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      Laura Benanti Describes Performing Concert Through a Miscarriage

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      The Tony Award-winning actress said in an Instagram post that she had decided to share the news to remind people “that there is no shame in this kind of loss.”Laura Benanti, the Tony Award-winning stage and screen actress, performed a concert for about 2,000 people on a cruise ship despite being in the middle of having a miscarriage, she wrote in a post on Instagram.“If it had been our first loss, or even our second, I likely wouldn’t have been able to go on,” she wrote in the post on Wednesday. “But unfortunately, I am not a stranger to the pain and emptiness of losing a pregnancy. It is a path I have walked before, hand in hand with my husband.”Benanti, who has performed on Broadway since the late 1990s and won a Tony for a featured role in “Gypsy,” was aboard a Broadway-themed cruise coming back to New York from Bermuda, where she had planned to perform songs from musicals she had appeared in, including “The Sound of Music,” “She Loves Me” and “My Fair Lady.” She realized on Sunday that she was having the miscarriage, she wrote, but decided to go onstage the next day.Benanti has two children with her husband, Patrick Brown.“My husband and I are heartbroken but we will move through this together as we, and so many others, have done before,” she wrote in the post. “I share all of this, not to garner sympathy or attention, but to remind the many people and families who have and will suffer in this way that there is no shame in this kind of loss.” More

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      ‘Smart’ Review: A.I. in the Living Room

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      Three women seeking companionship turn to an Alexa-like digital presence in this family drama at Ensemble Studio Theater.Artificial intelligence has lately proven that it can write Hollywood screenplays, ace the bar exam and maybe even develop a twisted crush. Jenny, the Alexa-like device in “Smart,” which opened on Thursday at Ensemble Studio Theater, asks philosophical questions about A.I. that by now feel consolingly benign, like whether it can replace the care we owe one another or fulfill our need for love.The short and perhaps obvious answer is no. Jenny, as conceived by the playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, functions as a home health aide that Elaine (Kea Trevett) sets up for her mother, Ruth (Christine Farrell), a widow who has suffered a stroke and increasingly stumbles over her words. Ruth’s skepticism thaws once she gets Jenny to play her favorite musician (the Brazilian artist Antônio Carlos Jobim) and order her favorite candy (Werther’s Originals). The insomniac Elaine also warms up: As she adds groceries to Instacart and composes texts to her ex in the middle of the night, Elaine talks to Jenny (voiced by Sherz Aletaha) like a much-needed companion.Ruth’s home is crowded with relics of the past, including her late husband’s worn-out sofa, where she occasionally talks to him, and yesterday’s dishes and trash (the set design is by Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma). Jenny’s glowing orb is a lone marker of the present tense. The future is there with them, too: Gabby (Francesca Fernandez), a programmer working to improve Jenny’s language skills, is listening remotely, her desk nestled in among the clutter. The boundaries between them further collapse when Gabby turns up in person, drawn to what she’s heard and seeking mutual connection.A.I. powers up the plot of “Smart,” which traces the fraught and imprecise networks of memory, obligation and necessity that bind parents and children (Gabby often talks to her own ailing father on the phone). Later, it pivots to capture the sparks that fly between new lovers. The production, co-presented by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports the intersection of arts and science, is ably directed by Matt Dickson on the compact stage and well acted by members of the small cast, particularly Ferrell, as the fog surrounding Ruth thickens and engulfs her. But the play feels like a composite of disparate parts that’s missing an engine.Beyond demonstrating that a smart speaker is no substitute for family, and an especially creepy way for a lonely software engineer to initiate an affair, “Smart” doesn’t mine fresh insight about what it means for relationships to be mediated by technology. Nor does the play resolve the conceit it takes two acts to set up, of a romance built on deception, despite promising its revelation as the primary source of narrative momentum. Even tech that seems mundane is worth deeper scrutiny, but here that examination detracts from the possibility of more cohesive and compelling human drama.SmartThrough April 23 at Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      In ‘Hamnet,’ Shakespeare’s Wife Takes the Stage, at Last

