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      Review: In ‘Love + Science,’ a Meet Cute Becomes a Medical Mystery

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      In 1980s Manhattan, two medical students find themselves at the forefront of the AIDS crisis in David J. Glass’s new play at New York City Center.The two medical students in “Love + Science” a new play by David J. Glass, quickly tumble into bed together and then spend five years too afraid to kiss. The time is 1980s Manhattan, and the students, Matt and Jeff (Matt Walker, Jonathan Burke), are gay men both researching virology when reports of a frightening new infection arise. In this meet cute turned medical mystery by In Vitro Productions, the pair find themselves at the forefront of the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, investigating a deadly threat to which they’re both vulnerable. Glass sets the clock ticking (the years are marked between scenes) and asks us to observe the history of the devastating disease, ensuing protests and therapeutic breakthroughs.Since the 1980s, a genre of plays dramatizing the AIDS epidemic, has generally sought to render on a human scale a catastrophe that might otherwise seem unfathomable. In “Love + Science,” Glass returns to the tradition of documentation, detailing both the microscopic maneuvers and social consequences of H.I.V. with the schematic precision of a lab experiment. (Glass is a senior lecturer in cell biology at Harvard University.) This meticulous drama that opened on Sunday at New York City Center functions primarily as a chronicle of developments, with characters whose particulars are cursory and incidental.Walker and Burke are able and appealing performers, but surface-level charm is all the information-saturated dialogue will allow. (The push and pull between them as lovers, hyper-informed by risk but lacking in chemistry, has the erotic charge of a leaflet.) Of the five supporting cast members, who play multiple roles, Imani Pearl Williams brings welcome pizazz as a lab student and a blind date who each deliver truth bombs like punchlines. Adrian Greensmith and Ryan Knowles make the terror and uncertainty faced by AIDS patients both palpable and affecting.The director Allen MacLeod’s lively production at least relishes the fun of 1980s aesthetics, with flashes of electric pink and blue in the lighting and projection design by Samuel J. Biondolillo and with costumes by Camilla Dely that are Zoomer catnip. And perhaps “Love + Science” will offer a bit of essential education, and opportunity for reflection, to those who did not live through the outbreak depicted onstage but have just experienced another pandemic.If the coronavirus is the playwright’s claim to timeliness, that context is left almost entirely inferred until a present-day coda attempts to draw a rushed and tenuous through line. At the performance I attended, the audience seemed to assume the show was over before its leap three decades forward. Not that the final scene offers narrative resolutions; the relationships between the characters hardly ask for any, and the future of scientific study is still unwritten.Love + ScienceThrough July 6 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; loveandscienceplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      For Her New Play, Tori Sampson Revisited Her ‘Black Power Household’

