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‘The Patient Gloria’ Review: A Theatrical Remedy for Toxic Therapy
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In ‘House of Us,’ Irina Brook Steps Out of Her Family’s Shadow
At 60, and already a renowned theater maker, Irina Brook is rethinking her work and tackling the legacy of her famous parents: “I’m only just emerging from my cocoon.”RYE, England — A couple of years ago, the theater director Irina Brook became obsessed with shadows. She kept photographing her own, and filmed others moving around her.It was a transparent metaphor for the feelings she was working through, because Brook’s parents have cast a long shadow over her life and career. Her latest work, “House of Us,” which opens in Venice on Nov. 29, is dedicated to her mother, the English actress Natasha Parry, whose rich stage and screen career lasted more than six decades. As for her father? You may have heard of Peter Brook, one of the most influential theater directors of the past century, who died this year, in Paris, at age 97.Brook, 60, is only just coming to terms with her family history, by laying much of it bare in “House of Us.” In this immersive work, which will be staged over two floors at Casa dei Tre Oci, a Venetian palazzo turned art space, visitors wander through a series of rooms inspired by Brook’s life, and her mother’s.Some are dreamlike reinventions of Parry’s bedroom and dressing room; another is a close reproduction of Brook’s kitchen, furnished with her possessions. (She shipped her kitchen table to Venice for the production.) Actors appear in multiple rooms, and private mementos, including family albums and Brook’s diaries, are on display throughout, as well as Brook’s images of shadows, transferred on oversize Japanese-style scrolls.“I somehow realized how invisible and shadowed I felt for all my life,” Brook said recently in an interview. “I’m only just emerging from my cocoon, belatedly.”Brook followed in her parents’ footsteps from a young age — “blindly,” she said — first by taking up acting, then moving to directing. Her first production, a 1996 staging of Richard Kalinoski’s “Beast on the Moon,” was an instant hit, and led to a steady, decades-long stream of gigs on prestigious European stages. Then, three years ago, she had an epiphany: Theater was “the wrong business” for her all along, she said.A lot has changed in her life since then. Brook left the Théâtre National de Nice, a major playhouse in southern France that she had led since 2014. She rented a house near the south coast of England, with panoramic countryside views. And she plotted “House of Us” — a “permanent moving work in progress” that would be so “insanely personal,” she said recently, while sitting at her kitchen table before it was packed off to Venice, “that it becomes insanely universal.”“House of Us” features video projections, as well as scenes performed by live actors.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThe audience in Venice will be free to roam between the Casa dei Tre Oci’s rooms.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThe installation includes private mementos like family albums and diaries, and Brook’s images of shadows on scrolls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThe Venice version will be the third iteration of “House of Us,” which was shown in Palermo, Sicily, in 2021, and briefly in Britain this past summer. Each has featured different performers: In Venice, 11 actors, including 10 local drama students, will perform the roles of Brook’s family members as well as characters from several plays by Chekhov, whose “Cherry Orchard” Brook and Parry once performed together.“House of Us” is a rebuttal of the type of shows Brook made for decades: “narrative, normal theater,” as she called it, including stagings of classic plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare (who was, incidentally, the playwright most identified symbolically with her father). “After I became a director,” Brook recalled, “I thought: ‘I’m not going to try and do anything new or different, because my dad’s already invented all that. What’s even the point?’”Brook, who grew up between France and Britain, performed in some of Peter Brook’s productions, but she didn’t see much of her father as a child. “As a man and as a director of his time, he was single-mindedly working, and children were not part of that equation,” she said. “We were totally invited to come and sit on a Wednesday afternoon now and then, but we’d get into trouble if we got fidgety, or fell asleep.”Her mother was often gone, too. “I adored her, but I just never saw enough of her, for all my life,” Brook said. “All she wanted to do was to act.” Still, Parry struggled at times to get work, because she also lived under her famous husband’s shadow. “I even wrote a letter to her agent as a little girl, saying: ‘Why don’t you get my mummy more work? She’s the best and the most beautiful,’” Brook said.A rehearsal for “House of Us” in Venice.Serena PeaAfter leaving boarding school in England, and after a stint in New York City in the early 1980s, an undeterred Brook experienced a taste of her mother’s suffering as an out-of-work performer. She knew she was “not really very good,” and “not really meant to be an actress at all,” she said, but she stuck with theater.