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      With an ‘Othello’ of His Own, Clint Dyer Comes Full Circle

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      LONDON — When Clint Dyer was an aspiring actor in the mid-1980s, he made his first visit to the National Theater, the revered London playhouse whose productions are a showcase for the great and good of British drama. “I’d never seen a stage that size,” Dyer recalled recently. “I’d never seen actors of that level. What a thing! How inspiring!”But when Dyer walked out of the auditorium after the show, he saw something that changed his mood instantly, he said: On a wall was a large photograph from a 1960s production of “Othello,” with the actor Laurence Olivier in the title role — in blackface. The sight “broke my heart,” Dyer said.Dyer, who is Black, said he grabbed a pen and wrote the words “Shame on you” in the whites of Olivier’s eyes.Almost four decades later, Britain’s theatrical landscape has changed radically. Last year, Dyer, 54, was named as the National Theater’s deputy artistic director — a position that makes him arguably the most high-profile person of color in British theater. On Wednesday, he premieres his own production of “Othello” at the playhouse.“It’s such a strange feeling that I’m in this building, directing the play that broke my heart,” Dyer said in an interview. “The beauty of that circle is almost overwhelming.”As the deputy artistic director of the National Theater, Dyer is arguably the most high-profile person of color in British theater.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesThe National Theater rarely stages the lengthy “Othello,” but previous productions have been landmark events. Those include John Dexter’s 1964 production with Laurence Olivier (so revered that photographs from the show were still on display two decades later), Sam Mendes’s 1997 staging featuring David Harewood in the lead and Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed 2013 production starring Adrian Lester as Shakespeare’s tragic hero, a Moor who murders his wife Desdemona after he is tricked into believing that she is having an affair.Dyer’s “Othello” — which sets the play in an arena populated by black-shirted thugs who seethe whenever Othello (Giles Terera) goes near his white wife (Rosy McEwen) — is highly anticipated, especially given that Dyer is the first Black director to tackle the play at the theater.During a recent rehearsal break, the director said he was hoping to do something new in this show. “As a Black man, I’ve always found productions problematic,” he said, adding that most directors play down the issue of race and focus on male jealousy, even when a Black actor takes the lead role. “The irony is,” Dyer said, “the way we’ve been performing ‘Othello’ has in some ways highlighted our racism more than the actual play.”Rosy McEwen as Desdemona and Giles Terera as Othello in the production by the National Theater, where Dyer is the first Black director to tackle the Shakespearean tragedy.Myah JeffersTo some theatergoers, Dyer’s rise to the heart of Britain’s theatrical establishment may appear swift. He was little known here until a play he directed and co-wrote, “Death of England,” opened in February 2020, just a few weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered London’s playhouses. The play, about a working-class man coping with his conflicting feelings for his deceased father, was a critical hit for the National Theater.Yet for almost two decades, Dyer had been toiling away in London’s theater land. Born in 1968, he was brought up in Upton Park, a poor district of East London. His mother was a nurse, and his father worked at a Ford car factory. He wanted to be a soccer player, he said, but after acting in a school play, older schoolmates encouraged him to attend Saturday morning workshops at the Theater Royal Stratford East. Soon, he was acting in a play directed by Mike Leigh, and theater administrators pushed him to try his hand at writing and directing, too.In 2004, Philip Hedley, the theater’s artistic director at the time, asked Dyer to direct his first production, “The Big Life,” about four immigrants to Britain from the Caribbean who take a vow to avoid women and wine, but swiftly break it. Based on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” the musical transferred to the West End, though Dyer struggled to get directing work afterward.Hedley said that race was “the only reason” Dyer’s career didn’t take off at the time. If he had been white, “he’d have been the hot property,” Hedley said. Dyer said he restarted his career by taking acting gigs, and writing and directing plays on the side. It was 15 years before he directed in the West End again, with “Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical.” He is now developing a Muhammad Ali musical for Broadway.“It’s such a strange feeling that I’m in this building, directing the play that broke my heart,” said Dyer. “The beauty of that circle is almost overwhelming.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesThere is curiosity in Britain’s theater world not just about Dyer’s “Othello,” but also about his plans as the National Theater’s deputy director. Dominic Cooke, a former artistic director of the Royal Court who is one of the National’s associate artists, said Dyer was chosen for the role partly because of his “really strong take on the politics of race.”The theater has long set targets to increase diversity on its stages, including one for 25 percent of performers to be people of color. (Last season it surpassed most of its objectives, with nonwhite artists making up 36 percent of its performers.) Dyer said “targets are valuable,” but it shouldn’t just fall to casting directors to increase diversity onstage. “We should really be going to writers,” Dyer said, adding that he wanted to ask playwrights to consider the diversity of their characters from the moment they began working on a play.Writers “should be doing the work to actually go out and learn about different cultures, different people and find the vernaculars that they speak in,” Dyer said.For all that focus on race, Dyer said his main responsibility as the National Theater’s deputy director was nothing to do with diversity, but simply “to sell tickets” — and that started with his “Othello.” For an artist of his generation, it felt like “a big deal” that a Black director was staging the play there, he said, but younger people might not see it as significant.That didn’t bother him, he said. “I’m glad they don’t think this is a big deal, as I do,” Dyer added. “Because they shouldn’t. It should be bloody normal.” More

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      in Theater

      Can This Man Stop Lying?

