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      ‘I’m Revolting’ Review: All About the Skin They Live In

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      Gracie Gardner’s play about illness, the body and our health care system is just as impersonal as the waiting room where her story is centered.With another pandemic winter on the horizon, it’s hard not to imagine all of the ways our physical health determines the shape and quality of our lives and reveals the most intimate facets of ourselves.That’s what I suspect the playwright Gracie Gardner (“Athena”), who is also an E.M.T., was aiming to get at in her new play, “I’m Revolting,” which opened Wednesday night at the Linda Gross Theater. But despite the show’s attempts to tell a moving story about illness, the body and the U.S. health care system, this Atlantic Theater Company production fails to make a compelling work of theater out of the issues facing patients in the waiting room of a skin cancer clinic.Bookmarked by conversations between two doctors, Jonathan (Bartley Booz, with the same bumbling brand of comedy he perfected as the wacky butler in “The Play That Goes Wrong”) and the veteran Denise (a mechanical Patrice Johnson Chevannes), “I’m Revolting” initially seems to be a play about the struggles of doctors and health care workers. Then it seems as if it will be a play about physical and emotional health, but it veers off course, and never works its way to a clear statement.In the impersonal space of a waiting room are seven blue chairs lined up neatly in a row, a water cooler, a vending machine, some fake plants, and a table with a bottle of hand sanitizer on it (set design by Marsha Ginsberg). The doctors discuss the day’s patients, identifying them by their maladies, their race and gender, their medical history.The flesh-and-blood counterparts gradually appear, beginning with Reggie (a stiff Alicia Pilgrim), a young woman concerned about how her surgery will affect her appearance, and her self-involved older sister, Anna (a brusque, hilarious Gabby Beans). There’s also Toby (Patrick Vaill), a sullen young man convinced his cancer is a punishment, and his hippie New Age mother, Paula (Laura Esterman); the meek Liane (Emily Cass McDonnell), who’s endured multiple surgeries, and her degenerate husband, Jordan (Glenn Fitzgerald); and the oddball regular, Clyde (Peter Gerety), who dispenses unsolicited advice.From left: Laura Esterman, Patrick Vaill, Glenn Fitzgerald, Emily Cass McDonnell, Peter Gerety and Alicia Pilgrim in the playwright Gracie Gardner’s new work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey mostly talk among their groups — Anna tells Reggie to assert her rights as a patient, Liane and Jordan discuss the merits of a particular lotion — and occasionally to one another. Paula’s suggestion that meditation and positive thinking is all the cure her son needs leads to a waiting room debate about science and alternative medicine.And yet there’s little to no depth to these patients, or anything novel in their conversations, which occur while they wait to be called on by Jonathan and Denise. It soon becomes clear that the thin plot is in desperate need of a raison d’être.The direction, by Knud Adams (“English”), is unremarkable; the actors not only lack chemistry but also deliver stiff readings of their lines. And for a play about the Big C, there’s no sense of urgency or threat. Even with a spare 90-minute running time, and the occasional laughs Beans, Booz and Gerety generate through their characters’ particular quirks and expressions, “I’m Revolting” drags like the hours in waiting room limbo.In those moments when the script rolls out some visceral details (describing the repurposing of a flap of forehead skin, or the archaeological dig into an eye socket), it feels like an empty attempt to have the audience squirm.During the play, I kept thinking of my neighbor who recently told me about his own battle with skin cancer. His story wasn’t just about the skin on his nose but his path to the malady — from a childhood running in the sun and several years working under the cloudless sky in the Caribbean — and his ongoing recovery.We are more than our afflictions, and the story of our nation’s medical care over the past few years warrants more than a few drive-by conversations in a waiting room. As it is, “I’m Revolting” only skims the surface when what it really needs is to perform a thorough examination.I’m RevoltingThrough Oct. 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Suzan-Lori Parks Is on Broadway, Off Broadway and Everywhere Else

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      The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama has four shows this season. “If you can hear the world singing, it’s your job to write it down,” she said.Suzan-Lori Parks is drawn to archways. Early on in her New York life, long before she became one of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, she lived above a McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue — the Golden Arches. Then she moved out by Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, with its triumphal Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Now she lives in an apartment overlooking the marble monument honoring the nation’s first president at the entrance to Washington Square Park.“It’s very symbolic,” Parks told me. “I’m always orienting myself to arches.”Arches, of course, are gateways, portals between one world and another, and Parks is endlessly thinking about other worlds.This season, audiences will have ample opportunity to join her.A starry 20th-anniversary revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning fable about two brothers, three-card monte and one troubling inheritance, is in previews on Broadway. “Sally & Tom,” a new play about Parks’s two favorite subjects, history and theater, but also about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, has just begun performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “Plays for the Plague Year,” Parks’s diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers, is to be presented next month at Joe’s Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring. And “The Harder They Come,” her musical adaptation of the 1972 outlaw film with a reggae score, will be staged at the Public Theater early next year.“I’m like a bard,” she said. “I want to sing the songs for the people, and have them remember who they are.”At this point in her career, Parks, who in 2002 became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a revered figure, regularly described as one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us,” said the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches playwriting and performance studies at Yale.“She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater,” he said. “And she really is the most successful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”PARKS HAS BEEN TELLING STORIES since she was a child. She wrote songs. She tried writing a novel. There was a period when she made her own newspaper, called The Daily Daily, reporting on what she saw through a Vermont attic window. (She was born in Kentucky, and moved frequently because her father was in the military.)While an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, she had the good fortune to take a creative-writing class at nearby Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who suggested she try playwriting, and, even though she feared he was just trying to politely steer her away from prose, she did. “That’s what I’m doing still,” she said. “Trying theater.”Her apartment is filled with evidence of a furiously busy creative life: shelves heaving with plastic crates containing thoughts on pending and possible projects; elements of a second novel marinating on a wallboard cloaked by a blanket; index cards in Ziploc bags; a laptop perched on a crate atop the dining table; lyric revisions in notebooks on a music stand by an ever-at-the-ready guitar. (She is a songwriter who occasionally performs with a band; this season’s four productions all feature music she wrote.)