“I just had no concept that anything else could possibly exist,” Brook said. “I wish that someone, when I was 19 or 20, had said to me, ‘Go to art school, go to film school.’”Instead, starting in the mid-1990s, directing became an outlet for Brook’s childhood longing for family. “I just always wanted a big table with lots of people sitting at the kitchen table enjoying themselves,” she said. “My directorship was very maternal.”Brook has also directed her own daughter, the actress and musician Maia Jemmett, 20, in several productions, including “Romeo and Juliet” and the British version of “House of Us.” Her mother’s “main focus is on making the actors shine,” Jemmett said. In addition to performing leading roles in Brook’s productions as a teenager, Jemmett also appeared in Peter Brook’s “Shakespeare Resonance” in 2020. She described her mother’s directing style and her grandfather’s as “unbelievably different.” While “there wasn’t much laughter” in Peter Brook’s rehearsals, she said, “with my mom’s rehearsals, it’s like being a child again, playing and having fun.”Yet Brook said those rehearsals didn’t bring her quite as much joy. In the years after her mother’s sudden death from a stroke in 2015, she began feeling increasingly unhappy in the director’s role, she said. “It’s like when you hold a party,” she added. “What host ever has fun?”During a difficult run of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” in 2018, she reached a breaking point. “I went to see the show one night, and I just thought: ‘My god, they’re not my real family. Maybe they are just lovely actors,’” she said. “I think at one point I could not stand the fact that theater is so ephemeral.”“I somehow realized how invisible and shadowed I felt for all my life,” Brook said recently.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesBy then, she also knew she was unsuited to directing a “big, heavy” French playhouse like the Théâtre National de Nice, Brook said. “I went in like a revolutionary, innocent fool,” she said. She enlisted teenagers from local schools to revisit Shakespeare plays and in 2015, staged a festival focused on climate change. But there was little willingness to put in effect the structural changes she wanted, she said.Brook left Nice in 2019, without finishing her second term as the theater’s artistic director, and threw herself into collecting material for “House of Us.” The show’s first two outings, and the Venice run, are only the first part of the work; Brook calls this section “The Mother.” She plans two additional installments: “The Son,” which will focus on the loneliness of young people today, and “The Daughter,” inspired by Brook’s childhood in the French countryside.What about “The Father”?“That’s the million-dollar question,” Brook said, with a wry smile. Peter Brook was supportive of “House of Us” until his death in July, she said, but when asked if she felt a responsibility for his theatrical legacy now, Brook answered: “He was a light person, and he wouldn’t want that weight to go on now. His favorite saying was: ‘Hold on tightly; let go lightly.’”It took confronting some shadows for Brook to let go, but with “House of Us,” she is reclaiming her sense of self. “I feel like sort of a young artist,” she said. “Starting my life at last.”House of Us: Part 1 — The MotherNov. 29 through Dec. 11 at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, produced by Teatro Stabile del Veneto; teatrostabileveneto.it. More
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Review: In This Solo ‘Christmas Carol,’ the Night Is Never Silent
Jefferson Mays stars in a Broadway adaptation of the Dickens classic, a one-man production that was originally live-captured for streaming.Has Jefferson Mays ever met a role — or a root vegetable — that he hesitated to take on? In the noisy, excitable one-man version of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway, in a production that opened Monday at the Nederlander Theater, Mays stars as Ebenezer Scrooge, spirits of Christmas, assorted Cratchits, street folk, partygoers. He even plays a boiling potato, straining against a pot lid. At the festive board, Mays is side dish, main course, everything.Creepy and antic, gloomy and giddy, Michael Arden’s production capitalizes on every trick in Dickens’s story and then pulls a few new ones out of Scrooge’s top hat. Peace on earth? Mercy mild? Please. There are moments when you would swear that Mays couldn’t possibly be unaccompanied, so raucous is this “Carol.” But he is, more or less. (Danny Gardner briefly joins as a wordless specter.) Happily, Mays — who has also triumphed in multiple roles in “I Am My Own Wife,” for which he won a Tony Award, and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — is a master of manifold parts. If he were left alone, without lights, sound, projections or Dane Laffrey’s curving, swerving set, he might put across this fable even more convincingly.Dickens’s story was last seen on Broadway in 2019, in a production that had originated in London at the Old Vic. That version wasn’t perfect. (Jack Thorne wrote a script freighted with his usual psychologizing.) But under Matthew Warchus’s direction, that version emphasized community, how we might all join together — actors, audience members, even the people in the cheap seats — to furnish the holiday table. The show emphasized giving and receiving, literalizing the story’s message of generosity and care.This “Carol,” adapted by Mays, Arden and Mays’s wife, the actress Susan Lyons, and live-captured