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      New Musical ‘Bhangin’ It’ Explores Identity Through Bhangra

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      “Bhangin’ It” explores complex identity issues through an intensely competitive North American dance scene.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.SAN DIEGO — Rehana Lew Mirza stumbled upon the world of collegiate bhangra dancing. An aspiring screenwriter working as an office manager, she had finally fallen in with a group of South Asian artists. She tagged along with a friend to Bhangra Blowout, an annual competition in Washington, where teams are judged for the skill with which they dance in the exuberant Punjabi folk style.Mirza became a superfan. She attended seven or eight competitions. She wrote a treatment for a bhangra-themed film. She became a playwright, met another playwright, and then, when the two of them married, they performed a bhangra dance at their wedding.So in 2014, when she and her husband, Mike Lew, were exploring a possible collaboration with a musical theater composer, she dug out that unproduced film script. Now the resulting show, called “Bhangin’ It: A Bangin’ New Musical,” is having a first production here at La Jolla Playhouse, a highly regarded regional theater with a long history of birthing Broadway-bound work.“There are such high stakes at the competitions, but then it’s also a very joyous dance form, and I loved that juxtaposition,” Mirza said. “So when we were talking about what to work on, I was like, ‘How about a bhangra dance musical?’”Ari Afsar, center left, and Jaya Joshi, center right, with cast members during rehearsals. Afsar plays a college student who starts her own bhangra group after she’s kicked off the school’s team.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesIn an era when many theater makers are concerned about whose stories are being told, and by whom, “Bhangin’ It” seeks to depict not just an underrepresented demographic group (it does that, too) but also people whose identities are complicated, evolving or uncertain. The protagonist, an undergraduate named Mary Darshini Clarke, is the daughter of an Indian mother and a white father, and is struggling to figure out how she fits in.The show’s story is this: Mary, a student at the fictional East Lansing University in Michigan, is thrown off the school’s bhangra team because her dance vocabulary is not traditional enough. So she starts her own team — a heterodox group with a diverse range of students and movement styles. You can guess what happens next: The two teams face off against each other, and if I told you any more, it would spoil the show.Bhangra, a dance form originally associated with harvest festivals in India, is characterized by energetic kicks and syncopated drumming. If you can’t quite grasp it, no worries — neither can some of the members of Mary’s team; in one of the musical’s big production numbers, a restaurateur puts the students to work making curry, hoping the fluidity of movement associated with mixing ingredients and washing dishes will transfer to the dance floor.Afsar, center, with Vinithra Raj, foreground left, and Bilaal Avaz, foreground right. “This show is so connected to who I am — getting into the specificity of what does it mean to be biracial and mixed race,” Afsar said.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesThe show has echoes of “Bring It On,” but stands out with its focus on Asian Americans.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesIn sync: Afsar and Avaz during one of the many dance routines.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesDuring a rehearsal last month, in a giant mirrored studio with doors kept open as a Covid safety measure, the barefoot cast — wearing not only blue surgical masks but also wristbands to show they had tested negative for the coronavirus — worked through the movement, step by step, aiming for a visual crispness. “You guys are a little soft,” a choreographer said. “Go sharper.” The creative team was still changing the script — a new key here, a new lyric there — and there were occasional traffic jams, as groups of dancers, in yoga pants and T-shirts, tried to master a sea of stage crossings without colliding.The musical has echoes of many that came before it — “Bring It On,” set in the world of high school cheerleading competitions, comes to mind — but stands out with its focus on Asian Americans, and, in particular, those whose families come from South Asia.Avaz, center, with other cast members. The choreography includes not only bhangra, but also Bollywood, hip-hop and ballet.Tara Pixley for The New York TimesAsians and Asian Americans have been underrepresented onstage, and that has been particularly true in musical theater. The number of musicals about South Asians is small: There was “Bombay Dreams,” which opened on Broadway in 2004 and “Monsoon Wedding,” which was staged at Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2017, and there is a forthcoming project, “Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical,” which is an adaptation of a popular Bollywood movie that is to have a production starting in September at the Old Globe Theater, also in San Diego, before transferring to Broadway.