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      Christopher Massimine is trying not to lie.He’s trying not to lie when his wife asks him whether he has sorted the recycling, or when his mother-in-law’s friend Mary Ann asks whether he liked the baked appetizers she brought over.He’s trying not to lie to his therapist, who has him on a regimen of cognitive behavioral therapy to help him stop lying. And he’s trying not to lie to me, a reporter who has come to interview him about how a lifetime of lying caught up with him.This effort began around 15 months ago, when Mr. Massimine resigned from his job as managing director of the Pioneer Theater Company in Salt Lake City after a local journalist reported that he had embellished his résumé with untrue claims.The résumé, it turned out, was the tip of the iceberg. Over the course of many years, he has since acknowledged, he lied prolifically and elaborately, sometimes without any discernible purpose.He told friends he had ascended Mount Everest from Tibet (he was actually in a hotel room in Cambodia) and attended Burning Man (on closer examination, his photographs proved to have been taken in Queens.)He told journalists he was born in Italy. (New Jersey.) He told school friends his birthday was in September. (May.) He told his wife he was having an affair with Kourtney Kardashian. (Not true.)When his binge of lying was exposed, it left Mr. Massimine’s life in tatters, threatening his marriage and discrediting his early success in the world of New York theater.He spoke to The New York Times to address what he described as a fundamental misunderstanding: These were not the lies of a calculating con artist, but of a mentally ill person who could not help himself.Mr. Massimine, talking with his wife, Maggie, has tried to identify the facial tics he experiences when lying.He is not the first to suggest that certain kinds of lying are a compulsion. In 1891, the German psychiatrist Anton Delbrück coined the term pseudologia fantastica to describe a group of patients who, to impress others, concocted outlandish fabrications that cast them as heroes or victims.That argument is advanced in a new book by the psychologists Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, who propose adding a new diagnosis, Pathological Lying, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.Psychiatry, they argue, has long misidentified this subset of patients. Rather than “dark, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “often suffering from their own behavior and unable to change on their own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, could benefit from behavioral therapies that have worked with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder.Just before his fabrications were exposed, Mr. Massimine checked into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder, a syndrome which can feature deception and attention-seeking. For many of the people close to him, a diagnosis made all the difference.“He’s not just a liar, he has no control over this,” said his wife, Maggie, 37, who admitted that, at several points, she had considered filing for divorce. “That really was the turning point for me, when I had an understanding of it as an illness.”Since then, she has thrown herself into the project of helping her husband recover. “It’s similar to Tourette’s,” she said. “You acknowledge that it’s their illness that’s causing them to do this, and it might be a little odd and uncomfortable, but you move past that.”A call from Mount EverestIn 2018, Mr. Massimine posted messages and photos on Facebook pretending to be near Mount Everest in Tibet.Maggie remembers, with painful clarity, the day in 2018 when she realized the breadth and depth of her husband’s problem.“I’m in tibet,” his email said. “Please don’t be mad.”He had attached a photograph of two men, a Sherpa and a fair-haired alpinist, with Himalayan peaks looming in the background. He had managed to sneak into China with the help of kind Buddhist monks, who led him as far as Everest Camp 2, he told her. “This is Tsomo,” he wrote. “He is awesome and if he comes to the USA you’ll love him.”Maggie stared at the picture, which he had also posted on Facebook; it didn’t make sense. Mr. Massimine, her husband of five years, had told her he was on vacation in Cambodia. He had not given himself time to acclimate to the elevation of Everest Base Camp; he had no mountaineering experience; he didn’t have a Chinese visa.“At first, I thought, Why is he posting this when it could get him killed?” she said. “And then, the crazier his posts got, I was like, This isn’t real. None of this is real.”That weekend, with help from her friend Vanessa, she began a “deep dive,” reviewing all of his Facebook posts and email accounts. She discovered elaborate deceptions — voice impersonators, dummy email accounts, forged correspondences. She was terrified, she said. “Who is this person?” she recalls thinking. “Who did I marry?”Christopher Massimine’s flair for theater emerged early.via Lawrence MassimineMr. Massimine is tall, handsome and eager to please. He grew up on a cul-de-sac in Somerset, N.J., the only child of a nurse and an auditor. His flair for theater emerged early — at 10, he wrangled the members of his Cub Scout troop into performing “A Knight’s Tale,” a play he wrote and scored. Family photos show him in costume, a fair-haired boy with fangs, a knight’s armor, an eye patch.The lying started early, too. He says it began in the second grade, when, nervous about bringing home a B plus in math, he told his parents that he had been invited onto the stage at school to sing a duet with an actor from “The Lion King.”Lying became a “defense mechanism,” something he did to calm his anxiety, usually without pausing to consider whether he would be believed. “It was just something where I kind of pulled the trigger and hoped for the best,” he said.In interviews, friends recalled this behavior, which they described as “tall tales” or “embellishments” or “campfire stories.” It never seemed malicious, said Jessica Hollan, 35, who was cast opposite him in a middle school production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”“It was more just like, you caught a minnow, and then it became a swordfish,” she said.Maggie shared a wedding photo from 2013. No one called him out on it, said Lauren Migliore, 34, who got to know him in college. She recalled him as a loyal, affectionate friend but sensitive and needy, “like a little puppy.” “I always thought it came from a place of insecurity,” she said. “I never thought it was worthy of mentioning. It was an attention thing.”By the time he met Maggie, Mr. Massimine was a successful theater producer with a tendency to extreme workaholism. Co-workers recalled his pulling all-nighters as productions approached, sometimes forgetting to shower or change clothes.This intensity propelled him upward through the industry; at 29, he was named chief executive of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, where he laid the groundwork for a runaway hit, a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish.But it hadn’t been good for the marriage. Now, Maggie understood that her husband’s work habits were not her only problem. They separated for a few months. Then she softened — maybe, she told herself, he was lying because she made him feel inadequate — and they got back together. He started therapy and went on an antidepressant medication.They spent months sifting through everything he had ever told her about his life, “just figuring out fact from fiction,” she said.A small group of prolific liarsVironika Wilde said she lied frequently as a teenager to “produce a moment of empathy in other people.”Ian Willms for The New York TimesIn 2010, when researchers from Michigan State University set out to calculate how often Americans lied, they found that the distribution was extremely skewed.Sixty percent of respondents reported telling no lies at all in the preceding 24 hours; another 24 percent reported telling one or two. But the overall average was 1.65 because, it turned out, a small group of people lied a lot.This “small group of prolific liars,” as the researchers termed it, constituted around 5.3 percent of the population but told half the reported lies, an average of 15 per day. Some were in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. But others lied in a way that had no clear rationale.This was the group that interested Dr. Curtis and Dr. Hart. Unlike earlier researchers, who had gathered data from a criminal population, the two psychologists set about finding liars in the general public, recruiting from online mental health forums. From this group — found “in mundane, everyday corners of life,” as Dr. Hart put it — they pieced together a psychological profile.These liars were, as a whole, needy and eager for social approval. When their lies were discovered, they lost friends or jobs, which was painful. One thing they did not have, for the most part, was criminal history or legal problems. On the contrary, many were plagued by guilt and remorse. “I know my lying is toxic, and I am trying to get help,” one said.This profile did not line up with the usual psychiatric view of liars, who are often diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, a group seen as manipulative and calculating. