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      Review: ‘Public Obscenities’ Pushes Far Beyond One Field of Study

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      The new work from Shayok Misha Chowdhury creates a strong enough center for the rest of its disparate parts to hold, and leaves the audience craving more.It is a testament to Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s gifts as a writer that he is able to evoke as many themes, histories and possibilities as he does in “Public Obscenities,” and leave his audience not dazed or frustrated, but longing for even more. Truthfully, the work might best unfold as a mini-series, a longer medium where his interests can find proper room to breathe.Running just under three hours, the play’s premiere production at Soho Rep, in Lower Manhattan, is both too long for one cohesive sitting, even with an intermission, and too short to tidy up all the threads at which it pulls. But, co-presented by the National Asian American Theater Company and directed by Chowdhury with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism, it creates a strong enough center for the rest of its disparate parts to hold.To be fair, Chowdhury winks at the impossibility of successfully wrapping up all his concerns in a terrific quip from Choton (Abrar Haque), a Bengali American student who had returned to his native Kolkata, India, for a vaguely defined academic project. At the Ph.D. level, he explains, fields of study — English, anthropology, performance, gender, cinema — all start to look and feel the same.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Along with his non-Bangla-speaking cinematographer boyfriend, Raheem (Jakeem Dante Powell), Choton hopes to interview queer locals found on the hookup app Grindr. To what end, exactly, is uncertain, but it does allow Chowdhury to explore the difficulties of mixing business, pleasure and personal experience in the precarious quest to analyze subcultures defined by their marginalization. Their own relationship dynamic is called into question as Choton and Raheem set up a joint Grindr account, and Haque and Powell navigate these burdensome complexities with touching humanity and intelligence.Their study also provides an excuse for a scene-stealing interview subject to come into the picture, played by the transgender activist Tashnuva Anan with a liveliness and self-assurance made for public adoration. Anan’s character, Shou, identifies as kothi, a native Indian gender similar to an effeminate man and, through Shou, Choton confronts his feeling of alienation from his compatriots’ queer scene.Apart from a later foray into a nearby river, he does this from his late grandfather’s house, now kept by his aunt (Gargi Mukherjee), her online billiards-addicted husband (Debashis Roy Chowdhury) and their housekeeper (Golam Sarwar Harun). With their colorful side stories and performances, these three build out a world unconnected to the young couple’s mission, which is also thrown off-balance through the discovery of an undeveloped film reel inside the deceased patriarch’s camera.This abundance of plot (is it too late to mention Shou’s street-smart friend, played by NaFis?) should come closer to overwhelming the production, but Chowdhury’s cinematic direction — aided by title credits screened onstage by Johnny Moreno (who also turns the space into a serene riverbank), Barbara Samuels’s transitional lighting and Tei Blow’s inventive sound design — keep things steadily afloat. And the sunny one-room set, by dots, a scenic-design collective, is ravishing in its simplicity and use of soft canary yellow (and burning incense).This expansive production casts a wide net, yes, but one kept from being spread too thin by a uniformly excellent cast and the deliberate pacing of a confident playwright. Chowdhury also accomplishes the not-insignificant task of successfully writing a bilingual play, with some of the Bangla dialogue translated via supertitles and some left to nonspeakers’ imagination.If the play ends with some unfortunately unanswered questions, its conclusion is a hopeful, not frustrating, one. Chowdhury is a writer with great promise who, with “Public Obscenities,” may have found himself on the brink of greatness.Public ObscenitiesThrough March 26 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 2 hours and 50 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Why Willem Dafoe Can’t Slow Down

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.WILLEM DAFOE, DRESSED in a black leather jacket, enters the downtown Manhattan restaurant where we’d planned to meet. He has his phone up to his ear, a look that’s almost a parody: In walks a Very Busy Guy. He sees me at the table, gestures at the phone extravagantly, rolls his eyes and grimaces at the absurdity of it. As the seconds go by, his apologetic demeanor morphs into something more like comedy — his head shaking, his hand waving in a vaguely Italian-style telegraph of exasperation, all of it coalescing into a fascinating improvisational bit.He stood a few feet from our table as he finished the call, giving the staff at the Georgian cafe ample opportunity to take in the actor in their midst. Maybe the performance was for their benefit, too? Yet it didn’t feel showy: He was not too famous to hide, not too self-conscious to resist doing what he does almost unthinkingly, which is use his body to perform. Acting is not so much a job for Dafoe as a way of being in the world, a practice so essential he can’t go without it.The digital cover of T’s 2023 spring Men’s Fashion issue.Collier SchorrDafoe, 67, is an unusual celebrity, perhaps the world’s most famous character actor — one who came up through New York experimental theater, who never intended to appeal to the masses. Like a Christopher Walken or a Ralph Fiennes, he suggests in his choices of roles as much as his performances that he thrives on parts that other actors might find distasteful or unflattering; he differentiates himself by a certain lack of discrimination. He’s been in nearly 150 films since his first starring role, as a young but hardened biker in Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Loveless” (1981). Many of them have been blockbusters, but some have never played in the United States and many were made by young directors about whom he knew little more than, as he puts it, that they gave him “a good feeling.”This month, Dafoe stars in “Inside,” a debut feature by the Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis, 46, about an art thief trapped by an elaborate security system within a minimalist high-end apartment that’s dangerously low on life-sustaining necessities. For 90 minutes, the camera rarely strays from Dafoe, as his character, over the course of months, endures near-starvation, total isolation and the absence (no small thing) of a functioning toilet. Working on the project required the actor to live apart from his family and friends for six weeks, “like a monk,” he says, cooking for himself in a small rental in Cologne, Germany. In the film, he lays himself bare, physically and psychologically, burrowing deep into the humbling ugliness of true desperation. He was, Dafoe told me later, “in heaven.”The actor Willem Dafoe, photographed in New York City on Nov. 16, 2022, wears Bottega Veneta jacket and pants, price on request, bottegaveneta.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.WILLEM DAFOE WAS born William Dafoe in Appleton, Wis., where he was drawn to community theater, the kid who’d do anything for a laugh. The second youngest of eight children, he made sure he would be seen, even amid the chaos of a home packed with older teenagers, their comings and goings barely monitored by his mother, a nurse, and his father, a surgeon (both now dead). “It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that when you’re in a big family, you gotta find your place,” he says. “I became the entertainer.” An extrovert with a transgressive streak, he dropped out of high school after being falsely accused, he says, of making a pornographic film for a communications class. He nonetheless briefly attended the University of Wisconsin and eventually joined an experimental troupe called Theatre X. (Along the way, the young man who’d been known as Billy decided to switch to Willem, a name a friend from college called him.)At 21, Dafoe arrived in 1970s-era downtown Manhattan, a creative playground for artists attracted to its cheap, empty lofts. Here, he came to admire the work of Elizabeth LeCompte, the pioneering director known for her role shaping the work of Spalding Gray, the polymathic performance artist. Dafoe began collaborating with both and then helped the couple form the theater troupe that would become the Wooster Group in 1980. But his integration into their world started with a major disruption: He fell in love with LeCompte, who left Gray to embark upon a 26-year relationship with Dafoe. (He and LeCompte have one son, Jack, who’s 40.) The three ended up subdividing the loft LeCompte had shared with Gray with a wall and separate entrances so no one had to move out. A