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      Stand-Up Comics Are Asking, What’s So Funny About Grief?

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      Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?The pandemic certainly put grief on the minds of artists and audiences, and that also explains a boom in books, theater, podcasts and television on the subject. One way to look at the final season of “Succession” is as a cringe comedy about people who are terrible at grieving.But the growth of stand-up on this theme is rooted just as much in aesthetic changes in the form. One of the most exciting developments in popular culture over the past decade is the growing ambition of comedy. Not only has it produced some of the finest, most urgent art on the pandemic, #MeToo and other newsworthy topics, but comics have also displayed a broader emotional palette than they did a generation ago. They are after more than just laughs. These new shows illustrate how grief, precisely because it’s usually handled with solemnity, jargon and unsaid thoughts, is ripe territory for stand-up.Michael Cruz Kayne warns audiences at his show about the death of his son that they might cry, adding, “If you don’t, that’s rude.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, there’s so much grief comedy right now that it’s already developed its own clichés: Joan Didion references, bits about the phrase “He’s in a better place.” Striking the right balance between light and dark is also tricky. Several comics sink into an indulgence they can’t afford. Comedy doesn’t have to be only about jokes, but when it stops being funny, there had better be a good reason.A SIGNAL TURNING POINT in modern stand-up was the moment when Tig Notaro walked onstage at a club in 2012, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you. I have cancer. Thank you.” She revealed that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that her mother had died. She wondered aloud, “What if I transitioned into silly jokes?”Then a funny thing happened: The crowd protested, loudly. Notaro sounded surprised, even mocking the interest in bad news, before adding: “Now I feel bad I don’t have more tragedy to share.”That storied set was eventually released as a special, called “Live,” to considerable acclaim. Many comics followed with raw tragedies to share. Laurie Kilmartin live-tweeted as her father died before turning that into a special. Doug Stanhope used his mother’s last days for a baroque routine.Comedy has always gravitated toward darkness. Richard Pryor and George Carlin broached the saddest subjects. But there is a difference in comedy today, in aim and overtness. An extreme example is “Red Blue Green,” a 2022 special from Drew Michael, who has produced some of the most formally experimental and artistically polarizing hours in recent years. Toward the end, he describes comedy as “mining sadness” and transforming it into a balloon animal to make it palatable for an audience. That was the setup to the twist, a long rant about his own failings and insecurities and miseries that ends without a punchline. The result was something more like therapy than art — a deflated balloon.This is the risk of comedy that lingers in tragedy. It can get stuck there. Hannah Gadsby had also toyed with the surprise of setting up tension without relieving it in the surprise hit “Nanette,” to make a point about how always going for the joke can stunt your growth. That success touched a nerve, and the backlash included loud complaints that it wasn’t comedy at all. Besides giving short shrift to Gadsby’s deft balancing act, this policing of genre boundaries does comedy no favors. A flexible, broad art form is a healthy one.Hannah Gadsby in their special “Nanette,” which set up tension without relieving it. NetflixThe push into melancholy territory can be found in more ingratiating work, including specials by the most commercial stars. In his 2018 special, Adam Sandler downshifted into melancholy and sang about the death of his friend Chris Farley. But the tone has changed most dramatically among a younger generation of comics who seem interested in more than mere escapist entertainment. It’s also probably no coincidence that little-known comics are more likely these days to get attention from producers and industry people if they build shows around a narrative or theme.“At this point in comedy, it’s not enough to be funny,” Ben Wasserman said in the Brooklyn funeral parlor where he staged his vaudevillian “Live After Death,” which explores the death of his father and grandfather (not to mention his tragic lack of an agent). “You have to make people feel.”MAYBE THAT WAS SAID with tongue in cheek, maybe not. Either way, there’s no question that in certain quarters of comedy, jokes are not enough.For instance, at shows around New York, the quirky, swaggering Gastor Almonte has been performing a hilarious 10 to 15 minutes about his hatred of oatmeal. In a previous era that might have added up to a debut special that resembled the work of Jim Gaffigan. But when Almonte turned it into an hourlong solo show, “The Sugar,” that material was beefed up with a soul-searching story about his diabetes diagnosis and how the prospect of mortality changed his family. Watching it, I confess I wondered what the Gaffigan version of this show would look like.“The Sugar” was staged downtown at Soho Playhouse, which has developed into a hub of weighty theatrical stand-up shows, many of which are transfers from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One of that theater’s biggest hits of the year was Sam Morrison’s breakthrough, “Sugar Daddy.”Quick-witted and charismatic, Morrison delivered a tightly honed work about the pain of losing his boyfriend that is both a love letter to his partner and a self-deprecating satire of a culture of mourning, one that spoofs well-intentioned condolences and support groups. He argued that the difference between comedy and tragedy was thin, saying that in the plays of Shakespeare, “comedy is only tragedy with a marriage at the end.” He explained that grief was lonely and impossible and “nothing helps as much as this show,” before a pinpoint pause, “because you guys can’t talk.” And he flat out played the vain millennial fool. “What is trauma but unmonetized content?” he asks, echoing a line from “WandaVision,” a series that itself is a grief narrative.In contrast to Drew Michael, Morrison is uncomfortable going long without a laugh. I saw the show twice, and the second time the punchlines had become faster, more