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      ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Closes on Broadway as Creators Spar With Rudin

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      The hit play, closed since January, was expected to reopen on Broadway this fall.“To Kill a Mockingbird,” a stage adaptation of the classic novel that in January announced a temporary shutdown after Jeff Daniels left the cast and the Omicron variant slammed into New York, will not reopen on Broadway.The play’s writer, Aaron Sorkin, and director, Bartlett Sher, emailed the play’s cast and crew late Thursday to inform them of the decision, and they blamed the original lead producer, Scott Rudin, who had stepped away from an active role in the show after being accused of mistreating collaborators. According to Sorkin and Sher, “At the last moment, Scott reinserted himself as producer and for reasons which are, frankly, incomprehensible to us both, he stopped the play from reopening.”Rudin, who continued to control the rights to the stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel, sent his own email to Sorkin and Sher on Friday, attributing the decision to the economic situation on Broadway, where overall ticket sales have lagged behind prepandemic levels. Both emails were obtained by The Times.“The reason I opted not to bring back TKAM has to do with my lack of confidence in the climate for plays next winter,” Rudin wrote, using an acronym for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He added, “I do not believe that a remount of Mockingbird would have been competitive in the marketplace.”The show continues to have a healthy life outside New York. A production in London’s West End opened in March, and a national tour in the United States opened in Boston in April. Those productions are unaffected by the Broadway closing.The play opened on Broadway in late 2018, and was a hit before the pandemic, regularly selling around $2 million worth of tickets a week, which is quite high for a play, and recouping its $7.5 million investment costs 19 weeks after opening.Broadway closed in March 2020 because of the pandemic, and “To Kill a Mockingbird” resumed performances last October, with Daniels returning to star as Atticus Finch, as he had done during the play’s first year. The play sold well until early January, with the exception of a week when breakthrough Covid cases forced performance cancellations; Daniels left the cast on Jan. 2, at a time when Broadway grosses were already plunging because of the resurgent pandemic, and the show’s grosses cratered.The play stopped performances at the Shubert Theater on Jan. 16, and Barry Diller, then functioning as lead producer, said it would resume performances on June 1 at the Belasco Theater. That did not happen, and according to the email from Sher and Sorkin the most recent plan had been for the play to restart performances on Nov. 2 at the Music Box Theater.Sher and Sorkin described themselves in the email as “heartbroken” and said they “mourn the loss of all the jobs — onstage, backstage, and front of house — that just disappeared.” Rudin, in his email to them, said, “It’s too risky and the downside is too great. I’m sorry you’re disappointed. It’s the right decision for the long life of the show.”Sher, Sorkin and Rudin all declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the play. The decision to not reopen the play was previously reported by the website Showbiz411. More

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      A Rebound for a Summer Pairing of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Oresteia’ at the Armory

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      Two Robert Icke productions have endured illnesses and last-minute casting changes. Now they have finally settled into a repertory groove.Perhaps more than any other production of this post-shutdown season, the Park Avenue Armory’s summer stagings of “Hamlet” and “Oresteia” — with their last-minute replacements and cast illnesses — have faced the most hurdles on their way to opening night.The productions, already delayed from their intended 2020 U.S. premieres, were dealt another blow this spring when, two days into tech rehearsals, Lia Williams (“The Crown”) tore her Achilles’ tendon. She was double booked to play Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, and the husband-killing matriarch Klytemnestra in “Oresteia,” but recovery, though guaranteed, would not be quick. She was forced to drop out. Jennifer Ehle and Anastasia Hille quickly stepped in, with Ehle having only 10 days to settle into the role of Gertrude before the first “Hamlet” preview.“I had no idea what I was getting into, and I really didn’t care,” Ehle said during a recent video call. “It was one of those moments where you get a call on a Sunday morning, somebody asks if you want to take a challenge, and you have no choice but to take the leap and start planning in midair.”The plays, helmed by the English writer-director Robert Icke, are now being performed in repertory at the Armory, where they will run through mid-August. “Hamlet” opened in late June to mostly positive reviews. (Maya Phillips, in her review for The Times, wrote that Icke “brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension.”) “Oresteia” began previews July 10, and is set to open Tuesday. Once it does, this ambitious pairing of classics of the Western canon will conclude a nearly seven-year journey of starts and stops.“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible,” Ehle (with Lawther) said of joining the cast of “Hamlet” during tech rehearsals.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow It All StartedThe plays had momentous premieres (“Oresteia” in 2015 and “Hamlet” in 2017) at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke had been associate director, and successful West End runs followed. Writing from London in 2015, Ben Brantley said Icke’s “theatrical chutzpah pays dividends” in his drastically reimagined “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ revenge-filled trilogy.That ancient Greek work and the surveillance-heavy “Hamlet,” with the actor Andrew Scott in the title role, cemented Icke’s status as an incisive editor and renovator of classics. Not that editing here means trimming down — each production clocks in at just under four hours — but Icke’s revisions bring the centuries-old plays’ essences to stark, ultramodern light.As planning began for the Shakespeare adaptation, he and Hildegard Bechtler, the set and costume designer, decided to reuse a frosted glass they had used in “Oresteia,” allowing them to achieve something like a cinematic jump cut. It’s what first led him to think of the two pieces as similar.