“Bhangin’ It” is distinguished by being set entirely in the United States, and by its focus on a biracial protagonist. That distinction is personal for many of those working on the project: Mirza, whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father was born in India and then relocated to Pakistan after partition; the director, Stafford Arima, who is a Canadian of Japanese and Chinese heritage; and the lead actress, Ari Afsar, whose father is from Bangladesh and whose mother is third-generation German American.“This show is so connected to who I am — getting into the specificity of what does it mean to be biracial and mixed race,” Afsar, who previously played Eliza in the Chicago production of “Hamilton,” said one afternoon during a break from rehearsals. She had been working on a dorm room scene in which her character is grappling with her dual identity; at the same time, Afsar was figuring out how not to bang her head getting in and out of a bunk bed. “To have the mix of two very different cultures in a childhood, and how does that impact your psyche and your ethos and how you interact,” she said, “it’s really visceral to the idea of belongingness, or the lack of belongingness.”The show’s director, Stafford Arima, left, with the choreographer Rujuta Vaidya during a rehearsal.Tara Pixley for The New York Times“Bhangin’ It” has been a long-gestating project, delayed, like so many other theater works, by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2013, Mirza and Lew met a songwriter, Sam Willmott, when the three were matched up by the organizers of an event called the 24 Hour Musicals, at which artists write a show in a single day. They hit it off, and as they talked about full-fledged projects they might later work on together, Willmott mentioned his love for Golden Age musicals, prompting Mirza to bring up her shelved bhangra screenplay.They continued collaborating on “Bhangin’ It,” often at La Jolla, where Mirza and Lew were working on a trilogy of plays about the aftermath of colonialism when the theater offered them the use of a rehearsal room to try out their new musical. Four workshops later, they are finally onstage, now with the backing of two commercial producers, Mara Isaacs and Tom Kirdahy, who are among the lead producers of “Hadestown.” The musical will have a second regional theater production starting late this year at the Huntington Theater in Boston before a likely run in New York.The creative team has expanded to reflect the show’s ambitions. Arima, the musical’s director, joined just last fall; he is the artistic director of Theater Calgary, and in 2015 he directed the Broadway production of “Allegiance,” a musical about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The music team includes Deep Singh, a performer of Indian classical music, while the dance team includes Rujuta Vaidya, who specializes in Bollywood-style dance but has also judged bhangra competitions, as well as Lisa Shriver, who brings Broadway to the mix, and Anushka Pushpala, a bhangra specialist who once competed for University of California, San Diego and now teaches at Bhangra Empire in the San Francisco Bay Area.Lew, the author of “Teenage Dick,” a contemporary riff on “Richard III” that is being staged around the country after a successful Off Broadway run, said part of the goal in building a diverse creative team and cast was that no one artist would have to be the “sole avatar” of representation. Mirza, as the member of the writing team with South Asian heritage, often bore that burden.“The show is beyond the idea that representation matters — it’s to the point of: You belong,’” said Afsar, above left, with Contreras.Tara Pixley for The New York Times“What’s happened before is that writers of color were expected to have two jobs — you’re the writer of the show, but then you’re also the cultural ambassador,” Mirza said. “This show is meant to show the large breadth of experience within South Asian American culture, and the large breadth of experience within college lifestyle. So how do you include as many different voices as possible in the room, so you can actually show where the dissonance and where the friction comes in, because that’s what’s of interest to me.”The friction in the musical is over how much traditional practice should bend in a diverse society. “The question is, ‘Is it all tradition, or is fusion OK?’” Arima said. “This piece is not just about collegiate bhangra — that is the vessel for this story of understanding tradition versus modernity.”The diversity gives the show richly complex music and dance — the instrumentation includes a rhythm section, strings and keys, as well as harmonium, bansuri flute, sitar, tanpura, tumbi, tabla, dhol, daf and ankle bells.“Some of the initial numbers were thinking about tropes of Western musical theater and how to make that through a lens of a South Asian American college student,” Lew said. “It was taking two strong reference points, from South Asian culture and American musical theater, and intersecting them. The palette is wide.”The choreography includes not only bhangra, but also kathak, a classical Indian dance form, as well as Bollywood, hip-hop, jazz and ballet.“It’s a great story to tell right this minute, with the intersectionality: I am not one thing, I am multiple things,” said Christopher Ashley, the La Jolla Playhouse’s artistic director, who frequently works on Broadway. “And that intersectionality makes for a really interesting dance musical.”Ashley said the production had benefited from pandemic restrictions by opening the doors to online auditions, which in turn made it easier for the show to look beyond New York and Los Angeles as it searched for young performers, many of South Asian ancestry, who, Ashley said, “were not going to be all the people you always see on Broadway.” Among those in the cast is a member of the U.C. San Diego bhangra team (Da Real Punjabiz).“The show is beyond the idea that representation matters — it’s to the point of: You belong,” Afsar said. “Growing up, we always feel like others need to validate us in order to belong. I hope that this show helps young people realize that belongingness is actually within ourselves, and that this mixed-race college student bhangra kid is able to teach everyone that message.”Audio produced by More

