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      At Under the Radar, Family Histories Bubble Up With No Easy Answers

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      The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a second selection of the works on display.‘Otto Frank’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.It’s unnerving how seldom Otto Frank blinks in Roger Guenveur Smith’s hourlong “Otto Frank.” But then why would he? Having for 35 years tended the posthumous flame of his murdered daughter Anne — while doing the same for her sister and mother and six million others — Otto might well have had to force himself to keep seeing.You may need to blink, though. Not because the story Smith tells in his crushing, exhausting monologue, part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, can come as a surprise. Anne’s diary, prepared for publication by Otto in 1947, has been outsold among nonfiction books, Smith tells us, only by the Bible. It was adapted for Broadway in 1955, and Hollywood in 1959.Yet we have rarely been asked, as we are here, to view the horror through a double tragic lens. Watching Smith inhabit Otto and endure his unrelenting memories feels like watching someone die in pain — and then keep dying over and over.That must be what Smith is going for. As has often been the case in his earlier monologues — about Huey Newton, Bob Marley and Rodney King, among others — he does not settle for dry narration. In lightly rhymed, intensely poetic cadences that sometimes spill into a kind of keening song (the live sound design is by Marc Anthony Thompson), he instead reaches out from history to make broader connections, beyond territory and time.Beyond race and religion, too. References to “the congregations in Charleston and Pittsburgh and Christchurch and Poway” mix synagogue shootings with murders in a mosque and a Black church. Otto also mourns enslaved Africans who were “marched to their death” during “the great middle passage” and name-checks massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda, Wounded Knee and Tulsa. (“Otto Frank” will be performed at the Oklahoma City Repertory Theater Jan. 27-28.) He even suggests that Anne “would be proud” of “the young American woman in a hard hat” — Bree Newsome Bass — who in 2020 climbed a flagpole in Columbia, S.C., to remove its confederate flag.Comparing atrocities (and braveries) is a tricky business, and the entire project of dramatizing the Holocaust is fraught with problems of scale. As was also the case with Tom Stoppard’s Broadway hit “Leopoldstadt,” I sometimes felt in “Otto Frank” that the names of the camps and the litanies of loss were being dragooned into dramatic service illegitimately. That doesn’t invalidate the sincerity and even the occasional beauty of the effort. But what Smith apparently felt forced to see sometimes made me want to look away. JESSE GREEN‘KLII’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Drawing on works including Patrice Lumumba’s Congolese independence address, Kaneza Schaal evokes King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who brutally reigned over the Congo Free State in the late 19th century.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs audience members take their seats for Kaneza Schaal’s “KLII,” they are offered bars of soap with which they can wash their hands in water buckets. Schaal is already onstage, sitting on a luxurious throne-like chair in the semi-darkness. A long beard spreads to the top of her red-and-gold uniform jacket. The figure she is evoking is King Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who, in the late 19th century, owned the Congo Free State (what is now, for the most part, the Democratic Republic of Congo).This dimly lit, moody prelude is quietly unsettling — quite a theatrical feat since nothing much is happening.Eventually, Schaal climbs a steep metal ladder to part-declaim, part-lip-sync a speech. This part of “KLII,” before the show makes a sharp turn in terms of artistic approach and content, is cobbled together from sources like Mark Twain’s satirical “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” from 1905, and a 1960 address from the independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but Camila Ortiz and Ian Askew’s sound is so blurred by industrial-strength reverb and booming echo that little besides stray words and sentences emerge from the sonic murk. There is something Leni Riefenstahl-esque about the vision of a despot authoritatively spouting unintelligible — either by design or accident — verbiage, but a little goes a long way, and the scene overstays its welcome.After climbing down from her perch, Schaal, who conceived “KLII” and directed it with the designer Christopher Myers, takes off her makeup — literally wiping Leopold off her face — and tells us, in a conversational voice now free of distortion, about her young daughter’s passion for “Fiddler on the Roof.” Other topics in that monologue (which is credited to Myers) include a brief on what happened when soap manufacturers transitioned from animal fat to palm oil and a peek at her family history with the tale of her Grandpa Murara, who fled Rwanda and opened a guesthouse in Burundi.In a note, Schaal describes “KLII” as “an exorcism, in theater.” This implies a certain amount of release, but even in its intimate, more directly autobiographical second half, the show does not deliver, or even aim for, easy catharsis.Avoiding the obvious is to be commended, but Schaal does not connect the dots into a convincing whole. “KLII” is most effective on a purely aesthetic, visceral level, down to small details that linger, like the cups of hibiscus tea that are handed to theatergoers on their way out. Printed inside the cups is a hand, which feels like a symbol of extended hospitality, until you remember that Leopold would casually order Congolese folks’ limbs to be hacked off. ELISABETH VINCENTELLI‘Our Country’Through Sunday. Running time: 65 minutes.Annie Saunders carries Jesse Saler, who plays her brother in the semi-autobiographical “Our Country,” which probes Wild West myths about freedom and the erosion of a sense of national identity.