“There was an acknowledgment that these two plays, though separated by many centuries, are in conversation with each other,” Icke explained during a recent video call, quarantining after testing positive for the coronavirus. “Those central questions about family and vengeance, and the obligations children have to their parents, and what it means if a family and a country are intertwined with each other, always felt like they were reflecting and refracting each other in really interesting ways.”Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director and founder of the Almeida, suggested bringing a repertory pairing of the two works to Manhattan back in 2018. Having met the Armory team while in town in 2017 for the Broadway premiere of his and Duncan Macmillan’s “1984” adaptation, Icke said it felt like it could be “a fruitful collaboration,” and the productions were announced for 2020.Williams, who had played Klytemnestra to great acclaim in “Oresteia,” would reprise that role, and play opposite Alex Lawther in “Hamlet,” who was cast after Scott was unable to commit to the transfer. But then the pandemic shut down live theater in 2020 and many planned productions were canceled, though everyone wanted to keep these two afloat. (In the meantime, Icke collaborated with the actress Ann Dowd on a socially distanced adaptation of “Enemy of the People” at the Armory last summer.)Angus Wright, seated at the table and projected onto the screen, in “Oresteia” at the Armory. In the foreground, from left, are Wesley Holloway, Anastasia Hille and Elyana Faith Randolph.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Pairing With ‘Poetic Logic’In April 2022, the company finally reunited and began rehearsals. Because of the plays’ length and density, the focus on each alternated on a weekly basis. Lawther said he enjoyed the repertory setting and “the luxury of watching this amazing company switch and suddenly do this Greek tragedy.”“They speak to one another in incredibly moving and mysterious ways,” Lawther said on a video call. “Although ‘Oresteia’ is much older, Rob’s adaptation is full of modern language, and feels like a contemporary family drama, whereas this ‘Hamlet’ uses the original text, and feels of a different time. There’s a poetic logic that exists in putting these two together.”While the productions share a set and much of the same acting troupe, Icke said he did not go out of his way to heighten the two works’ similarities.“The attempt is not to direct them to point back to each other,” he said, “but almost to hang the two paintings next to each other in a gallery, so that if audiences choose to, they can move back and forth and think about the ways in which the two might relate.”Written nearly 2,000 years apart, the works deal with chaos unfolding in the private homes of high-powered political families. Almost entirely stripped of period or royal specificity, the modern-dress productions allow Icke to focus on contemporary parallels. With “Hamlet,” it’s the British royal family.“This time, we talked about Prince Philip’s death and what it’s like for an old guard to die,” he said. “But I’ve always felt like Hamlet and Princess Diana have got something in common. You’re told again and again that he is adored by the people, and that one of the reasons [the king] does not have him packed off to prison immediately is because of how much the people love him. That sense of somebody struggling to make sense of themselves, and what’s happening to them, while under constant observation always took my mind to Diana.”For “Oresteia,” he said the story’s setup, with Agamemnon coming back from war with a new woman, would have meant for ancient Greek audiences what the Kennedy and Clinton families might signify to contemporary viewers.“Audiences then would’ve known their Homer back-to-front, so it was probably similar to telling audiences back then that the Monica Lewinsky scandal has just broken,” Icke continued. “Here’s Hillary, and Bill is about to walk through the front door. A modern American audience feels that. In another thousand years, to tell the Clinton story, you probably will have to go back and fill in the Lewinsky part of the story to get it across.”Luke Treadaway as Orestes, Klytemnestra and Agamemnon’s traumatized son, in “Oresteia.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Necessary PivotAfter Williams’s injury, “Hamlet” performances were pushed back, giving Ehle a little over a week to learn the part of Queen Gertrude for the first time. But Hille, who is British, needed to secure a work visa, and that forced “Oresteia” to be delayed nearly a month.When she got the call, Ehle said, “I thought, if the Armory has brought this man here, with these people, to tell this story, it couldn’t be anything but interesting.”Ehle, a two-time Tony winner for her work in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” described the process of situating herself within the production as “less rehearsing and more orienteering.”“Everybody knew where they were going to stand and I had to upload that as quickly as possible, and jump on a moving train,” she recalled. “My seat was there waiting, but I had to figure out where to put my luggage.”Many hours of last-minute rehearsals were required — Lawther called it a “baptism by fire” — with Hille, who was preparing with Icke via Zoom while awaiting her visa, only arriving in New York on July 3, just days before the first previews of “Oresteia.” Around that time, Ehle tested positive for coronavirus, and had to briefly retreat from “Hamlet.”