hothouse of talent, tension and creativity, the Wooster Group soon became one of the most influential theatrical companies in New York, central to downtown culture, in conversation with the city’s emergent dance and performance art scenes. Their work wasn’t linear, but there was nothing haphazard about their highly stylized, carefully rehearsed projects, which often ran on tight clockwork choreographies, integrating video and complicating ideas of plot.Dior Men coat, $5,600, shirt, $950, and pants, $890, dior.com; Prada turtleneck, $1,890, and boots (worn throughout), $1,790, prada.com; stylist’s own socks; and Dafoe’s own ring (worn throughout).Dafoe fell naturally into work that demanded both a strong ego and a spirit of collaboration. But the actor Kate Valk, another founding member who still performs with the Wooster Group, recalls Dafoe as providing the kind of energy associated with the frontman in a band: captivating and telegenic. “He was an important part of the charisma of the group,” she says. “He had that impish impulse always. He very much represented the id in the room.” Both Valk, now 65, and LeCompte, now 78, remember Dafoe as hungry to be looked at. “He wants very much to be needed,” says LeCompte. “And if he’s needed, he’ll give everything. He has to work.” Wooster also made experimental movies, in which it became clear that Dafoe — his chiseled face teetering between beautiful and gaunt — might have a future on film. (“Who needs the American West when you have all the planes on that face?” asks Valk.) He became known for taking on dark roles: the soulless killer in “To Live and Die in L.A.,” the 1985 William Friedkin thriller; a maniac with a surprising underlying pathos in E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” for which he earned his second of four Academy Award nominations in 2001. But for many years, he toggled between two extremes: heartless freaks (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) and the near-saintly (Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” 1986; Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” 1988). “When I saw him as Jesus, I thought, ‘Oy — Jesus,’” says LeCompte. “I realized, ‘He can be on a very big screen.’”Prada coat, price on request, shirt, $4,600, and turtleneck.So much of Dafoe’s movie career reflects the expressionism he honed at Wooster, in performances that were highly physical. Those qualities endure in his depiction of the Green Goblin in Marvel’s “Spider-Man” films; he appears in four of them, but his operatic performance in the first one, from 2002, is considered essential to the success of the series. And yet, another of his most memorable performances is a study in understatement. In the 2017 independent film “The Florida Project,” he embodies a man who’s made many choices he regrets but is trying, nonetheless, to do right by those he can help, however modestly. The film relied on local Floridians without feature film experience; the director, Sean Baker, shot the ending on an iPhone. At this stage in his career, Dafoe says, he has the luxury of accepting assignments on instinct: “When you’re starting out, you feel like every film can ruin you. Now I can take more risks.”IN “INSIDE,” THE burden of carrying the movie rests squarely on Dafoe, and on what he can still do with his body. A former student of karate, a daily practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, a skilled tango dancer, Dafoe, in one of the film’s memorable scenes, constructs a 28-foot-high tower of furniture, his breath labored as he lugs tables and breaks down chairs. In attempting to escape through a skylight, he crawls to the top of the structure and nimbly stands up before stretching his arms overhead. The athleticism on display from an actor in his late 60s is so striking that it’s almost distracting.Collier SchorrWatching the movie, I told Dafoe, I had the sense of him as an actor who — but he cut me off before I could finish: “Who’s not even entertaining the question of ‘Who’s going to see this, and what’s it going to do for me?’” He smiled.I was going to say I had the sense of an actor who is intent on proving — to directors, but more so to himself — that he is still strong enough, still motivated enough psychologically, to do grueling work; who refuses to let age be an impediment. Dafoe’s longevity, says the director Abel Ferrara, 71, with whom he’s collaborated several times, reflects his two and a half decades with Wooster. The grounding with the theater meant he never left for Los Angeles, where so many actors hustle for the wrong things. And as long as he was with the company, he was acting most days, rather than waiting out empty stretches in between projects, as other stars do. “You can’t be an actor, not working,” says Ferrara. “He knows that.”“Inside” was the kind of project that Dafoe relishes, one in which the role itself is a work in progress. “We had a pact,” says Katsoupis, the director, “that although we had a beautiful script, we would be discovering this character day by day.” Dafoe’s input was essential, down to the drawing he made of the mural his character would eventually create as he grasped for his own humanity within the unrelentingly hostile apartment. Stories he told Katsoupis over dinner — about a tuneless nursery rhyme that an ill patient of his mother’s used to sing, or about a particular hilarious but repetitive joke that a Bulgarian translator once told him — ended up in the film.Emporio Armani jacket and pants, price on request, armani.com; and Sunspel T-shirt, $90, sunspel.com.“You throw yourself into it,” Dafoe says. “And you have a beautiful day full of adventure and impressions that you don’t always get — and then you feel turned on.” He likens the experience of working with a director to being in love. “You feel energized and like your best self — you’re so enamored of this person that you want to be the best person possible. That’s the proposal: ‘We need you to do this thing, to go on this mission.’” The waiter at the restaurant brought a plate of Georgian desserts, including a rich honey cake, and, over oat vodka, Dafoe showed me some recent images on his phone: an ice skater he enjoyed watching on television; a digital clock in a cab showing the time 4:44 (part of the name of a 2011 film he made with Ferrara); a photo of him near a painting by the Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre, a copy of which is featured in “Inside.” He had been stunned to see the original in the lobby of the Shed, a Manhattan arts space, earlier that week and had someone take a photo of him in front of it — with his pants around his ankles. (“I told you, I like transgression!” he explains.) For Dafoe, performing for an audience, even a personal one, often involves high jinks and spontaneity. At some level, he’s clearly still driven by the desire to entertain, to shock, that drove him as a young actor. But interwoven with that is another motivation that takes more commitment: wringing the most meaning possible from inhabiting someone else’s story. He may get immediate satisfaction from the big laugh, but the truly hard days are justified by something else — finding significance in an object as simple as a glass filled with water, an example he gives from his latest film, how much it changes depending on who’s poured it, who’s drinking it, with what experience behind it. “Your curiosity in that moment — it’s not normal,” Dafoe says. “It’s hyperawareness.”Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello coat, $7,000, and pants, $1,290, ysl.com; and Prada turtleneck.His intention is to try to bond with other confused humans, he says, by acting out versions of their stories. It’s an impulse, he adds, as old as dancing in front of the campfire: “I’m going to get up and do this for me and for you and for all of us.” Comfort, consolation, connection — what else matters? “Because really,” he says, “there’re only two events. There’s birth. And there’s death. And in between, it’s all —” Then Dafoe makes the kind of crazy eyes that render him riveting onscreen, and the spiral hand gesture for “nuts” with a hand on either side of his head, emitting the babbling sound — garbled, funny, unnerving — of a madman.DURING THE 26 years that Dafoe collaborated with the Wooster Group, film was always something he did privately, on his own. His Hollywood income helped keep the company afloat; his colleagues supported the movies without being particularly interested in them. Eventually, he says, his absences — and then the fame that came after “Spider-Man,” in the aughts — took a toll on the relationships he had with his fellow company members. “They were a family,” he says matter-of-factly. “And I was like a man with many families.” In 2003, Dafoe, who was filming in Italy, fell in love with Giada Colagrande, an Italian director who was 27 at the time. A mutual friend had introduced them not long after she directed and starred in “Open My Heart” (2002), an erotic noir that had been a sensation at the Venice Film Festival. In a painful break with LeCompte — and therefore the Wooster Group — Dafoe moved part time to Rome to be with Colagrande, whom he married in 2005. The dissolution of that relationship was a shock not just to LeCompte but to the whole group. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown,” Valk says. And yet it somehow came as a surprise to Dafoe that he was exiled from the troupe.“I was totally naïve,” he says now. Leaving LeCompte meant losing some of his closest friends — and it meant walking away from experimental theater. “I just took a different life,” he says. “I started seeking out other opportunities in the theater, but it was very difficult after working in the company.” This past decade, he performed in two Robert Wilson productions in New York City — “The Old Woman” (2014), opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov, and “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović” (2013) — and he continues to pursue ambitious avant-garde projects with the few well-known collaborators who can launch them on a prominent stage. But he has little interest in conventional theater, he says: “It has to be something that I’ve never done before.”Emporio Armani jacket (sold as part of a suit); and Sunspel T-shirt.Now, when he’s not filming, he spends whatever time he has with Colagrande in New York and in Italy. During the pandemic, her mother moved into a farmhouse an hour’s drive outside of Rome, where the couple frequently join her. Over time, they’ve built it into a working farm, with goats, alpacas, a renegade ram, some showy turkeys (“They think they’re peacocks,” Colagrande says) and a vegetable garden big enough that they supply a nearby restaurant with cauliflowers, eggplants, tomatoes and lettuces.The actor has discovered, relatively late in life, how much he loves animals — maybe even identifies with them. “Paul Schrader” — who directed him in “Light Sleeper” (1992) — “says that all actors are like farm animals,” Dafoe told me. “They like to work.” I had gone to see him in Italy, where we were now chatting in the house, over the din of a green monk parrot, Paco, whom Colagrande, now 47, had rescued off a Roman street. It seemed to me the farm is like one big ensemble group, a cast of characters — sacred, showy, chirpy, recalcitrant — who demand attention and time, and also, crucially, who need Dafoe.Dafoe, for his part, seems perennially drawn to new troupes. He frequently works with the American directors Wes Anderson (five films together) and Robert Eggers (three). More recently, he has been drafted into the group of actors who collaborate with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. He just finished filming, in New Orleans, a Lanthimos project with Emma Stone called “And,” the details of which have not been revealed; the two actors also recently wrapped another Lanthimos movie, “Poor Things,” based on a novel with a Victorian setting and a “Frankenstein”-inspired theme.  On the CoversHermès jumpsuit, $6,150, hermes.com; Sunspel T-shirt; and stylist’s own turtleneck.Zegna polo, $4,700, zegna.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.While making “And,” Stone was struck by how much Dafoe loved being on set. The actors, she recalls, would often hear one assistant director announcing to another, over a walkie-talkie, that Dafoe was “self-motivating to set” — meaning, showing up even though there was no official reason to be there. “That’s what you want from actors,” says Lanthimos, 49. “To want to be part of it in any way.” In one scene, Stone’s character is seen slapping Dafoe’s, who’s meant to be off camera; ordinarily, Stone would make the gesture without an actor present, but Dafoe insisted that the move would look more genuine if he were actually being slapped, and then took the (staged) blow some 20 times.“There’s this instinct to perform that many actors have — the ‘look at me, look at me!’ kind of performer,” says Stone. “He’s the opposite of that.” Her comment, notably, was the opposite of how LeCompte and Valk characterized his relationship to the audience — an apparent eagerness to delight the viewer. “Maybe it’s changed through the years,” Stone says. “A lot of actors I bond with have been doing this for a long time, and you know they’ve gone from ‘I’ to ‘We.’”Dafoe says he saw his relationship to acting shift in tandem with the stages of life. He started out an extrovert, performing for the attention. Then it turned into an adult affair: “Once you start working, you use that as a means to survive.” For those who stick with it, the study of the craft takes over; the extroversion turns inward. “And then,” he says, “it becomes like a spiritual thing — to find your connection with all things.” He seems, in one sense, to be racing against time — to be seizing on his hard-won status to work as often as possible, in roles that are as physical and challenging as possible, while he still can. Other actors slow down over the years; for Dafoe, a sense of mortality makes all the more compelling his desire to “melt into things,” as he says, choosing parts that connect him to something bigger than himself.At the farm, after bowls of pasta, I asked Colagrande what kind of role she’d like to see Dafoe try next. “The head of a cult,” she told me. They’re both fascinated by figures who could create an awakening in large groups of people — while using that talent possibly for evil. Dafoe was reluctant to answer the question himself — to him, it’s never about the role but the whole project. He acknowledged that he wanted to keep doing parts that were vital: physical ones, like being the captain of a ship, or performing love scenes or working with animals. Off the table are kindly or ailing grandfathers.Colagrande and I had been talking privately for almost half an hour; we realized it was time to call me a taxi. Dafoe was — understandably — getting restless after all the leisure, the long lunch, the chores that had been put off. He had Italian to study, he had animals to feed, he had scripts to read — there was work to do, thank God, and he wanted, he needed, to go do it.Hair by Adlena Dignam at Bryant Artists using Oribe. Grooming by Aya Iwakami. Set design by Robert Sumrell. Production: Hen’s Tooth. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Photo assistants: Ariel Sadok, Dylan Garcia, Terry Gifford. Set assistant: Erin Turner. Director of photography: Angel Zinovieff. Assistant camera: Erin Althaus. Tailor: Eugenio Solanillos. Stylist’s assistant: Verity Azario More

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      in Theater

      When Clothes Fly Off, This Intimacy Coordinator Steps In

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      It takes a lot of people to make a movie. You’ve got the director for overall vision, the gaffer on the lights, the set decorators to add texture to the film’s world, and the costume designers to envision the actors’ looks.And when those costumes come off and things start to get a bit steamy? That’s where Jessica Steinrock comes in.Ms. Steinrock is an intimacy coordinator — or intimacy director, when she’s working on theater and live performance — who facilitates the production of scenes involving nudity, simulated sex or hyper exposure, which she defines as “something someone might not otherwise uncover in public, even if it’s not legally nudity.” Much like a stunt coordinator or a fight director, she makes sure that the actors are safe throughout the process, and that the scene looks believable.The role has come to prominence in the last five years. As the entertainment industry reeled from the litany of abuses brought to light by the #MeToo movement, many productions were eager to publicly demonstrate their commitment to safety. Hiring an intimacy coordinator was one way to do that.“A lot of places were really excited about the possibility of this work and being ahead of the curve — showing that their company cared about their actors, cared about consent,” Ms. Steinrock said in a Zoom interview from her home in Chicago.Ms. Steinrock — who has worked on projects including the critically acclaimed Showtime survival drama “Yellowjackets,” Netflix’s teen dramedy “Never Have I Ever” and the Hulu mini-series “Little Fires Everywhere” — has been involved in intimacy coordination since its early days. The industry took off thanks in large part to the highly publicized work of the intimacy coordinator Alicia Rodis on the HBO show “The Deuce” in 2018. At that time, Ms. Steinrock, whose background is in improv comedy, was working on a master’s degree in theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, focused on navigating questions of consent in that space.“In the improv world, I was picked up a lot or kissed or grabbed, or jokes were made about me that I didn’t consent to,” she recalled in a TikTok video. “And I was really curious if there were ways to navigate that better.”Jessica Steinrock explains to students in an intimacy and consent performance workshop at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, how the acronym CRISP describes how to give and receive consent.Mary Mathis for The New York TimesMs. Steinrock uses a range of modesty garments and barriers, including pouches, pads and strapless thongs, to keep actors safe when performing intimate scenes.Mary Mathis for The New York TimesThe issue was particularly thorny in improv, which is grounded in a philosophy of accepting and building on whatever your scene partner gives you.