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the canon of dramatic siblinghood, Antigone may be the most heroic sister. A mythic rebel drawn by Sophocles, she risks her life to bury her disgraced dead brother, an enemy of the state.The experimental writer-performer Annie Saunders does not dispute the bravery of that act of devotion. But in “Our Country,” a somewhat ungainly examination of Saunders’s bond with and duty toward her own legally beleaguered younger brother, she suggests there might be another way of looking at Antigone’s self-sacrifice.“I just wonder, has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe that was not her job?” she says. “Like maybe she could have just lived her life?”Saunders, who created “Our Country” with its director, Becca Wolff, knows it isn’t that simple — that love, a shared past and the pull of familial obligation can conspire otherwise. When the age gap between siblings is wide enough, as it is between her and her brother, Rafe (Jesse Saler), the older one has memories stretching back to the younger’s arrival.“When you were a baby I took you for show and tell, when you were born,” Saunders says. “Did you know that?”“‘This is my brother. Everybody line up and pet him,’” Rafe says, teasing her gently, disarmingly.“Our Country,” at the Public Theater, takes much of its dialogue from recordings that Saunders made, with her brother’s consent, of conversations between them. She, a Los Angeles artist, tries to understand him, an anti-establishment, pro-gun, Northern California marijuana farmer with a checkered legal past cleaned up by clever attorneys. Now he’s “in hotter water than usual,” she says: facing charges that might put him in prison. She’s been asked, by their lawyer mother, to write a letter in support of him.“Do you concede that you are having a particularly Caucasian experience of our criminal justice system?” Saunders asks, and Rafe pushes her off her high horse immediately.“Would you like to talk about privilege now in your play?” he says.On Nina Caussa’s rustic set, the siblings assemble a giant play fort — a patchwork tent whose awning stretches over the first rows of the audience. Sister and brother talk and tussle, their physicality almost balletic as Saunders, who is smaller than Saler, repeatedly carries him, though sometimes it’s the other way around. (Movement direction is by Jess Williams.)As the title suggests, “Our Country” means to be about more than one pair of siblings. Saunders and Wolff are also poking at Wild West myths about freedom, and at the widening chasm where some semblance of national identity used to be.Inside the fort, recollections of family history vary. Maybe, it seems, that longed-for collective past was partly imagined even at the time. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      As ‘A Strange Loop’ Ends, Its Creator Looks Back on a ‘Supernova’

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      Michael R. Jackson discussed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical, which closed Sunday after a nine-month Broadway run.The musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize even before it got to Broadway, and then it won the Tony Award for best musical shortly after opening. But on Sunday, it closed after only a nine-month run.It has been a tough theater season all around — “A Strange Loop” was one of six shows that closed Sunday — as the industry continues to face audiences that are smaller than they were before the pandemic.But “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a gay, Black musical theater composer endeavors to write a show about a gay, Black musical theater composer, exited at a high point: During its final week, it pulled in $955,590 at the box office, which was the highest weekly gross of its run, and which set a new house record for the Lyceum Theater.The final night was a celebration: The playwright Michael R. Jackson, who began developing this show when he was 23 and who is now 41, got a standing ovation when he took his seat. There were more standing ovations for the show’s three Tony-nominated performers, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison.Minutes after the show ended, Jackson sat for an interview about the run, the closing and his next project, in a hideaway up a spiral staircase above the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Jackson and the director of “A Strange Loop,” Stephen Brackett, at the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThis show has been part of your life for 20 years. What was this night like for you?It was emotional, and it was a reminder of why I even began to write it. I wanted to fill an empty space that I saw, both in myself and in the world. And so to see that realized and to see everybody filling in that space in all these colorful ways that are even bolder and more beautiful than what I started with was so powerful and so affirming and so necessary.There’s so much anger and pain in the show. Was that anger and pain yours, and do you still feel it?I have access to it. It’s one of many of the colors in the crayon box. But it doesn’t motivate me. There was a time in my life where the anger was the thing that propelled me forward, but I think harnessing it and digging into it and questioning it and living with it and subverting it and making fun of it and then ultimately accepting it really helped me become the artist that was able to write it.The show won the Pulitzer and the Tony but is closing earlier than you would have wanted. Do you think of the show as successful or not?The more that I’ve reflected on it, it really makes sense to me that “A Strange Loop” would be a supernova that cuts across the firmament and then explodes. It’s not necessarily a piece of art that’s meant to fill a commercial