“It’s pretty much impossible to do anything without everyone in the room,” Icke said, referring to absences resulting from Covid. “But this has been much easier because the big-picture decisions and structures had already been in place. We were able to focus on the details of the performances, rather than our sound design or choice of music.”Luke Treadaway, the British actor who plays Laertes in “Hamlet” and Orestes, Klytemnestra’s son, in “Oresteia,” had been preparing for the roles since 2020 and noted the effects of the changes on the ensemble. “The cast changes had a huge emotional impact on us all, because rehearsals become a world that you create with the people you create it with,” he explained. “We’ve had many understudies come on, because of Covid. It made us realize that it’s not just 10 actors in a cast, or however many, but a squad of people getting these two massive stories onstage every night, in any form we can.”Icke also acknowledged the resiliency of actors. “Anyone who has done much theater is very aware that everything can change in a second, particularly in Covid times,” he said. “It’s remarkable how adaptable everybody is, saying, ‘Well, this isn’t what we thought it was going to be, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. We’re really glad to be here and delighted to be presented with two productions.’ It all sort of just recalibrates itself.” More

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      ‘Oresteia’ Review: A Mother’s Grief, Underestimated

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      Anastasia Hille is riveting as Klytemnestra in Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory.Before the first domino of their tragedies falls, before murder begets murder begets murder, they are an enchanting family: the mother, Klytemnestra, warm and easy with her two little ones gathered close around her; the father, Agamemnon, suave in public but playful the instant he walks through the door at the end of the day.In their cozy contemporary sanctuary of a home, they seem so absolutely normal. These people love one another. The boy, Orestes, has never been a good sleeper, but when his bad dreams come, his parents are there to comfort him. And Iphigenia, his sister, is a darling in a citrus-orange dress. Though she is young enough that she totes her long-eared plush bunny everywhere, she is old enough, and smart enough, that she’s already a moral thinker. When the family has venison for dinner, she cannot bear the thought of eating a deer.“It’s a little dead body,” she says.Is this the deer whose killing so angered the goddess Artemis that she stilled the winds on which Agamemnon’s warships depend? Robert Icke’s fraught and gripping “Oresteia,” an emotionally harrowing retelling of Aeschylus’ trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory, doesn’t get bogged down in such background details of ancient mythology.What matters is the excruciating ransom that Agamemnon, a military commander and a great believer in prophecies, thinks he has to pay to get the winds blowing again so he can be victorious in war. He must murder Iphigenia, his curious, trusting, doted-on daughter who wants nothing to do with killing deer and has nothing to do with waging war.“By his hand alone,” the prophecy reads. “The child is the price. Fair winds.”Her innocent life, ended irrevocably, in exchange for maybe — if her father’s faith in the gods and the counsel of serious men is not misplaced — achieving his political objectives. Not, of course, that her mother has been consulted in this, let alone Iphigenia herself.“If she doesn’t feel pain,” Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says, arguing in favor of snuffing out his niece, “and it is a civilized procedure, and it is the clear and greater good, then who are the victims?”What is the value of the life of a girl? What is the value of her mother’s clawing grief and bottomless rage at her child’s murder? And how, exactly, has Klytemnestra come off so badly through the ages for her revenge killing of Agamemnon — as if she were singularly evil and crazed while he was simply a decent guy in a difficult position, who’d made the tough call that his own daughter was expendable?Hille and Angus Wright in Robert Icke’s production, which originated at the Almeida Theater in London in 2015.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTold in four acts over three and a half hours, this “Oresteia” is about grief so deep it settles into the soul and metastasizes into a need for bloody vengeance, whose result in turn becomes a cause of more fresh grief. If you’d wondered what unites “Oresteia” thematically with “Hamlet,” Icke’s other thrilling production running in repertory at the Armory this summer, there it is — two plays in which murders leave survivors bereft and homicidal, and in which one generation of a family suffers the treachery of another. But whereas “Hamlet” centers the title character, this re-centered “Oresteia” is concerned principally not with Orestes, the son, but rather with Klytemnestra, his haunted mother.“This whole thing,” she tells Iphigenia’s ghost as it flits through the house, “this whole thing is about you.”When this production by the Armory and the Almeida Theater was first announced, it was meant to star Lia Williams as Klytemnestra, reprising the role she had played in London, but an injury forced her to leave the show before previews began.Anastasia Hille is the Armory’s Klytemnestra, and she is magnificent in an incandescent, utterly sympathetic interpretation so riveting that you would do well to spend the entire first intermission watching Klytemnestra simply sit onstage, in a stupor of grief that ages her by the next act. Hille will win plenty of partisans over to Team Klytemnestra — even as the play would also like to draw its audience’s attention to the needless, cyclical horror of murder and revenge, and the self-righteous delusion that just one more death will even the score for good.In the terrifyingly real depiction of a loving marriage that’s destroyed before our eyes, Hille is matched every inch by Angus Wright as Agamemnon. After Klytemnestra realizes that he plans to murder Iphigenia (beautifully played at the performance I saw by Alexis Rae Forlenza, one of two young actors who share the role), the fight they have is so brutal and raw that you may recall its dynamics from the most damaging domestic argument you’ve ever had.“This is about a person who came from us, who would never have lived if we hadn’t loved each other,” Klytemnestra says, pleading her daughter’s case in the hope that her husband will hear reason. “What you are destroying is us, doing something that will overwhelm our history, a single action which if you bring it down on us will obliterate the whole story which precedes it.”Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Hille.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy the end of their fight, the current of intimacy that ran between them for years is shut off. They are for all intents and purposes exes, effective immediately, with any further emotional access denied. Which, in the bruised and intricate psychic honesty of this play, does not mean the love has entirely vanished.On a set by Hildegard Bechtler so chic it looks like what you’d get if Norman Foster and Richard Serra retrofitted an ancient castle, “Oresteia” seeks to implicate us in its patterns of needless destruction: Whenever the lights come up on the auditorium, we’re reflected in the set’s long glass wall.The show is peppered with tiny oddities and puzzlements that become clear, mostly, at the end. Slight spoiler: The reason that the grown-up Orestes (Luke Treadaway) watches much of the action from outside the periphery of the house is that he is immersed in a court proceeding, to determine his guilt in the murder of his mother. His memory is often uncertain. The woman questioning him (Kirsty Rider) doesn’t really buy that his other sister Electra (Tia Bannon), who conspired with him to kill Klytemnestra, even existed. The text hints that maybe she didn’t. There is a whiff of mystery about it all.But the tragedy of it is paramount — one set in motion by superstitious men who took it on faith that the life of a little girl didn’t matter, and who never stopped to think that her mother would counterattack.OresteiaThrough Aug. 13 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Quirky Parisian Festival Refinds Its Footing

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      The annual Paris l’Été hosts some especially strong multidisciplinary shows this summer, one of which includes a seven-hour hike.PARIS — The birds hovering around the ruins of Port-Royal des Champs, a former abbey southwest of Paris, may have been taken aback by the flock of visitors who arrived on a recent Saturday. Around 11 a.m., bleary-eyed Parisians poured out of buses for a seven-hour hike through the site and woodland that surrounds it — all in the name of theater.And “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Clara Hédouin’s back-to-nature adaptation of a 1935 Jean Giono novel, took full advantage of its unusual setting. A hunt was staged in the forest. Farming, a central theme, was debated in front of actual barns. Bird names were listed, at length, to the human audience in a meadow, while the local fauna circled above.The trek wasn’t what you’d expect from a city-centric arts festival like Paris l’Été (literally “Paris in the summer”), which played host to “Joy of Man’s Desiring” and organized travel from the capital. Yet this multidisciplinary festival, which started in 1990 as a way to keep the performing arts scene alive in Paris during the quiet summer months, has always had a quirky side.Its first director, Patrice Martinet, delighted in bringing unconventional works to venues ranging from gardens to suburban residential buildings. In 2016, a new team was appointed under Laurence de Magalhaes and Stéphane Ricordel, who were already at the helm of the Monfort playhouse in Paris. They promptly changed the name of the festival, from Paris Quartier d’Été to the more anodyne Paris l’Été.The early years of de Magalhaes and Ricordel’s tenure saw a dip in the quality and originality of the festival’s programming, but the 2022 edition suggests they have now found their footing. While Paris l’Été remains much smaller than the major French summer festivals, like Avignon, this year intriguing productions abounded. The week before “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” locals and tourists could take their pick from a Ukrainian punk concert, an immersive performance starring professional strippers and a bravura theater show built entirely out of cardboard props, among other offerings.Dakh Daughters at the Monfort theater.Maxim DondyukOn July 14, Bastille Day, a packed audience watched as the Ukrainian band Dakh Daughters, which has often performed at the Monfort theater since 2013, returned to that stage under very different political circumstances. This radical feminist group, which bridges the gap between punk and folk influences with stunning ease and a dark theatricality, has long sung about the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, as well as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas region. Yet currently, the band’s entire country is under attack.“Close the sky over Ukraine,” the screens behind the group read early in the show, and images of the conflict, Russian nationalist propaganda and protests around the world were subsequently shown. Between songs, the stories of ordinary Ukrainians were read in voice-over. Midway through the concert, the women of Dakh Daughters, who also performed at the Avignon Festival this week, asked the audience to observe a minute of silence.While the band performed a number of songs that were composed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its members dressed, as usual, in tutus and combat boots, with faces painted white, the band’s typically no-holds-barred performance style was stripped back. An edge of cold despair shaded even the loudest, most percussive moments. “I would like to return to my home,” the band’s drummer said at one point, in softly accented French. “Do you want peace in your home?” she then asked the audience. When the answer was a resounding “yes,” she whispered: “Good idea.”Marion Coutarel and Julie Benegmos in “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It.”Quentin ChevrierDakh Daughters aside, this year Paris l’Été focused primarily on new and recent French productions. “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It,” directed and performed by Julie Benegmos and Marion Coutarel at a high school, gave audiences a window into the world of professional striptease — and kept them on the edge of their seats, too, with the promise of one-on-one time with a stripper in a private booth for a lucky few.The production relied a little too heavily on this literal teasing. Early on, Benegmos and Coutarel explained that, at regular intervals, a flower would be given to an onlooker, who would then be invited to follow them outside the small auditorium. Two men and a woman were selected when I attended, and the audience was left to wonder what happens next. (The answer comes at the very end, and while I won’t give it away, it involves a virtual role reversal.)There is much of interest in the rest of “Strip: At the Risk of Liking It,” including filmed interviews with other professional strippers, a pole dance number and questions about the degree of freedom women are afforded when selling eroticized performances. But the show’s structure never quite flows, with abrupt transitions that fail to dig deeper into this material.