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      A Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s hit novel gives voice and agency to a historical character we know little about.Of the numerous puzzles about William Shakespeare, those concerning his love life are the most tantalizing. Why did he marry a local woman, Anne Hathaway, have three children with her, then decamp to London for a life in the theater? What was their relationship really like? And why do we know so little about Anne herself, whom one scholar has called a “wife-shaped void” in the playwright’s story?This year, the 400th anniversary’s of Anne death, might be the year we finally hear about this other Shakespeare. A volume of celebratory poems, “Anne-thology,” is being published later this month. A small bust of her has been unveiled at Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where her body has lain next to her husband’s since 1623. And, most strikingly, a Royal Shakespeare Company production devoted to her story opens next Wednesday at the company’s Swan Theater in the town.Tom Varey and Madeleine Mantock as William and Agnes, the characters based on Shakespeare and Hathaway.Manuel Harlan“It’s about time,” said Erica Whyman, the show’s director, in an interview after a recent rehearsal. “This is her town; she was born just outside Stratford and lived here all her life, as far as we know. She deserves to be back here.”The play, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling 2020 novel “Hamnet,” is named for the Shakespeares’ only son, who died at age 11 in 1596, for reasons unknown. His father apparently began work on the death-haunted “Hamlet” not long afterward, something that has driven biographers into frenzies of Freudian speculation.But in the script, which has been adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti, there is little doubt who is the star: Shakespeare’s wife, the mother of his children and the head of his household, who brims with spirit and practical intelligence, and runs rings around her partner and everyone else. In the play’s first scene, we see the 17-year-old William gawkily trying to woo her while she flies a pet hawk. (She, too, will never be tamed, we surmise.) Later, we see her industriously baking bread and mixing folk remedies while he dreams of poetry and the theater.Erica Whyman, who is directing “Hamnet,” is the acting artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“She’s so alive,” said Madeleine Mantock, who plays the role based on Anne for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “She has all this knowledge, all this capability.”O’Farrell explained in a phone interview that she first encountered Shakespeare’s wife at college, after becoming curious about the playwright’s family — something historians have often neglected. “Shakespeare’s domestic life, if you want to call it that, just never came into the picture,” Anne least of all, she said. “And the more I read, the more derailed I was about her and the way she’s been treated. She’s been sidelined, in fact worse than sidelined — vilified.”Shakespeare was just 18 when he married Anne in 1582; she was 26 and pregnant. Historians have speculated that theirs was a shotgun wedding which Shakespeare entered into with gritted teeth. That he left Stratford-upon-Avon to begin his theatrical career after the birth of Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, a few years later has added fuel to speculation that the Shakespeares had a loveless marriage. The playwright made only occasional treks back to his hometown until his last years. Signing his will with a shaking hand before his death in 1616, he left Anne his “second-best” bed — something that’s been interpreted as an insult. “Even among quite respected biographers, she’s cast as an illiterate, cradle-snatching peasant who lured this boy genius into marriage,” O’Farrell said. “But I couldn’t find a single shred of evidence for that.”Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, a former farmhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare’s wife grew up.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe town is on the river Avon, about 90 miles northwest of London.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDepictions of Shakespeare characters on a wall in Stratford-upon-Avon. Each year, millions of tourists come to see the town where the playwright was born and died.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe fact that she’s most often referred to by her maiden name, “Hathaway,” speaks volumes, O’Farrell added. “It’s like we don’t want to let her near him.”And speaking of names, “Anne” might not even be the right one, O’Farrell said. In one surviving document, she referred to as “Agnes,” the form adopted in the novel and the play. “The fact that we’ve possibly been calling her by the wrong name for nearly 500 years seems completely symptomatic,” O’Farrell added.Paul Edmondson, the head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said that the story of Shakespeare’s wife was likely complex and compelling. While little evidence of her personality survives — we don’t even have a portrait — the facts we know point to a shrewd, capable woman who managed a large house, was responsible for significant amounts of money and land, and possibly ran a brewing business on the side. In addition, of course, she raised a family for a husband who was mostly away working, as many men in England were at the time.