insistent, almost as if the best argument he came up with was to keep you laughing.Most of these comics share a belief that discussing the subject has become taboo, even stigmatized. “We don’t talk about grief: We keep our grief to ourselves,” Kayne says in “Sorry for Your Loss.” Glazer hit this same theme. “For that reason alone,” she says, “I want to talk about it.”There is an irony in so many comedians talking about grief by saying no one talks about grief. It evokes the parade of cancel culture-obsessed comics complaining about how you can’t joke about anything without getting canceled while doing that very thing. But the grieving comics are quicker to mock and undercut their own motivations.The fundamental hallmark of these shows is a meticulous self-awareness. The comics are constantly justifying their own work. There’s a defensiveness here, an anxiety that is understandable. Grief doesn’t sound like a fun night out. And there has been a backlash that you can detect from other comics, even ones practicing dark comedy. In his amusingly navel-gazing special “Blocks,” Neal Brennan poked fun at himself and others by terming this genre “stand-up traumedy.”In “Baby J,” John Mulaney mocked the idea of exploiting death. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixJohn Mulaney ridiculed the tendency to exploit death in his special, “Baby J,” by recalling how in elementary school he was jealous of a classmate whose grandfather had died because he became the center of attention. The recent movie “Sick of Myself” takes an even darker view in its scathing satire of the culture of victimhood. In one scene, the wildly self-involved protagonist fantasizes about her own funeral. It’s funny, if glib and uncharitable, in the way that biting satire often is.The truth is that death is too good of a straight man to ignore.So many of the opening jokes get their laughs by treating mortality with just the right amount of irreverence. (Glazer begins with “I hope you like stillbirth.”) The lightest touch is just enough. Witness the dry understatement of this line from the comic Rob Delaney’s wrenching memoir “A Heart That Works,” about the death of his young son: “In between Henry’s birth and his death was his life. That was my favorite part.”Another reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. Even if we don’t know someone who has died, we will. Or as Kayne explained to his audience: “We’re all pre-dead.”When someone dies, the conversations follow a tight script. Sorry for your loss. There are no words. We are all afraid of saying the wrong thing, and those suffering don’t entirely know how to respond. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. The competitiveness of grief is a frequent subject. Who suffers most? The consensus is it’s parents of children who die, but only in these shows might you hear someone weigh the levels of pain of a parent of a 2-year-old versus that of a 10-year-old (as Colin Campbell does in “Grief: A One Man Shitshow,” about the gutting experience of losing two teenage children in a car crash).While it might seem counterintuitive, the popularity of joking about death represents a welcome shift from pessimism about comedy that was popular among performers like Gadsby and Michelle Wolf during the Trump era. These more recent comics generally share a faith that comedy helps — even if only a little. There’s a joy in the performances of Morrison, Kayne and Alyssa Limperis (whose “No Bad Days” focuses on her late father) that takes you by surprise.It makes you question the seeming obviousness of the incongruity of this kind of comedy. Death is an integral part of life, one every great art form explores. It’s the existential elephant in every room. Why do comics joke about it? A better question: How can they avoid it?Ali Siddiq in “The Domino Effect 2: Loss.” He avoids self-aware jokes and instead leans into stories you can get lost in.via YouTubeThis may be part of the reason the most riveting special on grief spends no time analyzing the subject. In his eye-opening “The Domino Effect 2: Loss,” Ali Siddiq, a revelation of a performer, adopts a different approach. Instead of self-aware jokes, he leans into stories that are easy to get lost in, especially with his jaunty, magnetic delivery. Looking back on his childhood, he describes how he became a drug dealer and lost a girlfriend, a sister and eventually his freedom. He tells the story of his arrest with vivid, suspenseful detail, but also sadness at the cascading devastation of loss. It’s the rare comedy about grief that takes the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”THE BEST ART DOESN’T hit you over the head. It taps your temple with metaphor, allusion and maybe an oblique tease. Stand-up is so immediate, so direct in its relationship between the comic and the audience, that there’s a temptation to just be blunt, to tie up and underline your points with a punchline that calls back to an earlier one. But while there are only a limited number of subjects to joke about, there are infinite ways to do it. That variety is where art flourishes.One theme repeatedly voiced in these shows is the impossibility of overcoming sadness. We are told that time will not heal all wounds; that grief makes you want to get others to understand, even if they never will. The final stage of grief, the real one, is acceptance, and in one of his early jokes, Michael Cruz Kayne tells you that is the one you will never get to.You don’t need to have endured the death of a loved one to confront this problem, the one of failure. But you can try approaching it in different ways. This is what Kayne’s show is all about, how you can see the same thing from a radically different perspective. He cleverly illustrates this point by looking at examples in math, language and, most of all, comedy. The death of a child is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s obscene to use it for comedy, to laugh at it.But by turning this experience into a show, he keeps the memory of his son alive. It’s a subtle, moving performance that finds beauty in the trying. You get the sense that it’s what allows him to laugh at things he shouldn’t. When he takes the body of his child to a funeral home for cremation, he pays the bill and receives a receipt, which is projected on the wall behind him. It reads: “Thank you please come again.” More

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      In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