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      “This Land Was Made,” at the Vineyard Theater, is rooted in the playwright’s personal connection to a political movement’s awakening.The narrator of “This Land Was Made,” the playwright Tori Sampson’s speculative account of the Black Panther Party’s powder-keg origins, is an aspiring writer named Sassy. “Consider me your time-traveling griot,” she tells the audience with wry buoyanc‌y, evoking the West African tradition of storytellers who propagated endangered legacies.The play, which opens on Sunday at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, is an act of oral history rooted in Sampson’s personal connection to the political awakening at its center. “Sassy is not me,” Sampson made clear during a recent interview off the courtyard of the Marlton Hotel, a short walk from the theater.“The Black Panthers were like family to her,” Sampson said of her mother, who was orphaned at the age of 3 and raised by an aunt who was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s. She would accompany her aunt to meetings, where activists became like kin and their reverence for Blackness a guiding principle.Sampson’s mother, Wanda Louise Thompson, went on to raise the playwright and her sisters (her twin and an older sister) in a “Black Power household,” first in Boston and then in North Carolina, where they were taught, with some militancy, to value Black beauty and culture. (When her twin sister wanted a Britney Spears poster, for example, their mother insisted that two posters of Black artists go up alongside it.)Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Sassy and Julian Elijah Martinez as Huey P. Newton in the play “This Land Was Made” at the Vineyard Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut orphanhood was also to be part of Sampson’s inheritance; she was 13 when her mother died of a pulmonary embolism, and she and her twin sister, whom Sampson calls “my lifeline and compass,” became wards of the state. After a year of moving between foster homes, the twins petitioned to attend an all-Black boarding school in Mississippi, where their independence was contingent on high achievement.“I’m trying to connect who I am with my past,” said Sampson, 34, who lives in Los Angeles and has written for the streaming TV series “Citadel” and “Hunters.” She has only recently begun to process that her experience as an orphan is integral to her work. “I was always yearning to understand what it would look like to have a family,” Sampson said. “My imagination would run wild making up stories.”That impulse reverberates through “This Land Was Made,” which is set inside a Bay Area tavern with soul food simmering in the back kitchen. “I wanted to write a story where Huey P. Newton walks into a bar and changes the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. She got the idea for the play, a blend of historical fiction and sitcom conventions, when she learned that Newton’s rise to prominence began with an unsolved mystery.The facts in the murky case are these: In 1967, Newton and a friend were pulled over during a traffic stop in Oakland, Calif., in which Newton took a bullet to the stomach and a police officer was fatally shot. ‌Newton was charged and later convicted of voluntary manslaughter. (His conviction was eventually overturned‌.) Rallies ‌to “Free Huey” helped set off the Black Power movement.Sampson, right, with Kathleen Cleaver, a retired law professor and former communications secretary for the Black Panther Party, at Yale in February 2017. via Tori SampsonSo, if Newton didn’t pull the trigger, Sampson thought, who did? And what might Newton’s influence have been on his neighbors before his activism grew to an international scale? In the play, Sassy, Sampson’s narrator, claims to have heard the truth through the grapevine. “This Land Was Made” then unfolds as both a comedy and a call to action.Sampson said her taste for humor that bends toward social justice also comes from her mother. Though Thompson didn’t let her kids watch much television (only “The Cosby Show” for an hour a day), she adored “All in the Family” and considered its skewering of bigotry the height of the form. That show’s creator, Norman Lear, remains an inspiration for Sampson, who likes to wind up her characters and set them loose to elicit eye-opening laughs.“Tori has a particular tempo in mind for each character and how the ensemble builds together musically,” the play’s director, Taylor Reynolds, said of Sampson’s ear for dialogue. In fact, both women said the production was deep into tech rehearsals before Sampson watched the play with her eyes open.“Let them be loud and wrong,” Sampson said of her Lear-inspired ethos. “Just give them conviction and don’t hold them back.”Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where Sampson’s play “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” was presented in 2019, said her work demonstrates an “unrelenting investigation of identity that feels both global but also very personal.” A sharp and riotous sendup of ‌Eurocentric beauty standards, “If Pretty Hurts” is punctuated with fourth-wall-breaking monologues and draws on Sampson’s personal experience to interrogate the body-image pressures faced by Black women. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green called the play “an auspicious professional playwriting debut.”)While more grounded in the conventions of realism, “This Land Was Made” demonstrates Sampson’s fascination with how social constructs shape imbalances of power. (Sampson earned a ‌bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ball State University.) The play’s Oakland residents argue about colorism, assimilation and the fallacies of trusting the system, embodying the tensions that propelled Newton’s broader ideologies about Blackness.Sampson, who also writes for TV, has various projects in the works. “My life has never been a box,” she said, “so my mind doesn’t work that way.”Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBut Sampson, who began “This Land Was Made” in 2014, during her second year at what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, also aims to render the civil rights movement in America on a human scale.“I wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people,” Sampson said, in addition to exploring their role in striking up political currents that continue to reverberate. As violent incidents at the hands of the police have gained visibility over the past decade, often captured on video during traffic stops like the one Sampson imagines onstage, the consequences of failing to recognize the humanity of Black people have only grown.Conversations with former Black Panthers were also crucial to Sampson’s research process, more and less serendipitously. She spoke to Ed Bullins, the renowned playwright and the party’s onetime minister of culture, with permission from his wife, while he was in the hospital in 2014. (Sampson’s godfather happened to be his doctor.) “Make sure you remember those were some funny cats,” Bullins, who died in 2021, told Sampson of the party’s co-founders, Newton and Bobby Seale.The playwright ‌also interviewed Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to hold a leadership position in the party, after Cleaver, now a retired law professor, spoke at Yale.If it’s true what Sassy says, that “every great story is about journeying to find home,” it follows that Sampson’s work will continue to venture in many directions. She is developing a play about a nerdy comedian who embarks on a superhero quest to regain her Black card after she mispronounces Tupac Shakur’s name during sex. (“It’s a lot,” she said.)‌ And she will directly address her orphan experience for the first time in an animated series called “How to Succeed Without Parents.”“It’s always going to look different,” Sampson said of her idea of home. “My life has never been a box, so my mind doesn’t work that way.” More

