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      ‘… What the End Will Be’ Review: Learning to Let Go

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      The intergenerational comedy is a poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra.Kinship with our elders is a privilege not often afforded to queer people. How many sons have come out to gay fathers and grandfathers? Imagining the possibility of these generational bonds feels like a reparative gesture in “…What the End Will Be,” an astute and poignant reflection on sexuality, mortality and Black masculinity by the playwright Mansa Ra, which opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater.Did I mention it’s also a comedy?The play is set in a stylish living room in a posh Atlanta suburb, where Maxwell (Emerson Brooks) has taken in his ailing father Bartholomew (Keith Randolph Smith). Because Bartholomew has Stage 4 bone cancer, there’s only one way this can go, and he is already browsing for caskets online. But Maxwell, a careerist whose ambitions are a fortress against reality, is in deep denial. (“No dying,” he says to his father, laying the ground rules for their new living arrangement.)While Bartholomew is readying his goodbyes, Maxwell’s teenage son, Tony (Gerald Caesar), is figuring out who he wants to be. When Antoine, a femme and fabulous boy from school (Ryan Jamaal Swain), is caught sneaking out of Tony’s room, Tony reveals that he’s more than just a friend. “That’s your type?” Maxwell asks derisively, betraying a reflexive narrow-mindedness. (Tony had already confided in Charles, Maxwell’s more understanding husband, played by Randy Harrison.) But Bartholomew is pleased. “Bring it in, Champ!” he says, with a predictable aphorism about apples falling from trees.Then he grows wistful. “I wish I would’ve had somebody hug me when I came out of the closet,” he continues.Now, Chloe (Tiffany Villarin), a gracious in-home nurse, is Bartholomew’s most intimate source of comfort. The ghost of his dead partner (also played by Swain) haunts him like the pain he refuses to rate honestly on a scale from one to 10.Learning to let go — of personal hang-ups, social expectations and ultimately of life itself — is at the heart of “… What the End Will Be,” which is not shy on sentimentality. Directed by Margot Bordelon, the 90-minute production would not feel out of place on prime-time television, where straightforward setups deliver clear emotional payoffs with a side of laughs. But there’s gratifying nourishment in Ra’s recipe, a restorative fantasy as much as it is an unabashed tear-jerker.What if instead of being presumed absent, Black fathers were depicted as fallibly present? And rather than having his life taken away, a Black man were pictured in control over how he leaves the world? That all of the men in Ra’s play are gay fuels his confrontation with the assumptions and limitations heaped on them because they are Black.Assured and affecting performances from the cast succeed in tugging at heartstrings, especially Smith’s, whose frail ox ready for pasture is rueful but grounded, in a role that might easily turn maudlin. Swain is a total delight as the most self-actualized queen in the room, unwilling to dim his light for anyone still living in the dark. (“I’ve been offending people since I twirled out of the womb,” he says.)Bordelon’s staging for Roundabout Theater Company balances the play’s humor with its sobering central conceit. The slickly appointed interior, designed by Reid Thompson and covered with art that Bartholomew describes as Afrocentric, demonstrates Maxwell’s faith in the protective powers of material wealth. But money is no defense from human frailty.“… What the End Will Be” is less wide-ranging and conceptual than Ra’s previous work Off Broadway, “In the Southern Breeze,” and more playful and light-footed than “Too Heavy for Your Pocket,” also staged by Roundabout when he was known as Jiréh Breon Holder.In “… What the End Will be,” facing death really means reckoning with life — what makes it worth living despite its impermanence — and learning how to seize some measure of joy for yourself. It’s everything that is meant when we say that Black lives matter.… What the End Will BeThrough July 10 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘A Kid Like Rishi,’ Hazy Uncertainty Shrouds a Teen’s Killing