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      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      in Theater

      For Female Directors, a Generational Shift

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      In Germany, a country with few theater leaders who aren’t men, professional success has often meant becoming one of the guys. Now, a new group of women are developing their own way. dFRANKFURT — Of the 24 new productions expected on Schauspiel Frankfurt’s three stages this season, two-thirds will be directed by women. This is an astonishing statistic in Germany, where gender inequality is still pronounced across the vast theater landscape. Despite advances in recent decades, women run only a small fraction of the 142 publicly owned playhouses, and, according to the latest available statistics, in 2016 only 20 percent of theater directors were female.Two current productions at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the municipal theater company, show how the theatrical ground here has shifted over a generation to allow more confident explorations of female self-expression. Both plays lie far outside the standard repertoire, which is consistent with a general trend in German theater to break out of the narrow canon of acknowledged masterpieces. But only one seems to provide a uniquely female perspective on the work in question.Claudia Bauer, born in 1966, is one of German theater’s most acclaimed and prolific directors. A fixture on stages throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the past quarter-century, she enjoys a certain seniority among Germany’s female theatermakers. But both formally and thematically, her productions often feel very similar to those of her male colleagues. Like them, she has spent much of her career sifting through the (mostly male) theatrical canon: Some of her most acclaimed recent productions have been based on plays by Brecht, Molière and Tennessee Williams.At Schauspiel Frankfurt, Bauer has turned her attention to Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise,” adapted for the stage in a surprisingly faithful version by the writing team PeterLicht and SE Struck.In a memorable sequence from Buñuel’s surreal Oscar-winning movie, a band of affluent Parisians, trying in vain to eat a meal together, inexplicably find themselves dining onstage at a theater. That scene takes on a heightened degree of absurdity when it is recreated in Bauer’s antic production. The audience, of course, has been there all along. Getting the actors onstage to acknowledge the spectators’ presence could come off as an all too obvious gag, but here it’s a subversive joke that suggests a sort of mutual recognition between the out-of-touch elites portrayed onstage and the affluent theatergoers of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial center.It is one of the inspired moments when Bauer finds clever ways to translate Buñuel’s mischievous provocations to the stage. Her production eschews the film’s ironic detachment and pretense of normalcy in favor of something far more energetic and flamboyant. With a gypsy swing soundtrack and live video projections by Jan Isaak Voges that roam Andreas Auerbach’s set — an upscale residence inside a giant white container — the production feels halfway between a sitcom and a revue.Aided by a nimble eight-person cast that forms a tight unit, Bauer turns the digressive and episodic film into a gleefully absurd carnival where farce coexists with horror.Like Buñuel’s actors, Bauer’s maintain their composure in the face of increasingly perplexing circumstances. But they also preen and pose with evident relish, performing as much for one another as for the audience. “Discreet Charm” was a hit here when it opened this month, and some local critics wondered whether it might be a contender for next year’s edition of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best German-language theater, to which Bauer has been invited four times. The festival recently instituted a quota to help promote the work of female directors: At least half of the 10 shows chosen must be female-led. However, the past few years have seen the dawning of a new generation of bold and self-confident female theatermakers, and I doubt that Theatertreffen’s quota, intended as a corrective, will be necessary much longer.