“She’s running the household, she’s a co-earner, and she’s also keeping an eye on his investments in the town. She was his equal in many ways,” Edmondson said.And that “second-best” bed? Edmondson said that it could have been the marriage bed, filled with intimate memories; its mention in the will “might also have been a legal understanding,” guaranteeing her residential rights after his death.In the novel, Anne/Agnes might not be able to write — women rarely received formal education at the time — but her husband does encourage her to read. And, crucially, William’s departure for London isn’t framed as abandonment, but his wife’s idea. “She realizes he needs more,” said Mantock, the actress. “She wants to encourage him to be who he needs to be.”Mantock and Ajani Cabey, as Hamnet. Background from left: Hannah McPake, Frankie Hastings and Elizabeth Rider.Manuel HarlanIn fact, it is only Hamnet’s untimely death that threatens to tear the couple apart; in the play, Agnes is left to pick up the pieces and hold the family together, while William escapes back to London and buries himself in work. It is only when Agnes attends an early performance of “Hamlet” that she realizes that he has transmuted his grief into drama.The novel’s success has had some real-life impacts in Stratford-upon-Avon, too. At Holy Trinity church, volunteers who tend to the Shakespeare family graves said that many more visitors now ask after her, as well as him. Last summer, O’Farrell presided over a ceremony for the planting of a pair of trees in the churchyard — one commemorating Hamnet, the other Judith.“I find that incredibly moving, actually,” O’Farrell said. “And the fact that she and the children are being brought to life onstage in the town.”For Mantock, simply being in Stratford, walking its streets and seeing the places that Anne knew was both poetic and potent, she said. “I know that what I’m doing is not real,” she added. “Of course I know that. But I feel there’s this real person there everywhere I go.”Mantock said playing her role in Anne Hathaway’s hometown was both poetic and potent.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHamnetAt the Swan Theater, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, through June 17, then at the Garrick Theater, in London, from Sept. 30 through Jan. 6; rsc.org. More

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      Dmitry Krymov, Exiled Russian Director, Starts Over in New York

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      Dmitry Krymov, one of Russia’s most eminent directors, is among the dozens of artists who have left their homeland since Russia invaded Ukraine.If Dmitry Krymov, the celebrated Russian director and playwright, were directing a play about his life, the third act would begin, he mused, in a cramped, art-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It is winter, nearly a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, turning his brief visit to the United States into an open-ended exile after he spoke out against the war. And his living room has suddenly burst into flames.So much brownish-black smoke is filling the apartment that he can’t see his arms, and he’s gasping for air. The computer containing drafts of his plays is burning. He is struggling to stamp out the flames with a blanket. Then darkness. His lungs are so badly damaged by the fire, which was apparently caused by a wire that short-circuited, that his doctors keep him in an induced coma for nine days.But this third act, Krymov stressed later, is not meant to be the final one.Surviving a fire, he added wryly, had been a baptism of sorts for his new life in the United States. “A fire brings you closer to a country, when you burn,” Krymov, 68, said recently as he recovered at a friend’s apartment and reflected on his self-imposed displacement, which he sees as a banishment of sorts, but also as a rebirth. “My life as a play needs to end with something, and I hope that we’re not at the end,” he added.Krymov, who scaled the heights of Russian theater during a storied career, left Moscow last year, the day after the invasion of Ukraine, for what he thought would be a six-week trip to the United States to direct a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. He packed only one small suitcase.Before getting on one of the last Aeroflot flights to New York, he became one of the first prominent Russian cultural luminaries to sign a public letter criticizing the war. “We don’t want a new war, we don’t want people to die,” the letter said.The reaction was harsh. In the months that followed, he said, the authorities closed seven of his nine plays, which were playing at some of Moscow’s most vaunted theaters, and his name was erased from the posters and the programs of the two that continued. The cancellations were crushing, he said, but he had no regrets about signing the letter.“Sometimes,” he said, “you are facing something that is so obvious there is no other way.”During President Vladimir V. Putin’s first two decades in power, Russians in many walks of life — including the arts — were sometimes forced into compromises as the space for free speech narrowed. But with the war, that space has slammed shut almost entirely. As Putin has introduced some of the most draconian measures against freedom of expression since the end of the Cold War, Krymov has become part of a growing exodus of Russian artists, writers and intellectuals who have left the country, dealing a heavy blow to Russian culture.Krymov and the actor Annie Hägg rehearsed “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a mash-up of works by Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill.Marina LevitskayaChulpan Khamatova, one of Russia’s most prominent stage and screen actresses, left the country; so did Alla Pugacheva, one of its defining 20th-century pop stars. Young, ascendant filmmakers fled. Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, denounced the war, left the Bolshoi and joined the Dutch National Ballet. The list goes on.For Krymov, the 14 months since he left Moscow have had all the audacious drama, tragedy and dark comedy of one of his plays.In Russia, Krymov was revered by critics and audiences alike for his brazenly original and visually driven re-imaginings of classics from Pushkin, Chekhov and Shakespeare, among others. Now his antiwar stance has pushed him into a period of reinvention: as a little-known director in the United States, a country whose language he speaks only haltingly. He has gone from rehearsing plays at the famed Moscow Art Theater, where Stanislavski once presided, to rehearsing at a vacant barbershop in Midtown Manhattan that his new Krymov Lab NYC rents for $10 an hour from a friend.Last fall, his group was given a residency at La MaMa, the venerable East Village theater. He and a company of New York actors held workshops there of his adaptation of Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words),” and his own work “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a play mashing up works by Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. He hopes to stage them at La MaMa next fall.“I want to work and have my work shown in the United States, to make them angry back home that I am gone,” he said. He brandished a handwritten manuscript of a play he is working on, its words blurred after being drenched by a fire hose.“Manuscripts don’t burn,” he said with a hint of mischief, quoting the devil Woland from “The Master and Margarita” by the Soviet-era writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The quote, with its suggestion that true art cannot be destroyed, has taken on new meaning for him.Liz Diamond, chair of directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, has known Krymov for nearly two decades and teaches his work in her courses.“He has lost everything,” she said. “He was at the absolute heights of Russian theater.”She credited him with pioneering a visceral and strikingly visual form of theater, known as “theater of the artist,” where classic texts are mined for contemporary themes and fused with deeply personal meditations.Anya Zicer and Jackson Scott in Krymov’s “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words).” Steven PisanoHe often uses a single line, scene or gesture as a jumping off point in works like “The Square Root of Three Sisters,” an encounter with Chekhov that he staged in 2016 with students at Yale. In his play, an actress reinterprets a line about a fork left outside by repeatedly stabbing herself with a fork.Diamond recalled she was “thunderstruck” years ago upon seeing Krymov’s wordless take on “Don Quixote,” with the whimsically phonetic title “Sir Vantes. Donkey Hot.”“Dima creates a poetry of space that I’ve never seen anyone else achieve,” Diamond said.Born in 1954 in Moscow, Krymov was the only child of two titans of Russian theater: His father, Anatoly Efros, who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, was one of the leading Soviet theater directors of his generation, while his mother, Natalya Krymova, was an influential critic.Krymov said his father was Jewish, and that his parents, who were concerned about antisemitism, gave him his mother’s more Russian-sounding surname. Before he could walk, he said, he crawled around the backstages of leading Moscow theaters.“I never felt I was living in my father’s shadow,” he said. “My parents didn’t pressure me.”After graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School in 1976, he initially started out as a set designer, which has deeply informed his approach. He eventually became a successful painter, and returned to the theater in 2002 almost by accident, he said, and only reluctantly. He had mentioned to an actor friend an idea for a plot twist in “Hamlet” in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father doesn’t want his death avenged. At his friend’s urging, he directed the play, which bombed with critics but proved a hit with theatergoers.Soon he began teaching at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts, the oldest theatrical school in Russia, and he went on to direct and design dozens of productions.He and his wife, Inna, a frequent collaborator, who often finishes his sentences and lives with him in New York, have one son, age 40, who lives in Miami.This year Krymov’s work has taken on a sharper satirical edge as it grapples with the fate of Russian culture, which is under pressure, for very different reasons, at home and abroad.In the first scene of his new adaptation of “Eugene Onegin,” a group of elderly Russians are telling the story of Pushkin’s poem, as if to children. Then, suddenly, an actor planted in the audience violently throws a tomato at them, accusing them of ignoring the brutality of Putin’s war.“How can you talk about the beauty of Russian culture?” the actor screams. “It’s disgusting!”Krymov has many friends in Ukraine, and he said that he had broken down in tears several times during rehearsals of “The Cherry Orchard” in Philadelphia, thinking of them sheltering underground while bombs rained down.Still armed with his dark and fatalistic Russian sense of humor, he appears resigned to his new life. Alluding to Dostoevsky’s satirical novel “Demons,” he said he wouldn’t return home until “the latest demons had left Russia.”“It’s very safe to be a demon now in Russia,” he said. “Even if you are not a demon, you are going to put the tail and the horns on just in case they are looking for one.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Wife of Willesden,’ a Literary Marriage Falters