need indefinitely, and I now can’t imagine how it would do that without compromising its artistic integrity. So I consider it to be a fantastic success because that’s how I define success. And I’ll always prioritize the artistic integrity over the commercial and the financial.Jackson embraces the actor Jason Veasey at the party after the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMany people imagine that your parents are like Usher’s parents, who can’t accept his homosexuality and are skeptical of his career ambitions. I gather that’s not the case.Everything in the show is a fiction, even if it’s drawn from life. Whatever experiences I had with my parents, I took them in as I saw them, and I remixed them into a story. That’s not my parents, which I think is one reason my parents are able to watch the show and see its success and cheer for me so loudly.Do your parents accept you both as gay and as a musical theater writer?They do.I gather the show has led you to meet some famous people.As a child, I adored Whoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple” and “Soapdish” and “Sarafina!” I thought, when I heard she was coming, that when I met her I would see that lady from “The View.” But the minute I saw her eyes, she was that wonderful performer from my childhood, and that brilliant artist, who loved my show, and it was such a beautiful moment to meet her and to talk with her about the show. And then there were people who didn’t see the show, but who I got to meet as a result of it. I got to spend time with my idol, Tori Amos, and that was a life-changing experience.One person who didn’t come is Tyler Perry, who is mentioned repeatedly in the show, often critically.The interesting thing there is that he and I have a phone relationship. He called me right after I won the Pulitzer, and we text every once in a while, and we spoke recently. He’s probably one of the most complex relationships in my life with someone who I’ve never met. He has a kind of phobia around “A Strange Loop,” without having ever seen it, whereas I’ve seen most of his work. We’ll see where that relationship goes. Maybe it’ll go nowhere. I told him we need to sit down and have dinner.In the last year and a half there have been a record number of shows by Black writers on Broadway. Many have struggled at the box office, but so have a lot of other shows. What’s happening?We need to look at the larger economic realities that are happening in the world more broadly, and the ways those trickle down. A lot of people get very confused in thinking that theater and Broadway live in their own separate economy, outside of everything else, and it doesn’t.Jackson onstage with cast members at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThroughout its run, the show faced a number of cast absences. What do you think was going on?Coming out of the pandemic, there’s been illness, there’s been all kinds of things going on, and people are taking care of themselves. And I think that’s going to be a new normal: People taking care of themselves, and shows will have to adapt to that.One of the adaptations was that the weekend before the closing, you went on as Usher for three concert-style performances. What was that like?It was really cathartic and terrifying and thrilling. I went from having to live the role to having to play the role, and bringing those two halves together gave me tremendous closure. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some daily self-loathings that come in and say “Maybe the show’s not that good,” but once I stepped into it, I was again reminded of its power and of its audacity and of its singularity, and I sent daily self-loathing packing.This show has a white director and a white lead producer, which I understand has led to some pushback.There’s this hunger to infantilize me, or any Black artist, for making the choice to collaborate with who they want to collaborate with, and always wanting to use race or gender or some identity marker as an assumed obstacle, when it may not be at all. I wish that people would respect the choices that artists make and not want to undermine them by assuming that there’s some sort of racial discord that is always waiting to tear people apart or animate their artistic decisions. I’m a grown man, and I stand behind my artistic choices.Your next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” starts previews Off Broadway in March. What is it about?It’s a soap opera fever dream about representation in storytelling.I know it’s prompted in part by your own affection for soap operas. If you were a soap opera character, who would it be?Sammy Jo Carrington. She was on “Dynasty,” played with great aplomb by Heather Locklear. She’s a troublemaker, but she always gets what she wants.Jaquel Spivey and John-Michael Lyles take their bows at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDo you see any thematic overlaps with “A Strange Loop”?In some ways I’ve been thinking of it as a companion piece. It’s not a sequel. It’s not direct. But there’s themes that I’ve been working through on “A Strange Loop” that I expound upon in a larger way in “White Girl in Danger,” if that makes any sense. You’ll have to see it.What’s next for “A Strange Loop”?I’m really hoping that people will pick it up and make their own interpretations of it. It’s a story that is like a jewel that has many facets, and you can hold it up to the light and you can see different things in it, depending on how you interpret it. So I really hope that regional theaters and colleges and universities and whoever else decide to take the risk on doing it, and really put their own stamp on it. More

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      Edie Landau, Film Producer Who Was Ahead of Her Time, Dies at 95