“I and I,” written by Else Lasker-Schüler some 80 years ago and directed by Christina Tscharyiski, also at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.Robert SchittkoMany of the emerging female directors in Germany seem more committed to work that explicitly engages with feminist and post-feminist topics than directors of Bauer’s generation, who were pioneers in a male-dominated landscape where professional success often meant becoming one of the guys. Along with addressing issues of women’s representation, history and psychology, some of these younger directors — including artists from all over Europe, as well as the United States and Israel — are creating exciting stage aesthetics to address those themes.On Schauspiel Frankfurt’s smaller stage, the Kammerspiele, the Austrian-Bulgarian director Christina Tscharyiski, 33, has bravely taken a stab at one of the strangest, most obscure and most difficult-to-perform German plays of the 20th century: “I and I” (“Ichundich”) by Else Lasker-Schüler.That German-Jewish Expressionist poet and artist, who fled the Nazis in 1933, called her sprawling work, in six acts and an epilogue, a “hell play.” Composed in 1940 and 1941, “I and I” is an infernal romp that features characters from Goethe’s “Faust” and real-life personalities, including Lasker-Schüler herself and much of the Nazi high command. The unlikely group meets up in a version of hell somewhere in Jerusalem, which is where the author lived in unhappy exile until her death in 1945.The play was long ignored as an unperformable oddity: It made it to the stage for the first time only in 1979. In the barely four decades since, productions have been exceedingly rare. Tscharyiski’s take on “I and I,” stylishly designed by Verena Dengler and Dominique Wiesbauer, resembles a kind of Dadaesque haunted house where characters in Hasidic robes, medieval garb and Nazi uniforms wander a stage strewn with ash.Unfortunately, the production’s charms are largely visual, and the shortened performing version of the text fails to cohere in a compelling thematic, narrative or poetic way. Despite inspired performances by Friederike Ott as the poet, Lasker-Schüler’s alter ego, and Florian Mania and Tanja Merlin Graf as a pair of rival Mephistos, the demon who bargains for Faust’s soul, the production seems both overstuffed and underdeveloped, and much longer than its 75 minutes. Yet despite the production’s limitations, it feels momentous that this complex work is being reconsidered 80 years after it was written. And it’s heartening to know that a director as prodigiously talented as Tscharyiski can be enlisted to aid in our rediscovery of a key 20th-century artist whose theater works are too little known.Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie. Directed by Claudia Bauer. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through May 1.Ichundich. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Schauspiel Frankfurt, through April 17. More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘Little Girl Blue’ Revisits Nina Simone in Her Prime

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      Laiona Michelle’s tribute show, now at New World Stages, is more an impressionistic portrait for those familiar with the singer’s life and career.Musicals often rely on familiar patterns — a patter song here, an “I want” number there — and biographical musicals might well be the most predictable of all. The songs are mixed with enough back story to make the audience feel as if they haven’t just paid a lot of money to watch a cover act, and there is traditionally a juicy, awards-baiting tour de force for the lead performer.And so it has gone, successfully so in the case of such hits as “The Boy From Oz” (Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen), “Beautiful” (Jessie Mueller as Carole King) and “Tina” (Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner).Laiona Michelle’s tribute to Nina Simone, “Little Girl Blue,” which recently opened at New World Stages, fits the general format, with some interesting, if not always successfully implemented, idiosyncratic touches. The show’s most distinctive characteristic is its attempt to eschew linear storytelling and its refusal to supply the expected touchstones. This approach befits Simone, who rarely followed predetermined paths, but the resulting impressionistic portrait benefits from a viewer’s familiarity with the basic benchmarks of the subject’s art, personality and life.Each of the evening’s two acts takes place at a concert from a key period in Simone’s career: The first was in Westbury, N.Y., in April 1968, a few days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the second was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in July 1976. Backed by a snappy onstage trio led by the music director and pianist Mark Fifer, Michelle portrays Simone with a fiery commitment to the musician’s mood swings, prickliness and arch stylings. She emulates some of the banter and the set lists, but not that much. And since the rights to “Mississippi Goddam” could not be secured for this show, she and Fifer wrote the original “Angry Black Woman” as a kind of conceptual homage.Mostly those historical concerts act as springboards for snapshots of an often tormented, always searching artist, just like songs were springboards in Simone’s freewheeling live act. (It is not a coincidence that Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, whose performances can also go from erratic to brilliant and back again in a second, are both superb Simone interpreters.)If there is a thread, it is the fury of Simone fighting against the expectations placed upon her as a Black female artist. She disliked being labeled jazz, for example. “That is a term invented by white people to identify Black people,” she says in the show. “I. Am. Classical.” But her genius rested in using one to feed the other, leading to some inspired musical juxtapositions by Michelle (who wrote the script with additional material from the director Devanand Janki).At one point, Simone’s piano teacher Muriel Mazzanovich, a.k.a. Miss Mazzy, says, using her young student’s real name: “Eunice Kathleen Waymon, I’d like for you to meet Johann Sebastian Bach.” Michelle’s Simone immediately goes into the line “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier,” from the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” and that beat might well be the most hopeful moment in the show.