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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

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      Review: Despite the Primping, ‘The Cotillion’ Is Far From Flawless

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      Colette Robert’s play takes aim at antiquated rites of passage, and how they can promote classism, colorism and retrograde gender politics.The enterprising president of the Harriet Holland Social Club just wants the cotillion to be successful. The floral centerpieces are in place, a band is onstage, and the draperies are neatly tucked in and tied. The debutantes are primped and primed. By night’s end, she hopes, these young women will set off into their bright futures.Presented by New Georges and the Movement Theater Company at A.R.T./New York Theaters, “The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-Burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel,” written and directed by Colette Robert, mimics the proceedings of debutante balls. There’s the introduction of the debutantes, the father-daughter dance and a multicourse dinner, but this cotillion — and the production — is far from flawless.Madam President (Akyiaa Wilson), a 2-D villain, encourages the debutantes (Claire Fort, Caturah Brown, Starr Kirkland, Aigner Mizzelle, Monique St. Cyr, Portland Thomas) to prioritize appearances and wealth, hurling critiques with no regard for them as individuals. The more enlightened vice president (a hilarious Jehan O. Young, with priceless passive-aggressive expressions and line reads) pushes for more substance, like community outreach, and less of the superficial focus on style and status.The script clearly has something to say about these antiquated rites of passage. But Robert doesn’t go beyond the obvious: Instead of being a source of uplift and empowerment, the script says, Black debutante balls often promote classism, colorism and retrograde gender politics, like the objectification of Black women’s bodies. And yet, cotillions aren’t the source of the problem; they’re a symptom of a more nuanced social and cultural infrastructure. The play’s lack of deeper inquiry and character-building leaves us feeling unsated — even as the debutantes begin to question the whole affair.Structurally, the play never finds its footing. It mostly takes place in real time, but sometimes it veers off into a kind of choreopoem, with the girls speaking from the future, posing as if on an auction block or tearing off their dresses. And the uneven direction results in scenes in which the actors’ delivery is stilted — full of anticipatory pauses, not the naturalistic flow of conversation.More graceful is Teresa L. Williams’s set design, transforming the theater into a ballroom, and Stacey Derosier’s snazzy lighting, which creates a party atmosphere. And the fabulous Harriet Holland Social Club singers (Kayla Coleman, Cherrye J. Davis, Cristina Pitter, Montria Walker) give Marvelettes and Ronettes vibes, with their shimmery dresses (fantastic all-around costume design by Mika Eubanks) and choreography (nicHi douglas). The music (Dionne McClain-Freeney) expounds on the show’s themes via clever lyrics and a catchy score, played by the band on piano, upright bass and drums.It seems as if “The Cotillion” is trying to replicate what the writer Jocelyn Bioh did so well in “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which didn’t critique beauty pageants as much as the culture that created them.Robert’s show did inspire me to ask my mother about her cotillion. I was expecting embarrassment. “I enjoyed it,” she said. Her experience didn’t change her life for better or for worse. “The Cotillion” forgets: This is also just a party.The Harriet Holland Social Club Presents the 84th Annual Star-Burst Cotillion in the Grand Ballroom of the Renaissance HotelThrough May 27 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; newgeorges.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Beautiful Lady’ Review: A Cabaret for the New Order

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      Artists and dreamers sing of revolution in a musical set on the cusp of the birth of the Soviet Union.A few minutes into “The Beautiful Lady,” you might find yourself thinking the show owes a little something to “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”: After all, here are, again, a bunch of exalted Russians in a cabaret, singing of life, loss, hope and love.But “The Beautiful Lady,” a musical by Elizabeth Swados from 1984, is actually the artistic forebear of Dave Malloy’s “Great Comet,” even though it is only just now getting a New York premiere at La MaMa, under Anne Bogart’s evocative direction.Swados is best remembered for her 1978 show “Runaways” (briefly revived by Encores! Off-Center in 2016, a few months after her death); “The Beautiful Lady” adds to the mounting evidence that she was among the most idiosyncratic and creative composer-lyricists of her generation. (A few years ago Malloy joined the likes of Michael R. Jackson, Taylor Mac and Shaina Taub on the tribute album “The Liz Swados Project.”)More of a song cycle than a traditionally structured, plot-driven musical, “The Beautiful Lady” is set at the Stray Dog Café, a real-life St. Petersburg cabaret where the owner, Boris Pronin (Starr Busby), hosted such literary luminaries as Anna Akhmatova (Kate Fuglei), Osip Mandelstam (Henry Stram), Marina Tsvetaeva (Ashley Pérez Flanagan) and Alexander Blok (George Abud, from “The Band’s Visit”) in the years leading up to World War I. They’re high on ideas and ideals — and, for some of them, on each other — and dream of a political, sexual and artistic revolution.Swados and Paul Schmidt, who translated many of those writers’ poems (large chunks of which are incorporated into the show), wrote the book, which was revised by Jocelyn Clarke and serves mostly as a thread linking the songs. And, oh, what wonders those are: vibrant and funny, desperate and elegiac, with some so lovely they will shatter your heart.Bogart makes the most of La MaMa’s deep stage and creates striking tableaus with little more than a few chairs and tables (Andromache Chalfant did the scenic design) and bold lighting (designed by Brian H. Scott) that focuses on blue and red. The effect is powerfully stark and never overwhelms the humans at the heart of the story.When they change into gray jumpsuits about midway through, we are reminded how often dreams of revolution have ended in repressive regimes. In the musical’s dreamlike world, the Stray Dog remains open long enough that its denizens face that reality and must resort to gallows humor, telling each other jokes that mine the cruel absurdity of life under Stalinist rule, with its Orwellian Newspeak and thought crimes. (Some of those jokes have been repurposed for Putin; they still work.)“My lady made of silk and sighs,” Sergei Yesenin (Andrew Polec, a long way from “Bat Out of Hell”) sings in an ode to the American dancer Isadora Duncan, yearning and helpless as his world comes crashing down. “My lady full of laughs and goodbyes.” He might as well be describing — poetically, of course — the spirit of this show.The Beautiful LadyThrough May 28 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Jeremy Strong to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘An Enemy of the People’