“Writing, I think, is related to being kind of like a witch,” she said as she showed me around. “Writing is magical. I loved mythology, and folk tales, and I could hear them — old stories — not in a recording of something that somebody living in my presence had told me, but if you listen, you can hear organizational principles of nature, which includes the history of people, which is narrative.”So writing is listening? “Not in a passive way,” she said. “I’m on the hunt.” By this point, she was on her feet, pantomiming the stalking stance of a wild cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re being drawn toward it, and you’re reeling it in at the same time, like a fisher.”As she talked, she kept cutting herself off, reaching for ways to differentiate her craft. “There’s a lot of writers who have ideas, and they have an agenda, and that’s cool,” she said. “I think I’m something else.”Digging in to the question of why she writes, she became more and more expansive, reflecting on the songlines of Indigenous Australians, which connect geography and mythology.“We have our songlines too — we just forgot them a long time ago,” she said. “They’re encoded in all the religious texts. They’re in African folk tales. They’re in the stories that your mom or your grandmother taught you. They’re there, and I can’t get them out of my head.”“If you can hear the world singing,” she added, “it’s your job to write it down, because that’s the calling.”PARKS IS NOW 59, and her work has been in production for 35 years. In 1989, the first time The New York Times reviewed her work, the critic Mel Gussow declared her “the year’s most promising new playwright.” In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous quarter century; explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s co-chief theater critic, described Parks as “a specialist in the warping weight of American history,” and declared, “Suzan-Lori Parks has emerged as the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today.”“She’s a national treasure for us,” said Corey Hawkins, left, who is starring opposite Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Parks’s Pulitzer-winning “Topdog/Underdog” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She is a genre in and of herself,” said the playwright James Ijames, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fat Ham.” And what is that genre? “It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous — all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.”Her early plays were experimental (“opaque,” Brantley once wrote). The recent plays have been more accessible, for which Parks makes no apologies.“People — not you, but people — when they ask that question, they’re like, ‘Oh, so now you’re selling out! You’re getting more mainstream and you’re not being true to your roots!’” she said. “Oh, no. I’m becoming more and more and more true. Trust me on this one: I’m following the spirit, no doubt. So, yeah, ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ looks like real life, cause it is. So maybe we ought to think about what am I writing about, and if I’m true to what I’m writing about.”Reflecting her singular stature, Parks has an unusual perch from which to work: She is a writer in residence at the Public Theater, where she receives a full-time salary and benefits. At the Public, she also conducts one of her great ongoing experiments, “Watch Me Work,” a series of events, in-person before the pandemic and online now, at which anyone can work on their own writing while she works on hers, and then they talk about creativity. Early in the pandemic, Parks held such sessions online every day.“Her great subject,” said the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”Parks is also an arts professor at N.Y.U., which is how she wound up across from Washington Square Park, where she lives in faculty housing with her husband, Christian Konopka, and their 11-year-old son. For years, they shared one bedroom; this summer, they finally scored an upgrade, just 70 steps down the hall (their son counted), but now with a bit more space and that archward view.She has surrounded herself with a striking number of good-luck charms: not only the pink unicorn balance board on which she stands while typing, but also a tray of unicorn plushies; James Baldwin and Frida Kahlo votive candles; a hamsa wall hanging she picked up at a flea market; milagro hearts from Mexico; Buddha, Ganesh, rabbit and turtle figurines; and a deck of tarot cards (yes, she did a basic reading for me; I drew the high priestess card). Also: she has tattooed into one arm, three times, a yoga sutra in Sanskrit that she translated as “submit your will to the will of God.” (She calls herself a “faith-based, spiritual-based person,” and is also a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, which she does every morning, after meditation and before writing.)“All the help I can get, baby,” she said.Parks, 59, has four productions this season: a revival, a new play, a collection of pandemic-prompted playlets and songs, and a jukebox musical.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTHE MANY ARTIFACTS on display in her apartment include a shelf set up as a shrine to Baldwin, a dollar bill Parks collected when, feeling the need to perform, she tried busking in a subway station, and a “Black Lives Matter” placard she held at protests during the summer of 2020, when she also signed the “We See You White American Theater” petition, written by an anonymous collective, calling for changes in the industry.“Hey, I’m angry as the next Black woman,” she said. “And yet, to get through this, we need to also listen — listen to the voice of anger, listen to the voice of love, listen to the voice of wisdom, listen to the voice of history.”She added, “Let’s not just stand around telling people that they suck. At least where I come from, that’s not a conversation, and, at least where I come from, that’s not good dialogue.”The tone of some of the conversation around diversity in theater is clearly a concern of hers — that’s obvious in “Plays for the Plague Year,” which, in the most recent draft, contains a playlet called “The Black Police,” in which three “Black Cops” approach a “writer,” played by Parks, and say, “We’re here to talk with you about your blackness/Why you work with who you work with.”In our interview, Parks said she was troubled by “the policing of Black people by Black people, and not just in the arts,” adding, “we have to wake up to the ways we are policing each other to our detriment.”“No more trauma-based writing!” she said. “These are rules. And Suzan-Lori Parks does not like to be policed. Any policing cuts me off from hearing the spirit. Sometimes the spirit sings a song of trauma. I’m not supposed to extend my hand to that spirit that is hurting because it’s no longer marketable, or because I should be only extending my hand to the spirits who are singing a song of joy? That’s not how I want to conduct my artistic life.”She also said she is troubled by how much anger, at the Public Theater and elsewhere, has been directed at white women. “Not to say that Karen doesn’t exist. Yes, yes, yes. But it’s interesting that on our mission to dismantle the patriarchy, we sure did go after a lot of white women. If you talk about it, it’s ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.’ No, I’m not. I’m supporting nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of that got lost, and lot of times we just stayed silent when the loudest voice in the room was talking, and the loudest voice in the room is not always the voice of wisdom.”THIS SEASON, SHE’S PIVOTING back toward the stage after a stretch of film work in which she wrote the screenplay for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and was a writer, showrunner and executive producer of “Genius: Aretha,” both of which were released last year.At the start of the pandemic, she assigned herself the project that became “Plays for the Plague Year,” writing one short play each day for 13 months. The discipline was a familiar one: In 2002, after winning the Pulitzer, she began “365 Days/365 Plays,” then she did another daily playwriting exercise during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The pandemic play is part personal history — how the coronavirus affected Parks and her family — and part requiem for those who died during that period, from George Floyd to Parks’s first husband. The play, like much of Parks’s work, features songs she wrote. “I was moved into other states, where I wasn’t just documenting what happened that day, but I wanted to sing,” she said.She’s got plenty still to come — she’s still polishing “The Harder They Come,” which will feature songs by Jimmy Cliff and others, including Parks, who said the story, set in Jamaica, “really captures a beautiful people in their struggle.” She’s then hoping to turn to that second novel (a first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003).She is planning a screen adaptation of “Topdog,” as well as a new segment of her Civil War drama “Father Comes Home From the Wars” (so far, three parts have been staged; she said she expects to write nine or 12). Also: she’s writing the book, music and lyrics for an Afrofuturist musical, “Jubilee,” that she’s developing with Bard College; “Jubilee,” inspired by “Treemonisha,” a Scott Joplin opera that was staged on Broadway in 1975, is about a woman who establishes a new society on the site of a former plantation.Parks’s latest play is “Sally & Tom,” starring Luke Robertson and Kristen Ariza. The first production is now underway at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; it is expected to be staged next fall at the Public Theater in New York.Dan NormanOn a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks settled in behind a folding table to watch a stumble-through of “Sally & Tom,” which is being developed in association with the Public, where it is expected to be staged next fall. The work, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is structured as a play-within-a-play — it depicts a contemporary New York theater company in the final days of rehearsing a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks has had a longtime interest in Jefferson and Hemings, and at one point had worked on a television project about the relationship that never got made; the play, she said, is not a straight historical drama, but “about how the world is made, and how we live in this country.”The protagonist is a playwright who, like Parks, is warm but exacting, and is rewriting and restructuring the show as opening night nears. When I asked Joseph Haj, the Guthrie’s artistic director, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he at first shrugged it off, saying artists are always present in their work. After the run-through, he grabbed me to amend his remarks. “I take back everything I said,” he said. “I see her all over this.”Kristen Ariza, who is playing the playwright as well as Hemings (the fictional playwright stars in her own play) said “the play is full of humor, until it’s not.”“It feels so meta, because we’re doing the play, within the play, and we’re doing all these things like within the play,” she said. “She’s constantly questioning, ‘Does this fit? Is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She’s hearing our voices and adding things and making things work better as we go.”A few days later, Parks was in Times Square, watching an invited dress rehearsal for “Topdog/Underdog.” The set is draped in a floor-to-ceiling gold-dipped American flag, meant, the director, Kenny Leon, told me, to reflect the way commerce infuses the culture.Two actors who have enjoyed success onscreen, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the story’s brothers, mischievously named Lincoln and Booth. They share a shabby apartment; Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Their relationship to each other, to truth-telling, and to their shared history is at the heart of the story.Both actors encountered the play as undergraduates; Hawkins was a stagehand on a production at Juilliard, and Abdul-Mateen read a few scenes as Booth while at Berkeley. “It’s the first piece of material that I ever performed on a stage that I felt like was written for someone like me,” Abdul-Mateen said.Like many people I spoke with, Abdul-Mateen was particularly struck by Parks’s ear for dialogue. “It’s as if she eavesdropped on these two characters,” he said, “and just wrote everything down as she heard it.”Hawkins called the play “an ode to young black men who don’t always get to live out loud.” And he is embracing that opportunity — one night, he called Parks at 2 a.m. to discuss a section of the play; she has also helped him learn the guitar, which he had not played before getting this role. “There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries,” he said. “When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her.”Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang: Hawkins again, this time with a reverential plea. “Make us proud, man,” he said. “She’s a national treasure for us.” More

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      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

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      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

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      in Television

      Da’Vine Joy Randolph Doesn’t Want Anyone Finishing Her Sentences

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      Whether in comedies like “Only Murders in the Building” or dramas like “On the Come Up,” the ubiquitous actor refuses to be pigeonholed.Please forgive Da’Vine Joy Randolph if she needs to stifle the occasional yawn. When she hopped on a video interview in late September, the omnipresent, extremely busy and still slightly jet-lagged actress had only just returned from Colombia, where she was filming “Shadow Force,” an action movie for the director Joe Carnahan.Despite the exotic locale and a fulfilling work experience, the otherwise upbeat Randolph emphasized that she was happy to be back on her home turf in Los Angeles. “Even on a vacation,” she said, “after the two-week mark, no matter how amazing the vacation is, you’re like, I’m ready.”Randolph, 36, has been on a relentless professional pace for more than a decade now, playing a range of memorable roles in theater, film and television. She recently co-starred in the drama “On the Come Up,” the directorial debut of Sanaa Lathan, playing Pooh, the supportive but no-nonsense aunt of an aspiring teenage rapper (Jamila C. Gray).Yet Randolph is probably better known for her work in several comedies, including the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” and films like “Dolemite Is My Name.”Why Randolph keeps turning up alongside the likes of Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and Martin Short, she said, is anyone’s guess. “It’s actually quite a conundrum,” she said. “I think I have a good sense of humor, but I don’t consider myself funny.”Whatever type of story she is telling, Randolph said, she often takes a similar approach to her roles: “I really just focus on their dedication — everyone wants something.”She explained, “When people get into extreme situations or they want something bad enough, hilarity can ensue because the stakes are just that high. To the viewer, it can be comical. To me, I’m like in a Greek tragedy over here.”Rather than be remembered as a comedic or a dramatic performer, Randolph said she wants to be called “a transformational actor”: “I never want to get pigeonholed or known for one thing. I don’t want people to be able to finish my sentences.”Randolph shared the stories behind a few of her most memorable roles. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Randolph as Oda Mae Brown in “Ghost the Musical.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Ghost the Musical’In the stage adaptation of the 1990 movie, which ran on Broadway in 2012, Randolph was cast as Oda Mae Brown, the psychic played in the film by Whoopi Goldberg.That was my first job ever, and it started very quickly. Like, roller coaster plunging down — there was no windup. You booked it [whooshing sound]. Now my life is fortunately and unfortunately like that — that can be the nature of what it is. But to be thrown in, in that way, was a lot of getting used to. When we found out that “Ghost” was closing, I remember saying to my agents, “I want to do a movie and a TV show and a straight play.” And I booked one of Robin Williams’s last movies [“The Angriest Man in Brooklyn”], an episode of “The Good Wife” and an original play at Atlantic Theater Company [“What Rhymes With America”]. I was like, whoa. Good manifesting.‘Selfie’Randolph played Charmonique, a co-worker of the pharmaceutical firm staffers played by Karen Gillan and John Cho, on this short-lived ABC cult sitcom from 2014.I got to learn all the ins and outs of network television. After an episode was released, I remember the producers being like: “The numbers, the numbers, what are the numbers? What are the ratings?” I was like, whoa, that’s a whole thing. You did the pilot, then after you get 13 [episodes], then you find out if you get the back nine. Which we didn’t on that show. And — because people ask me all the time — I genuinely don’t know why. Our co-workers don’t know why. I have spent time with Karen Gillan. We don’t know why. I promise you there’s no secret I’m withholding.‘Empire’On the Fox hip-hop soap opera that ended in 2020, Randolph played Poundcake, a onetime fellow prison inmate of Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson).They built a whole soundstage and turned it into a prison, and it was just a two-hander with Taraji and me. It felt like getting back to the fundamentals, where I really got to dig in and play a different type of character. We were almost a whole other show within that show. Even the other actors were like, “How come you get to do all this stuff?” Craig [Brewer], the director of “Dolemite,” was directing me in one of the episodes for “Empire.” I was like, “You’re really cool to work with. Do you have any interesting stuff down the pike?” He said nothing. And then I go to the [“Dolemite”] audition, and I’m like, “Craig!” He was like, [sheepishly] “Oh, I didn’t know.”Randolph with, from left, Craig Robinson, Mike Epps, Tituss Burgess and Eddie Murphy in “Dolemite Is My Name,” a game-changer for her career.François Duhamel/Netflix‘Dolemite Is My Name’This 2019 comedic biopic starred Eddie Murphy as the stand-up and Blaxploitation actor Rudy Ray Moore and Randolph as Moore’s “Dolemite” screen partner Lady Reed.“Dolemite” changed the trajectory of my career. On my end, the work is never changing. My process, my way in — I don’t save myself for the big roles and phone it in for everything else. But the collaborative energy allowed my character to have a space to be seen and heard. Eddie is very meticulous with his work and this was a passion project for him, but he was so generous. Interestingly enough, I had booked it — deal signed and everything — and then they were like, uh, we don’t know. They made me re-audition, which was intense. But the gift in it was, if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have felt as confident and forthright. I was able to come to work being like, This is what I have to offer. Before I would have been like, [mousy voice] “What do you think, Mr. Murphy?” Now I was like, I know who she is and what they want from her.‘The Lost City’In this year’s hit comedy, Sandra Bullock starred as a romance novelist caught up in an unexpected jungle adventure and Randolph as her intrepid publisher.That was like my first true work-cation. It was wild. The last scene of the movie, where we were all on the beach, that’s where we lived. If the camera turned back, you would see the hotel we were staying at. The travel bans were just starting to come up from Covid, so for a lot of us, we were also very excited to be working. When you’re literally on the beach, it’s pretty hard to be a jerk. A lot of it had to do with Sandra Bullock and how she just took care of the actors.Sandra never got diva-ish or distanced herself, like, I’m over here and you’re down here. We were all in it together. I was having fun with the hair department. The moment I go into the jungle, I knew my hair was going to get more and more frizzy. It became like a game — each scene would be like, OK, so how frizzy is it?As Detective Williams in “Only Murders in the Building.”Patrick Harbron/Hulu‘Only Murders in the Building’As the resourceful Detective Williams on this Hulu comedy series, Randolph often crosses paths with the amateur sleuths played by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.That job, one thousand percent, was because of “Dolemite.” Steve Martin told me he saw “Dolemite,” was very impressed — “You held your own,” that whole thing — and that was a straight offer from him and the showrunner. It’s such a wonderful working environment. Lovely hours. You’re out by like 6, 7 o’clock. You go have dinner, a life. And just to be around Steve Martin and Martin Short — they still have this childlike anticipation and excitement, like it was their first project. That blows me away, every single time.Williams is damn good at her job and has a crazy case that she’s trying to crack. She’s aggressive and that has made her successful. Then these three civilians get in the middle of things, trying to solve it for her, alongside her, in spite of her. That makes her job more difficult. But in the process, she learns maybe it is OK to not work by yourself all the time. She’s coming to terms with it and it’s awkward and uncomfortable. That’s where the comedy comes in.