“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret,” on the other hand, takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it work through sheer virtuosity. The show is built around the contrast between Olivier Martin-Salvan, dressed in a dapper suit, who sits throughout the show and mumbles in an expressive yet incomprehensible mix of English and gibberish, and Pierre Guillois, who flits around him in boxer shorts, carrying dozens of cardboard cutouts as a means of telling the story.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”GestuelleThey come in all shapes and sizes, with words written on them to explain what they represent: “fjord,” “tree,” “hail,” and even “fly swat.” With the help of two assistants on the sides, Guillois, a maverick of a performer, spins lo-fi yet meticulous choreography out of these props. (Despite the title, the closest we get to skating is some shoe boxes on Martin-Salvan’s feet.)“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” has won a number of awards this season, including a Molière, and it was obvious why in this outdoor revival at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. Puns and visual jokes are interspersed throughout as Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an absurd quest around European countries to reconnect with a siren he met (in the form of Guillois, wearing a cardboard tail). There is nothing currently like it on the French stage, and the instant standing ovation rewarded the duo’s ingeniousness.The ingeniousness of “Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Hédouin’s open-air saga around Port-Royal-des-Champs, was of a different nature, and it had outstayed its welcome by the seventh hour. Giono, whose novel the show is based on, was an early environmentalist, and his characters, all inhabitants of a small village who set about reclaiming their joy with the help of a mysterious stranger, did fit beautifully into the surroundings. But the cast’s take on Giono’s lyrical style was often plodding, and gave the sense that the production had yet to find its inner rhythm.Still, there was joy to be found in traipsing through forests and the remains of the abbey, armed with the camping stools provided by Paris l’Été. At the end of the day, it was the sign of a festival hitting its stride, and thinking outside the box again.Paris l’Été. Various venues in Paris, through July 31. More

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      Review: In ‘Mr. Burns,’ Apocalypse Now, With ‘The Simpsons’ and Songs

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      Anne Washburn’s 2012 play about a post-pandemic society reckoning with loss has not aged at all, our critic writes.Stories, like viruses, are transmissible. In the brain, in the blood, they mutate and change. Tragedies become comedies; dramas become myths. And in Anne Washburn’s visionary and wackadoo “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” revived by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, an episode of “The Simpsons” becomes an opera and that opera becomes a way for a post-apocalyptic society to reckon with all it has lost.After a devastating contagion and concomitant nuclear meltdowns, the American population has shrunk to maybe a million, maybe half that. In the first act, set in the very near future, somewhere in the northeast, a few survivors have gathered around what should be a campfire (did the fire marshal not allow it?) to tell stories. Or as on this night, one particular story. Collectively, they piece together the events and jokes of “Cape Feare,” a Season 5 episode of “The Simpsons.”Recalling Sideshow Bob’s flourishes and Homer’s doofus behavior connects them to a lost world in a way that feels bearable. Real memories are too painful. Memories of a television show — in a time when televisions no longer work — are what they can manage. In the second act, these scattershot remembrances have been refashioned into a revue. The third act, set decades later and entirely sung through, with music from the composer Michael Friedman, transmutes them further.“Mr. Burns” debuted in May 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, and then moved to Playwrights Horizons. Sept. 11 was more vivid in the cultural memory a decade ago. One passage includes a haunting reference to twin towers of light. But with the pandemic, we have a new cataclysm to absorb, which makes “Mr. Burns,” directed by the festival’s artistic director, Davis McCallum, a timely selection. (Will there always be some new disaster? Will this play always seem of the moment? Yes. Probably. Ugh.) In its invention, its cool ruthlessness, its interrogation of why and how we use narrative, it has not aged at all.Sean McNall, Merritt Janson, Quintero, Karaman, Ota, and Zack Fine. With three-quarter seating, the director and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all.T. Charles EricksonIn some ways, the festival, with its sandy floor and jaunty tent, provides an ideal location. The opening at the back of the tent looks out into some old-growth trees. Even considering the mowed lawn — a concession to picnickers and the tick-averse — it suggests what the landscape might look like if nature made a comeback. (If the vista had shown the recently decommissioned Indian Point nuclear plant, located just down the Hudson, that might have been even more evocative.) But the play was built for a proscenium stage, not three-quarter seating, and McCallum and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all, particularly in the final act.The acting is uneven here, the rhythms sometimes off, though Sean McNall, a festival veteran, has a terrific turn as a newcomer in the first act, and Merritt Janson, a welcome Off-Broadway presence, does pointed and specific work as an actor-manager in the second. Zachary Fine, who operates on a very low-key in the first two acts, triumphs in the third. During that act, a chorus member banged a drum straight into my ear, which I could have done without.And yet, if you are in the area, and you can book a seat away from that drum, you should see “Mr. Burns.” Here’s why: It seems to me that no new work of art — theater, television, film, fiction — produced in these past few years has really represented the pandemic, at least as I’ve experienced it. Sometimes the more on the nose they were (“Station Eleven,” say) the further away they felt.