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      Levi Holloway on his psychological thriller starring Laurie Metcalf: “It wears the jacket of horror. But I think it’s more heart than horror.”When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind. Martin McDonagh’s gruesome “The Pillowman” is one. Tracy Letts came up with two: the gleefully nasty thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoia tale “Bug.”This certainly makes Levi Holloway’s “Grey House,” now in previews at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, an oddity. The premise is classic horror: Stranded in a blizzard, a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) end up in an eerie house filled with rather unusual children and their minder (Laurie Metcalf).“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, which premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”Paul Sparks, center, as a stranded traveler who finds shelter in a house occupied by, clockwise from left: Colby Kipnes, Sophia Anne Caruso, Eamon Patrick O’Connell, Millicent Simmonds and Alyssa Emily Marvin in “Grey House.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe genre may be scarce onstage but none of the major players here are strangers to works investigating disturbing tensions or the boundaries of reality. Metcalf and Sparks share a Stephen King connection: she starred in “Misery” on Broadway, and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” which is set in King’s fictional universe. Maslany’s virtuosic portrayal of numerous clones in the series “Orphan Black” earned her an Emmy Award. Millicent Simmonds played Emily Blunt’s daughter, Regan, in “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part 2,” while Sophia Anne Caruso played Lydia in the “Beetlejuice” musical on Broadway and starred in the Netflix fantasy film “The School for Good and Evil.”Even the director, Joe Mantello, has partaken, putting on his actor’s cap to play a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”During a series of interviews that took place in the Lyceum’s appropriately atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and the particular challenges and rewards of “Grey House,” which opens on May 30. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Levi HollowayWhen Holloway was 5, his father took him to see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a movie theater. “The skin was taken off of me,” Holloway said, “I was so scared.”Undeterred, his father eventually bought him a subscription to the horror film magazine Fangoria, so young Levi could understand the mechanics of fear. To encourage his kid to read, Dad gave him books by Stephen King, starting with “The Stand.”As a playwright, he has embraced horror partly out of genuine love (he mentioned John Carpenter’s “The Thing” as a favorite, and don’t get him started on why “The Exorcist III” is the best of the series) but also as a way to process a major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was killed at the age of 35. “It was so meaningless and pointless, and such a baffling event that it got me thinking about the why of it,” he said.“I started thinking about predestination and fate and how no matter what direction we’re going, we’re going to end up where we have to be,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write about grief, where you put it and the house that holds it.”Caruso, left, and Metcalf, who plays a minder of a group of children, in the play, directed by Joe Mantello.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSophia Anne Caruso“Mind games, manipulation, psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genre of quote horror to me,” Caruso said. “And I think that this play definitely sits in the ‘psychological thriller’ section of horror.”The young actress has her issues with the genre, in which she sees women as often losing power. “But throughout this story, we are holding a lot of power without people directly realizing it,” she said of the play’s women. (Well, maybe not all of them.)“What I love about my character is I feel like she’s always one step ahead,” Caruso said of her role, which makes the most of the actress’s gift for sardonic delivery. “She knows exactly where we’re going but she doesn’t show it, and that’s a fun frustration to play with.”Joe MantelloBefore rehearsals began, Mantello watched “The Shining,” in which he saw parallels with Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller and, yes, there are elements of gore in it, but I think it was the isolation of that family in a very wintry landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And some presence that is altering the trajectory of their lives.”As one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, Mantello is used to figuring out exacting scripts, but he initially found the one for “Grey House” to be elusive. So he asked Holloway what animated the play’s inner logic. “I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”The “grey house” is not just a physical place, either: it seems to connect to a generalized anxiety that feels very modern, even though the show is set in 1977. “I feel that the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now, and I’m very connected to the idea of people in peril,” Mantello said. Laughing, he added, “In this particular case, the danger is seemingly benign children, mysterious children.”“Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take,” said Metcalf, above right, with Holloway at the Lyceum Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesLaurie Metcalf“The thing that shook me the most was ‘The Exorcist,’” Metcalf said of her earliest encounters with horror films. “I think I was in my early teens and that did me in for horror for the next 50-something years.”And now here she is, starring in “Grey House.” Metcalf was drawn by the prospect of working again with Mantello, her frequent collaborator, and she was curious as to how he would handle a script that, she admitted, she did not “completely understand” the first time she read it. “I knew that Joe saw something in it that I wanted to be in the room to discover also,” she said.The show has to balance a tricky combination of dark wit and unsettling atmosphere. “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalf said of how the comedy and horror genres thrive on viewers’ feedback. “We’ll learn how far we can go with the humor and the thrills.”She added, “I had the same feeling in ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ which is horrific and funny,” Metcalf said, referring to performing in the Steppenwolf production of Martin McDonagh’s play, back