‘On the Come Up’Randolph’s character, Aunt Pooh, is the streetwise sister to Jay, an absentee mother played by Lathan, the film’s director, and the mentor to her niece, an aspiring rapper played by Gray.When I found out about that job, I was filming Netflix’s “Rustin,” playing Mahalia Jackson, so I’m giving full Christian, Southern Baptist auntie. To then go to that kind of auntie really intrigued me. But especially in telling Black-specific narratives from Black voices, there always has to be a message. Even with “Empire,” I don’t care if I’m an inmate, but there has to be a positive message that we grow and learn from. You see throughout the movie all the roles that Aunt Pooh was to her: I was her parent, and she was my niece and my best friend, if not a little sister. Which I think keeps their relationship very complex. As tough as Aunt Pooh is, she has this gushing heart for her family and for her niece, which was really quite special.The physical transformation was quite significant, and in a short amount of time. When I got to set, the costume just wasn’t quite hitting it. But the costume designer was really cool — I was like, “Do you trust me? I know who this person is and I can show you better than I can explain it to you.” She was like, “Sure, no problem.” And so, for two days, I went shopping here in L.A. and got all the costumes. Literally everything that I wear, that is what we pulled and bought. The moment I put it on, I was like, oh, OK. When you’re going from movie to movie, a lot of times, actors are wigged. But Sanaa Lathan, who had done a movie all about hair [“Nappily Ever After”], was like, “I think you really should rock your own hair.” I was like, no, no, I don’t want to do it. But the moment that we did the look, I was like, damn it, that’s it. Being that it was my own hair, I had to rock my hair like that on and off the set. The attention you get from that — I couldn’t be more different from it. I’m not method and I don’t usually subscribe to that. But it allowed me to stay in it and understand her. More

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      Review: In Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Memorial to a Lost World

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      The Viennese Jewish family at the heart of this new Broadway production thinks it is too assimilated to be in danger when the Nazis arrive. They are wrong.In November 1938, in Vienna, life chez Merz — the reciting of books, the games of cat’s cradle, the polished renditions of Haydn at the piano — proceeds with only brief interruptions despite the nearby sounds of broken glass. But then comes the rap at the door. The pianist, Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), goes to answer it and hastily returns.“Trouble,” she hisses.With that one word, the hinge of history swings open upon the abyss.It is also the word that turns “Leopoldstadt,” the harrowing new Tom Stoppard play that opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, from a domestic comedy into a Greek drama. What had been until then a loving portrait of Austrian Jewish bourgeois society in the years before the Anschluss — the play begins in 1899 and will follow the family through 1955 — becomes, as the Nazis enter not just the Merzes’ homeland but their home, a portrait of that society’s self-delusion. The cosmopolitan, intermarried and profoundly cultured clan, given less than a day to pack for a future most will not survive, finally understands that, for Jews, history has no hinge; the abyss is always open.Whether complacency is a moral failing, as “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue, is a vexing question. In the play’s first three acts — it has five, each set in a different year and performed without intermission over the course of 2 hours and 10 minutes — Stoppard posits the Merzes, and their relatives-by-marriage, the Jakoboviczes, as golden examples of assimilation. Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), the wealthy businessman in whose apartment near the fashionable Ringstrasse the story unfolds, has even converted to Catholicism as a kind of insurance. One of the always ambient children is confused enough about the distinctions between Jew, gentile and Austrian to top the family’s Christmas tree with a Star of David.Austrian gentiles are not confused, though. Antisemitic slights and violence are frequent enough that even the Merzes take notice. In 1899, the adults are already arguing the merits of Theodor Herzl’s plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But all signs, at least the cultural ones valued by the bourgeoisie, point to progress. Brahms has visited their home; Mahler, though “wet from his baptism,” is still “our man.” Klimt is painting Hermann’s wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow). And the playwright Arthur Schnitzler has inscribed a private copy of “La Ronde” to Hermann’s brother-in-law, Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), a mathematician being analyzed by Freud.As Stoppard flips through this Rolodex of Viennese machers, you may recognize his trademark bravura: tossing you into the deep end of his imagination, trusting that you’ll eventually surface. In this case, it’s a very deep end: By my count, 31 characters appear in “Leopoldstadt,” 24 of them members of the extended Merz-Jakobovicz clan. Even if you’ve studied the family tree available on the play’s website, it’s impossible to keep them sorted when they themselves are confused. “She’s my … my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law,” Gretl ventures of Hanna. “I think.”From left: Brandon Uranowitz, Caissie Levy, Faye Castelow and David Krumholtz.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut just when you fear you know too little, you realize you actually know too much. In “Leopoldstadt,” Stoppard takes dramatic irony — the audience’s grasp of what the characters cannot see — to such an extreme that it becomes the subject itself. It applies here not only to tangled relationships and romantic betrayals but to the larger tangles and betrayals of fate; if you’ve heard of Kristallnacht, you will be waiting for that rap on the door and wondering, perhaps unfairly, why the Merzes aren’t. But it’s mostly hindsight that has taught us what happened to Viennese Jews of that vintage.That we remain in suspense anyway is partly the effect of Stoppard’s kaleidoscopic technique, seducing us with manifold pleasures like that boisterous Christmas party in 1899, a polyphonic Passover in 1900, a farcical circumcision in 1924. Much as he has done in earlier plays with the metaphysical juggling acts of poets, revolutionaries and philosophers, he arranges the domestic affairs of these bourgeois characters into highly detailed and glittering patterns, like snowflakes seen under a magnifying glass.But “Leopoldstadt” is not quite as tightly constructed as “Arcadia,” say, or “Jumpers” or “Travesties”; it has too many themes to wrangle, and some dense historical exposition is unconvincingly disguised as small talk. As such, the play leans more than usual on a handsome, foreboding, smartly calibrated production. The acting is excellent across the board, with too many standouts to name. The director Patrick Marber’s deep-focus staging keeps all the stories going at once on a set by Richard Hudson that fairly gleams with honeyed smugness under Neil Austin’s lights. And Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes make you long for the elegance of prewar fashions until you are brought up short by remembering what happened to those who wore them.Even without any overt violence, the Kristallnacht scene, with its shiny blond monster calling the Jewish children a “litter,” is thus brutal, wiping away all the beauty in seconds. But the play’s argument and its likely source in Stoppard’s own life does not really emerge until the scene that follows, set in 1955. It is then, as Vienna prepares to open its new postwar opera house with an ex-Nazi on the podium, that we are explicitly asked to consider the connected problems of historical memory and premonition. Is it a corollary of the warning that we must never forget the Holocaust that we must always expect it again?Uranowitz, right, with Arty Froushan, whose character is ignorant of his Jewish relatives. “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you,” Uranowitz tells him.