“Mr. Burns” doesn’t exactly capture it either, but it captures something else. In these past two years, when I have had a moment of downtime, I have turned to comedies and procedurals, shows that made the world feel regular and knowable. “Mr. Burns” explores the ways that we use stories, even seemingly irrelevant stories, to make sense of our lives. “Mr. Burns” is a play about where we find comfort and it is also, more chillingly, about the limits of that comfort, about how reality can intrude even before the credits roll.Reality sometimes intruded, even here, out of the city, out of doors. The show’s opening had been delayed owing to coronavirus cases among the cast. The spectators closest to the actors were asked to wear masks; most did. Still, we could lose ourselves for a while, in imagining how a society much like ours might handle a disaster much worse than this one, how we might or might not come through it. To watch this feels pleasurable and painful and mysterious and weird. Or to put it another way: D’Oh.Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric PlayThrough Sept. 17 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Seagull’ Review: Blurring the Lines of Fiction

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      Elevator Repair Service’s Chekhov revival has promising ideas about art, experimentation and truth, but the production inevitably falls flat, our critic writes.If only I could find someone who loves me enough to gift me a dead bird in a brown paper bag.I jest, of course. The wounded young protagonist who delivers this confounding gift in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” communicates his thoughts and feelings through wild symbols — “new forms” of art, he says — like this particular one of the avian variety. The theater troupe Elevator Repair Service — known for its ambitious, innovative takes on classics like “The Great Gatsby” (“Gatz”) — attempts to meet that challenge in its latest work, “Seagull.”But this highly stylized contemporary production, which recently opened at NYU Skirball in a nearly three-hour production, feels like a series of ideas that never quite cohere. The beginnings of those ideas are promising, though: the toppling of the fourth wall, the meta references to the original text, the vivid tonal changes and the comic recasting of the play’s characters, each of them living through their own sad, ironic farce of a life.Let’s begin with those clowns. Konstantin (a wooden Gavin Price) wants to be a great writer but is too busy producing incomprehensible symbolist plays, at least that’s what his mother, Irina (Kate Benson, a bluster of affected melodrama), thinks. A vain actress with a vicious streak toward her son, Irina has come to stay with her sick brother at his country estate, and she’s taken along her boy toy, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (a compellingly aloof Robert M. Johanson). From the other side of the property comes Nina (Maggie Hoffman, magnetic), a young woman who wants to escape her circumstances and become an actress.One may need a map for the various romantic entanglements: Semyon (Pete Simpson) loves the depressed, coke-snorting Masha (Susie Sokol), who loves Konstantin, who loves Nina, who is enamored with Trigorin, who is attached to Irina. And Masha’s mother, Paulina (Lindsay Hockaday), is married to Ilya (Julian Fleisher) but is having an affair with the former playboy doctor Gene (a delightfully quippy Vin Knight).“Seagull,” directed by the group’s founder, John Collins, opens with a meandering curtain speech, charismatically delivered by Simpson as his real-life self, and ends in the world of Chekhov, where Simpson is now Semyon, a poor lovesick teacher. Simpson cracks jokes and rattles off (real and fictional) information about the Skirball stage, letting the audience know that the line between reality and fiction is needlepoint thin, though to what end is unclear.Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull,” directed by John Collins, not only breaks the fourth wall but also has its characters break into dance.Ian DouglasThe breaking of the fourth wall happens mostly in the first several minutes, though this play is being marketed as interactive, part “chat with the audience,” as if the entirety of the show will be meta. The production seems to want to reach toward some message about art — particularly experimental art, especially experimental theater — as when the group cheekily pokes fun at itself in Simpson’s opening speech. “If ERS is known for anything,” Simpson says, “we’re known for our livestock, wallpaper and violent dance.”I’m sorry to report that there’s no livestock or wallpaper but there is a bit of dancing (whether you’d deem it violent depends on your particular disposition). And besides a few references to the actors — not as their characters, but the real actors themselves — the production’s self-aware spoofing unfortunately falls to the wayside.The attempts to deconstruct Chekhov’s work extends to the set by Dots, the design collective. Lined up folding chairs, sat on by the cast, and a table with tech equipment are juxtaposed with a piano, where Konstantin broods, and a fraction of an old Russian dining room, just two perpendicular walls, decorated with framed paintings, a table and chairs in the center, where the characters sit to eat and play cards.And then there’s that dead bird.Dead feathered fowl! Suicide! Ruination! Unhappy marriages! Unrequited love! Festering resentment! “The Seagull” doesn’t