for streaming two years ago, is a lonelier affair. The script hews closely to the version that Dickens himself toured, with passages of prose narration that cut the goose-fat sentimentality with keen wit and gimlet detail. The broad outlines remain familiar: On Christmas Eve, Scrooge, an ungenerous money lender, is visited by several spirits who help him to understand the boy he was, the man he became and the ways in which his miserliness may reverberate into the future. It’s a kind of spectral exposure therapy. And fast-acting, too. A lone night cures him. In place of a communal gathering, we have one man’s journey toward self-actualization. Scrooge, at last, becomes an integrated person.Mays has always been a performer of incandescence and originality, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCan we say the same of Mays, a man who makes multiple personalities seem like a boon rather than a disorder? He has always been a performer of incandescence and originality. His red-cheeked flame typically burns too bright for realism, though he does sometimes adapt to a slightly lower voltage, as in the fact-based political drama “Oslo.” With his wide forehead and a broad, elastic face, he is an actor of unusual precision, but there’s a vein of waywardness to him, too, a wildness only barely contained. He can sketch a character lightly, with only a half turn and a flutter of his lashes, or debauch himself in orgies of gesture and expression. Rarely can he leave the set or props alone. Cutlery, curtains, the belt of his dressing gown: He makes exuberant use of them all.The production, conceived by Arden and Laffrey, magnifies that exuberance. Reviewing the 2020 streaming version, Jesse Green described it as “vastly effective as spooky entertainment.” And it is. But in person rather than onscreen, the eerie production elements often overwhelm. It begins with a fog-shrouded coffin and then a thunderclap — an abrupt sound effect that set many in the audience laughing. It also frightened a baby that some parent had unwisely brought. (This is not that kind of “A Christmas Carol.” Leave the babies and the under-12s at home.) The baby screamed so lustily that I missed a lot of the first scene and then had to race to catch up, so swiftly did Mays move through the text, sometimes narrating, sometimes embodying.And yet the design outpaces him. Ben Stanton’s lighting, flashy and subdued, bathes the stage in crepuscular tones. Joshua D. Reid’s sound design, some of it effective, much of it redundant, rarely ceases. Lucy Mackinnon supplies both highly original production design, like a flash of a ghostly horse, and superfluous embellishments, like a video of party guests glimpsed through a window. (The hair, wig and makeup design are by Cookie Jordan, but as with Laffrey’s costumes, they are barely visible in the murk.) Laffrey’s set is a whirling turntable. Several turntables? Beds, banquets, staircases and cemeteries swing in and out of view — Victoriana at a gallop and a risk for anyone inclined toward motion sickness.This “Carol” is a breathless entertainment. Is breathing such a bad thing? It might have been nice to have had more respite to appreciate Mays’s closefisted Scrooge, his liberal Cratchit and sweet Fan. But even at this velocity — Mays must run miles each show — he manages to particularize each of the Cratchit children and most of the guests at the Christmas party of Fred, Scrooge’s nephew. At the curtain call, Mays appears spent, but also deeply contented. Like Scrooge, he has had his catharsis and a workout besides. He can rest merry. The rest of us can escape to the relative quiet of Times Square.A Christmas CarolThrough Jan. 1 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; achristmascarollive.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More
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Liza Colón-Zayas Swears by Brené Brown, ‘Hacks’ and Hugs
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Review: In ‘Sandra,’ a Search for a Friend Leads to Self-Discovery
In the playwright David Cale’s thriller, a woman looking for a vanished friend discovers a new sense of self.David Cale’s new play, “Sandra,” is packed with classic thriller tropes, as if he had challenged himself to cram as many of the genre’s staples as possible into a 90-minute show — I kept waiting for someone to transfer information from a computer to a USB key as seconds ticked by.Though this tale of a woman’s search for a missing friend is built using basic potboiler blocks, “Sandra,” which opened Sunday at the Vineyard Theater, is far from generic.Cale is operating, as he has been for over 35 years, within the parameters of the monologue — a style demanding of writer and actor, and not one usually associated with white-knuckle suspense. He also weaves in the themes that have long permeated his work, including the way people reinvent themselves, often to deal with trauma, and the need for transformation in the face of adversity.The playwright usually performs his own shows, but here he is lending his voice to another actor, as he did with his 2017 hit, “Harry Clarke,” which starred Billy Crudup and introduced Cale to a wider audience.Marjan Neshat (“English,” “Wish You Were Here”) plays all the characters, chief among them the narrator, Sandra Jones, a woman in her 40s who owns a cafe in Brooklyn and is vaguely dissatisfied with her life. One day, a close friend, a musician named