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      On the London Stage, Families in Disarray

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      Two new plays, “The Southbury Child” and “Mad House,” explore domestic discord with contrasting degrees of success.LONDON — Families are having a hard time on the London stage of late, and in one instance, at least, balloons are partly to blame. That’s the unusual starting point of “The Southbury Child,” a lively if uneven new play from Stephen Beresford that has arrived at the Bridge Theater (through Aug. 27) after its premiere south of London last month at the Chichester Festival Theater.A young girl, Taylor Southbury, has died of a fast-spreading illness, and the local vicar, David Highland (Alex Jennings, in a galvanic star turn), is preparing for her funeral. The girl’s bereft mother, Tina (Sarah Twomey), has requested that her daughter’s memory be honored with helium balloons affixed throughout the church, bearing images of the Disney princesses the child so loved.David, though, rebuffs this idea. “This is not just a question of taste — of mere aesthetics,” he tells his wife, Mary (Phoebe Nicholls), as the townspeople in his Dartmouth constituency gather in support of Tina’s wishes. What matters most when it comes to grieving Taylor, the vicar says around the capacious kitchen table that dominates Mark Thompson’s set, is “an experience worthy of God” that looks at death head-on. That means rejecting embellishments like balloons — branded by Disney no less — that aren’t focused on spiritual priorities like salvation.David, we soon discover, is far from flawless and may not be ideally positioned to adjudicate behavior and protocol in others. A philanderer with a fondness for drink, he threatens to rupture his family no less fully than he upends a congregation whose mounting disapproval — “justice for Taylor” becomes their mantra — can be heard during the scene changes. (The exemplary sound design is by George Dennis.)The play wastes no time spelling out the inconsistencies in David’s sentiments: “You’re not exactly the poster boy for unshakable principles,” counters Craig (a likable Jack Greenlees), the gay Scottish curate new in town who, rather too conveniently, has fought his own battle with booze.Josh Finan in “The Southbury Child.”Manuel HarlanAdding to the increasingly vexed crosscurrents are the dead girl’s sweary uncle, Lee (Josh Finan), whose actions in the second act send a genuine shiver through the house, and the Highlands’ grown daughters, Susannah (Jo Herbert) and Naomi (a vivid Racheal Ofori), the first as prim and indrawn a personality as her younger, adopted sibling is a free spirit with a fondness for weed.Beresford wrote one of the defining plays of lockdown in his terrific solo piece, “Three Kings,” as a showcase for Andrew Scott, and here you sense the playwright’s delight at being able to populate a stage anew.Ambitious in its thematic reach, “The Southbury Child” suggests itself as a bustling state-of-the-nation play, which wastes no time referring to societal divisions, unemployment and the reality of Brexit. It also has plenty to say about the climate of cancel culture that threatens to engulf David via mob rule. Nicholas Hytner’s characteristically adroit production is on firmest footing when the play is at its most serious, and when Jennings’s bespectacled David puts his flippancy to one side to make way for genuine anguish.Hytner and Jennings have worked together on and off now for several decades, and their latest collaboration owes an incalculable amount to Jennings’s ability to do wry one minute and to tap the wellsprings of emotion the next.Elsewhere, you slightly tire of the script’s more glib moments: Waitrose, the upmarket British grocery store, is co-opted for a punchline, and there’s a light bulb joke that I could swear I’ve heard before.It seems odd, too, that a disgraced David cedes center stage near the end to the stricken Lee, whom the able Finan plays with a gathering despair that ends the proceedings on an intriguingly open-ended note. For all the breeziness of a play that likes its gags, “The Southbury Child” comes steeped in a degree of pain that even the best sermon might find hard to assuage.As for the calamity-prone clan in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” now in its world premiere at the Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4, what can I say beyond noting that I didn’t believe a single word of the fractiousness on view?From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc BrennerThe synthetic feeling of Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production is especially surprising following reports that Rebeck, the American author of such accomplished Broadway plays as “Seminar” and “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” wrote the play very much with its leading man, the TV star and stage actor David Harbour, in mind — specifically drawing upon mental health issues that Harbour has confronted in the past.It would help if the situation — a dying father (Bill Pullman) facing down his three children, Harbour’s emotionally wayward Michael chief among them — didn’t seem to owe such an obvious debt to plays like “August: Osage County,” albeit with the genders reversed, not to mention earlier studies in familial discord like Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” Pullman’s irascible Daniel roars his way to the grave via a series of standoffs that depend on hoary narrative devices like a revelatory letter and baldfaced pronouncements on the groan-worthy order of “None of us had a childhood.”That particular remark is spoken by the widower’s toxic daughter, Pam (Sinéad Matthews), who is the last of the children to gather at the chaotic family home for a rancorous reckoning that finds room, too, for a hospice nurse played by the wonderful Akiya Henry, an Olivier Award nominee this year for her performance in the Almeida Theater’s “Macbeth.”Henry’s character, patronizingly conceived in saintly terms, gets a breakdown moment that is better acted than the writing deserves, and her dismissal of “this ridiculous country” (meaning the United States) seems calculated to strike a chord with British audiences. It’s always good to see Pullman onstage, and Harbour’s conviction in a part that is presumably close to the knuckle exists beyond any doubt.But I’m still pondering the crucial narrative role of a pencil sharpener, which all too readily happens to be found outside a back door, ready for use. Playgoers, take note: You never know when a writing implement might become a matter of life and death.The Southbury Child. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Aug. 27.Mad House. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4. More