in 1999. “Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take.”Millicent SimmondsAs Caruso pointed out, genre cinema, especially horror, can be a fraught place for women. For Simmonds, who is deaf, there is an additional layer. “It’s rare to see Deaf people who actually have that kind of power and agency to navigate a world,” she said of her character, through an interpreter. “They’re often portrayed as victims, a pity creature, somebody to help. When I read the script,” she added, “it was about just a person, not necessarily that they’re a Deaf person.”Simmonds said that in general she has a hard time dealing with spiders and graphic violence in films, and cited Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as having affected her “because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not” — something that also applies to “Grey House.”Cagey, like her colleagues, about discussing the play in detail, Simmonds allowed that she sees it as a maternal story. “It investigates this question of what is a mother,” she said. “What does a mother mean to each of us? What do you need to sacrifice to be a mother? How do you raise a family?”Paul SparksLike Mantello, Sparks connected the show to a larger sense of dread that is haunting our society, a sense that our world is unsettled. “There’s a lot of things that we can’t control and things that we don’t understand, and things that aren’t what we think they are,” he said. “All that stuff is in this play.”The actor pointed out that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope, the cabin in the woods. But Holloway spins it in a novel way, inserting a cryptic side to the story that made Sparks want to pick it apart, and decode it.But he hopes audiences show some restraint in how much they share after seeing it. “I’ve been really going out of my way to not tell people anything about what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids — I think people are not going to know what to expect. And it’s not even going to be close to anything they can imagine.“I think you’re going to be shocked,” he added. “I really do.” More

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      ‘King James’ Review: We’ll Always Have LeBron

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      Two men’s kindred obsession with a basketball player is the scaffold for Rajiv Joseph’s examination of male friendship at the Manhattan Theater Club.It takes a while to figure out if Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, “King James” — centered on two fans of the N.B.A. legend LeBron James — is actually about basketball.This coproduction between Steppenwolf Theater, in Chicago, and Center Theater Group, in Los Angeles, arrives at the Manhattan Theater Club after runs in both of those cities. Similarly, like an imperfect play on the court, the plot travels quite a bit before making its shot. But with two emotionally precise performances agilely directed by Kenny Leon, Joseph’s latest rebounds from its initial inertia, revealing a touching examination of male friendship and the powerful social currents beneath it.In 2004, Matt (Chris Perfetti), a Cleveland bartender, is trying to unload his season tickets to the Cavaliers’ home games after a bad investment leaves him needing cash fast. Despite not knowing how to check for texts on his Motorola Razr — one of the production’s clever pleasures is the way Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s sound design and Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design trace time through evolving cellphones and ringtones — he manages to arrange a meet-up with Shawn (Glenn Davis), a fledgling writer who’s just sold his first story.Shawn offers Matt much less than the asking price, but, sensing a kindred devotion to the team’s then-rookie LeBron James, the two strike a deal and strike up a friendship — a wobbly one that the story checks in on over the course of James’ career. In 2010, when James left for the Miami Heat, a decision the friends see as treason, even as Shawn considers his own move. In 2014, with James’s prodigal return to the Cavs — news which Matt, now working at his family’s furniture store following another financial mistake, takes with more contempt than Shawn might like. And in 2016, with the team’s first championship win, worlds away from the friendship’s Bush-era beginnings.A two-hander will almost always let the meat (be it sports, play dates or Idina Menzel obsessions) fall off as its thematic bones reveal themselves and, across those four scenes, James eventually takes his place as the catalyst for the duo’s deeper bond. But, however well acted, the interactions Joseph creates for them during the first act (2004 and 2010) are just a little too slight in their significance, leaving most of the show’s heft to the sturdier second act.The inclusion of Khloe Janel as a D.J. — posted up by the audience, away from the stage — playing requisite jock jams and period-appropriate Usher hits during transitions, hypes up the love of the game but obscures the play’s core. Luckily, the perfectly cast Davis and Perfetti, whose physicality keenly conveys the toll of time passing, are intensely watchable, whether they’re discussing foul shots or failed ambitions.At first, it doesn’t seem relevant to mention that Shawn is Black and Matt is white, because Joseph excels at letting this distinction inform the characters in a play where race doesn’t factor much, until it does. For the most part, Matt’s casual use of Black lingo can be chalked up to awkward passes at the basketball culture to which he wants to belong. And his pontifications on what he views as “the problems with America” — which he proposes are not reflected in professional basketball — are mostly just the vaguely righteous rumblings of an angry young white guy.When tension does bubble up, during the play’s final encounter, it appears inevitable and is astutely observed without feeling writerly, showcasing Joseph’s mastery over the way everyday conversation can belie or reveal social realities. His work here is a strong analysis of friendship dynamics built along, but not hinged upon, the issues that divide them. King JamesThrough June 18 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Tony Awards Broadcast Can Proceed After Striking Writers’ Union Agrees