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, no doubt noting the resurgence of antisemitism today, seems to argue for that, painting complacency as a kind of hubris. In the play’s cosmology, more unforgivable than its shiny blond monsters is a callow 24-year-old Jakobovicz family survivor — he too is blond — we meet in this final act. Born Leopold Rosenbaum, he is now called Leo Chamberlain, having adopted the last name of his English stepfather because his mother, he says, “didn’t want me to have Jewish relatives in case Hitler won.” Leo (Arty Froushan) has written two “funny books” and is so ignorant of those Jewish relatives that one of them, a second cousin who survived the camps, cannot hold his tongue. “You live as if without history,” he spits, “as if you throw no shadow behind you.”This is not autobiography, but it’s close enough. Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Czechoslovakia, receiving his new last name just as Leo does, from an English stepfather. He started writing his first funny plays in his early 20s. He came very late to a full understanding of his Jewishness, including the murders of family members in Nazi death camps. You need not equate him exactly with his stand-in to see that in “Leopoldstadt,” by punishing Leo for his belatedness, he is punishing himself for his own.The play begins in 1899 and follows the family through 1955. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe last scene is thus a strange one: powerful, painful and masochistic by implication. But I was left wondering whom its argument was meant for. There are of course people who do not believe the Holocaust happened; I doubt they will see the play.And then there are those in no danger of forgetting, for whom the names of the camps, as intoned in the final moments, are as ingrained as the hypnotic babble of grief we call the Mourner’s Kaddish.That leaves only those who live in the bubble in between, who both know and don’t know. Stoppard seems to place himself there, along with the Merzes, whose refusal to believe the worst led them directly to it.As I would surely have done no better in their circumstances, I cannot bring myself to blame any of them. Not even Tomáš Sträussler. But the uncommonly bitter and personal focus in that final scene makes the play feel a bit unstable, teetering like an upside-down pyramid on its smallest point. “Leopoldstadt” is at its best not in instructing us how we must mourn a lost world but in bringing it lovingly back to life.LeopoldstadtThrough Jan. 29 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; leopoldstadtplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Review: Worth Its Weight in Gold

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      Subtle connections bridge the worlds of two caregivers in Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, making its Broadway debut.How do we connect with people? How do we care for them? And what does it all cost, both fiscally and emotionally? These are just a few of the questions Martyna Majok poses in her wrenching 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living,” which opened on Monday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.After debuting at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, “Cost of Living” ran Off Broadway in 2017 in a Manhattan Theater Club production at New York City Center. Now Majok is making her Broadway debut, arriving with an impressive inventory of awards and praise for her poignant, socially conscious work, which includes “Sanctuary City” (2021) and “Ironbound” (2016).In her Pulitzer Award citation, the committee wrote that Majok “invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.” She does this whether exploring the worlds of undocumented immigrants or working-class New Jerseyans holding on by a thread.As “Cost of Living” begins, Eddie is certainly looking for connection — and redemption, and a way out from under the specter of loneliness since his wife’s death. On this particular night, he says, he’s been stood up for a date with his dead wife, Ani. He sits on a stool center stage at a bar, a shelf of bottles adorned with multicolored string lights floating behind him.What Eddie (an affable David Zayas), a 40-something unemployed truck driver from Bayonne, N.J., leaves out in this impromptu bar eulogy to his wife are the tough times: his years of alcoholism and then a separation.From here the play, tenderly directed by Jo Bonney, jumps back in time, when Eddie and Ani are separated. It’s a few months after a devastating accident left Ani (Katy Sullivan) a quadriplegic and double amputee. Eddie wants to help with her home care; Ani, resentful and depressed, wants to be left alone.Not too far south of Bayonne, in Princeton, Jess (Kara Young) is struggling to stay above the poverty line. A recent alum of the Ivy League school, she’s nevertheless interviewing for a job as an aide to John (Gregg Mozgala), a grad student with cerebral palsy. Jess is direct but guarded when it comes to her life, and John is pretentious and calculating, though he gets Jess to open up with his knavish charm.Kara Young, left, as the caregiver to Gregg Mozgala who plays a grad student with cerebral palsy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s scenes alternate between the two stories of these caregivers, with a turntable set that rotates from Ani’s criminally beige living room and bathroom to John’s upscale, modern apartment with towering windows and a gray-tiled, sit-in shower stall. (The polished scenic design is by Wilson Chin.) Bonney’s deft negotiation of these separate settings and stories is just one of the ways “Cost of Living” impressively teeters between two main axes — the body, and the economy of its care — without toppling over.There’s a satisfying parallelism to the dynamics between the two pairs — the chemistry, the witty repartee, the heartbreak one character offers, intentionally or unintentionally, to another. Each twosome exists in their separate bubbles of Jersey life until they finally intersect. And yet Majok’s sharp writing is never predictable; even when she seems to be leading us down the path to a conventional love story, she pivots and offers an unexpected development — like a wife who sends texts from beyond the grave or a romantic invitation that turns out to be a slick power play.Bonney’s direction adds an extra layer of cohesion to the story: subtle connections that bridge the worlds, like Eddie and Jess each walking separately to the same gentle patter of rainfall on a stormy day (sound design by Rob Kaplowitz).Each of the four cast members performs with a three-dimensional pop of life. Eddie’s insistent affection and optimism is comically at odds with Ani’s dry deadpan. Sullivan’s fiery Ani speaks in a kind of poetry of insults and expletives. Young’s Jess is bright, brusque and uncompromising, even when her life is going sideways. And Mozgala portrays John as someone who is slippery, coy and clever, with a shadiness beneath.Majok’s script insists on the casting of diverse and disabled actors, helping to deepen an affecting work that readily breaks your heart, drags you through hurt and then kisses you on the forehead, sending you off with a laugh.This play left me breathless, and I’m not just using a manner of speech. As I made my way through the crowd of people exiting the theater, I took hard, shallow breaths, knowing that one deep inhale could set off a downpour of tears. This production either broke or mended something in me; I felt — brilliantly, painfully, cathartically — near the point of physical exhaustion.It seems as if the tears, the chuckles, the full body ache of feeling is the currency of an outstanding work of art. We give nearly two hours of attention, and great theater offers us empathy and humanity in return: riches of which even the world’s wealthiest can only dream.Cost of LivingThrough Oct. 30 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      As ‘Come From Away’ Closes, a Newfoundlander Heads Back Home