“You got placed in these uncomfortable or even harmful positions because the whole culture is ‘yes, and … ,’” said Valleri Robinson, the head of the university’s theater department, who advised Ms. Steinrock on her master’s degree and Ph.D. “It really started to come to the foreground for her that this was a problematic way of creating art.”Ms. Steinrock and Ms. Rodis met through Ms. Steinrock’s then-boyfriend, now husband, who is a fight director. Ms. Rodis recognized a kindred spirit, with all the makings of a great intimacy coordinator, in Ms. Steinrock. She mentored Ms. Steinrock on her first gig: a 40-person orgy on the TNT show “Claws.” “She was thrown into the lion’s den, and she absolutely smashed it,” Ms. Rodis recalled.Ms. Steinrock quickly rose to become a leader in the burgeoning field, and she now dedicates much of her time to educating people about it. In April 2022, she started her TikTok account, which now has more than 700,000 followers. In her videos, she critiques “spicy” scenes on TV shows (her current favorites include “Bridgerton,” “Sex Education” and “House of the Dragon”); breaks down how such scenes are filmed; and answers frequently asked questions about her work, such as “What do you do if an actor gets an erection?” or “If two actors are in an offscreen relationship, do they still have to follow the same protocols?” She’s not just demystifying her job, but also engaging people in broader conversations about intimacy and consent.The role of the intimacy coordinator can be a tricky balancing act between choreography and care, and Ms. Steinrock brings an academic grounding in feminist and performance theory to the work, coupled with innate people skills.“She’s very patient,” said Karyn Kusama, a director and executive producer on the Showtime drama “Yellowjackets,” who worked with Ms. Steinrock on the show’s pilot. “She listens. She’s looking to the actor to take the lead in terms of … what will make them feel most cared for.”Melanie Lynskey, as Shauna, and Warren Kole, as Jeff Sadecki, in an episode of the Showtime survival drama “Yellowjackets.” Ms. Steinrock worked on the show’s pilot, including on a scene where Shauna masturbates while looking at a picture of her teenage daughter’s boyfriend.Kailey Schwerman/ShowtimeThe pilot of “Yellowjackets” includes several intimate scenes, including one where two high schoolers, played by Sophie Nélisse and Jack Depew, have sex in a car, and another where a housewife, played by Melanie Lynskey, masturbates. Having Ms. Steinrock on set for those scenes was vital, Ms. Kusama said.As a director, Ms. Kusama said she has always felt a deep empathy with how vulnerable actors are in these scenes and makes a point to check in. But even if she poses a question, it can be hard for an actor who is uncomfortable to respond honestly knowing how much is on the line. An intimacy coordinator, as a neutral party, is more likely to get an honest answer.“Societally, sex is really hard to talk about,” Ms. Steinrock said. Her role is to “create more pathways of communication,” she explained, so the actors feel safe discussing any issues, big or small, that may come up.Having an intimacy coordinator doesn’t just create a safer environment, Ms. Kusama said: It also makes for better, sexier art.“It demands that you take responsibility for your story with the actors, that you actually say, Yeah, we’re depicting sex and here’s what it needs to mean — i.e. it needs to mean something,” she said. “And conversely, I can say to an intimacy coordinator, ‘You know, it feels like I’m watching two people peck each other on the cheek, and there’s zero heat here.’”This is where the choreography piece of Ms. Steinrock’s job comes in: She can offer ways to use breath or adjust positions to make a scene more evocative.Ms. Steinrock and her husband, Zev Steinrock, an associate theater professor, demonstrate an example of consensual touch. Mary Mathis for The New York TimesIn just five years, intimacy coordinators have become a vital part of the entertainment industry. HBO has required them on all of their productions since 2019 (Ms. Rodis oversees their program). At this point, Ms. Kusama said, it’s hard for her to imagine signing on to a project with intimate scenes without one.The discipline’s explosive growth has meant that coordinators have had to create standards in real time — like building the tracks of a roller coaster as it shoots into the air. “We have to first define this role and agree on what it is,” Ms. Steinrock said. “That’s Step 1 of building a new profession. And then we have to define what being qualified for that role looks like.”In 2020, Ms. Steinrock, Ms. Rodis and another intimacy director, Marie Percy, formed Intimacy Directors and Coordinators, with Ms. Steinrock at the helm. She had never been a chief executive before, but she taught herself on the job, quickly growing I.D.C. into the leading training and accreditation organization in the field. Its four-level program includes a mix of virtual and in-person classes. It is the only organization to offer certification for both intimacy coordination and direction, and it also runs workshops for other artistic professionals, such as actors or directors, who want to bring these practices into their work.“Jessica has created the accountability structures so that we can say: ‘This is what our certification means. Here’s all the education behind it. Here are the equitable practices we have, and here’s the accountability we have to these artists,’” Ms. Rodis said.Two students practice giving and receiving consent to touch each other during a workshop taught by Ms. Steinrock, who sees education as essential to IDC’s mission to “create a culture of consent in which intimate stories can be told with safety and artistry.”Mary Mathis for The New York TimesMs. Steinrock sees advocacy for these standards as a key part of I.D.C.’s mission. She was part of a working group organized by the Screen Actors Guild to establish new safety standards for intimacy, which were published in 2020; in 2022, the union launched a registry of vetted intimacy coordinators and announced that it would create a pathway to union membership for these professionals.“Intimacy coordinators are not a panacea for an industry that has historically abused its actors — and, frankly, historically abused most of the people in it,” Ms. Steinrock said. But integrating them into productions is a clear step that institutions can take, as part of a broader commitment to safety and equity.For Ms. Steinrock’s part, that commitment also includes working to diversify intimacy coordination. While it is a rare female-led discipline in an industry dominated by men, it is still predominantly white and straight — one of the pitfalls of a young profession that has largely relied on word of mouth to grow.Ultimately, the hope is that intimacy coordination becomes standard across the entertainment industry, and “that it helps us see each other and the role of sex in our lives differently, as something richer and more filled with possibility,” Ms. Kusama said.“Ultimately, I serve as a place where folks can come to ask questions that are otherwise very difficult to ask,” Ms Steinrock said, “and to make sure that they have someone who can advocate for them, especially if they’re feeling uncertain about how to advocate for themselves.”Mary Mathis for The New York TimesMs. Robinson has been excited to see her former student bring these issues out into the open. “She’s enhancing our vocabularies and giving us pathways beyond the industry to address these topics that people find so difficult,” she said. And while much of that awareness has happened via TikTok, Ms. Robinson also noted that Ms. Steinrock’s dissertation had been downloaded more than 700 times — another sign of just how much interest there is in this area.Inviting people to re-examine how sex works in the media they consume, Ms. Steinrock said, could improve the way they approach sex in general.“Media is so many people’s first experience with intimacy,” she said. “And when we care about how things are made, it starts conversations about how things are operating in other spaces, and I think that can have a huge impact as to what people expect in their day-to-day lives.” More

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      Why Some Black Playwrights Are Saying Their Shows Must Not Go On