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      The Tony Awards, a key marketing opportunity for Broadway, can go ahead in an altered form after the striking screenwriters’ union said it would not picket this year’s broadcast.This year’s Tony Awards ceremony, which had been in doubt ever since Hollywood’s screenwriters went on strike earlier this month, will proceed as scheduled in an altered form after the writers’ union said Monday night that it would not picket the show.“As they have stood by us, we stand with our fellow workers on Broadway who are impacted by our strike,” the Writers Guild of America, which represents screenwriters, said in a statement late Monday.A disruption could have been damaging to Broadway, which sees the televised ceremony as a key marketing opportunity, particularly now, when audiences have yet to return to prepandemic levels. Several nominated shows have been operating at a loss, holding on in the hopes that a Tony win — or even exposure on the broadcast — could boost sales.The union made it clear that the broadcast, which is scheduled to air on CBS on June 11, would be different from past ceremonies.“Tony Awards Productions (a joint venture of the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing) has communicated with us that they are altering this year’s show to conform with specific requests from the W.G.A., and therefore the W.G.A. will not be picketing the show,” the union said in a statement. “Responsibility for having to make changes to the format of the 2023 Tony Awards rests squarely on the shoulders of Paramount/CBS and their allies. They continue to refuse to negotiate a fair contract for the writers represented by the W.G.A.”The union did not detail what those differences would be, and the Tony Awards administrators did not have any immediate comment. But a person familiar with the plan, who was granted anonymity to speak about conditions that are not yet public, said the revised broadcast would include the presentation of key awards and live performances of songs from Broadway shows, but that it would not feature any scripted material by screenwriters in its opening number or comedic patter.The Tony Awards agreed that they would not use any part of a draft script that had been written before the screenwriters’ strike began, said the person.It was not immediately clear what role, if any, Ariana DeBose will play in the unscripted show. The Oscar-winning, Broadway-loving actress had hosted the awards ceremony last year, and had agreed to host again this year.It became clear immediately after the screenwriters went on strike that the labor disruption could affect the Tony Awards, because the awards ceremony is televised (by CBS) and live-streamed (by Paramount+) and ordinarily features a script written by screenwriters.Broadway is a heavily unionized industry, and unionized theater workers like actors and musicians were not going to participate in an awards ceremony being protested by another labor union. Tony Awards administrators, aware of those concerns, asked the W.G.A. for a waiver that would have allowed its writers to work on the show, given the dire straits of the theater industry; on Friday, the W.G.A. denied that request, and on Monday night it reiterated that denial, saying that the guild “will not negotiate an interim agreement or a waiver for the Tony Awards.”But Tony Awards administrators did not give up, and asked the guild if, even without a waiver to allow screenwriters to work on the show, it would allow the broadcast to proceed without writers as long as it meets certain conditions.Prominent theater artists who work on Broadway and are allied with the writers guild also spoke up on behalf of the Tonys, arguing that forcing the show off the air would be devastating to the art form and to the many arts workers it employs. The combination of the lobbying efforts and the new conditions appears to have prompted the guild to say Monday night that it would not picket the broadcast.The striking screenwriters have argued that their wages have stagnated and working conditions have deteriorated despite the fact that television production has exploded over the last decade. Negotiations between the major Hollywood studios — represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — and the W.G.A. broke down three weeks ago. Roughly 11,500 writers went on strike beginning on May 2.Over the last two weeks, the writers have assembled picket lines outside the major studios in Los Angeles and production sound stages in New York. But the writers have also gone farther afield, with some taking to picket outside productions in more far-flung locales like Maplewood, N.J., Chicago and Philadelphia.The threat of demonstrations forced Netflix to cancel a major in-person showcase for advertisers, which was scheduled for Wednesday, and to turn it into a virtual format instead. The company also canceled an appearance for Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, at the PEN America Literary Gala on Thursday.CBS has been broadcasting the Tonys since the 1970s, making it one of the longest continuous relationships between a single broadcaster and an awards show. CBS has a deal to broadcast the show through 2026. Because of the Tonys’s relatively low viewership, it has long been more of a prestige play for the network than a significant profit maker. More

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      Tony Awards Officials Ask Striking Writers to Reconsider Broadcast

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      The LatestTony Awards administrators held an emergency meeting on Monday to try to salvage this year’s ceremony in the face of a strike by screenwriters that is imperiling the broadcasting of the event.The officials have asked the leadership of the striking Writers Guild of America to reconsider and accept a compromise that would allow the Tony Awards broadcast, which is scheduled for June 11 on CBS, to proceed in some form as the Hollywood strike continues.The W.G.A. said on Friday that it would not grant a waiver that would allow screenwriters to work on a script for the broadcast. That made it difficult to see how the Tonys could be televised, since Broadway is a heavily unionized industry and it is widely expected that theatrical union members, who include actors and musicians, will refuse to participate out of solidarity with the striking screenwriters.The awards show’s management committee, which oversees the broadcast, held a 90-minute virtual meeting Monday morning at which they opted to seek a way to preserve the planned June 11 show, according to three people with knowledge of what took place who were granted anonymity to describe a confidential conversation.Several Broadway shows are already seeking to boost ticket sales by advertising their Tony nominations, but the June 11 telecast that they hope will provide an even bigger boost is now in danger. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhy It Matters: It’s Broadway’s biggest marketing moment.Broadway producers and industry leaders say that the annual awards show is a vital marketing tool for the industry, and particularly important to the financial health of new musicals.Broadway shows do not have the outsize marketing budgets of Hollywood films or television series, so they need to find other ways to build awareness, and the awards ceremony has traditionally been an important element of that.The ceremony benefits the theater industry in several ways: the shows that win awards often sell tickets to theatergoers eager to see the most acclaimed productions, and those shows that stage exciting or moving musical numbers on the broadcast often see a box office bump as a result.Background: Theater attendance is still down since the pandemic.W.G.A. members are striking for better compensation and structural changes to the way writers relate to studios, streaming services and networks as the entertainment industry evolves.At the same time, the theater industry is still trying to recover from the disruptions brought by the coronavirus pandemic: Broadway attendance this season remains about 17 percent lower than it was during the last full season before the pandemic.One sign of the current economic challenge: Four of the five shows nominated for best new musical this year are losing money most weeks, because the shows cost more to run than they are making at the box office. Those shows — “Kimberly Akimbo,” “New York, New York,” “Shucked” and “Some Like It Hot” — are especially hoping that winning prizes or showing off their production numbers on a television broadcast could help them sell tickets. And the nominated show currently doing the best at the box office, “& Juliet,” would welcome a chance to perform before a national audience.What’s Next: A decision could come in days.Conversations between theater industry leaders, union leaders, and CBS are ongoing. The Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, which jointly present the Tony Awards, are hoping to resolve the crisis soon.It appears more likely that the Tony Awards will have to find a way forward without a televised broadcast on June 11, but in an industry built on optimism, some theater officials are still holding out hope that pleas by theater artists to their Hollywood colleagues could yield a compromise.If a broadcast proves impossible, many industry leaders appear determined to hand out the prizes as scheduled, either at a nontelevised event or simply by announcing the winners. But there are also some who think the ceremony should be postponed until the strike is settled, so that it can remain on television. More

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      Review: A ‘Romeo and Juliet’ That Clowns Around With Tragedy

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      Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, this sportive, vividly acted production fails to make a convincing case for its new gags and directorial flights.“Romeo and Juliet” is at its core a cautionary tale of young love: Kiss a boy at a party one day, marry him the next, inside of a week you’re both dead. Of Shakespeare’s tragedies it is more propulsive than most, funnier and more modern, too, an amalgam of sex and death and a masquerade ball that requires little improvement. Cast a couple of charismatic leads, wind them up and let the bodies fall.That doesn’t mean that playwrights and directors shouldn’t interrogate or adapt the text. Of course they should. But what’s puzzling about the “Romeo and Juliet” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company in partnership with Two River Theater is how little any of that adaptation adds.Directed by Hansol Jung and Dustin Wills, who recently collaborated on “Wolf Play” at Soho Rep, and with what’s billed as a “modern verse translation” by Jung, this is a sportive, vividly acted production that fails to make a convincing case for its many directorial flights and vernacular interventions. Jung and Wills have thrown much spaghetti at the “Romeo and Juliet” wall. The result is a lot of noodling around.At 136 East 13th Street, usually the home of the Classic Stage Company, the set, designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee and lit by Joey Moro, is a wooden circle. This gestures toward the Elizabethan, as do Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes, which combine long skirts and slashed doublets with T-shirts and jeans.Jung’s script walks this same line between early modern and contemporary, leaving some tranches of the play intact, but zhuzhing up other parts with new vocabulary and new jokes. In the first scene, for example, the prologue is delivered more or less intact, minus a “doth” here and there. Yet the first line of dialogue is “I swear, man, we can’t be no one’s suckers,” which leads into some very filthy puns. (Are they bad puns? Yes. But so are Shakespeare’s.)Brian Lee Huynh as Capulet and Daniel Liu as Lady Capulet.Julieta CervantesJung’s interpolations are perhaps an improvement on the real first lines — an elaborate play on “collier” and “choler” — though specificity of acting and direction would have put the language across. And some of the substitutions, like “thrilled” for “proud,” are even less necessary. Still, Jung is savvy enough to respect Shakespeare’s rhythms and to match his word play, so there’s pleasure in seeing her lively mind volley with his.The acting, from Major Curda’s sad boy Romeo to Dorcas Leung’s sweetheart Juliet to Mia Katigbak’s warm, blunt Nurse, is uniformly strong. (Daniel Liu, playing a servant and Lady Capulet, is an actor to keep an eye on.) As actors of Asian descent don’t always get equal opportunities to play classical roles, this alone justifies the production. Jung and Wills’s direction doesn’t always serve them, though. It’s broad and busy, inclined toward clowning and with a habit of brazening out every sex joke. There are Brechtian gestures and live looping and Groucho Marx glasses and plastic fish littering the stage, which rob the story of momentum. Tybalt (Rob Kellogg), at one point, does the worm. Tragedy recedes.Yet if you are or can remember being young and possessed of big, ungovernable feelings, “Romeo and Juliet” won’t seem far away to you. Making the language and the dancing and the streetwear mirror our own time hasn’t brought it any closer.Romeo and JulietThrough June 3 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, Manhattan; naatco.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Antigone in the Amazon’ Review: The Drama Is Brazil’s Land War