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      Zadie Smith brings her first play, an adaptation of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath tale, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.This April, in New York, when the rains have come and the winds have calmed and the cherry trees and hyacinths have hustled into bloom, theatergoers might find themselves making a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for the New York premiere of “The Wife of Willesden,” the novelist Zadie Smith’s adaptation of a lusty wedge of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” And despite the punch and panache of the play’s language, they might find themselves going nowhere.As literary marriages go, one between Smith (“White Teeth,” “On Beauty,” “Swing Time”) and Chaucer, is in theory, of true minds. Though separated by some 600 years, both are keen stylists, eager comedians and dyed-in-the-worsted-wool humanists with a consuming interest in the varieties of emotion and experience. But marriage is hard and somehow Smith’s rendering — presented by BAM in association with A.R.T. — never quickens into life. “The Wife of Willesden,” Smith’s first play, is bookish bed death.Smith, aided by the director Indhu Rubasingham, has updated the action to the present and the setting a few miles north, from a South London tavern to a pub on the Kilburn High Road. (Rubasingham is the artistic director of Kilburn’s Kiln Theater, where the play debuted in 2021.) In Robert Jones’s design, the pub expands across the whole stage floor with lamps and lanterns flickering high above. Chaucer’s text, even unfinished, extends to 29 pilgrims and a host. Here the cast runs to just 10, though audience members seated onstage at wooden tables, swell those numbers.A prologue delivered by a character identified as Author (Jessica Murrain, charming in Smith drag), explains the circumstances. These pilgrims aren’t religious. (Unless drinking is your religion?) Instead, they are locals, out for a beer and a laugh and committed to a “lock-in,” a way to keep the party going long after closing time.In Smith’s rendering, Chaucer’s tapestry has shrunk to just one thread, though arguably its most vivid. If you have read “The Canterbury Tales,” from the cheerful bawdry of the Miller’s tale to the formalities of the Knight’s tale, the Wife of Bath will have leaped off the page in her scarlet stockings. Earthy, contradictory, impulsive and self-aware, she seems effortlessly and shockingly modern.The Wife, or Alison as Chaucer calls her, advocates for female pleasure and female autonomy and has some tart words regarding the prowess of her elderly husbands. What does it mean to offer her a modern vernacular and wardrobe? Extrapolating from “The Wife of Willesden,” not that much.Alison has been renamed Alvita. She is played with archness and authority and hip-swinging sass, shot through with vulnerability, by Clare Perkins, who has traded in those red stockings for a cold-shoulder dress and some very high heels. In Chaucer she is introduced as, “a worthy woman all her life.” Here: “She’s been that bitch since 1983.”Story within the story: Troy Glasgow and Ellen Thomas in the tale Alvita tells about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want.Stephanie BergerAs in Chaucer’s poem, she prefaces her tale with what is essentially her life story, enlisting the pub’s patrons as her many husbands and various friends and acquaintances. (The ensemble is nimble throughout.) Smith’s language is jewel-bright, particular and lively, and Perkins’s performance is brassy and expressive. But every time the Wife addressed the Brooklyn audience — sometimes rhetorically, sometimes seeking an actual reply — there was no response to her call.How to explain these connectivity issues? Smith’s vocabulary, which mixes North London vernacular and Jamaican patois, may be one problem. And the accents, however mild, might rattle unfamiliar ears. Then there’s the form, which attempts to expand the monologue into something more communal and multivocal. Rubasingham’s direction is busy. Maybe it’s too busy (there are disco songs and a haloed Black Jesus). And yet these efforts fail to lift this literary exercise to drama.But the principal problem is the way that Smith has collapsed the now and the then. In the general prologue, the Author warns that audience members might feel surprise or offense at Alvita’s thirsty frankness:“It’s worth remembering — though I’m sure you know —When wives spoke thus six hundred years agoYou were all shocked then. The shock never endsWhen women say things usually said by men”Yet there’s no shock here. Alvita has been married more than most, sure, but her advocacy for equality, for