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      A cast of three recount the gripping drama of the death of a teenager by the Dutch police in 2012.No matter where you decide to sit, you won’t see everything in “A Kid Like Rishi,” Kees Roorda’s thrumming documentary play at the Cell Theater, and surely that is very much by design.The task looks straightforward enough, going in — nothing obvious like columns to obstruct a person’s view. The room is deeper than it is wide, and the set consists mainly of a long wooden table and a few microphones, with audience members choosing seats along each wall. Projected feeds from four video cameras show various angles of the space we’re in, which is not large. We would seem to have the area sufficiently surveilled.Yet from the start of this gripping, understated drama, which recounts the killing of a 17-year-old boy of Surinamese descent by the Dutch police in 2012, we can’t always get a clear perspective. An actor’s back is to us, or one of the performers is blocking our vantage on another, or the video is too indistinct to show what we’re looking for. Which, ordinarily, would be maddening.In Erwin Maas’s stark production for Origin Theater Company, it becomes instead an exercise in visceral understanding — because our interpretation of events in the world has everything to do with how clear our sightlines are and what’s blocking our view, literally or metaphorically. And the people who witnessed Rishi Chandrikasing’s shooting early one November morning on a train station platform in The Hague — or participated in the police pursuit of him, or passed legal judgment on it, or were left bereft by it — all saw and heard, or believed they saw and heard, very different things in the same lone teenager and the same abrupt execution.“The District Court in The Hague deems legally and convincingly proven that the defendant intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm resulting in the death of the victim,” a judge pronounces at the top of the show.The defendant is an unnamed police officer; the victim is Rishi. But this is an acquittal, not a conviction — because, the judge reasons, even lethal force can be justified, and the police “had to assume that the person in question was armed and dangerous.”The acting is for the most part restrained, wisely letting the words — of bystanders, of a police shooting instructor, of Rishi’s haunted mother — speak for themselves.Rory DuffyDid they have to, though? And how much do racist fears shape perceptions of innocuous events, injecting mortal peril where no danger at all had been? Those are the questions at the heart of this Dutch play, assembled from courtroom, interview and other transcripts, and performed by a cast of three (Sung Yun Cho, Atandwa Kani and Kaili Vernoff) in an English translation by Tom Johnston.The acting is for the most part restrained, wisely letting the words — of bystanders, of a police shooting instructor, of Rishi’s haunted mother — speak for themselves. Vernoff strays from this in one portrayal, telegraphing a journalist character’s odiousness, while Kani can’t quite slip into the rhythms of Rishi’s girlfriend. Otherwise, the performances are solid.And Guy de Lancey’s scenography is outstanding: each element of the set, video, lighting and projections shaping our perception of what is murky and uncertain and what is bright and sure.Bits of the dialogue are in Dutch, interspersed throughout the play: audio calls relaying tenuous information to police dispatch centers in the minutes before and after the shooting. (The smart sound design is by Fan Zhang, who also composed the production’s tension-filled underscore.) As the recordings play, we don’t see supertitles projected, just the occasional phrase — “Black man,” “Take this with a grain of salt,” “You be careful.”The full translations of the calls are printed in the program, but our comprehension of those exchanges during the performance is fragmentary, as is the dispatchers’ in what comes to seem like a precarious game of telephone. A nebulous report of a possible firearm, seen by no one, morphs for the police into an urgent, adrenaline-charged, presumed reality: that a threatening man in a white coat has a gun.Not a single grain of salt appears to have been consumed.A Kid Like RishiThrough June 19 at the Cell Theater, Manhattan; origintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      BAM’s Next Wave Festival Returns With an Ivo Van Hove Production

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      The American premiere of the brutal play “A Little Life,” a drag-infused Hamlet and an immersive celestial installation highlight the festival’s latest iteration.The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s artistic director, David Binder, who is programming the 13 shows for the Next Wave Festival, is mixing “incredible light” and darkness, he said.It is the first in-person edition of the festival since 2019 and it will run from Sept. 28 to Dec. 22. The highlight will be the U.S. premiere of the stage adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” (Oct. 20-29) — a coming-of-age tale about four young men that includes depictions of self-harm, domestic violence, child abuse and suicide.