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      Review: ‘The Rise and Fall of … Jean Claude Van Damme’ Revives an Action Hero

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      A gleefully juvenile show about the Belgian star, from the writer Timothy Haskell, barrels through his life and oeuvre using toy action figures.The New York International Fringe Festival is no more, but its spirit lives on at a second-floor black box theater on the edge of the garment district. There you will find “The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of … Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months Earlier,” a new show whose descriptive title takes us right back to the heady days of such Fringe delights as “Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage” and “Harvey Finkelstein’s Sock Puppet Showgirls.”Though the show announces itself in an expansive manner, it is a minimalist affair: a low-cost approximative biography of a former B-movie action star told by just two men, using action figures that were sourced on Amazon and then jury-rigged into controllable puppets. Again: very Fringe.It will come as little surprise to connoisseurs of stage exploitation — an expression I use with affection — that the writer is Timothy Haskell, “one of the great hustlers of downtown theater,” as The New York Times described him back in 2007. In the years after that review, Haskell and the company the Psycho Clan cemented their status as the emperors of immersive horror theater, most famously with the “Nightmare” series of Halloween spook houses, which ran every fall for 14 seasons and returns in October after a hiatus. The Psycho Clan’s exploration of shock tactics peaked with “This Is Real,” in 2017, an escape experience in which audience members were “abducted” in Red Hook.With “Rise and Fall,” however, Haskell has returned to the lighter, goofier pop-subcultural vein that put him on the Off Off Broadway map in the early 2000s; during that period he turned out productions like “Road House,” a “fightsical” based on the film in which Patrick Swayze played a bouncer, and “Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy.” In this show, the actors Joe Cordaro (Jean-Claude Van Damme, plus a smattering of other roles) and John Harlacher (mostly as a narrator, and ending up in a painfully unforgiving costume) need only an hour to barrel through the life and oeuvre of the so-called Muscles from Brussels, who achieved peak popularity from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.Directed by Haskell, his brother Aaron and Paul Smithyman, the show tracks Van Damme from his childhood in Belgium to his early martial-arts training and his eventual move to Hollywood, where he deployed balletic splits and athletic leaping kicks in such classics of the VHS era as “Universal Soldier,” “Double Impact” and “Bloodsport.” Cordaro and Harlacher deploy stick puppets to move the story along, and pull up those action figures (customized by Aaron Haskell) for the fight sequences. Most of those have been dreamed up for the show, like a brawl between Van Damme and Steven Seagal that many 13-year boys would have loved to see in 1995.As the show’s title suggests, Haskell has little interest in digging beneath the surface to reveal the man behind the muscles. (For insights — sort of — viewers might want to check out the meta Van Damme film “JCVD,” from 2008, which, we are told, “the author of this play didn’t see because he was pissed about it.”) But despite the gleefully juvenile humor, pathos bubbles up, as when Van Damme’s career stalls and he is portrayed as grateful for a spot as a villain named Jean Vilain in “The Expendables 2.” Recalling a childhood trauma, Haskell’s Van Damme swears, “I would never be a laughingstock again. But I am. Or was.” No time to linger, though: There is always one more fight on the horizon.The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of … Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months EarlierThrough July 17 at the PIT Theater, Manhattan; thepit-nyc.com. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      ‘Dom Juan’ Review: The Perks of Being a Professional Hypocrite

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      Piety is just a pose in Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.It’s a funny feeling and not always a welcome one when a play reaches out across the centuries and punches you in the throat. This happens toward the end of “Dom Juan,” Ashley Tata’s gender-swapped production of Molière’s 1665 tragicomedy at Bard’s SummerScape festival.Dom Juan (Amelia Workman), libertine extraordinaire, has finally reformed. Or has she? Turns out, her piety is just a pose. “In today’s world the finest role you can play is that of the morally upright person,” Dom Juan explains to her long-suffering, devious servant Sganarelle (Zuzanna Szadkowski). “The profession of hypocrite has countless perks.”Her cynical avowal speaks — loudly — of politics today. But wait. It gets worse. This same speech seems to prefigure internet trolling (“hypocrites create a cabal of the like-minded, if you attack one, they all turn on you”) and the way that so-called cancel culture seldom cancels