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a lack of research into treatments and a general pessimism that habitual liars are capable of change.In a new book, the psychologist Drew Curtis argues that prolific liars could benefit from behavioral therapies.For Vironika Wilde, 34, a writer whose first-person account is referenced in the book, it was possible to stop. She started lying as a teenager, a “chubby immigrant girl who spoke with an accent,” hoping to win sympathy with over-the-top stories of a drive-by shooting or a fall from a roof. Over time, though, keeping track of the lies became stressful and complicated. And as she developed deeper relationships, friends began calling her bluff.In her 20s, she stopped by imposing a rigid discipline on herself, meticulously correcting herself every time she told a lie. She looked for new ways to receive empathy, writing and performing poetry about traumatic experiences in her past. Telling the truth felt good. “You still have these internal mechanisms saying something is off,” said Ms. Wilde, who lives in Toronto. “That is what makes it so relieving to stop. Those pangs of guilt, they go away.”But she was never able to coach other compulsive liars through the process. Several approached her, but she could not get past a few sessions and was never convinced that they were ready to change. “I had the impression,” she said, “that they were trying to avoid negative consequences.”This was a common observation among researchers who have spent time with prolific liars: That it was difficult to build functioning relationships.“You can’t trust them, but you find yourself getting sucked into trusting them because, otherwise, you can’t talk to them,” said Timothy R. Levine, a professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham who has published widely on deception.“Once you can’t take people at their word, communication loses all its functionality, and you get stuck in this horrible place,” he said. “It puts you in this untenable situation.”BackslidingMr. Massimine is cautious about joining group conversations where people are swapping stories, knowing that he may feel the urge to fabricate.In October 2019, the year after the Tibet lie fell apart, Mr. Massimine called Maggie in a state of breathless excitement. There was news: He had won a Humanitarian of the Year Award, from a group called the National Performing Arts Action Association.The couple had just moved to Salt Lake City, where he had been named managing director of the Pioneer Theater Company at the University of Utah. Things weren’t going well at work, where, as he put it, “the people who were supposed to be listening to me weren’t listening to me.” Once again, he found himself pulling all-nighters, lashing out at interruptions from Maggie, who was pregnant.Aggrieved and raw, he reached for an old solution. It was a deception that went beyond what he had done in the past, and he needed Maggie to back him up. “I felt like, you know, this was a very big lie, and I want to make sure I got everyone on board, so that it feels like it’s a real thing,” he said.Maggie was, frankly, dubious. But then he flew to Washington for two days, coming back with a medal and photos that appeared to show him at a White House podium. “I was like, OK, I guess he really did get this award,” she said. “Like, he came back, and he’s got an award.”His new co-workers were keeping closer track. In his first month on the job, he asked colleagues to secure him a last-minute observer pass to a U.N. conference, then claimed that he had been a keynote presenter, said Kirsten Park, then the theater’s director of marketing. It seemed like an “enormous exaggeration,” but then again, it was theater, she said: “Everybody expects a little bit of fluff.”She watched him giving interviews to reporters and describing a career of dazzling breadth and achievement. When he brought Ms. Park a news release announcing his Humanitarian Award, she searched for the organization, then the award, online, and found nothing.Mr. Massimine takes daily walks, thinking through the moments when he felt an urge to lie.“I absolutely thought it was a lie,” she said, but hesitated to report her doubts to superiors. When he flew to Washington to collect the award at the university’s expense, she doubted herself. “Maybe the only worse thing than lying is accusing someone of lying who hasn’t.”Mr. Massimine’s behavior became harder to ignore in 2021. He began posting amateurishly written articles — he now admits paying for them — that described him in even more grandiose terms: He had been a vice chair of MENSA International, a consultant to Aretha Franklin and a minority owner of a diamond company. Even friends, watching from a distance, wondered what was going on.“I didn’t think half the stuff in it was real,” recalled Jill Goldstein, who worked with Mr. Massimine at the Folksbiene.Then it all blew up. In a painful conversation with university officials, Mr. Massimine learned that a group of staff members from the theater had filed a grievance about him, alleging mismanagement and absenteeism, and that a reporter from the local FOX affiliate was preparing an exposé on his fabrications.Looking back at this period, Mr. Massimine did not sound particularly remorseful, but instead indignant toward his co-workers: “The audacity that, you know, these employees who have just been fighting me and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting. And I have been trying to work with them because I had no other choices.” That realization, he said, “sent me into a complete breakdown spiral.”Maggie recalls these days as the scariest she has ever lived through. She was so afraid he would hurt himself, she said, that she stood in the door when he used the toilet. Finally, she drove Mr. Massimine to the university hospital’s psychiatric institute, where he checked in for the first of three brief stays.Once again, she found herself at home alone, reviewing thousands of her husband’s emails.“I called my best friend, Vanessa, and I was just like, ‘He did it again,’” she said.A Smaller LifeMr. Massimine, with his wife, Maggie, and their son, Bowie, in the New York City borough of Queens.Dr. Jordan W. Merrill, a psychiatrist who treated Mr. Massimine in Utah that year, recalled him as exceptionally fragile during the weeks that followed.“There are times, as a psychiatrist, we have patients where we really worry we’re going to get a phone call the next morning that they are dead,” he said. “There was a period that he was that person.”Lying had not previously been a focus of Mr. Massimine’s psychiatric treatment, but now, the doctors swung their attention to it. Dr. Merrill described Mr. Massimine’s fabrications as “benign lying,” which functioned mainly as “a protection of his internal fragility.”