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      Several Black playwrights have canceled productions of their works, in some cases after performances started, because of concerns about conditions at the theaters presenting them.In Ohio, the playwright Charly Evon Simpson scuttled last month’s planned Cleveland Play House production of her latest work, “I’m Back Now,” after the director said that the theater had mishandled an actor’s report that she was sexually assaulted at the building where the theater housed artists.In Chicago, Erika Dickerson-Despenza forced Victory Gardens Theater to stop its production of “cullud wattah,” her Flint water crisis-prompted family drama, in the middle of its run last summer to protest actions that included the ouster of the theater’s artistic director.And in Los Angeles, Dominique Morisseau shut down a Geffen Playhouse production of her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its opening in late 2021, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.”The steps by playwrights to halt productions of their own work reflects concerns by Black artists frustrated by what they see as a failure of theater administrators to live up to the lofty promises made during and after the spring of 2020, when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police prompted nationwide protests and calls for change in many corners of American society, including the arts. In theater, an anonymously-led coalition of artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” circulated a widely read set of demands for change.“We don’t want to be pulling our plays — we are playwrights, we want our plays to be done, we are walking away from money, and we are walking away from seeing our work onstage,” Morisseau said. “But this is not an ego act and it is not a diva act. What we are doing is standing up when no one else will.”The cancellations have come just as theaters have been trying to reopen and rebuild following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.There has been notable change to address concerns about diversity and representation: An increase in the number of plays by Black writers staged on Broadway and beyond; a wave of appointments of administrators of color to high-level theater industry positions; the renaming of two Broadway houses after Black performers (James Earl Jones and Lena Horne).More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But the cancellations reflect recurrent concern about conditions in the industry. There is pain all around — although actors are often still paid, the playwrights can lose fees and the theaters lose box office revenue and sunk production costs. And there are reputational risks: Will theaters still want to hire these artists? Will artists still want to work at these theaters?“It’s damaging to the theaters, it’s damaging to the playwrights, and it’s damaging to all the artists involved, but it puts a spotlight on issues that need a spotlight, and I hope it’s catching the field’s attention and reminding us that we haven’t solved all the problems,” said Sheldon Epps, a senior artistic adviser at Ford’s Theater in Washington, the former artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, and the author of a new memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theater.” “We had all those conversations and all those conference calls, and the talk was valuable but clearly a lot more action is needed.”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris threatened to pull “Slave Play” from the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles to protest its dearth of works by women. After they agreed to stage more, the play, starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan, went on.Craig SchwartzThese cancellations began in October of 2021, when Jeremy O. Harris posted on Twitter an email he had sent to the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, saying he wanted to “begin the process” of canceling that theater’s production of “Slave Play,” his acclaimed drama about interracial relationships. The Los Angeles production was to be the first since a pair of buzzy Broadway runs, but Harris was upset that the theater had announced a season with just one work by a woman.The reaction was immediate. The company apologized publicly, and within a week had pledged that the following season at its Mark Taper Forum would feature only work by women or nonbinary playwrights. Harris then allowed “Slave Play” to proceed; the production became the best-selling show at the Taper since the pandemic shutdown.“We have nothing to lose by telling a theater that we don’t want to be their mascots any longer,” Harris said.“Here’s the thing: writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service — that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” he added. “The only cost is to the ego of theater administrators who have dropped the ball in upholding the politics of the playwrights they’ve programmed.”Harris ultimately praised the Center Theater Group for its responsiveness, and Meghan Pressman, the theater’s managing director and chief executive, said she was “grateful” for Harris’s confrontation, even though it was difficult.“We’re being called to task, and we learned a lot,” she said. Morisseau was next, pulling the rights for “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen. The precipitating incident has never been made public, but Morisseau said at the time that “Harm happened internally within the creative team, when fellow artists were allowed to behave disrespectfully.” The Geffen apologized, saying, “an incident between members of the production was brought to our attention and we did not respond decisively in addressing it.”In an interview, Morisseau said she considered pulling her play a last resort.“I felt there was nothing else for me to do,” she said.And why have there been several cancellations in recent months? “I think what you’re seeing is a failure of institutions and institutional leadership to take seriously the harms against Black women,” Morisseau said. “It’s nothing new to us, but it is very disappointing to experience it in a theater ecosystem that we all seek to be better. You can’t welcome us and our stories, and not welcome the people who tell our stories and the bodies on whom our stories are told.”Playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have enormous power over the use of their work, sometimes by virtue of their contracts, and sometimes by virtue of the nature of their relationships with regional theaters.Prepandemic, there were occasional instances of playwrights exercising such rights for a variety of reasons. In 2016, Penelope Skinner withdrew a Chicago theater’s right to stage her dark comedy, “The Village Bike,” after a news report detailed allegations that the theater’s leader had mistreated performers; in 2012, Bruce Norris withdrew a German theater’s right to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning race-relations satire, “Clybourne Park,” because he was angry about plans to cast a white actor to play a Black character; and in the 1980s, several playwrights canceled productions because of a union dispute.“We encourage authors to exercise all of their contractual rights to the extent possible,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America, an association representing playwrights.For the affected theaters, the cancellations have been disruptive — in each case, tickets had already been sold. Victory Gardens, which was already imploding when “cullud wattah” was pulled, has since stopped producing shows; the Cleveland Play House and Geffen Playhouse both issued apologies.“Cleveland Play House acknowledges there were missteps in efforts to respond to a sexual assault,” that organization said in a statement last month.The financial implications vary from case to case. Morisseau said that, when “Paradise Blue” was canceled, “Every artist got paid through their contracts. I, as the writer, and the Geffen, as the institution, are the only ones who took any financial hit.” David Levy, a spokesman for the labor union Actors’ Equity Association, said that “Every Equity agreement anticipates worst case scenarios in which a production is canceled before the full run of the show is completed. When that happens, the union does our part to enforce the contract so that actors and stage managers are taken care of.” In Cleveland, the union filed grievances that led to payment to its members for the canceled show there.The current round of cancellations is directly tied to the racial reckoning that has roiled theaters over the last three years; there have been a wide array of calls for change, from term limits for industry leaders and more diverse creative teams sought by the We See You petitions, to the renaming of theaters and the use of racial sensitivity coaches won in a pact negotiated by the organization Black Theater United.Black artists have cited the issues that propelled those movements in describing their current concerns. In Chicago, Dickerson-Despenza pulled the rights to her play after the dismissal of the theater’s artistic director, Ken-Matt Martin, who was one of three Black leaders in top positions at Victory Gardens. At the time Dickerson-Despenza decried the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” of the board. On Wednesday, the board issued a statement saying, “Victory Gardens Theater vehemently disagrees with the characterization,” noting that it had had a diverse staff and board, and adding that “it is our hope that, rather than jumping to conclusions and casting aspersions, we can all move forward with a shared goal of having a vibrant and inclusive theater community for all.”Stori Ayers, who directed both the canceled production of “I’m Back Now” in Cleveland and the canceled production of “Paradise Blue” in Los Angeles, used similar language in an Instagram post about the two experiences, citing “white supremacy theater making culture.” Both of those theaters declined to comment beyond their written statements.Simpson, the playwright who pulled the rights for “I’m Back Now” from the Cleveland Play House, said she had decided to take that step after Ayers withdrew from the production over the theater’s response to an actor who said she had been sexually assaulted in an elevator at the theater’s artist housing.