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      The production, with a new script by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, will begin early next year.“Succession” is ending. So what’s next for Jeremy Strong? He’s returning to Broadway.Strong, whose celebrity has skyrocketed with his portrayal of the scheming Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” will star next year in a Broadway revival of the classic play “An Enemy of the People.” Strong will portray the title character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who becomes a pariah when he decides to reveal that the water in local spa baths is contaminated.The play was written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen and has been staged on Broadway 10 times, most recently in 2012. There have been other New York productions, too; a socially distanced one-woman version of the show was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging.This new production will feature a script rewritten by the playwright Amy Herzog, who is no stranger to reimagining Ibsen: Her revised version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is now on Broadway, with Jessica Chastain in the starring role.Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” previously appeared on Broadway in a 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” He has also appeared in several Off Broadway productions.The “Enemy of the People” revival will be directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award for directing the musical “Fun Home,” and whose more recent Broadway ventures have been polarizing productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”“An Enemy of the People” is scheduled to run for 16 weeks in early 2024; an announcement on Friday did not specify the exact dates or the theater, and did not reveal any further casting. The producers are Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Patrick Catullo, who previously collaborated on Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show “The Old Man & the Pool.” More

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      New York Theater Workshop Announces New Artistic Director’s First Season

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      The Off Broadway nonprofit will embrace risk, said Patricia McGregor, its leader, favoring fresh over established works.For New York Theater Workshop’s first season programmed after the departure of its longtime artistic director, the Off Broadway fixture plans to produce an intergenerational saga centered on a Black family in Illinois, a lesbian farce set on a naval base, a story about a mysterious album of Nazi-era photographs, and a play with an unusual star: a Microsoft text-to-speech tool.The slate of shows, announced on Friday, has been curated by Patricia McGregor, who replaced James C. Nicola as artistic director last year. The organization has a track record of producing influential work, including its biggest hit, “Rent,” as well as celebrated productions such as “Hadestown,” “Once,” “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.”The 2023-24 season includes three world premieres and one work that debuted last year, favoring fresh over recognizable work. (The most recent season featured the Broadway-bound “Merrily We Roll Along,” starring Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez.) McGregor said that while there is certainly a place for those kinds of entrenched works at New York Theater Workshop, her inaugural season is focused on embracing risk and supporting artists whose work could be lost if the theater world becomes overly focused on name recognition, trusted forms and trying to ensure commercial success.“We’re more of a laboratory than a factory,” McGregor said. “Part of what the workshop wants to be is a testing ground.”This fall, McGregor will direct “The Refuge Plays” by Nathan Alan Davis, whose play “Nat Turner in Jerusalem” was staged at New York Theater Workshop in 2016. Produced with and staged at Roundabout Theater Company, the work is about four generations of a Black family who live in a home that they built themselves in a forest. An earlier version of the production was scheduled to start rehearsing in 2020 and was delayed by the pandemic.Later in the year, the nonprofit will stage “Merry Me,” a new work by the South Korean playwright and director Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”). In “Merry Me,” which will be directed by Leigh Silverman (who directed last year’s voting-rights musical “Suffs”), a restless lieutenant seeks to pleasure other women on the base — including the general’s wife — during a blackout.“I love you so much I could die,” slated for winter 2024 and directed by Lucas Hnath, employs a Microsoft text-to-speech product for the monologues, in between songs performed by the playwright, Mona Pirnot. (The Microsoft-fueled actor is funny and strange, McGregor said, but it also comes off as surprisingly human.)Next spring, the company will produce Tectonic Theater Project’s “Here There Are Blueberries,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich about a collection of Nazi-era photographs that is delivered to the desk of an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making the news and setting a German businessman out on a journey of discovery about his family. Kaufman, who was behind “The Laramie Project,” will also direct the play, which premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in California and is currently onstage at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C. More