“There’s optimism and there’s things that speak to the challenging world we all live in,” Binder said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “So I think it relates to one piece of all of that mosaic.”Ivo van Hove’s production of Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize-winning novel, which is set to be presented in Dutch with English supertitles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, runs just over four hours and features a live video screen to show close-ups of agonizing moments, like a character burning his own arm — and pouring salt in the wound. (Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)“It’s an extraordinary production that challenges the audience,” said Binder, who saw the world premiere production in Amsterdam in 2018. “Much like the whole season.”Even though it’s long, he said, “I guarantee you it holds you every moment.”This is just the second Next Wave Festival that Binder, who started as BAM’s artistic director in 2018, has programmed, after the 2020 and 2021 events were canceled because of the pandemic. He told The New York Times in 2019 that his focus for the first event would “move it forward by adding in a whole new slew of artists,” and that emphasis continues this year, with 13 programs created in eight countries featuring dance, music and theater. Nine of the 13 artists and companies are performing at BAM for the first time.“That was our guiding principle,” he said this week, “to cover a lot of ground with lots of international new artists.”One of the returning artists is the German director Thomas Ostermeier, whose riotous production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will come to BAM’s Harvey Theater stage this fall (Oct. 27-Nov. 5). In Ostermeier’s staging, Ophelia and Gertrude are played by the same actor — as are many of the other characters; the play features just six performers. (The Guardian called the production of it in Berlin, which mixed pop music and drag shows with duels, “kookily funny and coolly self-aware.”)Next up at the Harvey will be the U.S. premiere of the Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues’s carnivalesque dance piece “Encantado,” whose title refers to spirits of healing — the encantados — and which features 100 colored blankets that transform the stage (Nov. 8-9). Meanwhile, at the Howard Gilman Opera House, another dance piece, the Greek director-choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou’s dreamlike concoction “Transverse Orientation,” pairing experimental, painterly choreography with music by Vivaldi, will have its New York premiere, Nov. 7-11.Then the main stage shifts to opera with the U.S. premiere of Ong Keng Sen’s “Trojan Woman,” a queer Korean operatic take on the Greek tragedy (Nov. 18-19). The production, performed in Korean with English subtitles, fuses the traditional Korean musical storytelling form of pansori with K-pop music. (The “Parasite” composer Jung Jae-il composed the music in collaboration with the renowned Korean pansori master Ahn Sook-sun.)Binder also programmed work from within the United States, including an orchestral hip-hop performance by the Los Angeles producer and rapper Flying Lotus, the composer and D.J. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Wordless Music Orchestra that is being billed as a rendition of their Hollywood Bowl performance in Los Angeles this summer (Oct. 6-7).The festival is set to wrap up with an immersive installation by the Brooklyn-based interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider, whose world premiere of “N O W I S W H E N W E A R E (the stars)” at BAM Fisher may be the closest a New Yorker will come to clear-sky stargazing (Nov. 29- Dec. 22). Visitors will enter a completely dark space and be guided by an unseen voice as 5,000 programmed points of light, which the artist has said are inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s “infinity” mirror room, respond to everyone individually.The season also features the American premiere of the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman’s wordless production of “300 el x 50 el x 30 el” (Sept. 28-Oct. 1), which follows the inhabitants of a small village fearful of an impending disaster. (The title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark.) The Argentine choreographer Constanza Macras will showcase “Open for Everything,” which sheds light on contemporary Romany people, at the Harvey (Oct. 5-8). The Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s staged musical work “Everything Rises,” which seeks to “replace abstract slogans and inert diversity statements with lived experience and direct engagement,” will be at BAM Fisher (Oct. 12-15). More

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      This High School Musical Teaches Confidence, Power and Teamwork