Ethan, leaves for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; he never returns. Ethan’s compositions live on with Sandra (the lovely piano score is by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale’s collaborator on the 2019 play with music “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time”), who listens to them often. But physically, it’s as if he has vanished off the face of the earth.Our heroine decides to look for him, jumping on the first of several flights she will take over the course of the show. Once in Mexico, Sandra — who is separated from her husband and, perhaps, had not realized how emotionally and physically bereft she was — falls for Luca, a younger hunk. He says he’s a student, and glows with a magnetic, insouciant masculinity, with just the right amount of enticing mystery about his background. Luca is a male counterpart to the sultry sirens who have long lured film noir’s male protagonists, and at times it feels as if Cale is having great fun flipping the codes of the 1990s erotic thriller.Though the show’s plot can seem outlandish, Neshat acts as an anchor, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of effortless warmth.Sara KrulwichLeigh Silverman’s sober staging can dull the impact of the show’s suspenseful set pieces, as when Sandra surreptitiously searches a bag while its owner is in the shower, or when she stealthily records an incriminating conversation on her phone. Thom Weaver’s lighting is the great technical asset, romantically moody in the early stages of Sandra and Luca’s relationship, then suggesting the ominous chiaroscuro of film noir when the plot thickens.Neshat mostly stays rooted to a spot, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting, and the show feels uninterested in the body as a storytelling tool. The actress is literally at the center of it all, and has been handed a thorny gift of a role that requires the protean ability to portray a variety of characters, including the manager of Sandra’s cafe, an Australian surfer dude and an older gentleman straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She struggles to differentiate them, and even Luca does not register much as Neshat goes in and out of his accented “potpourri of a voice.”But she shines as Sandra herself, a woman who was confident enough in her identity to name her cafe after herself but feels adrift, and defined mostly in relation to others. As far-fetched as the plot gets, Neshat is a steadying force, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of anxious hope and effortless warmth — her smile alone is a masterpiece of complexity, in turn melancholy, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet. We immediately understand, for instance, why Sandra throws herself into the relationship with Luca (the reverse is not as convincing).Early on, Sandra informs us that when Ethan was about to depart for Puerto Vallarta, he told her that they were “so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too.” Yet Sandra does build herself out of Ethan’s absence, and even, ultimately, her own.SandraThrough Dec. 11 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More
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Review: On Broadway, ‘& Juliet’ (& Britney & Katy & Pink)
Shakespeare’s tragedy becomes a girl-power romp in a cotton candy jukebox musical, featuring songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin.They don’t even bother to hide the jukebox. It’s right there, out in the open, before the show starts: a chrome Cyclops glowering at you from the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theater, of all places.Are you daring me, “& Juliet”?I have done everything a critic can do to stamp out the jukebox musical. I’ve called it a cockroach, a straitjacket, a leech, a dead fish. I’ve argued that, with few exceptions, it’s a form that’s satisfactory neither as music nor as theater, let alone the combination. I’ve stood proudly, even among my colleagues, as a denier of everything that shows like “& Juliet” typically stand for.So shoot me: I liked it. It felt so wrong; it felt so right.This even though “& Juliet,” which opened Thursday on Broadway after establishing itself as a hit in London, trails the faint odor of carpetbagging and brand extension that makes other examples of the genre — “Motown: The Musical,” “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” and the inexcusable “Escape to Margaritaville” — so dispiriting. The show’s entire reason for being, after all, is to exploit the back catalog of Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker behind Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and 24 other No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1998.That the songs are good to begin with — chunky, hooky, belty, dancy — is neither here nor there; they generally are, in shows like this, or there would be no audience to pander to. Also par for the course is the way “& Juliet” wedges them into unlikely contexts, aiming for laughs that are little more than Pavlovian reactions to anticipated familiarity.What saves “& Juliet” from being a lowest-common-denominator corporate byproduct is something else, something I never expected: wit.The wit operates on many levels in the director Luke Sheppard’s super-poppy production, including hilarious hybrid Elizabethan costumes (by Paloma Young) that feature a codpiece the size of a snapping turtle, cotton-candy lighting (by Howard Hudson) and playful sets (by Soutra Gilmour) situating the story in a century somehow combining the 16th and ours.Stark Sands, left, as Shakespeare and Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway in the musical. The couple’s marital issues play out alongside Juliet’s new story.