freedom, for great sex is hardly radical now. Maybe it wasn’t even so extreme back then; the Wife became a favorite of balladeers. Her speech still has moments of ambivalence, as when she says that she found great happiness with a man who abused her. (Yes, he repented, but still.) And in the tale Alvita tells, about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want, there remains no genuine justice for the victim. But Smith leaves this tension mostly unexplored and unresolved.The play ends with Alvita and her husbands singing along to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” which is both apposite and wrong. The Wife of Bath is an everywoman, but she’s also a singular literary creation, a character who transcends her moment. She doesn’t really need the updates — or the knockoff Jimmy Choos — to speak to ours.The Wife of WillesdenThrough April 16 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: Laughing, and Crying, in the Face of ‘Grief’

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      In his solo show about the death of his teenage children, Colin Campbell recounts his calamitous relationship with the darkest of emotions.Death is often described as a loss, but for Colin Campbell and his wife, it was a theft. On June 12, 2019, the couple’s children, Ruby and Hart, were killed by an inebriated driver in a horrific crash. Ruby was 17 and loved anime; Hart was 14 and worshiped hip-hop. A photograph of them even younger — bright-eyed and golden-haired — rests on a table like a shrine, one of the few props in Campbell’s brusque tragicomedy, “Grief: A One Man ShitShow.”In “Grief,” directed by Michael Schlitt, Campbell recounts his relationship with the emotion. Before the bleak canvas of a back wall, Campbell, a writer and director of theater and film, begins his solo show with a warning of the semi-macabre journey to come: “Tonight, you are going to get taken to some uncomfortable places.” Seconds later, the lights dim and Campbell begins detailing that fatal night.Campbell knows that memories aren’t kept only in the brain; they are also conjured by the tongue. So the remainder of “Grief” unfolds like a talking book of essays (Campbell recently wrote “Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose”), weaving together the many ways friends and family fumble grief-talk with stories about Ruby and Hart. Campbell’s blunt delivery of the former often conflicts with his deeply felt recollections of the latter, but what is lost in his uneven performance is more than made up for by his vulnerability.Campbell insists that “Grief” is not an act of sadomasochistic indulgence, nor is the act of dramatizing pain anything new. Sophocles and Aeschylus did it first. Campbell calls back to the Ancient Greek practice of gathering for the sole purpose of communal catharsis through theater, reminding us that “Oedipus” and “Agamemnon” would play out over a full day in 20,000-seat venues. “Grief” simply asks for 75 minutes in a black box.Campbell is not concerned with niceties or palatable jokes. His script acknowledges its brazenness, but only after taking combative jabs at religion, grief books, group counseling and other restorative practices friends dare suggest. He dedicates entire passages to the messy parts of the healing process: how to explain to friends the differences between not wanting to live and being suicidal; how to empathize with other bereaved parents who still have living children; at what point during mourning is morning sex acceptable.I could never answer Campbell’s questions. I’ve never had a child, let alone lost two. But I have said eternal goodbyes. “Grief” opened on what would have been my grandmother Adina’s birthday, April 2. She turned 84 on that day in 2010, and died the next. I imagine that Campbell — adamant that no grief compares with that of losing all your children — might roll his eyes at that anecdote, but including her is the same act of remembrance he spent his unforgettable performance showing me how to do.GriefThrough April 16 at Theater Row, Manhattan; griefaonemanshitshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      The Enduring Appeal of ‘Wagatha,’ Now on Stage and Screen

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      A dramatization of the trial between the wives of two soccer stars is returning to the West End in London, joining TV shows, podcasts and documentaries about the high-profile spat.With its stage transformed into a green soccer pitch, “Vardy v. Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial” at Wyndham’s Theater in London last November promised its nearly sold-out audience a game, and the two women onstage were both trying to score a goal.But as two pundits ooh’ed and aah’ed from the sidelines, the actresses sparring were not playing soccer stars but the women married to them, caught at the center of an Instagram feud turned high-profile libel case that captured the British public’s attention last May and peeled back the curtain hiding the machinations of British celebrity and the glitzy world of English soccer.