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      She and her husband invented a model for faithfully adapting acclaimed literature, illuminating an alternate path for independent cinema.Edie Landau, who in the 1970s and ’80s was one of the few women producing films, working outside the studio system with her husband, Ely Landau, to offer unconventional movies to a mass audience, died on Dec. 24 at her home in the Century City section of Los Angeles. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her son, Jon.In the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie film was associated in the public imagination with writer-directors too young and eccentric for the studio system. In the years before that period, the Landaus produced artistically ambitious indie movies that followed a different model, adapting great works of literature into movies for the big and small screen.Their focus was plays. In the 1970s, the Landaus started the American Film Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to regular screenings of movie versions of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.There had long been movies based on great plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” that fully translated theater into the idiom of cinema. But the American Film Theater tried something different, faithfully abiding by the plays’ texts in simple, inexpensive productions.The Landaus produced more than a dozen films, often featuring eminent figures in surprising roles. In 1973, the tough-guy movie star Lee Marvin appeared in a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The next year, in an unusual turn as a film director, Harold Pinter oversaw the adaptation of Simon Gray’s “Butley.”Zero Mostel and Karen Black in the 1974 movie adaptation of the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” one of the first productions of the Landaus’ American Film Theater.Looking back at the project in The New York Times in 2003, the film historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that were “close to God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful movie making.”Ms. Landau frequently acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, but over time she took on an increasingly creative role in her partnership with her husband, particularly after he had a stroke in the 1980s.She took the lead in putting together “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an original HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the writer Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel “The Chosen” into movie form in 1981 and into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.“It was a given that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very beginning, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the idea two and a half years ago,” Mr. Potok told The Times in 1987.Richard F. Shepard of The Times praised the movie version for recreating 1940s Brooklyn “with such fidelity that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the particular Jewish life on them seem to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”A scene from the 1981 film version of the Chaim Potok novel “The Chosen,” produced by the Landaus.Analysis FilmEdythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later worked as a projectionist at Manhattan movie theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mother, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an office clerk.After graduating from Wilkes University with a bachelor’s degree in education in the late 1940s, Edie moved to New York City. She worked as an assistant at radio and television production companies, hoping to move up the corporate ladder. While working at the television distribution company National Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of the company’s founders. They married in 1959.That year, WNTA, a New York television station owned by National Telefilm, began airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology series that anticipated the American Film Theater. Ms. Landau worked her way up to become executive vice president of National Telefilm and oversaw some of its original programming, including “Play of the Week.”The Landaus’ children followed them into careers behind the scenes in the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son Jon produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the recently released “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a prominent theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is executive director of the Manhattan arts organization Symphony Space.Jon recalled how being able to work on the movie adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his own producing career, and how his parents invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a performance of a play written by Tina and performed at her high school, which led to its staging in a professional Los Angeles theater.Mr. Landau credited his mother with those breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make things happen,” he said.Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits. The men in this undated photo include her husband, seated second from left.via Jon LandauMs. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, ended in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s children survive her, along with a stepson, Les Landau; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.Photographs from her days as a film producer reveal that Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits.She hit back at what she plainly called “discrimination of women” in 1958, when she filed a formal complaint against United Airlines for not permitting her to board a Chicago-to-New York “executive flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for men only. Ms. Landau — who later earned a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles just for fun — told the airline that she was an executive, too.The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that finally led to scrapping the flights in 1970.After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please remember that I was once a major executive, not just a house wife,/So please trust me now to be C.E.O. … of my own life.” More