“It’s not seeking to take something from you, it’s about just trying to cope,” Dr. Merrill said. “I don’t know if they know they’re doing it. It becomes reinforced so many times that this is just the way one navigates the world.”For Maggie, the diagnosis made all the difference. Mr. Massimine’s doctors, she recalled, “sent me to psychology websites and really walked me through it so I could have a better understanding.” As she came to see his actions as symptoms of an illness, her anger at him drained away.The diagnosis also mattered to his employer. Mr. Massimine negotiated a $175,000 settlement with the University of Utah in which neither party acknowledged wrongdoing, according to The Salt Lake Tribune, which acquired the agreement through a records request. Christopher Nelson, a university spokesman, confirmed Mr. Massimine’s resignation but declined to comment further.The Massimines sold their large Victorian house in Salt Lake City and moved in with Maggie’s parents in Queens.The Massimines recently closed on a three-bedroom house in Queens, away from the world of theater.These days, Mr. Massimine meets weekly with a therapist, unpacking the moments when he felt a strong urge to fabricate. He says he quiets the urges by writing, posting often on social media. When he finds himself on the edge of a group of people swapping stories, he steels himself, takes deep breaths and tries to stay silent.Now that some time has passed, he and Maggie can laugh about the more ridiculous episodes — “I called my general manager and I was like, I can’t talk very long, I’m on Mount Everest” — and that is a relief. The effort of keeping track of lies had become a mental strain, “a million different things in my brain that didn’t need to be there.”“I want to change,” he said. “I don’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life. It’s taken a toll on my memory. It’s taken a toll on my character.”Recently, the Massimines closed on a modest three-bedroom house in Hamilton Beach, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens overlooking Jamaica Bay. It’s a long way from the world of theater and the life they had envisioned when they went on their first date, at Sardi’s.Maggie is OK with that. Given his problem with fabrication, sending him back into the world of show business would be “like telling an alcoholic to become a bartender.”Early this month, as he watched their 20-month-old son, Bowie, kick a soccer ball across their narrow back yard, Mr. Massimine seemed impossibly far from that old world. He spoke, a little wistfully, about the fictional Chris, the one he has had to relinquish.“There was this wonderful character of me, and he did things nobody else could do,” he said. “In some ways, I’m sad to see him go.”‘Why would we expect any of this to be true?’Mr. Massimine wrote about his lying, attributing it to mental illness.This fall, Mr. Massimine made his first tentative re-entry into the public eye, publishing a column in Newsweek that attempted to explain his lying.“As part of my diagnosis, when I am in mental distress, I create fabrications to help build myself up, since that self-esteem by itself doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “I compensated in the only way I knew how to: I created my own reality, and eventually that spilled into my work.”The column, which ran under the headline “I Was Canceled, It Turned My Life Upside Down,” portrayed him as a victim of office politics and online trolls. Judging by the comments written anonymously, it did not win him the sympathy of many readers.“He made up and accepted a humanitarian award that DOES NOT EXIST,” one wrote. Another asked: “As a confirmed liar writing about how you lied, why would we expect any of this to be true?”Ms. Goldstein, a friend, said she admired Mr. Massimine for pushing the limit of the kinds of mental illnesses that are discussed publicly.“Some of them are still in the closet, and this is one of them,” she said. “Compulsive lying, that’s not something that’s out and open. That’s not acceptable. That’s considered wrong.”Other associates were less forgiving. Ms. Park, who worked for Mr. Massimine in Utah, was one of the few former co-workers willing to comment on the record.“I have no doubt that Chris struggles with mental health,” she said. “Nearly everyone did in 2020. But lying is still a choice. The urge to lie doesn’t mean you have to. Moreover, knowing this about yourself, continuing to lie and then not disclosing it is also a choice.”She noted that he had secured a competitive, well-paid position in Salt Lake City with a résumé that falsely claimed that he had a master’s degree and that he was a two-time Tony Award nominee, among other things.“If this is a characteristic of his illness as he has said, he has clearly been able to use it to his advantage to gain prestige, position and pay,” she said.Even friends wondered whether his public discussion of his mental illness was disingenuous, a form of reputation management. “A redemption arc,” as Ms. Hollan, his friend from middle school, put it.“I want him to get better,” she said. “I love him to death. But at the same time I don’t know how much of what he’s saying is actually true.”The diagnosis will not resolve this problem. For much of recorded history, lying has been counted among the gravest of human acts.This is not because of the damage done by particular lies, but because of what lying does to relationships. To depend on a liar sets you on queasy, uncertain ground, like putting weight on an ankle you know is broken. “You are always hurting another person with that kind of behavior,” Ms. Wilde said.As I reported this article, Mr. Massimine regularly checked in with me to report his progress at avoiding lies, a streak that eventually extended to nine weeks. He felt good about sharing his story, reasoning, “If there are 100 people who think I’m full of shit, but one person it does help, that’s enough.”But on my last visit, when Mr. Massimine had stepped out for a walk, Maggie sat with me at the kitchen counter and listed things in the Newsweek column that she thought he had exaggerated to make himself look better.“Embellishments,” she called them, like saying he was doing “townwide construction work” when he had actually helped his father-in-law dig a hole for a neighbor’s cesspool.“I worry about his conversation with his therapist,” she told me. “I’m like, are you being honest with your therapist? Are you telling them everything?”She tries to keep up with everything he has been posting on social media, but she has a job, and he writes so much. Maggie sounded tired.“I am not confident that he has totally stopped,” she said. “I can obviously not watch him all the time.”While we were talking, Mr. Massimine returned home from his walk and settled on the couch, listening.“I disagree,” he said. “I think I’ve been good.”Rebecca Ritzel and Alain Delaqueriere contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Gett’ Review: Jewish History and a Woman’s Future

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      The ancient and contemporary swirl together in Liba Vaynberg’s ambitious, off-kilter play about life after a divorce.It is something of a shock to encounter Jennifer Westfeldt, as gorgeous and screwball-comedy perfect as ever, playing the mother of an actual grown-up — a daughter deep enough into adulthood that not only has she gotten married, but now she’s getting a divorce.Your brain may do some contortions as it attempts to adjust, but the effervescent Westfeldt — star of the classic rom-com movies “Friends With Kids” and “Kissing Jessica Stein” — has indeed taken up the Jewish-mother mantle. As Mama in Liba Vaynberg’s ambitious, off-kilter play “The Gett,” at Rattlestick Theater in Greenwich Village, Westfeldt handily steals the show.Mama’s daughter, Ida (pronounced EE-da), a poet with a day job at a library, is rather less interesting. This is unfortunate, given that she is the main character.One Dec. 25, en route to a friend’s party, Ida (Vaynberg) gets stuck in an elevator with a guy who is smolderingly hot despite his penchant for magic tricks. (The show’s magic consultant is Alexander Boyce.) The stranger is attracted to Ida even after she flosses her teeth in front of him, right there in the elevator.This is Baal (Ben Edelman), Ida’s future husband and eventual ex. His name, a note in the script explains, “is the Hebrew word for husband, master, and a false violent god who is eventually banished.” Romantically, Baal is not a healthy choice.Directed by Daniella Topol, “The Gett” is about his banishment, but its principal subject is Ida’s struggle to remake herself after their divorce. (A gett is a Jewish divorce decree.) Subtitled “One Woman’s Creation Myth,” the play borrows its seven-part structure from the seven-day creation of the heavens and Earth in the Book of Genesis. Within that framework, the first day is Ida and Baal’s meet-cute.The play slip-slides between the contemporary and the ancient, the real and the surreal. When Ida asks her divorce lawyer (Luis Vega) what the date is, he replies: “Well, there was light on the first day, and now we’re drawing a line that separates the heavens from the earth. So, the second day of creation.”It’s a difficult tone to strike, more so given the production’s unbalanced dynamic. Ida is curiously drab, lacking the pull of sympathy; scenes between her and a series of male characters (played by Vega) don’t breathe as deeply as they need to. But whenever Baal appears, things perk up — because the dark magnetism that makes it so hard for Ida to get him out of her head works on the audience, too. He is a beguiling presence, inhabiting a nearly spectral dimension.And Mama is all exuberance, with a delightful comic fizz. Rambling to Ida in voice mail after voice mail, she roots for her unconditionally.