anyone in power (“they just bow their heads, sigh contritely, roll their eyes, and everyone forgives them”). Lines like these might suggest savvy interpolations by the authors of this new translation: Gideon Lester, the artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard, and Sylvaine Guyot. But no, they’re faithful renditions of the 17th-century original. The language has barely been updated.Great playwrights often have themes that they return to, over and over again. Molière’s is hypocrisy. Which should make Dom Juan, a freethinker who spends most of the play discarding social convention as casually as you or I might wad a Kleenex, a hero. Or as in this production, a heroine. Sure, Dom Juan remains a seducer. But a woman doing what she wants with her body? Sounds nice!Dom Juan’s reality is more complicated — for Molière and for Tata, too. Here is how Sganarelle describes her boss: “The greatest scoundrel who ever walked the earth, a fury, a dog, a devil, a rat, a blasphemer who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell or werewolves or anything.” Which doesn’t sound as great.“Dom Juan” asks questions — perennial ones — about what an individual owes the community and what she owes herself. As seductive as it is to see a woman resist subjugation, we are now years removed from #girlboss slogans, which is to say that the idea of freedom in the absence of ethics or solidarity has lost its shimmer. And a particular lesson of the pandemic has been how easily freedom can be weaponized, how it can make other people less free.Tata’s busy, restless production introduces these complications, though it sometimes forgets them amid the commotion of the sock puppet, the rock band, the swordplay, the lace cuffs, the haze and some very cool visual and sonic effects. (Afsoon Pajoufar designed the set, with lighting by Cha See, video design by Lisa Renkel and sound design by Chad Raines.) I laughed out loud when the show’s curtain — a tapestry of a pastoral scene — appeared to shrivel and burn. Because what fun! But for a long time in the middle, the play goes nowhere, breathlessly, and pleasure palls before Dom Juan’s comeuppance arrives.As Lester and Guyot have respected Molière’s original text, the gender-swap rarely feels complete. A woman could never have behaved this way in Molière’s day. She could barely behave this way now. Still, the swashbuckling role remains a showcase for Workman, an actress of both swagger and steel. Her Dom Juan is groovy, rowdy, but also adamantine, so unmoved by others that she is half-statue already. The supporting cast doesn’t always equal her, but Jordan Bellow offers lovely physical comedy as Dom Juan’s deserted husband, Elver, and Szadkowski’s Sganarelle has some fine unruly moments.Despite its adornments and seductions, the play is bitter at its heart. Invest too deeply in Dom Juan’s liberation or even in her punishment and the ending will leave a bad taste. The only alternative is not to care — to lose yourself instead in the production’s delights, which is not a particular chore on a sun-drenched afternoon.Otherwise, you might find yourself thinking, uneasily, of the play’s prescient moral, spoken by Sganarelle: “To have power and a wicked soul — that’s a terrible thing.”Dom JuanThrough July 17 at the Fisher Center LUMA Theater; fishercenter.bard.edu. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Chameleon Flies From ‘The Blacklist’ to ‘The Kite Runner’

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      After nine seasons on the NBC series, Amir Arison is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel.An early scene in the new Broadway play “The Kite Runner” is mostly spoken in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, though the action depicts a distinctly American art form.“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!,” the 12-year-old Amir exclaims to his best friend, Hassan. The two boys, pretending to be cowboys, love American westerns, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After a standoff, Hassan charges at Amir, but Amir trips him and Hassan stumbles and falls. They wrestle, tumbling and giggling — blissfully unaware of the dark forces that will soon tear them apart.The place is Kabul, the year is 1973 and the two actors playing the boys are actually adults. One of them, Amir Arison, 44, the veteran stage actor who recently left NBC’s hit series “The Blacklist” after nine seasons, portrays Amir as a young boy and an adult.The show, which is scheduled to begin previews on July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It tells the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy growing up alongside Hassan, the Hazara son of his father’s servant. After a childhood act of cowardice, Amir spends most of the play reflecting on and trying to atone for his failure to come to the aid of his best friend.Arison, center, during rehearsals. He plays the protagonist, Amir, as both a child and an adult. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Arison jumps between acting out his childhood memories and narrating them from the present. He doesn’t leave the stage once.It may be a daunting part, but Arison, who cut his teeth on Off Broadway stages before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in some 190 episodes of “The Blacklist,” is up for it.Over the years, he’s played a flashy Iraqi dermatologist in the documentary drama “Aftermath”; a mysterious newlywed in Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”; and a government accountant in Stephen Belber’s “The Muscles in Our Toes,”Still, he said over lunch recently, this role is the biggest challenge of his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein open,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your mind and your soul.”Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story for the stage, said of the role: “It does raise the bar for that actor quite a bit, but then it becomes something truly virtuosic.