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      At Under the Radar, Stories Unfold via Sexts, Tweets and Puppeteers

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      The Public Theater’s experimental theater festival is back in person for the first time since 2020. Here, our critics review a handful of the works on display.‘Your Sexts Are ____: Older Better Letters’Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour.The art of talking dirty has withered of late. Or so Rachel Mars sets out to demonstrate in “Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters,” her filthy, funny yet eventually cloying performance piece dressed in the incongruous drag of a lecture.As evidence of the downturn, Mars compares some cherry-picked examples of epistolary smut with actual sexts she has solicited online. But do electronic acquaintances really stand a chance against the likes of James Joyce in full flower? Especially when the acquaintances are present only in the form of screenshots and Joyce gets rapturously read aloud?Though occasionally non-gross (“If you were here rn in my car what would we be doing?”) and on several occasions eliciting clever responses (“Probably arguing”), the sexts aren’t very sexy. Instead, as Mars’s presentation makes plain, they are dully goal-oriented, like Slack messages setting up meetings. They take no interest in the process of arousal or the way exquisite, elaborate and even embarrassing language can be part of it.Joyce, on the other hand, writing in 1908 to his lover (and later wife) Nora Barnacle, spins arias of sexual and scatological rapture that go so far past pornography as to crash the gates of literature. The man seems to have been unblushable — and the woman, too, though her responses have been lost and can only be imagined (as the show in fact does) by implication.The recovery of women’s sexual voices, especially queer ones, is Mars’s deeper theme here, a theme to which she lends some autobiographical muscle. Yet in doing so, and in moving from Joyce to the fevered Frida Kahlo, the cosmic Georgia O’Keeffe, the grand Radclyffe Hall and the prim Eleanor Roosevelt, her original sexts-versus-letters argument begins to fray.For one thing, those women’s letters are too romantic to be dirty. Then too, they are not the writers that Joyce, or for that matter Gertrude Stein, were. When Stein, in a letter to Alice B. Toklas, says she wants to treat her “wifie” to “an entire cow,” you don’t know whether “cow” is a pet word for “orgasm” or an actual pet. Either way, it’s brilliant, and you may wish she’d written it to Roosevelt. JESSE GREEN‘Moby Dick’Through Saturday. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.A large-scale puppet adaptation of “Moby Dick” is brought to life by a French-Norwegian company that includes the musicians, from left, Guro Skumsnes Moe, Havard Skaset and Ane Marthe Sorlien Holen.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWeathered and wild-haired, Ahab is a grizzled sea captain on the hunt, dragging his crew across oceans in search of his particular prey: the whale who took half his leg.Now Ahab inhales deeply, scenting in the salt air the presence of his nemesis.“It is Moby Dick,” he says. “I am sure of it!”In swims the white leviathan — not the lithe, tormenting beast of Ahab’s vengeance-soaked fantasies but a tattered, battle-worn creature with moldering flesh and a lumbering strength that’s no less fearsome for its gracelessness. He takes Ahab’s whole ship in his dagger-toothed mouth and claims decisive victory.Apologies if that plot point is a spoiler, but it is impossible to ruin with mere description the experience of the French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire’s exquisite “Moby Dick,” a large-scale puppet adaptation of the Herman Melville classic. From its first moment on the vast N.Y.U. Skirball stage, when glittering fish appear, their tails swishing in the darkness, the wondrousness of this show lies in its spectacle and ambience.Directed by Yngvild Aspeli, this is serious artistry, with 50 puppets (many life-size, others Lilliputian or gargantuan), seven actor-puppeteers and three musicians whose underscore modulates the mood as deftly as the intricate lighting (by Xavier Lescat and Vincent Loubière) and beguiling video (by David Lejard-Ruffet). Just one quibble: When the music’s volume rises, it can drown out the dialogue.The show’s narrator, of course, is the sailor Ishmael — sometimes a puppet, more often a human played by Julian Spooner. Ahab’s crew, Ishmael says, “seemed to be picked and packed specifically by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniacal revenge.”There is real-world resonance to the notion of unhinged leaders reckless with their followers’ lives, but this is not the production to explore that. On a set by Elisabeth Holager Lund, where the ribs of Ahab’s ship are made of whale bone, Aspeli’s “Moby Dick” is more interested in the specter of death that shadows the voyage. And it does not blink from violence: A scene involving a mother whale and her calf is first touching, then horrifying.But this production is also about the relish of life — including the pleasure of friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg — and the abundance of beauty all around. The breathtaking puppetry embodies that loveliness.If you missed Plexus Polaire’s arresting “Chambre Noire” at Under the Radar in 2019, don’t make the same mistake with “Moby Dick.” It’s running only through Saturday, then at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival Jan. 18-21. Hurry. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES‘Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner’Through Jan. 22. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Jasmine Lee-Jones’s play about cultural appropriation, colorism, sexuality and more features Tia Bannon, left, and Leanne Henlon. It reminded our critic of Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 2019, Forbes magazine named Kylie Jenner, a lip kit trendsetter, the youngest self-made billionaire. A year later, Forbes retracted that honor. Jenner, the magazine announced, was not in fact a billionaire. (And using a term like “self-made” to describe any Kardashian-adjacent adult had always been suspect.) This failure of journalism and accountancy did have one upside: It inspired Jasmine Lee-Jones’s vicious, playful, indignant work, a Royal Court Theater production being presented at the Public Theater.Offended by Forbes’s celebratory tweet promoting its initial article, Cleo (Leanne Henlon), a young Black British woman who uses the handle @Incognegro, composes a couple of posts of her own, which imagine Jenner poisoned and shot. The tweets go viral. And despite the warnings of Kara (Tia Bannon), her mixed-raced friend, she keeps tweeting, pained by Jenner’s insouciant appropriation of the full lips typically associated with Black women. (Cleo has been bullied for the plump lips that Jenner, a white woman, bought and built her brand upon.) The tweets are unnervingly violent: “Can you take a selfie whilst being lit? But like actually lit on fire?,” Cleo types. (That would be method No. 5: immolation.) A riff on Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse,” retooled for digital natives, “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” is a meditation on Black womanhood and identity, online and off and in the murkier spaces in between.As directed by Milli Bhatia, Lee-Jones’s script shifts between the surrealism of the endless scroll — in which the two actresses voice memes, GIFs, emojis, tweets and retweets — and the relative naturalism of Cleo’s room. But even here — under a tangle of rope and lace, designed by Rajha Shakiry, that seems to literalize the World Wide Web — the argot of social media invades. Abbreviations like “idk” and “lmao” overrun ordinary speech. And virality seems to empower Cleo in adverse ways. Yet the play, ardently acted, is ultimately hopeful.The internet is a sewer. Yes, of course. But in real life, two friends, however divided by colorism and sexuality, might find their way back to each other. That this is achieved by the imagined murder of another woman, however entitled, is one of the show’s stickier points.On Wednesday, the second night of the run, technical difficulties plagued the show for nearly an hour. Then the difficulties stopped it cold. After a 15-minute pause, the play resumed, with the sound and light cues now appropriately synced to the script. Those miscues had been a distraction, particularly when it came to understanding the actresses, whose speech was warped by wonky microphone effects. Still, maybe there was a lesson somewhere in this technical mess. The technologies of social media can amplify individual voices. But it can distort them, too. ALEXIS SOLOSKI‘A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly’Through Jan. 22. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.“A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly” by 600 Highwaymen is a participatory, experimental piece about finding communion.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe final installment of 600 Highwaymen’s pandemic triptych takes place in an antiseptically corporate room on the top floor of the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.A participatory, experimental piece about finding communion in a disrupted but healing world, it requires little more than a stack of notecards, a rubber band to hold them and chairs for the audience members, who are also the actors. In theory, you could perform it anywhere.But it is tough to cast a dramatic spell in an unadorned event space, and hard to focus the attention of a group when floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a wraparound terrace where visitors come and go against a busy cityscape.If only this kind-spirited show by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone were being staged in a theater, a space designed to shut out distraction. How strange that the Under the Radar festival chose otherwise for the finish to a triptych structured like the industry’s shutdown and return: lonely isolation, cautious distance, disquieted reunion.On a recent afternoon, “An Assembly” had none of the quasi-sacramental feel of the previous parts of “A Thousand Ways.” It felt instead like doing a team-building exercise with a dozen amiable colleagues I’d never met. We spoke lines, answered questions (“Who here is worried?” “Do you have any tattoos?”) and moved about as the notecards instructed.A tall guy volunteered to take the first turn with the script. “This won’t be recorded,” he told us, reading from a card. “We won’t look back at it.”And I thought: We won’t? I’ve looked back with such affection on the earlier parts: the ways they asked me to imagine the humanity of people I did not know, and let them do the same with me — fostering empathy and connection in a time of antipathy and aloneness.The first part, “A Phone Call,” matched two strangers for a script-guided telephone conversation. I did that from my apartment in late 2020. The second, “An Encounter,” seated two strangers across a table, separated by glass and following a script. I did that at the Public Theater, in an empty auditorium, in mid-2021.Those works arrived when theater lovers unappeased by streaming were ravenous for any semblance of the live stuff, and craving human interaction. By now, we’re used to being with strangers again — if not to passing their keys and phones from hand-to-hand, as Part Three asks us to.Well over a year into the industry’s revival, “An Assembly” feels belated. It is calming, though. And if the people in your group give off a considerate and patient vibe, as those in mine did, it’s heartening, too. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      Kevin Spacey Pleads Not Guilty to 7 Charges of Sexual Misconduct in U.K.