“You were so weird,” she tells Ida, remembering her as a child, and there’s no mistaking that this oddness was a good thing, worth cherishing.Produced in partnership with Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, “The Gett” intends to work on two levels, as one woman’s divorce story and as a play laden with meaning from Jewish history and culture. The script contains plenty of layers. But in performance, flatness too often dominates.Then the scene changes, Ida’s voice mail beeps, and Mama returns, persistent in her love.“This is your mother,” she says, and for a few moments all is well again.The GettThrough Dec. 11 at Rattlestick Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Review: In ‘KPOP,’ Korean Pop and Broadway Meet (Too) Cute

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      The worldwide sensation and American-style musical theater form an awkward alliance onstage.“A lot of people come to these things and they don’t even understand the language,” says Harry, a filmmaker who passes for the villain in the noisy yet skimpy new musical “KPOP.” “So what are they watching for?”Good question.For the record, the answer provided by Tiny, a member of a Korean pop group called RTMIS, is delivered, unlike a lot of the show, in English: “Perfection, Mr. Harry. OK?”And it’s true that if you enjoy the precision-drilled dancing, meticulous melisma and auto-tuned sentiments that have turned K-pop into a worldwide sensation over the past 10 years, you are likely to be among those cheering the musical’s Broadway incarnation, which opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square.But those who aren’t hard-core fans of the genre or don’t understand Korean — let alone those who saw the radically different and far superior Off Broadway version in 2017 — will have a harder time enjoying this one. For them, the musical is less an eye-opener than an ear-pounder, assiduously drowning out any ambitions it may once have had to be more.It can’t be lost on the creative team that in adapting their Off Broadway hit for a bigger and more conventional audience they courted the same fate as their fictional counterparts. Both then and now, the book of “KPOP,” by Jason Kim, concerns the efforts of a Seoul hit factory to push its stable of custom-groomed artists into crossover success in the United States. To do so, they are willing to sacrifice almost anything.That theme was given edgy, immersive expression in Teddy Bergman’s 2017 staging, produced by the experimental theater incubator Ars Nova in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective. It imagined the audience as members of an itinerant focus group who, serving as emissaries of American taste, were led in small packs from space to space and given glimpses of what those sacrifices might mean.If some seemed silly, others were trenchant; an especially disturbing encounter involved a plastic surgeon. But by the time everyone assembled in one last room for a concert-cum-party, the giddy fun of the bubble-gummy songs (by Helen Park and Max Vernon) felt earned — even if the reversal was dramatically perplexing. Were we now celebrating what the rest of the show had encouraged us to disparage?That problem remains, with new ones added. To begin with, Bergman, directing again, faced an overwhelming difficulty in the fact that no Broadway theater could accommodate the immersive concept. Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s set provides a partial solution: Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth bearing performers. And video screens mounted everywhere (Peter Nigrini is the projection designer) allow us to eavesdrop on the backstage action captured when Harry the filmmaker (Aubie Merrylees) goes rogue.Instead of the audience moving, a tongue-shaped stage does, sliding back and forth with the performers. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe narrative frame was rebuilt less successfully. The audience, no longer a focus group, merely watches as a K-pop impresario named Ruby (Jully Lee) prepares for a concert that will introduce her stable of acts to America. There are three of them: the five-woman RTMIS (pronounced Artemis), the eight-man F8 (pronounced fate) and the solo diva MwE (pronounced mu-WEE) — an orphan Ruby has raised, Mama Rose-style, for stardom.MwE (played by the actual K-pop star Luna) has been reconfigured entirely. Her problem is no longer that she is aging out of pop credibility but that she wants creative freedom and a normal life with her boyfriend (Jinwoo Jung). Ruby ruthlessly tries to quash those dangerous ideas — love and creativity are not things a K-pop star can afford, she says — even as she complains about MwE’s failure to perform from the heart.This is familiar material, thinly delivered, and so is the dissatisfaction of the members of RTMIS, which is so vague and hastily resolved I barely caught what it was. Only among the members of F8 does the conflict feel fresh and worthy of exploration in song: Its seven longtime members resent the “new kid,” Brad, brought in to juice their American rollout. Biracial and Connecticut-raised, Brad (Zachary Noah Piser) is seen by the others as inauthentic; he isn’t even fluent in Korean.The songs, unfortunately, do not take up the challenge of investigating that issue, or any other. They are all diegetic — actual numbers performed by the characters — and are thus connected to the story, as in a jukebox musical, by only the feeblest of threads. When Brad tells the filmmaker that he grew up neither Korean enough for some nor American enough for others, and proceeds to sing a song called “Halfway,” we may expect an exploration of those feelings. But no, it’s a love ballad, addressed to a girl: “Can you meet me halfway, baby?”The same problem derails “Korean Man,” a song for F8 that you may think from the setup will express their assertion of national pride. As we learn from the parts of it that are performed in English, though, it’s mostly about having the “baddest swagger” and “bein’ a bad, bad boy.”Jully Lee, left, plays a K-pop impresario named Ruby, and the real-life K-pop star Luna plays MwE.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith their link to the drama severed, and the drama in any case attenuated, the songs cease to function as they normally do in musical theater and collapse into a concert. That’s true even before the final 20 minutes of the show, when the filmmaker plot is summarily abandoned and, with it, any pretense of plot.So that flashback scene in which Ruby tells MwE, at 13, that she’s a “disaster” with “tree trunk legs,” and a choreographer shouts that she’s shaming her parents? Forget about it. Come hear the band. (Actually, there are only three instrumentalists.)By then, if you are not a fan, you may feel worn out by the aggressive mimicry of the K-pop performance style, not just in the mostly electronic arrangements but also in the minutely detailed choreography by Jennifer Weber, the squint-inducing lighting by Jiyoun Chang and the hundreds of can-you-top-this costumes by Clint Ramos and Sophia Choi. In that environment it’s hard to say whether Brad’s “Halfway” and MwE’s “Mute Bird” — acoustic songs simply staged and feelingly delivered — are actually lovely or merely a relief.In its remaking for Broadway I wish “KPOP” had preserved more moments like that: moments that allow you to consider what the excitement of K-pop (for those who feel it) and the expressiveness of American musical theater (likewise) can profitably say to each other. Both have their fans and no doubt their glories, as well as their limitations. But it seems to me that in introducing the two, a good place to have met would have been, well, halfway. “KPOP” still has far to go to get there.KPOPAt Circle in the Square, Manhattan; kpopbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      After a 70-Year Run in London, ‘The Mousetrap’ Heads to Broadway