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      “The Motive and the Cue” Asks What Makes a Great Performance

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      “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play in London, imagines fraught behind-the-scenes maneuvering by John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during rehearsals for a classic Broadway production.“The classicist who wants to be modern, meeting the modernist who wants to be classical.” So says Elizabeth Taylor, summing up the fractious encounter between the revered Shakespearian actor John Gielgud, and her new husband, the actor Richard Burton. It’s 1964, Taylor and Burton are the most famous couple in the world, and Burton is rehearsing the role of Hamlet for a Broadway production that Gielgud is directing.It’s not going well.That’s the setting for “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play directed by Sam Mendes, written by Jack Thorne, and starring Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton and Tuppence Middleton as Taylor.The play, which opened to enthusiastic reviews in May and runs through July 15 at the National Theater, in London, was an idea born out of the pandemic, said Caro Newling, a co-founder with Mendes of Neal Street Productions, which developed the show.Newling said that, during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Mendes was thinking about why theater mattered, and what went into creating great performances. When they were discussing those questions, she added, Mendes recalled reading a copy of “Letters From an Actor,” an account of the 1964 “Hamlet,” by William Redfield, who played Guildenstern in the production. “Suddenly, bang, this idea shot out,” Newling said.A 1964 photograph shows Richard Burton, left, and John Gielgud in a rehearsal for “Hamlet.”Getty ImagesThe idea was a play based on the fraught relationship between the rambunctious, hard-drinking Burton and the repressed, elegant Gielgud during rehearsals for “Hamlet,” with the added combustible element of a sidelined, glamorous Taylor, sitting out her honeymoon in a hotel suite.Newling and Mendes started researching, and discovered another out-of-print book: “John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet,” a fly-on-the-wall account by Richard Sterne, an ensemble actor who smuggled a tape recorder into the rehearsal room.Mendes called Thorne, the playwright behind the stage blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the television series “His Dark Materials,” and suggested the rehearsal dynamics might provide fruitful material.Initially unsure, Thorne found a focus by “understanding the position that Gielgud was in at the time. He wasn’t being loved by the public, treasured by the profession. His great rival Laurence Olivier was running the National Theater and a new kind of modern theater was dominating the West End. He took the Broadway job because he didn’t have other offers.”“Hamlet,” had been a defining role for Gielgud, who had played the part over 300 times. For the Broadway “Hamlet,” he came up with the idea — daring at the time — of doing the play as if it were a rehearsal run-through, in ordinary clothes. In “The Motive and the Cue,” Burton tries to stamp his brash personality on Hamlet, while the classicist Gielgud wants something more sensitively attuned to Burton’s deeper emotions.The cast of “The Motive and the Cue.” Jack Thorne, who wrote the play, said it was about “why we do what we do, what it feels like, and what it costs.”Mark Douet“What’s interesting is that Burton is getting it wrong, sort of on purpose, trying to show Gielgud that it must be modern,” said Flynn, who lived as a teenager in Wales, where Burton is a national hero. “I had a picture of him playing Hamlet on the door of my house for about 15 years,” Flynn said. “It felt eerie that now, I was playing him, playing Hamlet.”The irony of the Burton-Gielgud conflict, he added, was that Burton idolized Gielgud, and was desperate to be regarded as a serious actor. “He is incredibly successful, but deep down, he fears he has drifted into complacency, is not doing something valuable with his art,” Flynn said.The set, designed by Es Devlin, uses expanding and contracting scrims to create seamless transitions between the “Hamlet” rehearsals, a pink hotel suite in which Taylor and Burton throw glamorous parties for the cast and the scenes of more intimate encounters. One of these is between Gielgud and Taylor, who provides the psychological insight that allows the director to find a way to Burton.Middleton, who plays Taylor, said, “Elisabeth is the voice of reason, one of the wisest characters in the play.”“She completely understood Burton’s obsession with conquering Hamlet, and why it was so difficult for him.,” she added. “It was important to me to show she wasn’t this chaotic, floozy character she is sometimes seen as.”Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor in “The Motive and the Cue.” The play is set shortly after Taylor’s marriage to Richard Burton.Mark DouetMuch of the play is concerned with how to play Hamlet: The breakthrough moment for Burton happens when he can connect his painful past to the character’s motivations. “This is what actors have to do when they strip themselves down to play a role,” Thorne said.In the end, the 1964 production was a triumph, running for 136 performances; “The Motive and the Cue” has been a hit, too. It is currently playing to sold-out houses and its popularity suggests that the play’s central ideas — theater as a community and a crucible of emotional connection between actors and audience — have resonated after the enforced closures of the last few years.“It’s about fathers and sons, classicism and modernity, the clash of these forces,” Thorne said. “But I hope it’s also about why we do what we do, what it feels like and what it costs.” More