“To put it simply: if the health, safety and well-being of people working on my play is in question, then there’s no reason for the play to happen,” Simpson said. “I could no longer trust that the theater was going to take care of the people putting on my show.”Simpson said she’s not sure what will happen next with “I’m Back Now,” because it was commissioned by the Cleveland Play House, and this was to be its first production. The play is about three generations of Cleveland residents, including a historical figure named Sara Lucy Bagby, who was the last person forced to return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act.“You want the production, and you want to make it possible, and many of us are taught to be so grateful for that and to ignore things that may bother us,” Simpson said. “I didn’t ever imagine having to pull the rights.” More

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      ‘Becomes a Woman’ Review: A Girl Gets Wise in Brooklyn

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      A young woman works to free herself from the expectations of men in Betty Smith’s 1931 play.The Mint Theater specializes in dredging up long-forgotten plays, most of them classically structured and written between the late 1800s and the 1940s. Its latest find is so perfectly on brand that it could have been retrofitted by a canny theater archaeologist. A three-act piece from 1931, “Becomes a Woman” had never been published or produced until now. It’s also by a female playwright — to its credit, a demographic the Mint has long championed. This time, however, she has a familiar name, at least to a certain generation: Betty Smith, the author of the beloved 1943 best seller “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”As it turns out, Smith wrote more plays than she did novels, though none were anywhere near as popular as the semi-autobiographical “Tree.” (Her sole Broadway credit is as the co-writer of the musical adaptation’s book, in 1951.)Alas, Britt Berke’s timid production does not make a strong case for “Becomes a Woman.” The evening’s liveliest aspect might well be the erratic outer borough accents.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.The themes here are similar to those one would find in the pre-Code Hollywood movies of the late 1920s and early 1930s — most centrally, that of a woman becoming pregnant out of wedlock and seeking emancipation from the controlling ways of her father and her boyfriend-turned-husband.Our heroine is one Francie Nolan (Emma Pfitzer Price), who shares a name with the central figure of “Tree” but is not the same character. This Francie is 19 and works at a Brooklyn five-and-dime store, where she trills the songs of the day so customers can decide whether they want to buy the sheet music.It’s easy to feel that little happens in Act 1, but that’s only because we have been trained to think of women talking to each other as being trivial. In fact, a lot of information and characterization is suggested in the affectionate banter between Francie and her older and more experienced colleagues, Tessie (a warm Gina Daniels) and Florry (Pearl Rhein), who try to impart the ways of the world on the younger woman. “A girl has to really like a man before she gets intimate with him, but a man has to get really intimate with a girl before he likes her,” Florry warns the innocent Francie. You can almost hear Barbara Stanwyck saying this line, and Rhein, who has a feel for the rhythm of the period’s language, gets close enough.As to who runs the world, Smith was under no illusion: Francie is under the yoke of both her blowhard, tyrannical father, Pa Nolan (Jeb Brown), and her rich boyfriend, Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend). She gets support from Tessie, but ultimately the only person she can rely on is herself.It is not an easy arc to navigate, and Price’s Francie is not as vulnerable and naïve as the character should be at the start, not as steely as she needs to be by the end. Then again, her foils wilt: Neither Townsend nor Duane Boutté (as Leonard’s father) projects the confident authority of a man used to getting his way, while Brown draws Pa with thick Sharpie strokes.Smith could navigate a thin line between sentimentality and clear-eyed realism but alas, this production feels less like complicated life than a diorama of it.Becomes a WomanThrough March 18 at New York City Center, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      For Two Broadway Stars, a Love Story Blossoms in a Honky-Tonk Bar

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      The new musical “The Lonely Few,” starring Lauren Patten and Ciara Renée, puts a romance between two women at its very heart.LOS ANGELES — During a rehearsal of “The Lonely Few” at the Geffen Playhouse, Lauren Patten, a Tony winner for her performance in “Jagged Little Pill,” was sharing a stage with Ciara Renée, whose Broadway credits include “Waitress” and “Frozen.” The performances were mesmerizing, and loud (drumsticks were broken; earplugs were provided), with Patten steam-rolling her way through a pair of headbangers about the joys of rock ’n’ roll and the desire to escape, and Renée filling the room with a heartbreaking ballad about unrequited love.“I would go see that band,” Zoe Sarnak, the show’s composer and lyricist, said during a break.The setting was about as far from a Broadway stage as one could imagine: a small rehearsal space in the Westwood neighborhood. And the actual performance space for the show, the Geffen’s Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, isn’t that much larger. The 114-seat theater has been reconfigured to resemble a dive bar in backwoods Kentucky, so audience members, sitting at tables and bar stools amid the players, will feel as if they’re at a neighborhood watering hole.“The minute you walk into the theater, you’re going to feel like you’re not at the Geffen,” said Ellenore Scott, who is sharing directing duties with Trip Cullman. “Performers will be walking right by you, or using your table, or doing an entire scene next to you.”For venues this size, Patten said, vocal adjustments need to be made. You’re still playing to the guy in the back row, she said, but with a care for the audience member sitting a few feet away. “I also think that with a show like this, with music like this,” she said, “it’s got to smack you in the face.”After five years of development, which included pandemic-related breaks, “The Lonely Few” is now having its world premiere, with preview performances scheduled to start Thursday and opening night set for March 9. In the musical, Patten plays Lila, a Save-A-Lot clerk who leads the Lonely Few, a preternaturally gifted band that plays Friday nights at Paul’s Joint, the local honky-tonk. Rounding out the band is Damon Daunno (“Oklahoma”), Helen J Shen (“Man of God”) and Thomas Silcott (“Birthday Candles”); Joshua Close (a star of the 2022 film “Monica”) portrays Lila’s brother Adam, the loving but troubled albatross around her neck.When Amy (Renée), an established musician, enters the club and offers Lila a chance to come on the road with her and open for her band, choices must be made, both practical and romantic.The new show has provided the two leads with a rare opportunity to create roles from the ground up. It’s a welcome change for Renée, who took over but didn’t originate the roles of Jenna in “Waitress” and Elsa in “Frozen,” both on Broadway.A recent rehearsal in Los Angeles. The show’s vibe is honky-tonk dive bar.JJ Geiger for The New York Times“I’ve done a lot in my career where I’ve been the Black woman who steps into a white role,” she said. “But this play doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s totally new. And there’s so much beauty in that.”“The Lonely Few” is also that rarest of shows: a musical that puts a love story between two women at its very heart.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.“Fun Home,” the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic novel, features the coming out narrative of an adolescent girl, as does “The Prom,” which opened on Broadway in 2018. But the romantic relationships in both of those musicals — though crucial to the stories — are largely secondary.