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      The Oscar-winning actor had already pleaded not guilty in July to five other counts of sexual misconduct. He is currently out on bail.The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey pleaded not guilty in a hearing at a London court on Friday to seven more charges of sexual misconduct, the BBC and other British news outlets reported.Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, which authorized the criminal charges in November, had said previously that the charges related to allegations of sexual assault, indecent assault and causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent.The charges involve one man and the offenses were alleged to have taken place between 2001 and 2004, prosecutors have said.Mr. Spacey, 63, a two-time Oscar winner, had already pleaded not guilty in July to five counts of sexual misconduct, relating to allegations involving three men involving incidents that are said to have taken place between March 2005 and April 2013.Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London during that time. A judge has scheduled a trial on those charges to begin on June 6, 2023.On Friday, the British judge, Mark Wall, agreed to join the seven-count indictment to the previous five-count indictment, Reuters reported. Mr. Spacey appeared via videolink only to confirm his name as Kevin Spacey Fowler and enter seven not guilty pleas during the brief hearing, the news agency said.The Southwark Crown Court, where the hearing took place, and legal representatives of Mr. Spacey did not immediately respond to requests for confirmation.The actor, who won Academy Awards for his performances in “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty,” is free to work and travel before the trial, having been granted unconditional bail. More

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      Paul Mescal in a Streetcar Named Desire

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      In London, the Irish actor stars as Stanley Kowalski in a deeply empathic version of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Paul Mescal’s fast-ascending screen career has taken a detour to the London stage, where he is playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” This deeply empathic version of Tennessee Williams’s defining 1947 play is scheduled for a limited run at North London’s Almeida Theater through Feb. 4.That leaves audiences limited time to discover the sizable stage chops of Mescal, the heartthrob Irish actor who came to TV attention on Hulu’s “Normal People” in 2020 and has recently generated award-season buzz for the movie “Aftersun.” Barely a week has passed of late without his being mentioned for one or another major forthcoming film.The electricity he generates onscreen is fully evident in this latest “Streetcar” — a play frequently revived in London but rarely with the clarity and power brought to it here by Rebecca Frecknall, an associate director at the Almeida who won an Olivier Award last spring for an ongoing revival of the musical “Cabaret.”Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando. But he also exists amid a gifted company who lay bare the numerous contradictions of an infinitely rich play. Not intended as a mere star vehicle for its increasingly high-profile male lead, the visually stripped-back production is emotionally revelatory, too: Frecknall’s forensic skills allow us to look afresh at a motley gathering of people, Patsy Ferran’s tremulous Blanche DuBois chief among them, who seek understanding and compassion but just as frequently come to grief.Mescal, left, shares the stage with Anjana Vasan, who gives an outstanding performance as Stella.Marc BrennerStanley, of course, must fight his corner once he and his newly pregnant wife Stella (Anjana Vasan, outstanding) find their cramped New Orleans quarters taken over by Stella’s older sister, Blanche. Having lost the family ancestral home in Mississippi, Blanche shows up in Louisiana “hot, tired, and dirty” and on the run from a shaming and shameful past that she will clearly never escape.Purists may balk at Madeleine Girling’s raised platform set, which lacks the scenic divisions of the Kowalski household that the play repeatedly refers to. The impression instead is of an open, porous space where the actors not appearing at that particular moment often sit to one side, primed for action or for gladiatorial combat, even — something Mescal will soon be exploring onscreen.Visible well above the stage is a drummer, Tom Penn, who keeps ominous pulse with the roiling emotions of the play, as if to amplify yet further the damaged psyches on view. The rape scene ends with Blanche appearing abject in a pool of rain, as if the episode could somehow be washed away.The text’s paper lantern of legend is onstage, covering the naked light bulb that Blanche finds abhorrent. But the characters defy expectation, both in costume and physical type: Stella appears in various sweaters, incongruous with talk of the sweltering summer heat, while Ferran’s Blanche — dark-haired, large-eyed — is at some remove from the ethereal blondness often associated with this role. Nor does she make her entrance in the character’s signature white suit specified in the text. The result is a production, performed in the round, that adheres not so much to the letter of the play as to its bruised and bruising spirit. Much the same was true of Frecknall’s acclaimed 2018 revival for the Almeida, also starring Ferran, of Williams’s lesser-known “Summer and Smoke.” Frecknall takes her cue from the wounding lyricism of Williams’s writing, not his (copious) stage directions, though the inclusion of some slow-motion toward the end feels like a directorial intervention too far.I’ve rarely seen, for instance, the anger that coexists with Blanche’s fragility conveyed as clearly as it is here. She may speak in grandiose terms of her briefly beloved Mitch (an exceptionally touching Dwane Walcott) as her Rosenkavalier, but this Blanche, for all her delusions, seems to understand all too well the rum hand life has dealt her. (On that topic, the card game that ends the play has been cut.)Brought into the production late on when its original lead, Lydia Wilson, dropped out because of injury, the prismatic Ferran communicates the flighty neurotic in Blanche alongside someone nervy enough to tackle Stanley on his home turf.“I’ve got to keep hold of myself,” she says near the start, her equilibrium no less fragile than that of the brutish man-child Stanley, who cries like a baby for Stella well before his wife gives birth to their own. The bedroom is Blanche and Stanley’s battlefield, and both actors communicate the primal impulses that draw them together in a permanently disruptive date with destiny.Mescal, it seems, has his own dates pending with Hollywood, which may make such stage ventures harder for him to come by in the years ahead. (I smiled when Stanley dismisses Blanche’s “Hollywood glamour stuff,” something that the actor playing him surely knows about firsthand.)Whatever this fine actor’s future holds, his present is allied to an electrifying ensemble production of “Streetcar” that, by rights, won’t have its final stop here.A Streetcar Named DesireThrough Feb. 4 at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk. More