“Little Girl Blue” loses focus during the Montreux concert, as the push and pull between Simone’s talent and her demons, her activism and the world around her, becomes harder to pin down — it feels as if Michelle was somehow bedeviled by her subject. Then again, she is not the first, nor the last: Liz Garbus’s Oscar-nominated documentary is tellingly titled “What Happened, Miss Simone?”Little Girl BlueAt New World Stages, Manhattan; littlegirlblue.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Theater

      ‘CODA’ Is Being Developed Into a Stage Musical by Deaf West

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      The theater plans to work with the Oscar-nominated film’s producers to adapt the story of a teenager torn between helping her deaf family and singing.The Oscar-nominated film “CODA,” in which a hearing child of deaf parents pursues a passion for singing, is being developed into a stage musical by Deaf West Theater, a highly regarded Los Angeles-based nonprofit with a strong track record in musical theater.The project, which does not yet have a creative team or a production calendar, is a joint venture between the theater and two of the companies that produced the movie, Vendôme Pictures and Pathé Films.“CODA,” written and directed by Sian Heder, is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture. The film is about a high school student torn between helping her family, which runs a fishing boat, and pursuing a newfound interest in singing; she is the only hearing member of her family. (CODA is an acronym for child of deaf adult.)“‘CODA’ is unique among the entire canon of feature films in that it features us in our natural setting: among the world at large and among our own, often at home or in private settings,” DJ Kurs, the artistic director of Deaf West, wrote in an email interview. “As a Deaf person, I knew from the start that ‘CODA’ would make a perfect musical: It addresses our relationship with music and how we move through the world of sound like immigrants in a foreign country, learning new, seemingly arbitrary rules on the fly.”Deaf West, founded in 1991, is the nation’s most prominent theater focusing on what it calls “Deaf-centered storytelling,” and its productions are generally performed in both American Sign Language and spoken English by casts that include deaf and hearing artists.The theater has previously staged five musicals, including two revivals that transferred to Broadway, “Big River” in 2003 and “Spring Awakening” in 2015. Both were nominated for Tony Awards. “CODA” would be the second musical originated by the company; the first was “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” in 2007.“Professional musical theater was largely inaccessible to our community for the most part until our production of ‘Big River’ was staged in bigger houses in L.A. and N.Y.,” Kurs wrote. “Now we have musical theater aficionados within our community, and that’s a beautiful thing. I would wager that the art form of signed musical theater is still in its infancy.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      in Television

      Debra Messing Can Age Easily in ‘Birthday Candles.’ It’s Baking That’s Hard.

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      An actress with an obsessive work ethic, Messing is learning to make a cake onstage in “Birthday Candles” on Broadway.“Birthday Candles,” the existential dramedy now in previews on Broadway, relies on a simple recipe: an eight-step process for a golden butter cake. At every performance, the actress playing Ernestine, the show’s Everywoman heroine, bakes that cake onstage, in real time.Here, in Roundabout Theater Company’s production, that actress is Debra Messing, which means that “Birthday Candles” depends on yet another recipe: Find a Hollywood star. Rehearse. Repeat.If you’re wondering whether Messing is a baker, let’s just say that when she tried out the recipe during the first wave of the pandemic, the cake exploded. She had added nearly two cups of baking powder, rather than nearly two teaspoons.