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      The Swiss director Milo Rau drapes a traumatic episode of Brazilian history with a Greek tragedy on a Belgian stage.GHENT, Belgium — You can’t say the Swiss theater director Milo Rau doesn’t practice what he preaches. Art and activism are deeply intertwined in his work: As part of his “trilogy of ancient myths,” he rehearsed and filmed part of an adaptation of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” in Iraq in 2019. In the next installment, “The New Gospel,” inspired by the life of Jesus, he staged a film, using refugees in Matera, Italy.For the third project, “Antigone in the Amazon,” Rau has turned his focus to Brazil and the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers Movement in which farmers have been occupying unworked fields and growing crops there.Last month, Rau and actors from NTGent theater in Belgium helped Brazilian activists re-enact the murder of 19 of these farmers, in 1996, by a military police unit. This action, at the site of the massacre on the Trans-Amazonian Highway, became a national talking point in Brazil.That’s all before any part of “Antigone in the Amazon” reached the stage. The play had its premiere on Saturday at NTGent, where audience members were greeted by politically-inspired banners in the theater lobby. On each seat was a copy of the “Declaration of 13 May,” a new manifesto against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and “neoliberal green-washing,” signed by a long list of intellectuals and activists.Arriving after so much political action, the play feels like an afterthought. Watching its four actors narrate the history of Rau’s project and the making of the re-enactment, aided by ample video footage shot in Brazil, it often looked as if the production was a mere repackaging of the events that led to its staging.Not that it isn’t well-crafted. Over his term at NTGent, Rau, who will depart later this year to become the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen, has perfected the art of bringing real events onstage, by laying bare the process and inviting audience members to think along. In “Antigone in the Amazon,” two Flemish actors from NTGent, Sara De Bosschere and Arne De Tremerie, address the audience at regular intervals, explaining the tricky process of making the show and the ethical issues it raised.At one point, they are shown onscreen performing a scene from “Antigone” for the residents of a remote Amazonian village, who sit in a circle around them. De Tremerie then comes forward to reflect on the experience. He talks about the sense of privilege he couldn’t shake while he was there, and the risk of leaning into “a guilt complex disguised as activism.”This is a welcome bit of self-reflection, since Rau is sometimes at risk of leaning into the figure of the white savior. The first part of his trilogy, “Orestes in Mosul,” felt especially grating in that regard: In it, survivors of war in Iraq revisited trauma through fictional scenes involving murder, yet they were unable to travel to meet the audiences watching them in Ghent or Paris — a situation that left me wondering exactly who or what I was clapping for.I occasionally wondered the same thing about “Antigone in the Amazon.” Still, it is a more balanced, effective production than “Orestes.” Two Brazilian performers, Frederico Araujo and Pablo Casella, join the Flemish cast onstage. A third, the Indigenous activist Kay Sara, was supposed to join them and play Antigone, but we are told early in the show that she had “decided to go back home, with her people.”Instead, in addition to other roles, the charismatic Araujo plays a gender-fluid Antigone, the Greek heroine who opposes her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, when he decrees that her brother Polynices won’t be buried or mourned after his death on the battlefield. Only a handful of scenes from the classic tragedy are featured in Rau’s play, all in service of the production’s metaphor: The Landless Workers Movement is Antigone, rising up against injustice.The Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak as Tiresias. Some scenes are performed live onstage, while others feature actors who were filmed in Brazil.Kurt van der ElstSome scenes are performed live onstage; others feature Brazilians like the Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak (as Tiresias), who were filmed. The level of emotion that emanates from the screen often makes more of an impact than the stage action: The actress Célia Maracajà’s quiet dignity is breathtaking when she appears as Eurydice, Creon’s wife. Even the dirt that covers the nearly bare stage, to match the setting of many scenes in Brazil, feels like a prop compared to the vividness of the film.Many in Ghent rose to their feet at the end of “Antigone in the Amazon.” Yet even then, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to review. In writing about this play, am I actually being led to evaluate the ideals of the Landless Workers Movement? Or a re-enactment that took place in Brazil, in a social context few in Europe know anything about?The question isn’t unique to Rau: Whether you agree with the vision of the world that underpins a piece of theater tends to impact your appreciation of it. Yet in some of Rau’s productions, the political messaging is the point. Reviewing them feels like being asked to rate their inherent “goodness.” Who, with any empathy at all, would pan Indigenous activists saying lines from “Antigone” into Rau’s sympathetic cameras?While political theater, as a genre, has a tendency to speechify about sociopolitical issues from the safety of the stage, Rau at least gets up close to his subjects. In that sense, I reflected after the applause had died down, “Antigone in the Amazon” actually feels more like long-form journalism than theater. Drawing on extensive research, Rau distills historical facts, commentary and anecdotes, sets up compelling scenes and characters, all to educate his audience; even “Antigone” feels like the metaphor a shrewd writer might use to describe a just struggle against an inequitable system.But we don’t typically review a reporter’s work as art. In putting this strand of political theater onstage, Rau is, simply, reporting effectively.Antigone in the AmazonThrough June 10 at NTGent, and on tour in Europe; ntgent.be. More