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      Step dance helps students at Brooklyn Transition Center focus and release excess energy — and it plays a starring role in their musical, “In the Stuy.”“Check one, two, three,” two characters sing into hand-held microphones, grooving in gold-rimmed sunglasses. “This is Benny on the dispatch, yo.”Cut to eight dancers in front of a Monsey Trails bus who start stepping: stomping, clapping, slapping their thighs, doused in rhythm.This scene arrives toward the beginning of “In the Stuy,” a Bed-Stuy adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “In the Heights” — created, performed and filmed by the students and staff of Brooklyn Transition Center, a special education high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant.Each year for a decade, the center’s arts teachers have put on a musical, and in this year’s — filmed because of the coronavirus pandemic — step has a starring role. “In the Stuy” will be screened on June 3 (for friends and family) and June 4 (for the public).Shakiera Daniel, center, a dance teacher and instructional coach, with students.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesThere has been a step club for five years at Brooklyn Transition Center, which serves students ages 14 to 21. Step, the tradition of percussive movement that gained popularity in Black fraternities and sororities, helps the students at the Center who benefit from highly specialized instruction — like those on the autism spectrum or with emotional and behavioral issues — release excess energy, focus better in class, learn a skill to be proud of and socialize.Shakiera Daniel, a dance teacher and instructional coach, leads the step club, which she started in 2017. “In addition to just dancing, it’s a lot of life lessons that come out of it,” Daniel said recently in a courtyard of the school. “And just helping them grow into young adults.”The step team tends to attract students with behavioral issues, Daniel, 31, said, and their home room teachers will often reach out to her, asking for her support.“They know that I’ll go and talk to the kids,” she said, and “what I say will hold some weight because again, they really like dance, they like step, they like socializing with the kids that they’re with. They like performing.”Daniel “goes hard” with recruitment in September, she said, then holds three-part auditions in October. This year 60 students showed up to try out, compared with just a handful when she began.Annette Natal, an assistant choreographer, running through moves with the students.Nathan Bajar for The New York Times“If they can hold a steady beat, then that’s all I need,” Daniel said “A lot of the students that I have never have stepped in their lives, or even heard of it. And then they’ll try it with me, and I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, you’re amazing.’”In the “Benny’s Dispatch” scene of “In the Stuy,” three women start stepping, clapping and slapping in mesmerizing synchronization. Dressed in black, their T-shirts read “#DanceSavesLives,” “#LoveWins” and “#TakeAKnee.”It was Daniel who came up with the twist for the show’s title. “‘In the Heights,’ it was not sitting well with me,” she said. “We need to gear it toward where our students live and the area that they see, that they’ve been exposed to.”Kate Fenton, a drama teacher who directed the musical, used the same artistic license to thread in story lines about inflation and gentrification. The show addresses the challenges facing Bed-Stuy, a historically Black neighborhood, but also celebrates the culture it’s steeped in.In one scene, Daniel’s step team dances to Iggy Azalea’s “Work” inside a hair salon — reminiscent of the “No Me Diga” scene in “In the Heights.” When possible, Fenton used songs students already knew and incorporated them into the story.Tahir Tate, also known as Rafiq, has a lead role in “In the Stuy.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesAnd she also incorporated neighborhood spots familiar to the students. The hair salon scene was shot at Da Shop barbershop around the corner from the school. Next door to Da Shop is Genao, a Dominican restaurant with a luxe lounge, where a step routine was shot, this one evoking the club scene of “In the Heights.” Set to Panjabi MC’s “Beware,” the number has a Bollywood flair, and dancers sport vibrant scarves knotted around their waists.Desiree Wilkie, 16, a student who lives in the neighborhood, often goes to Genao with her mother. Wilkie, who started stepping with Daniel this year, said she wanted to try it because so many in her family grew up stepping.“Since we all got siblings, little ones,” she said, she wants to show them how the students express themselves through step, so the kids can “see how high school feels.”The opening routine, to the title song from “In the Heights,” was filmed on Ellery Street, right outside the school. In that number, Abigail Bing, 19, dances front and center, performing an intricate step sequence with flow.Asahiah Hudson and Desiree Wilkie. Hudson said that for him, step is about confidence.