyes, wearing a whimsical sweater.We had been talking for nearly 90 minutes when he mentioned it. I’d asked if he remembered anything from his earliest childhood, in Iran in the 1980s.“The thing that I remember the most is fear,” he said. “The feeling of fear. Everywhere.”Then he told me about the picture. It’s him at 5 or so, shortly before his family immigrated to the United States in 1986. He described the look on his face — “real angry” — and his memory of sitting for the photo: how his mother, her hijab slipping, kept urging him in vain to smile.“And on the car ride back,” he said, “I told my mom that I thought that the camera was a gun and I was at a firing range. Because in Iran, on television, they would be showing public executions in the news.”So. The little guy in the sweater, trying to be brave, thought he was about to be shot.At 43, Moayed is a million miles from the fraught reality of that frightened child. He is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, Kendall Roy’s old friend. And he is currently starring on Broadway as the ultra-controlling husband Torvald Helmer in “A Doll’s House,” opposite Jessica Chastain as Nora, the wife who walks out the door.Jessica Chastain, left, as Nora and Moayed as her ultra-controlling husband, Torvald, in “A Doll’s House” at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Moayed likes to keep the photo close.“I always want to remind myself that this is where it all came from,” he said.It was late April when we spoke at the Hudson Theater, on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and the show’s six Tony Award nominations were yet to come — the one for him, for best featured actor in a play, his second. His first was for his Broadway debut, as a sweet Iraqi topiary artist turned wartime translator, opposite Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” in 2011.Moayed’s Torvald could not be more different. A lawyer tapped to run a bank, he micromanages his wife, monitoring what she eats and spends. At once chilling and comical, he speaks to Nora in a voice soft as a cat’s paw, muscles and claws hidden just beneath the fur. He does not take her seriously as an adult human being, ever, yet he seems totally unaware of his own fragile vanity. He is the kind of man it is dangerous to laugh at, because ridicule infuriates him.It is an insidiously knowing portrayal of one of the great terrible husbands of the stage. But Moayed, who grew up in a suburb of Chicago and spent most of his career pigeonholed into Middle Eastern roles, hadn’t been sure he wanted to play Torvald at all.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” he said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist. ‘A Doll’s House’ and Ibsen was like: Oh, that is a category of things that’s never going to happen for me.”The British director Jamie Lloyd had other ideas. After seeing Moayed in “Bengal Tiger,” he noticed him over the years consistently giving standout performances — as the scheming Stewy in “Succession,” of course, but also in YouTube clips of the Off Broadway two-hander “Guards at the Taj” (Moayed won an Obie for that, in 2016), and in the film “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” as Peter Parker’s enemy Agent Cleary.“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,’” Moayed said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available for me were being an ensemble member in some sort of Shakespeare regional theater thing, or playing a terrorist.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGearing up to stage Amy Herzog’s “A Doll’s House” adaptation on Broadway, Lloyd spotted Moayed on a list of possible actors for a different role, but sensed that he was “more of a Torvald than anything.”“My feeling was that he’s clearly someone who doesn’t mind being unlikable,” Lloyd said by phone. “Because he knows that there’s a reason for it. And he’s so compelling as these unlikable characters.”What initially intrigued Moayed about this version of “A Doll’s House” was Herzog, whose short play — “Gina From Yoga Two, Is That Your Boyfriend?” — he’d acted in at the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova in 2010. Like Torvald, his character in that play was a species of creep, though in an interview Herzog described Moayed as “the menschiest person” and “definitely the furthest cry from the actual Torvald that you could find.”“His feminism is not a posture,” she said.When Lloyd asked her opinion of casting Moayed, she added, “I just knew, I knew he could do it.”What swayed Moayed about the role was the metaphor that leaped out at him from Herzog’s script. When he first read it last autumn, he was flying from Budapest, where he had been shooting a movie, to Berlin, where he was attending a protest against the Iranian government’s repression of women and girls — part of a movement led by Iranian women and girls.The story of Nora, freeing herself from the gilded cage of her marriage to a profoundly self-centered man, reverberated with him on a societal level.“I’m reading it, and all I see in this play is Iran,” he said.Aside from his stage work, Moayed is widely known to fans of the HBO drama “Succession” for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, an old friend of Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong, right).Peter Kramer/HBOMoayed stopped in London for a chemistry meeting with Lloyd, and they took a long walk through the city, where an Iranian protest was happening in Trafalgar Square. Moayed recalled saying that he didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist, someone who would physically threaten his wife.