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      The Canadian actress Petrina Bromley has been in the cast during the show’s surprise hit run on Broadway. It resonated because “it’s about kindness,” she says.On Sunday afternoon, “Come From Away” played its final performance on Broadway, before a raucous sold-out crowd that wept and waved. By Monday morning, stagehands were already taking down and hauling away the real trees that gave the Schoenfeld Theater its forested look.Petrina Bromley, the lone Newfoundlander in the cast, returned to the theater to collect her belongings and to talk about the show, which told the true story of how Gander, Newfoundland — a small Canadian city with a big airport — sheltered thousands of airline passengers forced to land when trans-Atlantic flights were grounded by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.The musical, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein and directed by Christopher Ashley, opened in 2017 and became a surprise hit, with its message of generosity and community resonating at a time when those values seemed in short supply.Bromley, like all members of the cast, played multiple characters, but she is best known as Bonnie, the woman who ran the local animal shelter, and wound up caring for the dogs, cats and two bonobos that had been onboard the planes. (Among the items in her dressing room: a variety of bonobo-related gifts sent by fans.)A scene from “Come From Away,” near the start of its Broadway run. Bromley said that when she first heard the creators’ idea for the show, she thought, “Good luck to you.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBromley, 51, has been with the show off and on for seven years, throughout its development and the Broadway run. All told, she has been in 1,514 performances of “Come From Away,” including pre-Broadway runs in San Diego, Seattle and Toronto as well as 1,362 Broadway performances. She has also been part of two concert presentations in Newfoundland — one before the Broadway run and one last month — and she was part of the cast of the filmed version, shot during the pandemic shutdown.Her status as a Newfoundlander — she is a career Newfoundland actress who was raised on the island and is returning there now that the show has closed — gave her a unique perspective on the show. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.How are you doing?It’s a lot, right? I thought yesterday would be hard, but this is actually harder. The trees are being felled. I’ve come and gone from the show a bunch of times but the space itself has always been here. And now it’s not going to be here anymore.You wound up in the show because you met the show’s writers in Gander on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11?I was in Gander with a local theater company, Rising Tide Theater — we were doing something as part of those events. We walked into the one coffee shop that wasn’t a Tim Hortons, and the only other people in there were this young couple sitting at a table with cue cards, organizing themselves to do an interview. I had the same reaction everybody in Gander had: “Good luck to you. I’m not sure how you’re going to turn that into a show, but have at it.” We stayed in touch through Facebook and stuff like that, and they saw me in a couple of shows in Toronto, and I was invited to audition.Apparently the audition went well.I was on the other side of the doors, waiting to go in, and some incredible person with an incredible voice sang “Let It Go” so incredibly well and loud and high and my inner monologue was, “What are you doing here?” So I abandoned my book and said to them, “You know, I think considering what the show is, and who I am, and where I’m from, I should sing you a song from Newfoundland.” So I sang a very silly song about a talking goat [“The Mobile Goat,” recorded by Joan Morrissey]. I think they were a little confused by it, but it was certainly something they hadn’t heard. And I do credit that tune with getting me the job in the end.Bromley talking with fans outside the theater on Sunday. “People do tell me their pet stories all the time, and it’s beautiful,” she said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesYou had some apprehension about how Newfoundland was going to be depicted.When you have a culture that is distinct, it’s easy for it to be stereotyped. So the accent, and being poor, and being undereducated became the marks of what it is to be a Newfoundlander. In Canada, the “Newfie” joke was a big thing for many, many years, and we were often portrayed in the media and pop culture as stupid Newfies. That was my concern: Here are some mainlanders — “Come From Aways” — coming down to tell a story about us, and how are they going to paint us? But at the very first rehearsals in La Jolla, Chris Ashley made it very clear he wanted every character in the show to be treated with respect and not to be just cartoons. And as soon as he said that, I was like, “It’s all going to be fine.”When this show was in development, there was a lot of skepticism about whether it could work commercially.Absolutely. I’ve been skeptical the whole time. I was always wondering about the sheer earnestness of it, in a world that is as cynical as our world is. And telling a story about 9/11 in New York to New Yorkers — there was a lot of concern.Why do you think the show worked for as long as it did?Because it is about community, and it’s about kindness. There are no dragons and no helicopters and no wizards. This show raised up ordinary people doing very simple ordinary things — just helping each other out — and particularly in the past five or six years, with what’s been going on here in the States and around the world, kindness and generosity are things that we’re losing sight of.You played a woman who runs the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Are you an animal person?I have three dogs. I have allergies or I would have a million pets. People do tell me their pet stories all the time, and it’s beautiful. It’s a lovely way to connect.Did you ever meet Unga, the bonobo most discussed in the musical?She passed away before I was able to go to the zoo. If the pandemic hadn’t put a roadblock up, I would have been there to meet her. But I did meet Unga’s son Gander, and her other son Jerry, at the Columbus Zoo [in Ohio]. Bonnie and I went together and watched them in the enclosure. It was incredible.What is the level of awareness of the show in Newfoundland?You can’t not be aware of it — it’s everywhere. We just did those concerts back home — three shows in Gander and three shows in St. John’s, at large arenas, which sold out in minutes. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people have made the pilgrimage to come see it here or in Toronto or in places across the country where the tour was happening. It’s made its way into being part of the culture now. And everybody wants it to have a further life in Newfoundland.Bromley, center, at the final curtain call with Bonnie Harris, the woman she portrayed in the show.