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.While the casting director Laura Stanczyk and the cultural consultant Humaira Ghilzai ensured that Afghan actors auditioned (and that it was easy for them to do so), the role of Amir ultimately went to Arison, who is Israeli American. He grew up in Florida the son of Israeli immigrants; his mother was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors.In March, when Arison landed the audition for Amir, his first call was to Ghilzai, whose family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know of her affiliation with the show, but he had worked with her twice before — once for his role as a colonel in the Pakistani army in a West Coast production of J.T. Rogers’s “Blood and Gifts” — and asked for advice on his accent.Arison is a chameleon, Ghilzai said: He’s played Afghans, Arabs, Americans and “metamorphosizes into whatever you need him to be.”“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. Its first professional production took place in 2009, and it has since been staged in multiple countries. The Broadway production, directed by Giles Croft, is based on the version that ran at Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (The play “mostly works on the level of childlike fable, satisfyingly schematic but frustratingly simplistic,” Stephen Dalton wrote in a Hollywood Reporter review.)The book — published two years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban — has captivated millions of readers around the world. Now the play arrives on Broadway almost a year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban seized power again.Hosseini’s tale gave readers a rare inside perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but it also has, as Arison pointed out, universal themes of immigration, power, redemption, and father and son relationships.Azita Ghanizada, who plays Amir’s wife, Soraya, with Arison.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“The immigrant story never goes away,” Croft, the director, said in an interview. “Most of us have it in us somewhere. Even if we didn’t experience it ourselves, somewhere in our background, somebody will have traveled to get somewhere that they think will be better or safer. So we carry it with us.”As does Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after the Soviet army invaded the country, and told The Times last year that he still has “a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan.” (In “The Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also escape Afghanistan — first to Pakistan, then to the United States.)Along with Arison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Azita Ghanizada, who portrays Amir’s wife, Soraya, and Salar Nader, who plays the tabla onstage throughout the show, are both Afghan.“It’s been really heartening for me to see how devoted they are to representation,” Ghilzai, the cultural consultant, said of the cast members. “I think because their culture has been misrepresented so much that they really, really, really want to get it right.”Still, placing a non-Afghan in the central role was not a choice made lightly.“The thing that swung it for me,” Croft said of Arison’s casting, “was that he has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.”The director Giles Croft, left, said he cast Arison as Amir because he “has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.” Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn coaching the cast and creative team, Ghilzai guided actors through Dari pronunciations — including the names of characters and towns. The dialect is sprinkled throughout the script.One actor recently asked Ghilzai about Afghan body language: What should he do if he loses in a competition? She advised making a thumbs up motion, a Middle Eastern insult. (They later replaced it with a different gesture, so the meaning wouldn’t get lost in translation.)This production is Ghilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to re-evaluate the text. In a pivotal scene in the second act, Assef (Amir Malaklou), the neighborhood bully turned-Taliban member, taunts Amir, who has returned to Afghanistan from America.“But America’s not all bad,” Assef tells him. “You know who taught me how to use a Stinger missile? Your C.I.A.”The line emerged from conversations between Ghilzai, Spangler and Croft and was added for this production. It recognizes the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.Arison, third from left, played an F.B.I. special agent on the NBC series “The Blacklist.”David Giesbrecht/NBCIn his last episode of “The Blacklist,” Arison’s quirky character Aram Mojtabai told his colleagues that he’s leaving the FBI and plans to move to New York, where among other things, he’d likely see “a Broadway show.” (The episode left open room for him to return.)On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novel, had done his first play in second grade, and couldn’t pass up the lifetime dream to be on Broadway himself.While his part there is “the most unheroic hero you’ll ever see,” he said in the interview, he has come to see it as personally meaningful in ways he didn’t expect.At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father are hidden inside a fuel truck, fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son don’t know if they’ll live or die.“The other day I just lost it because I thought of my grandparents — that’s what happened to them,” Arison said. “That’s another way I connect, even though I’m not Afghan.“So I’m hoping — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added, that “through an individual story, we do not forget that history is repeating itself.” More

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      At Comedy Shows in Lviv, Crowds Look for Humor Amid a Deadly War