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesBing joined the step team this year, and participated in the musical for the first time. She said that since she was little she has wanted to be an actor, dancer and stepper. “I always wanted to become one of them,” she said. “That’s my biggest dream now.”Also in that number is Asahiah Hudson, 21, who has been stepping since middle school. At Brooklyn Transition Center, he said he had found friends through dance and mentors in Daniel and her assistant choreographers, Annette Natal and Mikyaa Haynes.“Step means to me, it means confident and be powerful and be stronger as a team,” Hudson said. “When I work with Ms. Daniel and the team I feel happy and powerful.”Daniel has been stepping since she was in seventh grade in Hershey, Pa. While choreographing the musical, she said, she would get home from work to Corona, Queens, and stand in front of a big mirror, playing songs and trying out new footwork.Daniel with her step students and assistants.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesStep practice, which happens during school hours, was increased to two days a week in preparation for “In the Stuy.” Step, Daniel said, is a great incentive for students to stay focused and teaches them how to vocalize their feelings.For Dante Neville, 16, who started stepping with Daniel last year, step is a way to let out extra energy. When he returns to class after a rehearsal, he said, his concentration is improved.“When I’m in class,” he said, “I don’t pay attention and I feel like if I do something that makes me focus, I’ll feel much happier.”That sentiment rings true for many members of the Brooklyn Transition Center’s step team. Onstage at rehearsal, they light up after a practice well done, hugs and high fives ringing through the auditorium. Step, as Hudson put it, means confidence.“This place would be a lot more hectic had step not been a thing,” Daniel said of the center. “That feels good to say.” More

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      ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Sends Up America. Now It’s Coming to Broadway.

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      Rachel Chavkin will direct Larissa FastHorse’s satire, which takes aim at American mythology, next spring at the Helen Hayes Theater.“The Thanksgiving Play,” Larissa FastHorse’s satirical sendup about an elementary school drama teacher attempting to organize a culturally sensitive holiday pageant, is coming to Broadway next spring.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that owns the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway, said it would present the play there in a production directed by Rachel Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown.” The theater did not announce dates or casting information.“The Thanksgiving Play” was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, and has been widely produced around the country. A starry version, featuring Bobby Cannavale, Keanu Reeves, Heidi Schreck and Alia Shawkat, was streamed online last year by the producer Jeffrey Richards’s pandemic-era online play series.FastHorse is a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation of South Dakota, and Second Stage said she would be the first female Native American playwright produced on Broadway. Last year she won a so-called genius grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.“The Thanksgiving Play” will follow a production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy” on the Hayes stage. That production, directed by Austin Pendleton, is scheduled to begin performances this fall.Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in Bess Wohl’s “Camp Siegfried” at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan/ArenaPALSecond Stage also said Thursday that at its Off Broadway theater it would present “Camp Siegfried,” a play by Bess Wohl set at a German American summer camp where adolescents flirt not only with one another, but also with fascism. The fall production will be directed by David Cromer; the play had a previous run at the Old Vic in London last fall. More