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      The enduring Agatha Christie whodunit, which has stumped West End theatergoers since 1952, will come to New York next year. (No spoilers, please.)For the past 70 years, London theatergoers have enjoyed trying to figure out the identity of the murderer in “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s enduring whodunit.Now, Broadway audiences will get a chance to try to solve it.On Friday, keen-eyed theatergoers discovered a website for the Broadway iteration, which announced that the murder mystery, whose London production holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest-running play, would make its Broadway debut some time in 2023.The website did not give details about the run’s start date, location or cast, but said the production’s set would be “a loving recreation” of the chintzy West End design and even borrow its wind machine, which is used to create a storm.On Friday, Adam Spiegel, the show’s British producer, confirmed the transfer of the show in a telephone interview from St. Martin’s Theater in London, where he was hosting a special matinee of “The Mousetrap” to celebrate its 70th birthday.Spiegel said he “was not ready” to provide any details of the Broadway run, but insisted it was going ahead. “Oh God, yes, it will happen in 2023,” he said.He is producing the show with Kevin McCollum, the Tony Award-winning producer who recently helped take “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII, from London to Broadway.It is unclear why “The Mousetrap,” which began as a radio play, has never reached Broadway before. For decades — even when it was merely middle-aged, and still far from becoming a septuagenarian — some critics have called it an anachronism, noting its old-fashioned staging, with creaking windows the closest thing to a special effect.A New York production did open Off Broadway in 1960, at the Maidman Playhouse. “‘The Mousetrap’ will not exactly shake you up, but neither will it let you down,” Lewis Funke wrote in The New York Times. But it never moved to Broadway.The original 1952 production starred Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim, who were married. All told, the show has been performed over 28,915 times in London, the production said on Friday in a news release, and has been seen by over 10 million people. Queen Elizabeth II attended its 50th anniversary performance in 2002.A decade ago, when the show was celebrating its 60th anniversary, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that seeing it in London was like “being part of a field trip to a historic site,” because he found himself surrounded by so many tourists and schoolchildren. But he loved its cozy mystery. “Oh, bliss, it’s a living Clue board,” he said.“So, yes, ‘The Mousetrap’ creaks,” he wrote, “but old houses do; that’s part of their charm.”The show’s long West End run was interrupted by the lengthy coronavirus shutdown. Spiegel said the idea for the transfer to Broadway arose soon after “The Mousetrap” reopened in May 2021. Ever since, it “has probably had the most successful run of its life,” Spiegel said, “so suddenly we got a renewed sense of purpose about where else it might work, and New York seemed a good place.”“The Mousetrap” is set for a limited engagement, according to the website. Asked if that could end up actually being for 70 years, like in London, Spiegel demurred. “That might be a bit ambitious,” he said, “but we might as well aim for the moon.”Wherever “The Mousetrap” ends up being staged on Broadway, one thing about the production is guaranteed: Spiegel said that it would “of course” end every performance just as it does in London, with a member of the cast asking the audience to keep the identity of the killer to themselves. The no-spoilers plea has helped keep the ending a surprise for 70 years. More

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      ‘The Rat Trap’ Review: Together for Better, but Mostly for Worse

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      Noël Coward’s bleak portrait of a collapsing marriage between two artists has its American premiere at New York City Center.Sheila Brandreth and Keld Maxwell are in love and about to get married. She is a novelist and he is a playwright, both at the start of their careers: It’s a union made in literary heaven, and Sheila (Sarin Monae West) looks forward to “the joy of working together and helping one another to make our way in the world.”But when Keld (James Evans) is out of earshot, Sheila’s roommate, Olive Lloyd-Kennedy (Elisabeth Gray), offers a more jaundiced perspective. “You are much the cleverer of the two,” she tells Sheila, “and because of that I prophesy that you will be the one to give in.”Alas, it is Olive who is right.This is not much of a spoiler considering that the play is called “The Rat Trap,” the title revealing a gloomy — cynical souls might say realistic — view of marriage as terribly wrong for one party, possibly even both. That this all ends on an uncompromisingly depressing note is all the more startling considering that the show, presented by the Mint Theater, was written in 1918 and is meant to be a comedy.Then again, its author is Noël Coward, whose view of matrimony was like a cocktail of Champagne and strychnine.Written when Coward was 18, “The Rat Trap” was first staged in London in 1926 and is just now making its American debut. Elements of his signature style already figure in this piece of juvenilia, including such epigrams as “Marriage nowadays is nothing but a temporary refuge for those who are uncomfortable at home.” What’s more remarkable is that the teenage Coward had an uncanny sense of the agonizing friction between artistic ambitions and domestic life.Alexander Lass’s underpowered production at New York City Center does not bother exploring some tantalizing possibilities — like, for example, the nature of Olive’s feelings for Sheila — and it does not quite manage to hit either the comic highs or the dramatic lows. (There are also some questionable set and blocking choices, like a sofa positioned in such a way that the actors sitting on it must contort themselves to avoid showing their backs to the audience.)But West shines, first as a woman in love then as one who shrivels into seething disillusion when her career stalls while her husband’s blossoms. Because of course Sheila’s ambitions end up taking a back seat to his. “I gave up my working brain for you,” she tells Keld, who responds with a classic anthem of weaselly self-justification.The play appears to suggest this imbalance is baked into the conventions of bourgeois relationships. But it also satirizes the bohemian pretensions of Naomi Frith-Bassington (Heloise Lowenthal) and Edmund Crowe (Ramzi Khalaf), a couple of proto-hipsters who prefer free love to the officially licensed kind.Coward later wrote that “The Rat Trap” had some merits, but “the last act is an inconclusive shambles.” He was too harsh — the ending is trenchant rather than inconclusive. In love as in war, it seems to say, everybody loses.The Rat TrapThrough Dec. 10 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      London’s Theater Cuts Matter, on Broadway and Beyond