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      At the Cultural Defense shows in Lviv, comedians and audiences look for humor amid a deadly conflict. Don’t mind the air raid alarms.LVIV, Ukraine — Some morsels of news are so grim and absurd that they sound like they were conceived in the warped imagination of bored satirists. Like the headline from Belarus a few weeks ago, reporting that 10th graders there were being taught how to aim rifles — using shovels.“What do you think about that?” asks the comedian Vadym Dziunko.Dziunko is onstage with two other comedians and a well-known singer. All are seated and holding microphones, gamely trying to find humor in a place and at a moment when the tragic is trouncing the funny by a spectacular margin.It’s a recent Saturday night at the Cult Comedy Hall, a comedy club in downtown Lviv, near Ukraine’s relatively peaceful western border. Some 100 people have spent about $13 apiece to eat, drink and listen to comics riffing about whatever crosses their minds, which is often the latest news about the war with Russia. Or in the case of this shovel-as-rifle business, the topic is the oddness of life in Belarus, a dictatorship a mere 150 miles to the north.“What do you expect from a country where a potato is a weapon?” says the comedian Oleksandr Dmytrovych. Then he imagines an instructor, giving tips to the kids.“‘We can’t give you rifles yet — —”“‘Because we only have one,’” finishes the third comic, Maksym Kravets.From left, Maksym Kravets, Oleh Luzanov, Bohdan Vakhnich and Oleksandr Dmytrovych riff on whatever crosses their minds.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThis is Cultural Defense, an evening of unscripted and free-flowing humor staged in Lviv every few nights. It began two weeks after the Russian invasion, when Kravets, a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night, called the co-creator of the show, Bohdan Slepkura, and pointed out that the Cult Comedy Hall was in a basement.“I said, ‘You know, the place is a bomb shelter,’” recalled Kravets, a burly and bearded 42-year-old.Kravets, wearing a T-shirt with “Wildness” on it, and Dmytrovych were sitting in another room in the club after the show recently. Initially, they said, they were not sure anyone in the country was in the mood for chuckles. The shock of the invasion was then fresh and hundreds of thousands of residents from the eastern part of the country were flowing into the city.“Before the first show, we thought, maybe this isn’t the right time for comedy,” said Dmytrovych, who is 30 and bearded, too. (“Without beards we’re ugly,” he explained.)“We were petrified,” he went on. “But after the first show, we came and sat in this room and realized, people want to laugh. They want to hear jokes about our enemy. From that first night, we understood this would be bigger than we had thought.”The shows are held in a basement space that is certified as a bomb shelter.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere has been exactly one international breakout star in Ukrainian comedy and he happens to be the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelensky. If this puts pressure on others in the business, it wasn’t obvious onstage on this Saturday, when nobody seemed especially pressed to land on a punchline and a singer, Mykhailo Khoma, spent a lot of time ruminating about his childhood.Ukraine has long had a modest live-comedy scene, though anyone accustomed to the standard setup at American clubs will find novelty in the show’s format. There’s no warm-up act, and at no point is anyone standing onstage alone. There are different guests every night. The evening starts with four men leading a raucous call and response in Ukrainian, like the rest of the show.Hosts: “Glory to the Nation!”Audience: “Death to enemies!”Hosts: “Ukraine!”Audience: “Above all else.”Hosts: “Putin!”Audience: Unprintable putdown!After that, the stars take their seats and start to talk.Some of the humor is self-deprecating. In a previous show — they’re all available on YouTube — Dmytrovych riffed about the news that Ukrainian soldiers had mastered a “single use” antitank missile called an NLAW. This was amazing, he said, because by nature and necessity, Ukrainians are accustomed to reusing everything, over and over.“I got slippers in a hotel in Egypt a year and a half ago and I’m still wearing them,” he said. “When they got dirty, I washed them. When they fell apart in the washing machine, I glued them together. Now these are slippers I offer to guests.”Kravets is a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night.Emile Ducke for The New York Times“For as long as we’re laughing, we’re not giving up,” Dmytrovych said.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere are plenty of jokes at the expense of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who is scorned as a blustery idiot who underestimated the spirit and resolve of Ukrainians. The Russian military, on the other hand, is largely spared. The point, explained Dmytrovych, isn’t to belittle the invading forces, which Ukrainians regard as formidable and horrifying. It’s to lift the spirits of people who are not on the front lines, or who might have once lived near the front lines and have since relocated.So during one show, Kravets extolled the surprisingly polished beauty of checkpoints in Lviv (“I would not be surprised if they served lattes”), some of which have exceptionally long lines. (“I thought at the beginning they would take my order and at the end I’d be handed a Big Mac.”)Internal politics are a recurring theme. During a show a few weeks ago, a poll was cited that found 90 percent of Ukrainians want to join the European Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      ‘53% Of’ Review: Zinging Pro-Trump Women, and Everyone Else