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      Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting

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      A new play about a sisterhood of sorrows brings something scary to the stage, but is delivering shocks and icks enough?Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Don’t they always?Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. Of the small knife she occasionally brandishes, Marlow, who gives Wednesday Addams vibes, comfortingly says, “If I put it in your eye, it wouldn’t even hit your brain.”Good to know — and basically true of the play itself.“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is. Raleigh is not very maternal; Marlow says she is their mother “sometimes.” Other than feeding them and untangling their tresses as if weeding a garden, she generally leaves them to their own devices.At the start of the play, those devices include some kind of gas-mask contraption that an ethereal deaf girl named Bernie (Millicent Simmonds) is making. (Hint: It’s not a gas mask.) What Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse: a kind of tapestry of innards. (She is presumably called Squirrel because of her tendency to gnaw things like phone cords that if left un-gnawed would short-circuit the plot.)Luckily, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just making nice. She translates for Bernie and, when the outsiders arrive, calms them with good humor. Explaining her name, she admits that it may be unusual but “it’s no A1655.”The outsiders, a childless couple, need calming because they’ve just wrecked their car on a requisitely dark and snowy mountain road. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving; swerving to hit a deer, she hit it anyway. The accident has left Henry (Paul Sparks) with his ankle mangled, or maybe his leg or maybe his soul — it’s a restless manglement, moving through him as the play’s 95 minutes tick by. In any case, Raleigh splints him up, and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.Well, not really moonshine.“Grey House,” which comes to Broadway from Chicago, where it had its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theater in 2019, keeps its secrets as quiet as its shocks are conspicuous. Only gradually do we get any sense of how the marriage of Max and Henry was crashing even before the accident, or why the coven of girls, if not their minder, has such an interest in helping it come apart completely. By the time we do begin to put together a possible explanatory scheme, it’s too late to matter; the trappings of horror, if not any meaningful horror beneath, have scared the bejesus out of the psychological drama.From left, Sophia Anne Caruso, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Millicent Simmonds in “Grey House” at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least those trappings are superb. Though I’ve left undescribed the two other humans (at least I think they are humans) who fill out the cast, it gives nothing away to discuss the even-more-prominent title character. As designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz, and especially as given voice by the sound designer, Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be the repository of feelings and history that everyone else is mostly sidestepping. It moans while they tease.That teasing quality, though sometimes charming — and often, if you are a scaredy-cat, a relief from the hard-core jolts — is the giveaway that “Grey House” should not be taken too seriously, regardless of its allusions to real-world horror of the past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and staging will be manipulated to scare and delight us, to give much credence to anything deeper. In that way, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, squishing familiar arias — gore, ghosts, what have you — into a chic and enjoyable if mostly empty new container.Letting go of meaning in the theater in favor of sensation is a big ask today. The ambition of playwrights to speak directly to our times through emotional naturalism has largely wiped horror, mystery and their ilk from our stages. One of the last such plays to appear on Broadway was an adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” in 2015, starring Bruce Willis as an author of mystery novels and, as the psychotic fan who nearly nurses him to death, once again the great Laurie Metcalf.So another thing that has to be said for “Grey House” is that it has given artists who want to explore the opportunities and particular language of an unfashionable form a rare chance to do so. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn that opportunity into a meal; by investing in its clichés without condescension, they do much to de-cliché them.But what makes the effort meaningful to artists — Holloway began thinking about the story after a family tragedy — may not make it meaningful to us. And though the theater is already a kind of haunted house, filled with odd beings and strange noises, horror may simply work better in a less live medium. When Max and Henry show up at the cabin, unaware that anyone is there, they look around at the spooky surroundings, listen to the wind howling, and somehow find it all so familiar.“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. Which is the problem exactly.Grey HouseAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; greyhousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More