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      The cushion of state money let the Hampstead and Donmar playhouses develop broad programs with international reach. Now they must find creative ways to play on.LONDON — Standing ovations at London theaters are drearily routine these days, but I experienced one a few weeks ago that felt genuinely impassioned. I’m thinking of the fervent audience response to a new two-character play, “Blackout Songs,” on Hampstead Theater’s intimate second stage. (The show runs at the 100-seat Hampstead Downstairs until Dec. 10.)Chronicling the bruised and bruising relationship between two self-destructive drinkers who meet at an A.A. meeting, Joe White’s spiky tragicomedy is impressive on several fronts. Its performers, Alex Austin and Rebecca Humphries, fearlessly inhabit two restless lovers trying to stave off psychic and physical ruin. The writing plays with time, asking the audience to piece together a fragmented narrative that views these characters — unnamed until the very end — at critical points as they ricochet in and out of each other’s lives.The play asks a lot of the two actors, who meet its demands with force. But there was an additional reason for the palpable excitement in the house at the show’s end that night. The excellence of the show dealt a direct rebuke to the still fresh news of major cuts in government ‌subsidies for arts institutions across London, in which the Hampstead lost its entire grant. Work like “Blackout Songs” is what the Hampstead exists to do, and suddenly the theater felt at risk.The same fate befell the venerable Donmar Warehouse, another small theater with an outsize reach. Might the activity of two playhouses so crucial to the theatrical ecosystem — not just in London — be somehow curtailed? Would they have to become safer, less adventurous?Both houses have long shown their importance, here and overseas. Equipped with three auditoriums between them (the Hampstead has a 370-seat main stage as well), they have generated a substantial body of work, sending shows from London into the world and also offering homes to shows from abroad. The Donmar has just staged the European premiere of “The Band’s Visit”; a second American musical, “Next to Normal,” is scheduled to arrive there next year.To cut these theaters’ subsidies is to advocate, willingly or not, for shrunken ambitions. Philanthropy and commercial activities can pick up the slack, of course, as in the United States. But donor bases don’t arrive overnight. The cushion of state money let the Hampstead and the Donmar develop broad programs with international reach. Unless the theaters tread carefully, the effects of the cut will be felt far beyond London.I can easily see international producers snapping up “Blackout Songs,” not least because its compactness — two characters, one set — is attractive financially. But the director Guy Jones’s production sets the bar high. On a bare stage with just a few chairs, the play’s jagged, nonlinear style is accompanied by whiplash shifts in mood that Humphries and the compellingly volatile Austin capture with ease. The impact couldn’t be stronger, prompting the best sort of guessing game about where the play might end up next.“The Band’s Visit” at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Michael Longhurst.Marc BrennerThe Hampstead has a history of birthing plays that have entered the theatrical canon. Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” and Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party” premiered there, as did Harold Pinter’s seminal two-hander, “The Dumb Waiter.” The flow of writing works both ways: The Hampstead has hosted multiple American Pulitzer Prize-winners and finalists, including Marsha Norman, Martyna Majok, Tony Kushner and Stephen Karam.“The Humans,” the Karam play that won the 2016 Tony Award, traveled to the Hampstead in 2018 with its American cast. An earlier Karam play, “Sons of the Prophet,” will receive an overdue British premiere on the Hampstead’s ‌main stage on Dec. 12: further evidence of that two-way traffic.Sure, not every Hampstead offering has been of comparable value. It has faltered of late with plays like “The Breach” and “The Snail House,” two misfires from Naomi Wallace and Richard Eyre; the current main stage play, Rona Munro’s history-minded “Mary,” is beautifully directed by the Hampstead’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert, but doesn’t galvanize the audience as “Blackout Songs” does downstairs. (It also requires more background knowledge of Mary, Queen of Scots and her court than most playgoers will possess.)Still, it’s important to the Hampstead to program a range of work across its two theaters and throughout the year. “What’s the point of a theater not having shows?” Greg Ripley-Duggan, the Hampstead’s executive producer, said pointedly by phone this week. But, he added, the lost subsidy was “an awful lot of money to make up, and to make up from one year to the next. The business model is going to have to change radically.”An absence of state funding will mean greater reliance on corporate and individual philanthropy, and pressure on ticket prices in a city where playgoing — especially away from the West End — is still reasonably affordable. Tickets for “Blackout Songs” can be had for about $12, a sum unheard-of in New York.Across town at the Donmar, a recent 30th-anniversary gala fell within days of the funding cut announcement, and the playhouse’s current and former artistic directors took to the stage at the event to celebrate the 251-seat powerhouse and argue for its survival. The Donmar is also lucky to be hosting a show just now that plays to its strengths: “The Band’s Visit.” On view through Dec. 3, the production is the first musical at this address from its current artistic director, Michael Longhurst, whose career spans both sides of the Atlantic, much like the Donmar itself. “Frost/Nixon” and “Red” are just two Broadway hits first seen there, as was Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” which is now back onstage in New York through Feb. 5.“The Band’s Visit” has gone in the other direction. Much lauded on Broadway, this adaptation of a 2007 Israeli movie of the same name has an unshowy sweetness ‌that suits the intimacy of the Donmar — all the better for a musical set in an Israeli backwater that is transformed by the unexpected appearance of a‌‌ group of Egyptian ‌musicians lost on‌ their way to somewhere else.Like “Blackout Songs,” this loving reappraisal of “The Band’s Visit” brought the audience to its feet. Let’s hope the Donmar, and the Hampstead, find creative ways to play on.Blackout Songs. Directed by Guy Jones. Hampstead Downstairs through Dec. 10.The Band’s Visit. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Donmar Warehouse through Dec. 3. More

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      Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘Topdog/Underdog’ and the Art of Deception

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      “I know we brothers,” Lincoln tells his younger sibling, Booth, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With a slight hesitation, he then asks, “but is we really brothers, you know, blood brothers or not, you and me, whatduhyathink?”The question, posed late in this dynamic two-hander, is both a catalyst and crisis for Parks’s most famous characters: Lincoln, or “Link,” a three-card monte con artist turned whiteface-wearing Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth, a shoplifter and ladies’ man. And for the actors starring in the play’s Broadway revival, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the question takes on an even deeper meaning given their electrifying chemistry onstage.“What I love about this experience is that there’s so much respect back and forth between Corey and me,” Abdul-Mateen, 38, who portrays Booth, said. “It’s no ego, just respect.”Hawkins, 34, playfully quipped, “I have a little bit of ego.”In his review, Jesse Green praised both actors, noting Hawkins’s “astonishing verbal and physical performance” as Lincoln and how Abdul-Mateen, in his Broadway debut, “fully meets the challenge, banking sympathy with his sweetness.”Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Abdul-Mateen as Booth in the acclaimed production, directed by Kenny Leon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those familiar with his more debonair roles in movies like “In the Heights” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Hawkins, a Tony nominee for “Six Degrees of Separation,” has so thoroughly transformed himself into a man downtrodden by bad choices and racism that he is virtually unrecognizable. Abdul-Mateen, who won an Emmy for “Watchmen,” intoxicates with his exuberant Booth, both flashy and naïve. We realize, too late, that his character has also been changing, and though his metamorphosis might be slower, it is even more jarring.Under the direction of George C. Wolfe and starring Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey (the rapper formerly known as Mos Def), “Topdog/Underdog” first appeared on Broadway 20 years ago. That year, Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play, and in 2018, The Times named it the best American play of the previous 25 years.Kenny Leon’s new production of “Topdog/Underdog” was a bit of a risk at a time when young Black playwrights are getting more opportunities on Broadway, and pioneers like Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy are finally getting their due. I’ve always considered Booth and Lincoln shaped by the language, swagger and blunted ambition of our earlier hip-hop generation, a sentiment that the show’s sound designer, Justin Ellington, underscores with songs by Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle.As a result, I wondered how Lincoln and Booth would appear as millennials and in a moment of greater gender fluidity and more nuanced masculinity than the one in which Parks originally conceived them. In an interview this month before one of their performances, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen described their first encounters with “Topdog/Underdog,” why they think their characters struggles with masculinity still resonate, and how they care for each other as actors and friends in this industry.Unlike the sibling rivalry they’ve perfected onstage, the two men were genuinely excited to be together offstage, often ending their answers with a compliment for their co-star or by finishing each other’s sentences. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I felt seen,” Abdul-Mateen said of first encountering the play.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHawkins said he views “the play as an ode or love letter to Black men.”Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesDid you know each other before the show?YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II I used to say that I met Corey once at a party in 2012. But it just might not be true. But I was familiar with Corey for a very long time. I went to Yale, and he went to Juilliard, and you know who’s who in the New York circles.COREY HAWKINS We all knew of each other. Before I got to Juilliard, I knew how many Black folks were in the program. There were only a certain number of us. But this was my first time meeting him. Of course, I knew his work.When did you first learn about “Topdog/Underdog”?HAWKINS I was a junior in high school when the play first premiered at the Public Theater in 2001, so it wasn’t until I was at Juilliard that I came across the show in a student production. A friend of mine, the actor Sheldon Woodley, was directing Amari Cheatom and Johnny Ramey in a version of this play. I was in my first year, wearing what they call “theater blacks” and moving the set pieces around the stage, so I was in the orbit of the play. And then I read it and fell in love with it from there.ABDUL-MATEEN It might have been in 2010 for me. At Berkeley [where he received a bachelor’s degree], a student was doing a director’s showcase of 15-minute scenes. I had one scene from “Othello,” then I did one scene from “Topdog/Underdog,” and I played Booth. It was the first time I read anything contemporary that felt like it was made for me. There was a line from the play that just stayed with me, “She gonna walk in here looking all hot and [expletive], trying to see how much she can get me to sweat, how much she can get me to give her before she gives me mines.” That made me think of my family, my cousins, my people and my friends. And I felt seen, so I said, “Oh, I got to go investigate Booth some more.”Twenty years ago, we had less nuanced conversations about Black masculinity than we are having now. Do you think that changes how we see these characters?HAWKINS I think naturally those differences will be evident because Yahya and I are Black men who live in this era versus 20 years ago. There have been shifts in the conversations around men’s roles and responsibilities, but how I, as an artist, see those things might be different than how my character, Link, sees them. I have to be true to the intentions of what Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, but I do see the play as an ode or love letter to Black men. We can be raw, right, wrong, joyous, funny, heartbreaking and unapologetically Black onstage.ABDUL-MATEEN I think Booth imagines himself as a romantic who knows about women. He’s probably not in the social circles that are speaking about toxic masculinity, but, like a lot of people I know, he fashions himself a gentleman. But, the beautiful thing about this play is that we get to be masculine and also play husband and wife, be silly, immature and vulnerable. We cry, laugh, talk about being hurt in our family, and tell lies designed to make us seem bigger than we are. And then we call each other out when we can see that we’re not succeeding. The test of the play is who comes out on top, so masculinity is always on display within that room.“There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now,” Abdul-Mateen said of Hawkins’s performance.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesYour characters’ arcs are subtle and then, especially in Booth’s case, suddenly explosive. How do you prepare for these transformations?ABDUL-MATEEN I make it my responsibility never to see it coming. Because we don’t see our transformations coming in life. As for Booth, I’m trying to keep it positive for as long as possible since he doesn’t know he has a change coming. And as an actor, I also want to stay ahead of the audience so they can be hopeful for as long as possible. And then they’re surprised or caught off guard at the end, which is what Corey refers to as the “three-card monte” trick within the play.HAWKINS With three-card monte, you’re just moving the cards around and trying to react to what’s in front of you. I have to hold off for as long as possible with Link as well. He has to fight the drug that is the cards because there is nothing as powerful as when he picks up those cards one more time. And that’s what begins the downward slippery slope for him. But until then, Link and Booth are just bouncing up against each other, pushing until they can’t anymore. That makes it heartbreaking, tragic and surprising for me every night.Are there any instances in which you’ve been astounded by the other’s performance?ABDUL-MATEEN It happens all the time.HAWKINS All the time.ABDUL-MATEEN Show to show.HAWKINS Moment to moment.ABDUL-MATEEN There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now.”HAWKINS Yeah, at the end of the play, every single show, night after night, I feel like I’m just sitting there watching you give a master class, and I wonder what you will do next. And that’s so exciting, man, because there’s not too many people who can access that range of emotion.Ultimately, this is a tragedy, but I was struck by the handshake and hug that you give each other onstage after the show ends. Why is that important for the audience to see?HAWKINS I know we’re both going through it, so I just think it’s a matter of knowing that I got another brother in the fight. We make it look easy, but it isn’t easy going up there. But, for me, I have to let Lincoln go and literally leave him on the floor. So, when I get up, I’m able to reset.ABDUL-MATEEN I am not Booth, and Corey is not Lincoln. When we take a bow, I am being myself. But, at the beginning, when that curtain goes up, only Corey and I are out there and putting on this show for two and a half hours. I have an obligation to get as close to my character’s truth as possible, and when I want to get that hurt out, I got to give it to Corey’s character. That’s my job. And it’s his job to do the same thing back to me. So, when we take our bows, I get to say, “I appreciate you for taking care of me and that this was a pleasure to do this.” More