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      A new comedy by Steph Del Rosso starts as a satire of conservatives, then takes aim at progressives. Too bad the jokes barely cut either side.In America, to vote in a federal election is to commit a secret act. One votes in private, in a curtained booth, on intimate terms with an oversize ballot. But little in American public life stays private for long.Exit polls soon provide precise demographic breakdowns, illuminating just who voted for whom. Perhaps you remember this statistic from back in 2016: Despite the “locker-room talk,” to say nothing of the accusations of groping, forced kissing and assault, 53 percent of white women voted for Donald J. Trump. The fitful new comedy “53% Of,” by Steph Del Rosso at Second Stage’s uptown space, takes that data point as inspiration. (Corrected metrics later showed it was more like 47 percent, but whatever.)The play begins in a middle-class living room, embellished with “Home Sweet Home” throw pillows and an outsize American flag. The setting is a small city in Pennsylvania. The time is wine o’clock. Four white women, members of a local conservative club called the Women for Freedom and Family Group, have met to toast Trump’s win and to make plans for his visit to their city. They’re joined by a fifth white woman, PJ (Eden Malyn), who arrives in a sweatshirt bearing the Confederate flag. That sweatshirt upsets the other women because it says the quiet part — the racism that undergirds their politics — loud and proud. It helps explain why these women have voted against their own gendered interests.After internal squabbles, the meeting devolves — a gelatin salad is thrown — and the actresses return, with slight changes of clothing (jackets instead of skirts), this time playing the women’s boorish husbands. It is a month or so later, and the men, also white, have gathered to watch the Trump inauguration.Grace Rex, Wake, Marianna McClellan and Crivelli, now as a progressive coalition in New York.Joan MarcusAfter a second change, the same actresses return again, this time as an urban collective of the pussy hat-knitting variety. The set, barely altered, has become a cramped New York apartment in some outer borough. The flag has gone, replaced by feminist ephemera. These women are white, too. Apparently the group had one Black member at one point. She hasn’t returned. There’s racism here, too, of course, which manifests as enthusiasm and tokenism.Del Rosso’s play is a kind of target practice, and in every act those targets are big. But the effect is hit or miss. The conservative women crave status and recognition. The conservative men crave women who aren’t their wives. The liberal women mask ego as sanctimony. None of this surprises. (I saw “53% Of” the day after the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, when in progressive corners of social media, ostensible allies had already begun to turn on one another.) The jokes are very shallow when they could go deep. Flesh wounds only. Take for example a moment in which the women contemplate going to a march against police brutality, only to ditch it for a bridal shower, a documentary screening, a date.A note in the script advises that “no one is a caricature in this play. Embrace their full complexities.” But Del Rosso and the director, Tiffany Nichole Greene, judge these characters energetically, which sours the play and leaves the actresses little space to expand beyond parody, though Anna Crivelli and Marianna McClellan find a few more grounded moments.The best scene of the play is also the last, in which Crivelli’s Sasha, who is white, goes for a drink with her college friend KJ (Ayana Workman), who is Black. (She is the one who bailed on the collective.) This dialogue also tackles white privilege, but from a place of greater realism rather than scattershot satire. Crivelli makes us feel Sasha’s good, misguided intentions; Workman delineates KJ’s frustrations with not being seen as fully, fallibly human. It’s a sad scene. And a good one. Here, finally, the aim is true.53% OfThrough July 10 at McGinn/Cazale Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In a Powerful ‘Hamlet,’ a Fragile Prince Faces His Foes

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      Alex Lawther makes for an especially riveting hero in Robert Icke’s chic if imperfect modern-dress production at the Park Avenue Armory.Many Hamlets I’ve seen are wily. Some kooky. Narcissistic, aloof, even pretentious. Less common is a Hamlet who is tender and romantic and achingly vulnerable, like a petal falling from the head of a flower at the end of its bloom.When Alex Lawther’s fragile Danish prince drags himself onstage in Robert Icke’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” which opened Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, he recalls the 19th-century poets Arthur Rimbaud and Percy Shelley, a brilliant yet dejected young man who seems resolved to his sorrow — and to a tragic end.In the last decade, Icke has gained prominence for his heightened and contemporary-inflected adaptations of classics. This “Hamlet” played in the West End in 2017, with the hot-priest-sized package of magnetizing charisma known as Andrew Scott in the lead. He was one of the best Hamlets I’ve ever seen — though, as in so many other takes, the focus fell on his brooding and banter more than his emotional depth.Lawther, best known for his role in “The End of the __ing World,” doesn’t have Scott’s starry flair, but he possesses his own demure kind of charisma; he draws you in even as he withdraws into himself. As a result, this rendition honors Hamlet as not just self-indulgently melancholy, but as grappling with legitimate, heartbreaking loss.We begin at a swanky wedding party. (Hildegard Bechtler did the stylish sets and costumes.) Beyond a wall of sliding glass panels, we see Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), and her new husband, his uncle Claudius (Angus Wright), dancing amid balloons and strings of lights. Dressed in a black suit, Lawther slowly shuffles across the stage and sits close to, but removed from, the action. He roughly rubs his palms against his thighs, as though to rub the fabric off his body.Throughout the hefty 3-hour-and-45 minute production, Lawther fully embodies Hamlet’s despondency, shuffling like a wayward toddler, with knees slightly bent and