seem like the kind of play that would tickle your funny bone, and yet Chekhov himself considered it a comedy. Most productions cast it as a tragedy (especially after the seminal Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski reinterpreted it as such in one of its first productions).Collins opts for both, going all in on comedy in the first half and making a daring turn to tragedy in the second. So Masha isn’t the cool goth pining after the dejected artist but a mopey dork in knee-high compression socks who drags herself across the stage while the sad-sack Semyon shuffles along after her. Konstantin isn’t a misunderstood virtuoso but a solipsistic hipster of an artist with serious mommy issues. In the final scene of the first act, Gene, having comforted two distraught characters in a row, comically declares, “You’re so upset! You’re all so upset!”And yet, despite its playful humor and antics, the show often falls into lulls where it’s mostly just performing a rote version of Chekhov’s piece.It’s not until partway through the second act that the show’s unforgettable shift occurs. The actors freeze, posing in an almost suffocating silence for several minutes. The set darkens and fog unfurls across the top of the stage. None of the actors speak, but we hear them reading their lines in voice-over. We see Nina slumped in a chair in the corner, Irina sitting in a commanding pose front and center, arms spread out on either side to rest on the chair backs, her legs brazenly crossed in front of her, and Ilya leaning against a pillar, head drooped to the side. The effect is haunting when paired with the disembodied voices. Instead of trying to seamlessly incorporate both the dark humor and the woe, the production calls attention to each individually.Chekhov’s play lends itself to dismantling and comic scrutiny. Take Aaron Posner’s postmodern remix, “Stupid _______ Bird,” which actually manages to pull off the balancing act that the Elevator Repair Service’s “Seagull” struggles with, splitting the difference between a dutiful replication of the text (or at least parts of it) and an irreverent sendup of prevailing ideas, themes and executions of the beloved work. Posner’s ambitious, if pretentious, play manages it a bit better through an almost Spartan-level commitment to its conceit, from script to stage.“Seagull” is milder in its execution of its ideas, though it would benefit from committing more to its experimental aspirations and making its insights about art clearer. And it could further blur the line between performance and reality as it does in the opening scene, allowing the actors to speak more freely, to improvise, to share parts of themselves even as they inhabit their characters.This production may get its audience thinking about art, experimentation and truth but can’t quite see those thoughts through. In the play Konstantin declares that we need new forms. This production may have inadvertently provided the answer: Only if the artist is up to it.SeagullThrough July 31 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Goodman Theater Names Susan V. Booth as Artistic Director

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      Booth, who currently leads the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, will succeed Robert Falls, who is retiring after 35 years leading the Chicago mainstay.Susan V. Booth, the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofits in the country.Booth, 59, who will assume the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm.The Goodman, which has an annual budget of $22 million and a staff of roughly 200, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it staged more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene known primarily for actors to one recognized as a seedbed for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be contained in a storefront theater,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.The move will be something of a homecoming for Booth, who went to graduate school at Northwestern University, directed at theaters across the city and served as the Goodman’s director of new play development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even proposed to her on the catwalk over the Goodman’s main stage on her last day on the job.In a telephone interview, Booth said she looked forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as marked by a muscular, democratic and “radically diverse aesthetic.”“It was always a really fluid ecosystem, where artists would bounce between punky first-year start-ups in the backs of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread turnover in leadership in Chicago theater, because of retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to figure out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and civically, to determine how best to reach the widest audiences possible.She said she also wanted to work with the theater’s artistic collective to continue the Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving prominent placement to challenging new works.“I love me a classic, and I have no interest in relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the level playing field that’s created when you produce new work.”Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled the operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowment, and led it to a 2007 Tony Award for regional excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights, while cultivating new voices through programs like the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership.Asked about a signature project, she cited a staging of “Native Guard,” the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s poem cycle exploring both her family history and the history of Black Civil War troops, which was staged originally at the Alliance and then later at the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience engaged with the work as about the source narrative,” she said. “It was a community event.”It was “theater designed to catalyze dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That mattered to me a lot.”The Goodman’s 2022-23 season, programmed by Falls, includes the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community split by political polarization (one of two productions to be directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30th-anniversary production of “The Who’s Tommy,” directed by Des McAnuff.As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the ripe political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the pure pleasure of theater.“I don’t know a theater community in the country that isn’t creating the odd joy-bomb,” she said. More