“Those pieces are incredibly important to the canon, and I’m so thankful for them,” said Sarnak, whose previous shows include “A Crossing” for Barrington Stage Company. “But I can’t think of a show where the narrative center is a love story between two women who are out.”The first seeds of the show were planted in 2018, when Sarnak was talking with Rachel Bonds, who wrote the show’s book, about working together. They wanted to do a piece about two women with music in it, telling a story that could pull from their own experiences.For years, Sarnak had written songs about her life and past loves. “There are several relationships in my life that find their way into the show,” she said. “The first woman I ever dated, who I was with for four years, and then my marriage and divorce, and then relationships after that. It’s not any one relationship. There are pieces of anyone I’ve ever been with or been in love with.”For the play’s setting and people, Bonds drew from her childhood growing up in Sewanee, Tenn., home of the esteemed University of the South. “Sewanee is up on a mountain, and when you go down into the valley, it’s a whole different world,” she said. “There’s a real separation,” she added, “and I grew up very aware of that.”“Southerners are often portrayed as stupid or ignorant, and small-town folks are often portrayed as people without dreams or meaning in their lives,” Bonds continued. “I really wanted to fight against that.”Over time, the project morphed from “a play with music” to a full-blown book musical, a first for Bonds, whose plays include “Goodnight Nobody” and “Michael & Edie.” Many of Sarnak’s songs shaped the show’s plot about the star-crossed lovers Lila and Amy. “I think we both felt that these songs wanted to be a love story, this play had to be a love story,” Bonds said.Not long after, the two began considering possible leads. Sarnak had worked with Patten on readings and workshops, but never anything that had been produced.“We both felt that these songs wanted to be a love story, this play had to be a love story,” said Rachel Bonds, right, with Zoe Sarnak.JJ Geiger for The New York TimesGrowing up in Downers Grove, Ill., Patten was an early bloomer, staging home concerts in her living room when she was 3. “Apparently, the first song I sang was a Hank Williams song, ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues,’ where he talks about drowning himself in a river because his woman left him,” she said. Commercials and theater roles soon followed.Patten made her Broadway debut in “Fun Home.” In 2021, she received a Tony for her role in “Jagged Little Pill,” but the show was criticized for changing Patten’s character, Jo, from seemingly nonbinary to gay and cisgender when the production moved from Boston to Broadway. In 2021, Patten released a mea culpa, in the form of a video conversation with the trans writer and activist Shakina Nayfack. “There’s a lot I wish was handled differently,” Patten said, looking back. “But I do feel grateful that even with something that was obviously a painful moment, I think it has a potential to move things forward in the industry.”Like Patten, Renée also began performing at an early age, winning singing competitions by the time she was 12. “I thought I was going to be a Christian music artist,” she said. In high school, however, she fell in love with the theater, and at 22, within three months of arriving in New York, she was offered roles in three Broadway shows. “I picked the flop,” she said of “Big Fish.”Then came a starring role in “Frozen,” though her run was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. “Every night I’d see these little girls, Black girls, girls of color, wearing Elsa, Anna, Olaf,” she said. “They were just so excited about their favorite characters, and about getting to see the leads of a show being played by women of color. I know how impactful that is, because I know that, growing up, I never saw it.”AS INITIALLY WRITTEN, the character of Amy in “The Lonely Few” was racially nonspecific, but that soon changed, even more so after Renée came aboard. “This whole piece could be open casting,” Bonds said. “But then when we started to place it in the South, we were interested in the tensions they’re in, and we really started to nail down who these women were.”So was Amy created for Renée? “I think it’s certainly being heavily shifted by my presence,” Renée said with a laugh.“It’s a testament to Rachel and Zoe really caring about my story as a Black woman,” she added, “and about this Black character in the South being queer, that there are things that complicate that in a way that’s different than if this character were white.”The show’s creators made a point of the care they are taking with the love story, and they have hired an intimacy director to help. “I feel a lot of trust in the room with Ciara,” Patten said. “We’re both doing very intense, emotional, vulnerable things in the show, and I feel very safe to do that with her.”During a break in rehearsal, the directors gave notes. In Lila’s line about chewing gum, Cullman told Patten it sounded like she was saying “gun.”“Oh my god,” Patten said. “Gum. Guuum.”“I feel a lot of trust in the room with Ciara,” Patten said. “We’re both doing very intense, emotional, vulnerable things in the show, and I feel very safe to do that with her.”JJ Geiger for The New York TimesBoth directors offered suggestions to Renée and Patten about their first scene together, when the two lock eyes in Paul’s Joint and the rest of the world (and the rest of the band) fades away.Many of the tweaks made over the past days and months are intended to ensure the show is as truthful to the place and its people as possible. The creators are quick to point out that the love story is the focus, not any sort of hatred or violence a lesbian relationship might provoke in the community. “I’m just not interested in seeing women get brutalized anymore,” Bonds said.In many ways, the musical toys with several possible expectations theatergoers might have coming into the show. How will this interracial love story between two women play out in a Kentucky dive bar? And just what is a band this good doing in a Kentucky dive bar in the first place?“This setting, this little bar, has become a bit of an enclave for folks who might feel like outsiders or weirdos or misfits,” Bonds said. “I think the community where Lila comes from actually surprises you in the end.”Despite the show’s specificity, the creators believe “The Lonely Few” will have broad appeal. “In my heart of hearts, I hope we have an Off Broadway run in New York,” Bonds said. “And then I hope we have a Broadway run.”“This is a queer love story,” she continued. “It’s a love story between two women. But my hope is that anybody could watch it, and be moved by it, and see themselves in it.” More

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      Review: A ‘Seagull’ Airlifted to a World of Soy Milk and Prada Sneakers

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      Parker Posey stars in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” as Chekhov comes to the Catskills.With so many Chekhov adaptations on the market, it’s fair to wonder whether the Dramatists Guild requires playwrights to crank them out as a condition of membership.If so, “The Seagull” is apparently the recommended source — appearing more often than “The Cherry Orchard,” “Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya” combined. The 1896 tragicomedy about the hopelessness of love and theater has set off a flock of homages and spoofs, often in one booby-trapped package.That most of the adaptations don’t stick doesn’t matter; since opening night, little has been heard from “Drowning Crow,” “Stupid ____ Bird,” “A Seagull in the Hamptons” or even “The Notebook of Trigorin,” Tennessee Williams’s 1981 stab. What counts, at least as far as selling the show is concerned, is the mash-up of a classic title with a modern sensibility, so that troikas and patronyms become sports cars and upspeak.The first question to ask in approaching these rehashes is: Do they make any sense if you don’t know the source? The second question is: Do they add any worth if you do?“The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s entry in the reincarnation sweepstakes, clears the first bar, with maybe a trailing foot, in a New Group production that opened on Tuesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Airlifting the story from a 19th-century Russian estate to a 21st-century Catskills compound makes sense, and Chekhov’s artsy, spoiled, lovestruck characters are more or less at home in a world of soy milk, Prada sneakers and pans in The New York Times.