a constant sway that makes him appear near collapse. Planning to enact his vengeance on his scheming uncle, he holds a gun off at an angle, as though his arm is being puppeted by someone else pulling the strings above the stage.And when he speaks, it’s in a slow, warbling singsong, at once contemplative and idiosyncratic, especially when he pauses in the middle of sentences as though his mind is hiccuping with existential thoughts.Though the peculiar line readings sometimes turn monotonous, he snaps out of it, erupting into a surprising fit of mania. And Lawther threads the famed “What a piece of work is man!” monologue with poetic resonance, moving from wonder to despair through slow articulation and emphatic rhythm.From left: Lawther, Michael Abubakar, Hara Yannas, Angus Wright (as Claudius),Gilbert Kyem Jnr and Tia Bannon in the modern-dress production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIcke, whose one-woman “Enemy of the People” played the Armory last year and whose “1984” had a brief Broadway run in 2017, brings a cinematic eye to the proceedings, using foreground and background to create dimension. In one clever bit of staging, Hamlet tarries in the forefront as the king and queen canoodle in back and guards race by mid-stage between them, fresh from sighting the former king’s ghost.At the same time, the director brings some curious adjustments to the characters, giving Polonius a touch of dementia and depicting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a couple clearly at odds about how they should respond to the royal request to monitor Hamlet.The women, in particular, get short shrift. Gertrude is unreadable, despite Ehle’s punchy line readings, and Ophelia’s descent into madness occurs faster than you can say “something rotten” — doing a disservice to Kirsty Rider’s perfectly matched delicate companion to Lawther’s Hamlet.As Claudius, Wright has the self-consciously composed air of a politician but misses some of the menace, while Peter Wight leans too heavily on the bumbling as Polonius. Luke Treadaway, however, makes the most of Laertes’s transformation: from refined gentleman and doting brother to unhinged revenge seeker, wildly swinging a gun at the news of his father’s murder and sister’s suicide.There are actual gunshots, too — ghastly pops and flashes of light that make the audience jump to attention. This is nowhere as gratuitous as, say, the 2019 DruidShakespeare production of “Richard III,” or even the current Broadway staging of “Macbeth,” with its severed limbs and crotch wounds. Still, the sight and sound of a gun onstage today, given our country’s despicable relationship to firearms, is unsettling.What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and, by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.Clockwise, from lower right: Lawther (as Hamlet), Kirsty Rider (as Ophelia), Luke Treadaway (as her brother Laertes), Wright and Kyem.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective; soft overhead light halos Lawther as he seems to addresses theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.Tom Gibbons’s sound design envelops the proceedings in ominous atmospheric gloom:a distant howling wind; the cold, mechanical hum of static and feedback; and, finally, the thunderous exclamations of drums. Less fitting are the production’s folksy compositions (by Laura Marling) and use of Bob Dylan songs, which, even deployed ironically, are a bit too Midwest-porch-jam for this chic production.“Hamlet” is one of the Shakespeare plays that most suffers from diminishing returns — adaptations that try too hard to innovate, to render a classic modern and hip. Though Icke’s protracted production occasionally falls into that trap, ultimately the creative team’s visual and technical prowess — along with its provocative young lead — make this a tale of musing, mania and murder for our age.HamletThrough Aug. 13 at the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes. More

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      In Munich, Young Directors Offer Horrors Both Real and Fantastical

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      The Radikal Jung festival transports theatergoers to Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine and an American high school in the Middle Ages.MUNICH — At the end of a recent performance of “Bad Roads” here, the play’s Ukrainian director, Tamara Trunova, thanked the audience for staying for the entire 180-minute production, a harrowing succession of vignettes set in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014, eight years before it undertook a larger war against Ukraine.“It’s much easier to drink a glass of wine than it is to watch our play,” Trunova said from the stage of the Münchner Volkstheater, where “Bad Roads” opened this year’s Radikal Jung (Radical Young) festival, an annual showcase of productions by up-and-coming directors.The two previously scheduled installments of Radikal Jung were canceled because of the pandemic. This year’s edition, which kicked off on June 26 and runs through this Saturday, is the first to be held in the Volkstheater’s brand-new home, a luxurious performing arts complex in a former slaughterhouse.The festival is traditionally focused on theater from the German-speaking world, but this year’s lineup of 11 plays was unusually international. The widened geographical perspective seemed to acknowledge the artistic affinities between the work of young German theater makers and their counterparts in Greece, London and Paris. All but one of their productions were of recently written dramas, which seemed to reflect a desire to tell new stories that specifically address contemporary concerns. Many of today’s burning issues — including the pandemic, debates around gender and sexuality, the ubiquity of pop culture and social media, life during wartime and climate change — surfaced in Radikal Jung’s varied crop of productions.In a strong lineup that also featured an innovative