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      ‘Romeo & Juliet’ Review: Older, Gentler Star-Crossed Lovers

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      With age-blind casting at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, two actors who have been married for 38 years play the teenage leads.GARRISON, N.Y. — A romance and a love story are two different things. In art, we’re not great at differentiating.Take “Romeo and Juliet,” a corpse-ridden romantic tragedy routinely mistaken for a tale of deepest love, even though the lovers are teenagers who’ve only just met — people who, despite their ferocious infatuation, would absolutely flunk a quiz about each other’s likes and dislikes, dreams and histories.They’re passionate, sure; isn’t everyone at that age? But the rash young people in “Romeo and Juliet,” both the title characters and some of their friends, die from their own impetuosity. They’re not old enough to know better than to kill one another in anger in the street, or agree to a harebrained plan that involves faking one’s own death and being interred in a real tomb.Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s staging — which opened on Friday night at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s new 98-acre riverside site, under the canopy of its familiar tent — presents the tragedy as a love story, with a twist. Romeo and Juliet are played by festival regulars Kurt Rhoads and Nance Williamson, actors who have been married for 38 years and done 68 previous shows together. Upon which background, apparently, the central idea of this production mistakenly depends.“With Kurt and Nance in the title roles,” Upchurch writes in a program note, using an ampersand as her production’s title does, “we get to take it for granted that Romeo & Juliet truly love each other.”Even if we could, and I don’t believe we can, that assumption wouldn’t be terribly helpful to a drama that’s driven by the urgency of fresh desire yet played here with the languor of long acquaintance, as if guided by Friar Laurence’s admonition to “love moderately.” And so the sparking attraction between Romeo and Juliet ignites not a raging conflagration but a glowing ember — warmth, not heat.The fault isn’t in the chronologically incongruous casting; audiences are sophisticated enough not to bat an eye at the actors’ ages. And in a summer when Ian McKellen is returning again to the title role in “Hamlet,” which he last played onstage a year ago, at 82, other well-seasoned actors might also want to take their shots at interpreting Shakespearean youths.Upchurch’s elegant interspersing of ethereal choral music by Heather Christian is one of this production’s most alluring features, along with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash. But Upchurch hasn’t built a frame or puzzled out a conceit that supports her age-blind casting. The idea feels forced, not organic — grasping for meaning rather than providing it.Romeo and Juliet, adolescents still under their parents’ roofs, take drastic measures to wrest control of their lives and futures. But the even-keeled Rhoads and Williamson imbue these teens with none of the tidal-wave emotions that make them idealistic enough to defy their families’ hatred for one another, and heedless enough not to pause for rational thought.Without that palpable, desperate, cocktail-of-hormones recklessness, their actions make no sense. And if we don’t believe the characters, the play loses its stakes and its heft. As when Lady Capulet (a solid Britney Nicole Simpson) urges the almost 14-year-old Juliet to marry her suitor Paris, saying: “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid.” There’s gut-punch potential in that line about girls and imposed maternity, but in the context of this wan production, it merely evaporates.Paris (Erin Despanie), though, is interesting: unusually affable, and thus uncommonly sympathetic. You feel a little bad for the guy as he innocently looks forward to his wedding. And if Kimberly Chatterjee’s appealing Friar Laurence doesn’t manage to reconcile his own honorable objective — ending the antagonism between the Capulets and the Montagues — with his deranged death-faking scheme, he is nonetheless one of the more fully inhabited characters.A hillside along the Hudson River serves as a captivating backdrop, with costumes in eye-popping patterns by Enver Chakartash.T. Charles EricksonThe tent in which this all plays out, with little more than chairs for a set, is a temporary structure nestled at the foot of a sloping hill. It’s due to be replaced nearby with a permanent open-air theater designed by Studio Gang, with Hudson River views — the sort of vista that festival goers enjoyed for decades at Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s former longtime home, on the grounds of the neighboring Boscobel House and Gardens.That backdrop is gone for now, but the customary soft sand stage floor is in place, to be traipsed across by spectators on the way to their seats. Also comfortingly unchanged: the dexterous use of the landscape outside the tent as a playing space. After mortally wounding Romeo’s friend Mercutio (Luis Quintero), Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Zoë Goslin) runs off to the hill, where, in dramatic side lighting (by Stacey Derosier), he surveys the damage from a distance. Upchurch does well with such tableaus.Covid-19 cases in the company delayed the opening night of this “Romeo & Juliet.” Even when it arrived, two actors wore face masks onstage. It’s impossible to know how much the disruption of illness might have foiled the depth of characterization in this production.But more time would not have alchemized the central elements that refuse to meld: the onstage fiction of Romeo and Juliet’s ruinous romance, and the offstage reality of two veteran actors’ devoted love.Romeo & JulietThrough Sept. 18 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More