“If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.What interested him was subtler: investigating what he called “the micro cuts” that men inflict on women — in Torvald’s case, while cooing adoringly.“If you show humanistic qualities,” Moayed said, “you get a lot of people to look at it and be like, ‘Oh, I wonder if I do that.’”For the audience, the production can work on multiple levels: as a wake-up call for unwitting misogynists, as a catalyst for breakups, as an echo of awful exes. And, based on what Moayed has heard from Iranian friends and family, also as the metaphor he perceived.The parallel is so clear to his mother, he said, that she is convinced — albeit mistakenly, Lloyd confirmed — that his being Iranian is why he got the job.Moayed was born in 1980, the year after the Iranian Revolution ousted a secular, autocratic government and ushered in a theocracy. His oldest brother Amir was already in Illinois, and when Moayed’s family joined him there in 1986, his other brother Omid came along. But their beloved sister, Homeira, who had taken care of young Arian in Iran, had married there. It took 17 years to bring her over.Moayed’s initial interest in acting may have come from noticing how much his parents, middle-aged newcomers to a strange country, laughed at the classic Hollywood films they introduced him to, like Charlie Chaplin comedies and “Singin’ in the Rain.”“Subconsciously, I think I was trying to mimic that and just release a little bit of the tension that was inside of that traum—” He stopped himself before he finished the word. Then: “Well, it was traumatic. But that turmoil that was those first 10 years or so.”Moayed didn’t want to play Torvald as a “chest-out” chauvinist. “If you see that onstage, it’s very easy for a male to be like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesStewy, Moayed’s loose-cannon capitalist in “Succession” — a performance that got him an Emmy Award nomination last year — is also of Iranian descent. Early on, Moayed and Jesse Armstrong, the series’ creator, talked about which wave of immigrants Stewy’s family might belong to. Moayed, whose father was a banker in Iran, preferred his own.“I said, I think they came in the ’80s, which means that he came under duress, lost a lot of money,” he said. “I just like that trajectory, that Stewy climbed the ranks real fast. And was good at it, and went to a bunch of fancy private schools, got in somehow and became friends with Kendall, and then the rest is history.”Both Stewy and Torvald are centrally concerned with money and the acquisition of it. Moayed, in contrast, is intrinsically political. Around 2006, he decided that he wouldn’t play terrorists — insalubriously for his bank account in the heyday of “Homeland” and “24.”He believes passionately in the notion of artist as citizen, and in using art to “move the needle forward,” as he likes to say. For him, that applies to teaching and making theater with Waterwell, the New York City arts nonprofit he co-founded in 2002, but also to acting in shows like “A Doll’s House” and “Succession” — a series that, he said, demonstrates “how capitalism really is skewed and there shouldn’t be a few people that own all that money.”His perspective would come as a surprise to the finance-bro Stewy fans who, encountering Moayed in the real world, frequently, fruitlessly invite him to do cocaine with them.He is not that person — even if Stewy is the character who shook up casting directors’ perception that Moayed should play only Middle Easterners and humorless, heavy drama. A whole spectrum of creepy-guy roles has opened up to him, Torvald among them.He does get to channel his inner mensch, though, in the new Nicole Holofcener movie, “You Hurt My Feelings,” as he also did in “The Humans,” a hit on Broadway in 2016.But if Moayed could do something as an actor that he’s never had a chance to? He would dip into a genre he loves, ideally with his “A Doll’s House” co-star.“Jessica and I, we’re both like, ‘We should do a romantic comedy together,’” he said.His favorite is “When Harry Met Sally,” but he’s thinking more along the lines of “Romancing the Stone.”“A romantic comedy adventure,” he said, “would be some real friggin’ fun.” More

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      ‘Monsoon Wedding’ Review: Marriage of Musical Styles, With Mixed Results

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      Mira Nair’s 2001 movie about a couple brought together by their families becomes a song-filled pageant, with mixed results.In musicals, the marriage of elements is everything. A story that’s too thin will dissolve when mixed with the songs. A story that’s too heavy won’t let the songs lift off. To get the right fizzy blend, the balance must be perfect.That is not yet the case with Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” which opened Monday in an always busy, sometimes touching, but strangely mild production at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Its shambolic plot lines (drawn from Nair’s 2001 film of the same name) and Indian-pop-meets-marching-band songs, though full of interest individually, fail to build on themselves or one another, leaving the intertwined tale of love and obligation to unravel as fast as it spins.Not that the movie was a landmark of pith. The arranged marriage of the rich “South Delhi girl” Aditi Verma (played here by Salena Qureshi) and the U.S.