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      Striking Writers’ Union Denies Waiver, Imperiling Tony Awards Telecast

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      The Writers Guild of America indicated it would not grant a waiver to allow a live telecast of the Tonys on June 11, threatening one of Broadway’s biggest marketing moments.The union representing thousands of striking television and movie writers denied a waiver that Broadway officials had sought that would have allowed the Tony Awards ceremony to proceed with a live televised broadcast on its scheduled date of June 11, two people briefed on the decision said on Friday night.The denial by the union, the Writers Guild of America, described by people who were granted anonymity to disclose confidential discussions, is imperiling one of Broadway’s biggest nights — a key marketing opportunity that is even more crucial in the fragile post-shutdown theater economy. Industry leaders say that without the ability to reach the broad audience that tunes into a Tony Awards broadcast, several of the newest musicals are likely to close.Broadway boosters are still hoping that over the weekend the writers’ guild might be persuaded to change its mind. But industry leaders are acknowledging that such a reversal seems unlikely. Without a waiver from the writers’ guild, a live broadcast ceremony is essentially impossible because much of Broadway, including nominees and presenters, would refuse to cross a picket line.The management committee of the Tony Awards, which is the group charged with overseeing the broadcast, has scheduled an emergency meeting on Monday at which it will discuss how to proceed.One option would be to postpone the entire event until after the strike is settled, in which case some money-losing Broadway shows would most likely close rather than hang on in the hopes of an eventual boost from a broadcast. Another would be to hand out the awards in June in some non-televised fashion, which would significantly reduce the marketing value of the awards. But they could try to make up for that by staging some kind of razzle-dazzle song-and-dance-heavy broadcast after the strike ends.None of the parties would speak on the record on Friday night, but several people close to the discussions described the state of affairs after The Hollywood Reporter reported that the waiver had been denied.For Hollywood, the Tony Awards are not a front-burner issue — it is a niche ceremony watched last year by 3.9 million people, which is fewer than other awards ceremonies like the Oscars (18.7 million) or the Grammys (12.5 million).But for Broadway, the stakes are enormous. The Tony Awards are the industry’s biggest marketing moment — a chance to introduce viewers to shows they have not heard of, and to remind them of the joys of musical theater — and that kind of reach is especially important now, with Broadway attendance yet to reach prepandemic levels. Four of the five nominees for best new musical are not selling enough tickets to cover their running costs many weeks, and all could use the box office boost that a win, or even a well-performed number on the awards show, often provides.“Shucked,” which is also in contention for the best new musical Tony, hoped to get national exposure from a ceremony, its lead producer said.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Tony Awards is the biggest commercial for the industry at large, and for a show like mine, which is unbranded and just at the stage where we are finally starting to see some lifeblood, it would be devastating to not be able to be part of this,” Mike Bosner, the lead producer of “Shucked,” one of the five shows vying for the coveted best new musical award, said before the denial was announced.“Our whole timing of when we opened the show was based on being part of the ramp-up to the awards season, when there are a lot of eyeballs on the show and there’s national exposure,” he said.The Tony Awards are one of Broadway’s biggest marketing opportunities. Renée Elise Goldsberry and Phillipa Soo appeared on last year’s broadcast. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven before news of the W.G.A.’s decision to deny the waiver spread, some producers were pessimistic. “My guess is that there won’t be a broadcast,” Robert Greenblatt, one of the producers of “Some Like It Hot,” which is also a nominee for best new musical, said earlier. Greenblatt is familiar with all sides of the issue — he is not only a frequent Broadway producer, but also a former chairman of NBC Entertainment and WarnerMedia.If the Tonys are delayed or derailed, it will damage many shows. “Particularly this season, when we’re still recovering from the Covid shutdown, it would be especially devastating to not have that opportunity — to not be able to showcase how many great and diverse plays and musicals are on Broadway right now,” said Eva Price, a lead producer of “& Juliet,” another contender for best new musical.Already, the W.G.A. strike has affected one awards show — last weekend’s MTV Movie & TV Awards. The host, Drew Barrymore, dropped out in solidarity with the union and the ceremony turned into a pretaped affair after the W.G.A. said it would picket.On Wednesday, with the prospect of hundreds of demonstrators marching on picket lines, Netflix abruptly announced it was canceling a major in-person Manhattan showcase it was staging for advertisers next week, and turning it into a virtual event instead.Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, also said he would not attend the upcoming PEN America Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History, a marquee event for the literary world that was scheduled to honor him. In a statement, Mr. Sarandos said it was best if he pulled out “given the threat to disrupt this wonderful evening.”In 2008, the last time the writers were on strike, organizers of the Golden Globes were forced to cancel the awards ceremony after the W.G.A. was actively organizing demonstrations and actors said they would not cross any picket lines. Winners were revealed in a news conference instead. But during that strike the W.G.A. did grant waivers to some televised ceremonies, including the Screen Actors Guild Awards.The organizations that present the Tony Awards, the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, declined to comment; they are said to be closely monitoring the situation but unsure of how to proceed. Representatives for the W.G.A., and CBS, the Tonys’ longtime broadcaster, also declined to comment. More