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      ‘Almost Famous,’ Now a Musical, Will Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The stage adaptation, with book and lyrics by Cameron Crowe and music and lyrics by Tom Kitt, will begin previews Sept. 13.“Almost Famous,” Cameron Crowe’s rock ’n’ roll coming-of-age story, will make its pandemic-delayed trip to Broadway this fall.A musical adaptation of the beloved 2000 film, the show had an initial run in San Diego in 2019, and its creative team then continued to work on the project while theaters were shut down by the coronavirus pandemic and as Broadway began to rebound.The musical is now scheduled to begin previews on Sept. 13 and to open Oct. 11 at an unspecified Shubert theater. It is the 11th show to announce performance dates for the new Broadway season, and at least two dozen more are circling.“Almost Famous” is Crowe’s semi-autobiographical story, set in 1973, about a teenage music journalist and his relationships with members of the band he is chronicling as well as the young women who follow it. Crowe wrote and directed the film, and won an Oscar for the screenplay; he has written the book and is a co-author of the lyrics for the musical.In an interview, Crowe described himself as “exuberant” about the Broadway transfer, saying, “I’m ready to share it with people.”“Every time I see the play I go back to being 15 years old,” he added.Crowe said he grew up seeing Shakespeare plays at the Old Globe in San Diego, where the musical began its life, and that he has found working in theater more “personal and soulful” than working in the film industry. And, he said, “something about telling a story about loving music draws music-loving people.”The Old Globe production garnered strong reviews, particularly from the critic Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times, who called it “an unqualified winner.”The score is mostly original, with music by Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) who collaborated on the lyrics with Crowe; the musical also features a number of pop songs, including Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Joni Mitchell’s “River.”The show is being directed by Jeremy Herrin (“Wolf Hall”) and choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby.The lead producers are Lia Vollack, a former Sony executive who is also the lead producer of “MJ,” the Michael Jackson musical, and the Michael Cassel Group, an Australian production company that has become increasingly active on Broadway. The show is being capitalized for up to $18 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The role of the young journalist, named William Miller, will be played by Casey Likes, who also played the role at the Old Globe in San Diego; this will be his Broadway debut. (“He still looks young,” Crowe promised.)Chris Wood, best known for CW television shows including “Supergirl” and “The Vampire Diaries,” will make his Broadway debut as the band’s lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Billy Crudup in the film). Anika Larsen (“Beautiful”) will take on the role of the protagonist’s mother, Elaine (played by Frances McDormand in the movie), and Solea Pfeiffer (“Hamilton”) will portray Penny Lane, Kate Hudson’s character in the film. The cast will also include Drew Gehling (“Waitress”) as the band’s lead singer, Jeff Bebe. More

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      Édouard Louis, Miserable in the Spotlight

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      The French writer played himself onstage and hated the experience, according to a new work he developed with the Swiss director Milo Rau. This time around, there’s an actor in the role.PARIS — Édouard Louis isn’t happy right now. That is one of the takeaways from “The Interrogation,” a new play he was set to star in, then canceled, then rewrote for another actor, working with the Swiss director Milo Rau. In May, “The Interrogation,” which was co-produced by the Belgian playhouse NTGent and had its world premiere in Amsterdam, made its way to the Théâtre de la Colline in Paris — and perhaps fittingly, left more questions than answers in its wake.It is a deeply meta addition to what I guess we could now call the Édouard Louis theatrical universe. The recent onslaught of French and international productions based on his work — with star directors including Thomas Ostermeier and Ivo van Hove — has been curious to watch, because Louis doesn’t write primarily for the stage. Most of his books, including “The End of Eddy,” which delved into his difficult childhood as a closeted gay child in a homophobic, violent, working-class environment, have been billed as memoirs or autobiographical novels.For a little while, it seemed as though Louis had happily rekindled an early passion through the medium, since theater classes were his escape as a teenager. Louis has even played himself onstage in Ostermeier’s version of “Who Killed My Father,” a monologue commissioned and originally performed by the French actor and director Stanislas Nordey.Yet if Rau’s “The Interrogation” is to be believed, Louis hated that experience. In this production, he appears only through video and in voice-overs. Onstage, he is played by the Belgian actor Arne De Tremerie. “Something didn’t feel right” about his stage debut, we learn via De Tremerie; Louis also calls the life of an actor “exhausting” and “not the dream life I had hoped for.” It’s too bad, then, that while “The Interrogation” was on in Paris, Louis was in New York to perform “Who Killed My