digital reworking of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and a brilliantly acted one-woman show about Britney Spears, “Bad Roads” stood out — and not just for its torn-from-the-headlines immediacy.The Ukrainian writer Natalya Vorozhbit based the play, subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War,” largely on reports she gathered while traveling across combat zones in eastern Ukraine. An earlier version of “Bad Roads” was staged, in English, at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017; Trunova’s production premiered at the Left Bank Theater in Kyiv in 2019. (A film version directed by Vorozhbit was Ukraine’s official entry in the 2022 Academy Awards.)On a stage dominated by a giant fence, a dozen actors vividly conjure Vorozhbit’s nightmarish tales. Hallucinogenic and frequently absurd, they alternate between the barbarically cruel and the banally quotidian. In the opening narrative, a journalist on a fact-finding mission in the Donbas needs to list her identifying body marks, such as moles and tattoos, on an application before entering the region, in case she is killed while on assignment.A scene from Natalya Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads,” directed by Tamara Trunova at the Munich Volkstheater.Spyros RenntAnother moment in “Bad Roads,” which is subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War.”Spyros RenntThe reporter, who in initiating us into the war zone seems to be a stand-in for the playwright, recites a lengthy monologue that combines the prosaic and the poetic. She tells us about the suffering she finds as well as the conflicted sexual attraction she feels toward the soldier who leads her around. “You aren’t just some ripped Brad Pitt look-alike,” she says. “You really have killed another person.”This introductory story sets up the moral ambiguities of the tales that follow, in which ordinary people, robbed of their lives by a senseless conflict, are driven to extremes.The production is relentlessly dark and savage, even if it’s shot through with morbid humor, such as the moment when a medic who is transporting her lover’s corpse propositions the soldier who has accompanied her on the mission: “A body without a head in a body bag just doesn’t turn me on.”It was sometimes difficult, at least for this non-Russian- and non-Ukrainian-speaking viewer, to tell who was on which side. (The performance had German surtitles). The disorienting atmosphere brought to mind Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary film “Donbass,” another anthology of surreal episodes about the 2014 conflict. At the same time, Vorozhbit’s sensitivity to her characters’ psychologies — and her desire to understand the perspective even of violent perpetrators — make “Bad Roads” a deeply human work about the compromises, cunning and sheer blind luck that surviving in an inhuman time requires.It was almost a relief to leave the real-life horrors of “Bad Roads” behind for the immersive dystopia of “Gymnasium,” a “high school opera” written and directed by Bonn Park with music by Ben Roessler. The only Volkstheater production at Radikal Jung, it is quite possibly the loopiest and most entertaining German production that premiered last year. Set in a kooky mash-up of the late Middle Ages and the 1990s, the show is a campy, riotous sendup of films like “Carrie,” “Heathers” and “Clueless” that gleefully pokes fun at American high school myths.The stock characters and plot devices of teen comedies transposed to the eccentric setting provide Park and Roessler plenty of fuel for skewering our off-kilter world. Tribalism, feudalism and superstition are among the medieval codes that are resurgent in the “post-truth” digital age. With scrappily sung musical numbers and eye-poppingly colorful sets and costumes, “Gymnasium” comments on trolling, viral rumors and climate change skepticism with a gentle satirical touch.The hand-drawn sets, the low-budget special effects — including an active volcano that looms over the school — and the rough and spirited playing of the Orchestra Academy of the Munich Philharmonic (credited as the Orchestra of Cheerleaders) help make “Gymnasium” the senior play you wish your school had been awesome enough — or your classmates talented enough — to put on.While “Gymnasium” constructed its sui generis world from history and pop culture references, “We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, plunged its audience into a largely digital theatrical universe to probe the hopes, anxieties and confusions of Gen Z.First presented as part of an online theater festival put on by the Onassis Foundation-Stegi in Athens, this impossible-to-categorize show is a social media vaudeville where four fearless young performers bare their souls (and a lot of skin) while screaming into the cyber void.“We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, at the Munich Volkstheater.Pinelopi GerasimouWhile their tools of self-expression are TikTok and Instagram — and many parts of the live performances are captured with the performers’ smartphones or computers and projected at the back of the stage — their grievances are old as the hills: rage at their parents, unhappy loves, the impotence to change a world that refuses to accept them. Their autobiographical monologues, staged with furious energy and physicality, are alternatively heartbreaking and empowering. In an exuberant finale, the actors engage in some kick-ass cosplay, battling against the patriarchy and their own self-destructive tendencies as glam-rock Power Rangers.Our world and the people in it need some serious sorting out. The innovative productions at Radikal Jung suggested that theater can help us untangle things, however modestly, by fostering a greater sense of solidarity with the victims of complex systems of oppression. As an actor in “We Are in the Army Now” says, “Ideology can’t be explained using emojis.”Radikal JungThrough Saturday at the Münchner Volkstheater; muenchner-volkstheater.de. More