“I see it as a comedy of manners,” said Liv Hennessy, the writer of the play, which returns to the West End on Thursday at the Ambassadors Theater. “It’s a theatrical way for us to look at the way people behave in our current society.”The play is just one recent retelling of the real-life case that became known as the “Wagatha Christie” trial, in which Rebekah Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, sued Coleen Rooney, the wife of the former Manchester United star Wayne Rooney, for defamation. The catalyst: Rooney’s accusation, on Twitter, that Vardy had leaked her personal information to the British press.The wives and girlfriends of soccer players — commonly known in Britain by the acronym WAGs — have long been followed by tabloids, but Rooney’s post caused an online furor. Its escalation into the legal realm led to breathless coverage, drawing in powerhouse lawyers and unearthing revelations about both women’s personal lives.The legal side of the long-running saga came to an end last July, with the High Court ruling against Vardy, saying that the reputational damage from the scandal was not libel and ordering Vardy to pay almost all of Rooney’s legal costs, which amounted to about £1.7 million, or $1.9 million.But the case’s power as a story has lived on, with production companies, documentary makers, podcasters and journalists finding the unfolding trial and its cast of characters just too irresistible not to dissect, all helped by the availability of the weeklong case’s court transcripts.“It’s the old adage of: You can’t write this,” said Thomas Popay, the creative director of Chalkboard TV, which produced a two-part dramatization, “Vardy v. Rooney: A Courtroom Drama,” that aired on Channel 4 in Britain last December. “We literally didn’t. We took the transcripts and recreated them.”Alongside the West End play and Channel 4 show, offerings for followers of the feud include a BBC podcast called “It’s … Wagatha Christie” and the Discovery+ documentary “Vardy vs Rooney: The Wagatha Trial.” Rooney has signed a Disney+ deal for a three-part documentary looking at the events leading up to the trial, and the saga is reportedly being considered for a retelling as part of the series “A Very British Scandal.”Rebekah Vardy, left, lost her defamation case against Coleen Rooney, right, in London’s High Court last year. Rooney described how she concocted a sting operation to reveal the betrayer.Daniel Leal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“All of us can relate to the idea of being betrayed — especially betrayed by someone who we trusted,” Popay said. “And on Vardy’s side — we can all relate to not being believed.”In her 2019 social media post, Rooney described how she concocted a sting operation to reveal the betrayer by posting false stories that were visible to a single account — Vardy’s — to test if they would turn up in The Sun, a London tabloid.The popularity of the post led to Rooney being nicknamed “Wagatha Christie” — a portmanteau of WAG and Agatha Christie, the mystery writer — for her detective work. Vardy quickly denied she was the leaker and sued Rooney for defaming her.“We are absolutely interested in people’s misfortunes and what goes on in celebrity lives,” said Adrian Bingham, a professor of modern British history at the University of Sheffield who has studied media and gender issues. The women’s involvement with the soccer world gave their dispute resonance with a wider audience, he added, while the legal case gave the non-tabloid media a legitimate reason to cover it. Producers of the adaptations say they have asked their own lawyers to look over scripts, lest they find themselves accused of defamation.The court transcript itself had moments and revelations that many say were ripe for re-enactment: a phone with key evidence in the form of WhatsApp messages, apparently lost to the bottom of the North Sea; lawyers in wigs formally reading out text messages from the women, some containing profanities; Vardy’s tears on the witness stand after cross-examination by David Sherborne, Rooney’s lawyer.“It was positively Shakespearean in terms of how it went down,” said Popay. “We decided the best thing to do and the most accurate thing to do was to completely recreate the trial by using the court transcripts verbatim.” His company’s show, which was commissioned in May during the trial and aired in December, drew 1.5 million viewers.In the Channel 4 show “Vardy v. Rooney: A Courtroom Drama,” Vardy is played by Natalia Tena, seen here arriving at court.Channel 4Hennessy, the writer of the West End play, also relied heavily on the court transcripts, but took liberties by leaning into the soccer world, structuring the play like a game itself. Reading the transcripts, she said she was struck by the humanity of the two women, who have both been criticized (Vardy has said that people made abusive threats toward her and her unborn baby following that fateful post, while the trial laid bare tensions in Rooney’s marriage and her experience growing up with fame).“It does ask how complicit we are in creating public figures, and tearing them down when they don’t meet our standards,” Hennessy said.Even at a rehearsal in late March, before the play’s official return, it was clear the trial continued to intrigue and perplex even the cast members. During a pivotal scene in which Rooney is grilled by Vardy’s lawyer on precisely why she made the fateful decision to share the feud with the world, the actors broke character to pose their own burning questions: Was that decision one of a calculating woman, or a woman at a breaking point? Why had she not privately confronted Vardy? And what did it feel like to live, as they imagined Rooney did, in a world where one’s image could become a public commodity?Though celebrity gossip can be easy to dismiss as frivolous, the two opponents in the trial were both women from working-class backgrounds who laid out one aspirational pathway for others like them, said Rebecca Twomey, an entertainment correspondent who has covered both women closely.