Father” at St. Ann’s Warehouse (through June 5).There is a mild absurdity to this situation, which goes unacknowledged in Rau’s self-serious production. It starts with a letter, read in voice-over, in which Louis apologizes to Rau and tells him he doesn’t want to commit to being onstage again. “The Interrogation,” which was originally supposed to premiere in May 2021, was hastily canceled as a result. “Once again, I failed at being happy,” Louis laments.Enter De Tremerie, who took over so the production could go forward. With his blond hair and slight build, he can easily pass for Louis, and offers a heightened, more theatrical version. Where Louis, an inexperienced actor, aimed for naturalness onstage, De Tremerie has homed in on some of his quirks: the way he carries himself with his head slightly forward, the nervous flutter of his lips.De Tremerie’s performance is commendable, yet “The Interrogation” doesn’t give him enough space to exist separately from Louis. In fact, Louis keeps appearing on a screen, in a hooded sweater identical to De Tremerie’s. At several points, De Tremerie looks up at Louis, or playfully imitates him; Louis, mostly shot in close-up, looks down at the stage. Fiction meets reality, a common trope in Rau’s stage work, but here, neither appears to enrich the other.De Tremerie alone onstage in “The Interrogation.” Tuong-Vi Nguyen“The Interrogation” could have made much more of its central paradox. At its heart, it is about a literary star who unsuccessfully sought meaning in success, since he had pictured it as his “vengeance.” (“Now I exist,” De Tremerie says as Louis, after retracing his rise to the top.) Yet as the text zooms in on the backlash against Louis’s work, and the demands that come with fame, it becomes clear that the author’s dissatisfaction extends beyond acting.At the same time, “The Interrogation” feeds the frenzy around Louis, whose story has become bigger than himself, at once a lightning rod and part of French folklore. The show pores over episodes of his life that he has already recounted elsewhere without much new insight, from the bullying he endured as a child to his life-changing encounter with the writer Didier Éribon, who became a mentor. “I feel like I’ve been robbed of my freedom,” De Tremerie says onstage of Louis’s situation, before addressing the audience directly: “I am not your little clown.”But he doesn’t need to offer himself up for consumption so exhaustively. Just last year, Louis published two books that joined the flurry of stage productions. A TV adaptation of “The End of Eddy,” by the Oscar-winning screenwriter James Ivory, is also in the works, Louis said recently on Instagram. Near the end of “The Interrogation,” De Tremerie says with a sigh: “No more stories. No more revenge. Just life.” Perhaps Louis should take his own advice, at least for a time.On a much smaller stage in Paris, another real-life figure who has unwittingly become a symbol found a striking home. “Free Will” (“Libre Arbitre”), a new play co-written by Léa Girardet and Julie Bertin (who also directed), delves into the life of Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist who has been repeatedly barred from competition since 2009 because of elevated testosterone levels.Girardet had already scored a hit with a soccer-inspired one-woman show, “The Syndrome of the Bench,” and “Free Will” is equally lively and punchy, though darker. If you have lost track of the saga around Semenya, an intersex woman who was asked by World Athletics, the sport’s governing body, to take medication to suppress her natural hormones, this play is a sobering reminder.Juliette Speck as Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist, in “Free Will,” directed by Julie Bertin at the Théâtre Dunois. Simon GosselinJuliette Speck is quietly excellent when she portrays Semenya, and all four cast members perform multiple roles. They depict the sex verification tests Semenya had to undertake, imagine meetings between high-ranking members of World Athletics and recreate the 2019 case Semenya brought to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, using verbatim excerpts from the trial. At the end of the play, the court’s ruling — that the restrictions applied to Semenya were discriminatory, but a “reasonable” way to preserve the integrity of women’s sport — is, quite simply, heartbreaking.Bertin and Girardet do a superb job of explaining the complex issues and vocabulary involved, with more playful scenes interspersed. In one, the cast pretends to call World Athletics to suggest a new category for competitions: “reassuring women,” whose dainty running style (in heels, complete with a demonstration) would be more in keeping with the expectations of femininity placed on athletes.“Free Will” had its Paris premiere at the Théâtre Dunois, which caters to young people, but older adults have much to learn from it, too. Unlike Louis, Semenya isn’t in the spotlight enough for theater audiences to know the entirety of her journey — but her story deserves to be told.The Interrogation. Directed by Milo Rau. Théâtre de la Colline.Libre Arbitre. Directed by Julie Bertin. Théâtre Dunois. Further performances at the Théâtre 13 through June 4 and at the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe next season. More