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      ‘Prayer for the French Republic’ Heads to Broadway

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      The play, which is scheduled to open in January, joins a string of Broadway shows that confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad.Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play about a family grappling with contemporary and historical antisemitism in France, will transfer to Broadway this winter.The play will be produced by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club, which last year presented the play’s first run Off Broadway. The production will be directed by David Cromer, who also directed it Off Broadway; it will be staged at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, with previews beginning Dec. 19 and the opening scheduled for Jan. 9.Casting has not been announced.The production comes as concerns about antisemitism have been on the rise in the United States and beyond. Last season featured two shows about antisemitism — the play “Leopoldstadt,” about a Viennese family before, during, and after the Holocaust, and the musical “Parade,” about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia — both of which are leading contenders for Tony Awards this spring. And this season will include “Harmony,” a musical about a vocal group that runs afoul of the Nazis in early 20th-century Germany.“Prayer for the French Republic” will be Harmon’s second play on Broadway; his poignant singleness comedy, “Significant Other,” had a run in 2017 at the Booth Theater. But Harmon is probably best known for another comedy, “Bad Jews,” which was widely staged around the country.The play has a relatively large cast — MTC listed a company of 16 actors Off Broadway — and a three-hour running time, making it costly to produce on Broadway at a time when many theater nonprofits are struggling financially. This production is being financed in part by the Roy Cockrum Foundation, which was established by a Powerball-winning theater lover who supports ambitious work by nonprofits.Also this week, MTC announced that it has appointed a new executive director, Chris Jennings, to succeed the outgoing executive producer Barry Grove. Jennings is currently executive director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington. He will work alongside MTC’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who last year notched her 50th anniversary with the company. More

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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      in Television

      Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber to Lead Broadway ‘Doubt’ Revival

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      The production, presented by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, is to begin performances in February.Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber will star in a revival of “Doubt: A Parable” on Broadway this season.The play, by John Patrick Shanley, is about a nun who suspects a priest has sexually abused a student at a Catholic school. In 2005, the year it first opened on Broadway, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play; it was later adapted into a film and an opera.The new production is to be produced by the Roundabout Theater Company, and to be directed by Scott Ellis, who has been serving as the nonprofit’s interim artistic director since the death of artistic director Todd Haimes in April. (All Broadway theaters are planning to dim the lights of their marquees for one minute at 6:45 p.m. tonight in Haimes’s memory.)Daly, who will play the nun who serves as the school principal, and Schreiber, who will play the parish priest, are both Tony winners. Daly, known to television viewers for “Cagney & Lacey,” among other shows, won a Tony Award in 1990 for starring in a revival of “Gypsy.” Schreiber, the star of Showtime’s “Ray Donovan,” won a Tony Award in 2005 for a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”The production is to begin performances next February at the American Airlines Theater.“Doubt” will be one of three plays staged by Roundabout on Broadway this season. The others are “I Need That,” a new play written by Theresa Rebeck and starring Danny DeVito alongside his daughter, Lucy, and “Home,” a revival, directed by Kenny Leon, of a 1979 play by Samm-Art Williams.“Doubt” will not be the only play by Shanley on the New York stage this season. The Manhattan Theater Club, the nonprofit that staged the original production of “Doubt,” plans to present a new Shanley play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” Off Broadway next winter. More