“We like to put people on pedestals — and bring them down,” she said, adding that many people enjoyed a modern-day pantomime. “You might think they’re airhead WAGs, but these are two sharp, intelligent women.”Still, the enduring appeal of the high drama of “Wagatha Christie” is also simple, Professor Bingham said.“The reason people are telling it is not because it’s insightful,” he added. “It’s because it’s a great story — with great lines.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘A Little Life’ Is Quite a Lot

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      Self-harm, lashings, child prostitution, rape: Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of the 2015 novel tests the audience’s trauma threshold.How much is too much? The question recurs a lot during “A Little Life,” the theatrical pileup of suffering and woe that opened on Wednesday at the Harold Pinter Theater in London. The play is beautifully acted but surpassingly bleak, and spectators may find their own threshold for trauma tested more than once. I know mine was.Telling of a New York City lawyer who seems to know very little but pain, this is the English-language debut of a much-traveled Dutch-language production, directed by Ivo van Hove, that reached New York last year. That version was first seen in 2018 at the International Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director. To create the English adaptation, he has joined forces with the Dutch dramaturge Koen Tachelet and Hanya Yanagihara, the American writer on whose 2015 novel the show is based. (Yanagihara is also the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)This latest iteration — which runs at the Harold Pinter through June 18, then transfers to the Savoy Theater until Aug. 5 — has been selling out and generating tabloid headlines, not least because the show’s fast-rising leading man, James Norton, appears naked for extended sequences.But far more noteworthy is the grievous state in which we find Norton’s character, Jude, whether clothed or unclothed, pretty much throughout. “You’re so damaged,” Jude’s longtime friend-turned-lover Willem (a sweet-faced Luke Thompson) tells him, in the understatement of the night. When Jude does undress, we see a body disfigured by scars. Self-harm, rape, lashings, child prostitution, attempted murder: Jude has known it all. No wonder the play’s website comes with an elaborate content warning and the offer of “post-show support resources.”Yanigahara takes 720 pages to tell the story of four college friends whom we follow through their precarious lives — though Jude’s is the most awful: Willem, a womanizing actor, is his best buddy; then there are J.B. (Omari Douglas), a prickly painter; and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), an architect who comes from family money.From left: Thompson, Norton, Zubin Varla as Harold, Emilio Doorgasingh as Andy, Zach Wyatt as Malcolm and Omari Douglas as J.B.Jan VersweyveldIt’s not the fault of Douglas or Wyatt, both fine actors, that J.B. and Malcolm seem to fade from view as the play proceeds. A feisty J.B. drives the opening scene, set at his 30th birthday party in Lower Manhattan, but is soon relegated to painting in silence on the periphery of the designer Jan Versweyveld’s multipurpose set, which manages to accommodate a kitchen, a hospital room and an art studio in one tall space.Video footage of New York on either side of the stage provides a sense of place lacking from the script. And although the play’s events span decades, there’s hardly a mention of politics or culture, as if these topics might detract from the misery unfolding across nearly four hours. (This version is a half-hour shorter than the Dutch one.) An exception is Jude’s fondness for one of Mahler’s “Rückert-Lieder,” which begins with the line, “O garish world, long since thou hast lost me.”Yes, Jude does experience kindness: He is adopted as an adult by his former professor, Harold (an elegant Zubin Varla), whose wife, Julia, has been excised from the stage adaptation.And he finds a companion and ally in Ana (the expert Nathalie Armin, the play’s lone female role), a social worker who helps him push through his concealed trauma.Mostly, though, you just watch as Jude rolls up his sleeves and takes a razor to himself yet again. The production owes an enormous amount to Norton, a likable and attractive stage-trained TV star in a role that playgoers might otherwise recoil from, and this performance is sure to be a contender for the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.But I couldn’t help nodding in agreement when Willem remarks in the second act that he is “sometimes surprised” that Jude’s still alive. You emerge stunned at the sheer mercilessness of it all, but moved? By the acting, yes. But not the play.A Little LifeThrough June 18 at the Harold Pinter Theater, then July 4 to Aug. 5 at the Savoy Theater, in London; alittlelifeplay.com. More