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.These characters, mostly renamed with English soundalikes, constellate pretty much as the original 10 did. (Some workers on the estate have apparently been fired.) Their North Star, Irene, played by Parker Posey, is a moderately successful and immoderately self-involved actress who is “theater famous, not famous famous.” Posey, that former indie “it girl,” is perfectly cast as a woman who has won one Tony but can say with light sincerity, “I do need another one.”Along with her lover, the middlebrow novelist William (Ato Essandoh), Irene has returned from the city to visit her ailing friend, Samuel (David Cale), and her sensitive yet untalented son, Kevin (Nat Wolff). Kevin is in love with Nina (Aleyse Shannon), a neighbor’s daughter who stars in the play he plans to present to the assembled company. But Nina is in love with William, while another family adjunct, Sasha (Hari Nef), is in love with Kevin.There are yet more triangles and quadrilaterals of affection, not always clearly mapped in Bradshaw’s vigorous trimming of the text. (Even so, Scott Elliott’s production is a bit pokey, running 2 hours and 35 minutes.) But you do get the gist: Everyone wants someone they cannot have, and privilege breeds discontent.Whether Bradshaw’s “Seagull” also passes the second test for such adaptations — does the new version add any value beyond what the original offers? — may depend on whether you admire his work in the first place. His kind of theater, he has said, is about asking audiences to “question their own reactions” even if they are “outraged” as a result. This he has faithfully done in plays like “Fulfillment,” “Intimacy,” and “Burning,” which depict, often explicitly, incest, pornography, scatology and sadomasochism.Posey as the stage actress Irene with Nat Wolff, who plays her sensitive son, Kevin, in Thomas Bradshaw’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s a lot of that in his “Seagull” too. Kevin’s ridiculous play — in the Chekhov a gassy symbolist fantasy — is more literally gassy here, as Nina extols the virtues of public farting. Its climax comes when, having asked audience members to share their “most recent masturbation experience,” she rewards the best answer with the chance to watch hers. With unusual delicacy for a Bradshaw play, this is staged in a tub behind a curtain.But mostly he translates the bad behavior of Chekhov’s characters to snark instead of smut. Take the famous opening salvo of the original “Seagull,” in which Masha is asked by Medvedenko, the poor schoolteacher who loves her, why she dresses all in black. Her ruefully funny answer — “I’m in mourning for my life” — becomes something merely nasty when Sasha, as she is now called, tells the rechristened Mark (Patrick Foley), “at least I don’t buy my clothes at Walmart.”If the play, with all its cattiness and cruelty, at times feels like “Mean Girls Goes to Camp,” it’s not always clear where the meanness is coming from. When Sasha or Irene cut someone down, as they frequently do with generous heaps of obscenity, Nef and Posey subtly show us that they’re mostly self-medicating with insults.But other times it seems as if no one, or perhaps just the popular yet perennially panned Bradshaw, is behind the rancor. It’s no accident that the names of the holies casually sideswiped in the rush of dialogue are mostly theatrical: Arthur Miller, Tracy Letts, “How I Learned to Drive,” Terrence McNally, Nora Ephron and Janet McTeer in an “all-female ‘True West.’”Grinding axes can be funny, and several times I caught myself guffawing in public, then regretting it privately. Though that’s probably just where Bradshaw wants us, the easy laughs don’t really provide added value; over time, they’re more subtractive.But then two things happen.One is that the play opens a new line of inquiry as Nina (who is biracial) and William (who is multiracial) explore the way identity inflects their art and ambition. “Interracial children are the glue that will one day bond our sad, broken country,” William says. To which Nina responds flirtatiously, “I don’t know. I think Black people should stick together.”This is the kind of alteration that enhances the original, giving a familiar relationship a different dimension.And then in its second half, the play changes again. Instead of looting or even building on Chekhov, it is drawn into the immense depth of his writing and becomes, at least fitfully, “The Seagull” itself. The tender scene in which Irene redresses, in both senses, her son’s wounds — he’s tried to kill himself — works exactly as it always does, no matter that it involves a conversational detour to P.S. 122. And the play’s infallible final gesture, here involving rude Scrabble instead of bingo, once again doesn’t fail.Still, I’m left to wonder whether a few moments of enhanced relevance are worth the bother of a comprehensive and often counterproductive update. Couldn’t this cast have pulled off the standard edition? And pulled it off more smoothly, without the staging longueurs occasioned by the rough text and the stop-and-go direction? (But do keep the fabulous contemporary clothing by Qween Jean.)Short of fulfilling a union requirement, there’s no reason for playwrights to keep pickpocketing Chekhov. Though as I write that I realize: That’s what we all do anyway.The Seagull/Woodstock, NYThrough April 9 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Dominates Olivier Award Nominations

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      Studio Ghibli’s fantastical movie was an unexpected choice for a stage adaptation. Now, it is up for 9 awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.A stage adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro,” an animated Japanese children’s movie filled with fantastical creatures, emerged on Tuesday as the front-runner for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Barbican Theater in London and included numerous giant puppets, secured nine nominations for the awards — more than any other play. Those included nods for best comedy, best director for Phelim McDermott and best actress for Mei Mac as a girl who discovers a magical world near her home.The play’s high number of nominations was perhaps unsurprising given that “My Neighbour Totoro” received rave reviews when it opened last year.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the play’s puppets were “the most endearing sight on the London stage” at the time. Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times said the Royal Shakespeare Company production was “a tender, remarkably beautiful family show that extols kindness.”Although “My Neighbour” secured the most nominations, it did not get a nod for best new play. Instead, four more grown-up dramas will compete for that title. Those include “Prima Facie” at the Harold Pinter Theater, a Broadway-bound one-woman show about sexual assault that stars Jodie Comer; “Patriots” at the Almeida Theater, a retelling of President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” adaptation at the Gielgud Theater.Those shows will compete with “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” a play at the Royal Court in London about six young Black men who meet for group therapy.Jodie Comer’s performance in “Prima Facie” struck a chord with West End audiences and she was also nominated for best actress. She is up for that title against Mei Mac of “My Neighbour Totoro,” as well as Patsy Ferran for “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater, Janet McTeer for “Phaedra” at the National Theater, and Nicola Walker for “The Corn Is Green,” also at the National.Before Tuesday’s announcement, many British theater critics had expected Emma Corrin to receive a nomination for “Orlando,” a play based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid novel, at the Garrick Theater.That would have likely caused a media stir as Corrin, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has over the past year repeatedly urged award show organizers to make their acting categories gender neutral. Last year, Corrin told the BBC that it was “difficult for me” to be nonbinary and nominated in female acting categories.Emma De Souza, a spokeswoman for the Society of London Theater, the award’s organizers, said that Corrin was considered in the best actress category, but did not make the cut. “It was an incredibly competitive year,” De Souza added.The best actor award is set to be equally hard fought. Among the nominees are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Rafe Spall for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and David Tennant for “Good.” They will compete against Tom Hollander for his role as an oligarch in “Patriots” and Giles Terera, who starred in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.In the musical categories, the nominations are led by “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” also at the National. The show, about the residents of a housing complex in the northern English city of Sheffield, secured eight nominations, including best new musical. It will compete for that title with the “The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse and “Sylvia” — a hip-hop musical based on the life of the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst — at the Old Vic.Those three titles will face stiff competition from “Tammy Faye,” a high-profile production at the Almeida Theater that told the story of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker using new music by Elton John.The winners of this year’s Olivier Awards will be announced on April 2 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More