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhat was your career like before this show?I thought it was fine! I was a very employed, everyday working actor in Newfoundland, which is not easy to do. I had enough of a reputation and experience to be consistently working, mostly in theater, sometimes in TV and film. And I thought that that was as good as it gets. I still feel that way. I’m going home, back to Newfoundland, hopefully to fall back into working with the people that I love who create new, incredible work all the time.What is your career like now?I’m much more recognizable at home, which is lovely. I picked up a TV series back home, called “Son of a Critch,” and we just finished filming the second season of that. I’m a tertiary character, but it’s a lovely little gig to have and hopefully that can blossom into other things. I don’t have an agent, and I never have, and I have worked in Stratford [in Ontario] and on Broadway. But I’m probably going to get an agent so that I can work across Canada.What surprised you about Broadway?While I do have a lot of reverence for it, if you hold things on a pedestal, when you get there in a lot of ways it’s the same thing: It’s a job that you go to every day. I appreciate, being the age that I am, to have had the experience to know that it was going to have highs and lows, and that there would be ordinariness inside of the extraordinariness. And I’m always aware of the privilege of it, and the reality that none of us would have been on that stage but for the fact that a very tragic event happened and thousands of people died. And grateful that I got to tell a story, connected to them, that kept their memories alive in any way, shape or form for people who needed to hear it.What did you learn about New York City?It’s crazy. It’s great. To live in New York was incredible. But again, the layers get peeled back when you live somewhere, and you see that it isn’t just a helluva town. I found it difficult on many levels. To be in a very privileged position of working at this incredible place, but literally walking past the most desperate individuals I’ve ever seen in my life, people who are in jeopardy, on the street, asking for help, and we all walk past them and no one helps them. To come and tell this story, where giving a helping hand makes sense, and watch it not happen in reality on the street, I’ve found that hard to reconcile.Have you changed?Absolutely. In many, many ways. I like to think that I’m a bit more generous, a bit kinder than I was before this. It’s also made me a better singer. It’s made me a better actor. And certainly the cosmopolitan experience of living in a big city has changed me.Why are you going back?Because it’s home. There’s a joke about Newfoundlanders: “How do you know the Newfoundlanders in heaven? They’re the ones who want to go home.” More

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      ‘Mud/Drowning’ Review: 3 Fools, 3 Kooks, 2 Bizarre Plays

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      A new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, “Mud” and “Drowning,” tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds but too often overreaches.What absurdist work perhaps does best is map the places where our comprehension ends. The surreal reality of being human in the world is enough to lead a writer to create worlds in which, say, bestiality, petty theft and cuckoldry are just business as usual, or where odd, misshapen humanoids reflect on love.In “Mud/Drowning,” a new production of two of María Irene Fornés’s short plays, presented by Mabou Mines and Weathervane Productions at the Mabou Mines theater in Manhattan’s East Village, the director JoAnne Akalaitis tries to accentuate the weirdness of the playwright’s worlds. But too often she overreaches, obscuring the more subtle turns of the text.In “Mud” (1980), a poor woman named Mae (Wendy vanden Heuvel, a touch overzealous) works jobs ironing and goes to school on the side, learning how to read and do math. Her slovenly, illiterate companion Lloyd (a fascinating Paul Lazar, at turns crouched in a chair like a gargoyle or seated on the floor, staring off like a despondent animal) isn’t impressed. He’s mostly concerned with his erection.Mae brings home a neighbor she likes, Henry (Tony Torn, perfectly posturing), a wannabe intellectual who’s not nearly as wise as he thinks he is. Soon she, Henry and Lloyd (her adopted brother, or lover or something in between) are living together in a perverse love triangle of desire and codependence.Paul Lazar, left, and Wendy vanden Heuvel in “Mud.”Julieta CervantesAkalaitis’s self-conscious direction tries to meet the text on its own terms: The hourlong performance of “Mud” is punctuated by abrupt transitions between each of its 17 scenes; while Fornés simply called for the actors to freeze in place, this production includes cheesy, slow-motion dances and synchronized pantomimes.The physical interactions have been cut, and instead a narrator (Sifiso Mabena) reads all of the stage directions. As a result, we get Fornés’s poetic descriptions — “The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun” — but also an unnecessary additional character who gives the story a level of removal. Instead of encountering the play as is, we get descriptions and explanations that serve as barriers, not windows, into the work.The production’s treatment of “Drowning” (1986), a work of just five pages, is more on par with Fornés’s pithy play about three freakish figures who discuss life and love. “Is this why we have come to live? To love like this? And hurt like this?” asks Pea (Gregory Purnhagen), one of three sickly looking men with face sores and unnaturally bloated bodies, in neutral tan-and-brown wardrobes.He’s talking about his love for a woman whose picture he discovers in a newspaper, an object previously unknown to him — along with things as commonplace as snow. Pea and his more knowledgeable companions, Roe (Peter Stewart) and Stephen (Tomas Cruz), walk languidly through the space, mirroring one another’s movements and singing the bizarre dialogue in mesmeric operatic tones.Here “Drowning” is scored to a new “pocket opera” by Philip Glass, performed by Michael A. Ferrara, the keyboardist and musical director, and the harpist Anna Bikales. It elicits a multitude of sensations in the brief 30-minute performance: A bold, steady rhythm unexpectedly stops and restarts like a game of Red Light, Green Light; a mounting crescendo spells drama and heartbreak even when the action onstage is static.Whereas in “Mud,” the music seems like an interruption overpowering the dialogue, the music, the dialogue and the movement in “Drowning” are all on the same plane. That play also uses the minimalist sets and dramatic lighting more wisely; both sets comprise just a single table and chairs, with tiles and wallpaper in similar retro brown-and-tan patterns, along with neon-yellow strip lights set along the back wall. It’s too much for Mae and Lloyd’s modern abode, but the off-putting color palettes and Gatorade-colored lights draw out the otherworldly qualities of Pea and company.Along with Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee, Fornés made stages weird for decades before she died in 2018, influencing those eminent playwrights and many more — even though her work isn’t as widely known today as that of her peers. Her characters live in weird corners of the imagination, where uninhabited desire and grim existential queries abound. Such spaces need no introduction or justification: It should feel like an honor to be a stranger in Fornés’s strange lands.Mud/DrowningThrough Oct. 9 at Mabou Mines, Manhattan; maboumines.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More