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      5 Broadway Veterans on Race and Representation in Theater Design

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      “Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism.” Set designers, lighting designers and a sound designer talk about skin tones, aesthetics and more.Design for live performance can cast a surreptitious spell, shaping an audience’s perceptions with stimuli we might not even notice consciously: a change of light, a snatch of sound, a detail of costume or décor. It’s encoded language, and we respond to it viscerally.To the lighting designer Jane Cox, the Broadway veteran who directs the theater program at Princeton University, that dynamic makes design ripe for interrogation in the context of antiracism. A course that she and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins taught, about race and lighting design, was one of the seeds of a multidisciplinary symposium, “Sound & Color — The Future of Race in Design,” taking place Saturday and Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory. Organized by Cox and Tavia Nyong’o, a curator at the Armory, it will include commissioned installations by young designers of color.Cox and four other Broadway designers participating in the symposium spoke recently by phone about race and culture in design. These interviews have been edited and condensed.Mimi Lien, Set DesignerMimi Lien won a Tony Award in 2017 for the set design of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.”Emma PratteDesigners for live performance create and curate an experience, right, by juxtaposing visual, sonic, tactile, spatial elements within a time-based structure. All of these chosen elements carry so much cultural meaning and emotion. The job of designers is to handpick those elements and create a design vocabulary that communicates narrative or a particular emotion. With that comes so much responsibility, because our landscape is constructed with the goal of telling a particular story or reaching a particular audience with really calibrated visual and sensory cues.There is a lot of talk about representation right now. But for me, the real interest of this symposium is the aesthetic question. Like, why do people have certain associations with certain colors, and with darkness versus light? That is a huge cultural, media, anthropological question. And I’m really interested in how the two things intersect: What is the intersection between representation and aesthetics?Jane Cox, Lighting DesignerJane Cox was a Tony Award nominee in 2022 for her work on “Macbeth.”Evan AlexanderBranden says, “Racism is a visual ism.” And he’s right. Racism is perpetrated or understood through how we see other people. How we hear other people. And that happens through the way people are dressed, through the spaces they inhabit, through the way they move, through sounds. When they’re depicted in an image or on a stage or in a movie, design impacts enormously how you see people and how you feel about them. Who’s the center of focus, who’s not the center of focus. Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism, and so does racism.My great hope is to investigate more deeply the ways in which our imaginations are colonized by our specific cultures. Designers are people who believe in our senses. How does sensory input impact these questions of racism? The point of the weekend is to try to start to find a language to talk about these things.Justin Ellington, Sound DesignerJustin Ellington was a Tony nominee in 2020 for “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” and his work can be seen on Broadway in “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders.”Justin Ellington“Race.” [sighs] That word. The angle I’ll be coming from is more cultural than race. A lot of the work that we do, especially with the contemporary work, is very specific about certain communities. There are people that live in those communities, and then there are people that need to do research to understand what’s going on. Living in a place and then hearing about that place that you live in is often drastically different.I was part of a workshop recently and some of the dialogue that was given to the Black characters, I was like, “I don’t know those people, never heard of those people.” Definitely imagined Blackness. As a designer, we need to read scripts and not just say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Because you’ll find yourself in Act II like, “What?” It’s like, “That is a terrible misrepresentation of a people.” I’m a sound designer by title but I’m a storyteller first. Sometimes I feel like a cultural watchdog.Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, Lighting DesignerJeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s work can be seen on Broadway in “Kimberly Akimbo.”Hunter CanningThere’s no such thing as racially correct lighting. So in some ways I’m free of that burden. What I have as a burden is a conversation that always comes up, about skin tone — how to be able to represent performers in the best light. Lighting white skin is just as complicated as lighting other, nonwhite skin because everybody’s skin tone reflects a different kind of way. You do have to train your eye.Many years ago, I saw a show that had an Asian cast. There’s a certain idea of lighting design that we should always have a warm and a cool tone onstage. This lighting designer’s particular warm tone was very amber; amber gel has a lot of green in it. Literally the Asian people just looked like they had liver disease, warm and yellow because of the skin tone having more green in it.Adam Rigg, Set DesignerAdam Rigg was a Tony nominee in 2022 for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Ian MaddoxWe’re taught rules. Especially in theater and opera, there are systems that we follow straight down to the architecture of the space. Which were mostly designed by white men. The future, for me, it’s not about wiping away that history. It’s about truly finding a way to find equity in the vocabulary.I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but I’ll just say it. “Ain’t No Mo’” was originally designed by a team of BIPOC designers [Black, Indigenous and people of color]. The work was shocking and exciting. Then it moved to Broadway with still some designers of color, but some white cis male designers incorporated into the team. You could feel the cleverness draining from it. It felt safer. If we’re really trying to broaden Broadway — which is what the end goal for most of us is, to able to make a living — that representation goes down to design as well. Who was in the room not saying, “Hey, ‘Ain’t No Mo’,’ it’s a really Black play.” Who was just like, “Let some white people design it”? More