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      ‘Dreaming Zenzile’ Review: A Tribute to Mama Africa

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      The musical is Somi Kakoma’s thank-you note, written across generations, to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.If you want to see a performer in full command of her instrument and her powers, take the F train to Second Avenue and walk the few blocks to New York Theater Workshop to savor Somi Kakoma in “Dreaming Zenzile,” her tribute to the South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba, born Zenzile Miriam Makeba.Makeba, a star from the 1960s through her death in 2008, pioneered the form broadly known as world music. Singing in Xhosa, Swahili, Sotho, Zulu and English, Makeba popularized African songwriting among American and European audiences, earning the nickname Mama Africa. Throughout her life, she lent her voice to social justice causes, particularly that of Black South Africans living under apartheid. Onstage, at New York Theater Workshop, in collaboration with the National Black Theater, Kakoma, in a marigold dress, with a voice like a sunrise, plays her through 76 years of her eventful life.Makeba was a vocal shapeshifter who could triumph in practically any genre — folk, jazz, American songbook, Afropop. Vocally, Kakoma has that chameleonlike quality, too, varying her big, bright voice with husky breaths, vivid ululation and the Xhosa clicks for which Makeba was famous. Her singing seems as effortless as it is varied, as easy as it is virtuosic. “Dreaming Zenzile,” directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz with music direction by Hervé Samb, is best understood and enjoyed as Kakoma’s gift of love and dignity, across generations, from one artist to another.The set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as a work of theater, “Dreaming Zenzile” struggles among the competing forms of recital, dream play, memory play and biography. The bare set, by Riccardo Hernández, suggests a concert stage, illuminated by Yi Zhao’s vibrant lights and backed, less helpfully by Hannah Wasileski’s banal projections of waves, flowers and rainbow abstractions. Is this an auditorium or some astral way station? Is it the afterlife? Lacking the style and thematic force that defines Blain-Cruz’s best work, the show feels less like a narrative than a tone poem, which can make time hang heavy in the first half; it takes an hour just to bring young Miriam to her professional debut.Amplified by a four-person chorus (Aaron Marcellus, Naledi Masilo, Phumzile Sojola and Phindi Wilson) and a four-person band, the music feels electric, often joyful, a sharp shock of pleasure that Marjani Forté-Saunders’s supple, elegant choreography enhances. But the interplay between book passages and Makeba’s songs, which are not subtitled, rarely feels essential. Why these songs, in these moments? By contrast, Kakoma’s emotion-heavy, jazz-inflected songs are too on the button. Really, they’re all button. Those who arrive without a working chronology may feel lost.Though it touches briefly on some central themes — exile, responsibility — and limns, however elliptically, most of the major life events of its subject, “Dreaming Zenzile” withholds what most of us desire from a work of this kind: a greater understanding of how a performer’s life shapes and impacts her art, the relationship between experience and oeuvre. This desire isn’t necessarily fair or sensible. Sometimes that relationship doesn’t exist. Sometimes it is too oblique to parse. But because “Dreaming Zenzile” too often favors symbol and abstraction, the audience is denied this connection.Only in its closing moments, which occur shortly before Makeba’s death, does the show achieve a kind of cohesion and vigor. Throughout, Makeba has taken up the burden of activism with sturdiness and poise, freeing her voice in the hope that others might be made free. Finally, she announces the cost.“Do you know what it is to be the first?” she says, choking on the words. “Do you know the weight of that? The loneliness?”To ask one woman to stand in for an entire continent was always too great a burden. Mama Africa? It was impossible. That Makeba bore it for so long, and with such grace, is a wonder and a gift. At its best, “Dreaming Zenzile” is a thank-you note, written with deep and abiding gratitude.Dreaming ZenzileThrough June 26 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More