-raised Hemant Rai (Deven Kolluri) was but one strand of a multifamily, multigenerational tale arranged in a riotous collage of small, colorful scenes. It didn’t matter how many went nowhere; the editing was all.The musical tries to maintain that quick-cut effect while also squeezing the material into a traditional musical theater format. Nair told The New York Times she’d been inspired by the example of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a classic that, like “Monsoon Wedding,” encompasses one family’s marital chaos as part of a community’s encounter with tradition and change.But “Fiddler” was adapted from a collection of short stories about a strong central character, not from a movie about many. The difference shows. The musical’s book, by Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan, is all over the place, and as staged by Nair on an abstract courtyard set by Jason Ardizzone-West, you rarely know where that is. The production seems to think in camera terms, as if a lens were still directing the audience’s attention when in fact nothing is.From left, Rhea Yadav, Sharvari Deshpande and Salena Qureshi in the production, directed by Mira Nair.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesI’m not sure anything could. Along with the frenzy of assembling the enormous celebration, the musical, like the film, encompasses a secondary comic romance between Dubey, the wedding planner, and Alice, the Vermas’s put-upon maid. The marriage of Aditi’s parents (Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh) also gets a look, as do the romantic ideas of a tweenish cousin and a gayish brother, would-be in-laws, other relatives, local workers and (it sometimes seems) all of Delhi.Nair does create musical-like texture by pulling some of these stories forward while pushing others back. The problem that threatens Aditi’s marriage — she is not yet over her affair with a married man — is recessed so far it essentially disappears upstage, depriving the crisis of serious tension. In its place we get the milder problem of deracination, since she will have to move to Hemant’s home in the States: Can she learn to love New Jersey?The problem that threatens the marriage of Dubey (Namit Das) and Alice (Anisha Nagarajan) has on the other hand been upgraded from almost indecipherable in the movie to very serious indeed: In a country born in bitter partition, ethnic or religious divides of any sort — he’s Hindu and she’s Christian — can be harrowing. The resolution is facile (“the heart never tells a lie”) but at least it’s in a song.That song, sung by Dubey’s mother (Sargam Ipshita Bali) to her overwrought son, is lovely, one of the few with a clear personality among 22 in a score that too often feels like a collection of snippets. In one, the gorgeous “Madhaniyan,” Aditi’s father bids her farewell on the eve of the marriage, pulling the same strings as “Far From the Home I Love” in “Fiddler.” (Well, not quite the same strings; the excellent eight-person band is highlighted by a sitar.)But gorgeous or not, the score (music by Vishal Bhardwaj, lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead) is, like the script, all over the place. When the style, whether American or Indian, occasionally matches the characters and situation, the alignment makes the moment pop. An absurd production number called “Chuk Chuk” (for the sound a train makes as Dubey chases one to win Alice) sounds straight out of Bollywood, and with its cinematic projections (by David Bengali) and frenetic choreography (by Shampa Gopikrishna) it fits the dramatic moment in a way that excuses its utter lack of logic. A white horse is involved.Namit Das and Anisha Nagarajan as the lovers in a secondary romance in the show.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOtherwise, the musicalization feels both too assertive and too inconclusive, like a parade passing by. (There are rarely buttons on the songs to tell you they’re done, leaving the audience wondering whether to applaud.) Only in one song is there a concerted approach to the dramatic experience. The song involves Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, raised with her as a sister. Serious and studious, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, mostly as a way of escaping the marital expectations that Aditi, a pampered princess — “even your panties are ironed” — is all too willing to meet.That Ria is also escaping a social atmosphere that tolerates the sexual abuse of girls is a theme that Nair emphasizes much more strongly here than in the film. But powerful as this is, especially in Deshpande’s performance, it is also destabilizing. It’s hard to make the leap from her late-Act II outcry, “Be a Good Girl,” to the happy ending, complete with exquisite saris (by Arjun Bhasin), a celebratory remix and the requisite double wedding.How Ria became the central figure here — hers is the only solo number in the show — is a bit of a mystery, as if “Fiddler” decided to put Chava, the disowned daughter, above the title. Longer scenes (some are just three lines) might have helped explain the change, or shift our expectations in a show called “Monsoon Wedding” to the character who specifically doesn’t want to get married.Still, you have to be grateful that Ria has elicited from the authors their most powerful writing. In “Leaving Means Returning,” sung to her by her stepfather, a lyric encapsulates in a beautiful phrase the tempting if ambivalent embrace of family: “We are your comfort and your courtyard.” Just so, genre is a place of safety but also a kind of prison. “Monsoon Wedding” does not quite escape either.Monsoon WeddingThrough June 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More