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that’s just the surface; more important are some fundamental choices about what a jukebox can and should be. For one thing, “& Juliet” is not — like “Jersey Boys” and “The Cher Show” — a biomusical, chronicling artists’ ups and downs no matter how jimmied or flat-out falsified. Martin having no taste for the spotlight, it instead opts for an original story, if you can consider a reboot of “Romeo and Juliet” original. Making that story a fable — not unlike “Head Over Heels,” the Go-Go’s romp from 2018 — smartly relieves it of the pressure of reality.But the book, by David West Read, aims higher than that. Because so many of Martin’s biggest songs featured singers like Perry, Britney Spears, Pink and Ariana Grande — Taylor Swift’s are mysteriously absent from the show — the choice to focus on a young woman made sense. Yet Juliet, as Shakespeare wrote her, comes with some baggage, including the fact that by the sixth line of the prologue she’s dead.Undoing that fate became the musical’s animating principle and spine. In Read’s telling, Juliet (Lorna Courtney in a blow-you-away performance) doesn’t die but rather wakes up confused and a little emo following Romeo’s suicide. Cue “…Baby One More Time,” which she performs, still in her funeral dress but also sporting headphones and a Walkman, in front of her lover’s sarcophagus.That’s as grim as “& Juliet” gets — not very — because, as the erasure of Romeo from its title suggests, this girl is getting a glow-up. Here the show moves into meta territory, introducing Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, as the force behind the revision. “I mean, what do I know,” Anne (Betsy Wolfe) slyly tells cocky Will (Stark Sands). “Maybe she doesn’t kill herself just because he killed himself?”When Will insists (to knowing chuckles) that he writes his plays completely by himself, Anne simply grabs the quill until he agrees to share authorship. To raise the meta ante, they also write themselves into the tale. “& Juliet” then proceeds to process the Shakespeares’s marital issues through Juliet’s new story, toggling between Anne’s feminist uplift and Will’s squirrelly, writerly (and perhaps patriarchal) need to complicate it.So when the scene shifts to Paris, where Anne provides Juliet with a new boy to enjoy, that boy — François du Bois (Philippe Arroyo) — turns out to have eyes for someone else, whom Will has contrived to throw in his path. The plot now twists its way through several typical Shakespearean tropes, including comic mismatches, reunited lovers (Paulo Szot and Melanie La Barrie) and the return of yet another character (I won’t spoil who, but you can probably guess) from the grave.Philippe Arroyo, left, as François and Justin David Sullivan as May in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe songs that illustrate these developments — “Oops! … I Did It Again” when Juliet agrees to marry François, “Blow” for a big Paris ball — are mostly apt enough, though with nearly 30 of them squeezed into the show’s 150 minutes they eventually dig an aural rut. (The sound design by Gareth Owen doesn’t help, with its arena-style reverb in a relatively small theater.) And some have the tang of reverse engineering, as when Juliet’s nonbinary best friend, May, is given Spears’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”Nevertheless, May (Justin David Sullivan) is a typically clever modern gloss on Shakespeare — a playwright, as Anne points out, who is “basically synonymous with gender-bending.” And if three of the couples, liberated by Juliet’s liberation, achieve surprisingly normative happy endings, the girl herself ends the show uncommitted, still trying to “own her choices,” apparently by not making any.Most of the comedy derives from similar tensions; though “& Juliet” is jokey, and its authorship is entirely male, its feminist critique is real enough, winking alternately at Shakespeare’s assumptions and ours. At one point, Anne summarily up-ages Juliet by about a decade because she’s “not going clubbing with a 13-year-old” — nor (it goes unsaid) letting a 13-year-old marry.Indeed, it’s Anne who provides most of the wit, not just verbal but philosophical. And it’s Wolfe’s performance — capped with a roof-raising rendition of the Celine Dion hit “That’s the Way It Is” — that gives the show its heart, an organ too often unheard from in musicals entirely focused on the ear.I could have used a bit more brain, though; “& Juliet” sometimes seems suspicious of its own intelligence, like a nerd invited to the cool kids’ party, only to get drunk and vomit in the pool.The overcompensation — two confetti explosions? — is unnecessary. Jukebox musicals may still be bottom feeders, but, as “& Juliet” proves, there are sometimes small treasures to be found in the murk. And as long as they’re going to keep arriving regardless, I have to admit (citing Martin’s hit for those theater critics the Backstreet Boys) I want it that way.& JulietAt the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Manhattan; andjulietbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More