“It took me two days to clean out the oven,” she recalled in an interview. “I can honestly say that the baking has become the thing that I am most nervous about.”Considering that Messing never leaves the stage, and that Ernestine ages 90 years — from 17 to 107 — in 90 breathless minutes, this is saying something.MESSING, A 53-YEAR-OLD ACTRESS who marries daffy comedy to a ramrod work ethic, was speaking on a recent afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the American Airlines Theater, where “Birthday Candles” opens April 10. She wore a purple sweater and a surgical face mask, with her famous red hair mounded on top of her head — less of a bun than an entire gâteau.John Earl Jelks, left, with Messing in the play, which opens April 10 at the American Airlines Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs Messing tells it, she has always been hungry: “to act, to learn, to progress.” Taken to “Annie,” a musical about a spunky redhead, as a 7-year-old, she decided that acting was for her. Even then, she took her craft seriously; the following summer, she played a blind girl in a play at camp and insisted on rehearsing with her eyes closed. She walked off the stage and into the orchestra pit. It was the first of many workplace injuries to come.Messing wanted to be a musical theater performer, a triple threat. Her dancing, she said, is merely adequate, so she tops out at a double threat. After college at Brandeis and graduate school at New York University, she talked herself into a lead role on the sitcom “Ned and Stacey.” Michael J. Weithorn, the creator, hadn’t thought that she came across as Jewish enough or neurotic enough. But Messing is, by her own proud admission, both of these things.“Happy neuroticism,” said Vivienne Benesch, who is directing “Birthday Candles” and has known Messing since graduate school. (Benesch has a lot of memories from those days; one involves a unitard.)“Ned and Stacey” ran for two years. When it ended, Messing booked “Will & Grace,” a sitcom about a gay lawyer (Eric McCormack) and his best friend, a straight interior designer (Messing). Though a conventional network sitcom, “Will & Grace” was a milestone for queer representation, and it allowed Messing to refine her gift for dizzy, kinetic physical comedy.“She’s not afraid to show up and fall over things in service of the story,” McCormack said in a phone interview, as he was recovering from emergency dental surgery — but still wanted to speak about his friend.McCormack also confirmed her reputation as something of a workaholic. “That is her strong suit,” he said. “She will delve.”When the original run of “Will & Grace” ended, in 2006, Messing starred in a mini-series, “The Starter Wife,” that later came back for an additional season. In 2011, she heard about a new musical drama, “Smash,” a brainchild of the playwright Theresa Rebeck and Steven Spielberg that was planned for Showtime before it moved to NBC.“I was like, ‘I have to be part of this,’” Messing said. “I am going to be able to play a character where I watch people sing and dance all day long.”She was cast as Julia, the book writer of a Broadway-bound musical about Marilyn Monroe. Rebeck recalled being glad to have her, saying: “She’s extremely beautiful. And she’s funny. She’s fearlessly funny.” (Rebeck also said, perhaps less generously, that Messing had a lot of input in Julia’s controversial, scarf-forward wardrobe.)Despite a strong pilot, “Smash” splintered. Messing blamed the firing of Rebeck after the first season, but problems had surfaced earlier. When it ended, after two seasons, Messing went to Broadway for John Patrick Shanley’s oddball romantic comedy “Outside Mullingar.” She played a detective on “The Mysteries of Laura,” another show that didn’t last for long. Then “Will & Grace” was revived — something Messing preferred not to discuss. When it finished in 2020, after three seasons, she was ready for Broadway again.“Birthday Candles,” by Noah Haidle, premiered at the Detroit Public Theater in 2018. A year later, Roundabout, which has a long relationship with Haidle, greenlit a cold reading. Haidle requested Messing because, he said, “She’s good at acting and a very famous person.”Messing, who listens to the “Birthday Candles” script as she falls asleep, said, “Doing the work gives me peace.”Kholood Eid for The New York TimesBenesch, the director, sent the script to Messing, who read it on her bed, laughing, then crying. She arrived for the reading more prepared than anyone Haidle had ever seen. Afterward, Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, said that he wanted the play for Broadway. But it seemed as if there were other plays contending for a slot. So, to sweeten the deal, Messing sent him a cake, with sprinkles and “Let’s Do It” written in icing.Had she baked it?“Oh, hell no,” Messing said. “I wanted him to say yes.” The next day, he did, but then the pandemic pushed opening night back a couple of years.THE PLAY, WHICH GESTURES toward modernist classics like Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” takes place on a single set: the kitchen of a middle-class home in Grand Rapids, Mich. Ernestine enters as a teenager. “I am going to be a rebel against the universe,” she says. “Wage war with the everyday.”When the lights go down 90 minutes later, she is a great-great grandmother, reconciled to the universe. In between there are births, death, comedies, tragedies. Every scene takes place on one of her birthdays and the golden butter cake is baked continuously, without benefit of a mixer. (They’re too loud.)During the pandemic lockdown, Messing caught up on “Real Housewives” shows and attempted the ukulele. She also studied the script for “Birthday Candles.” Some parts came to her easily; she identified with the young Ernestine’s passion and expansiveness. The breakdown of the middle-aged Ernestine’s marriage, her experiences of loss — these resonated, too. But what Ernestine undergoes later is unfamiliar. “I haven’t experienced any of it yet,” Messing said.She watched YouTube videos of centenarians: studying how they moved, how they sat. She also worked with a voice coach to learn about what happens to the larynx as women age. Ernestine never leaves the stage, so there are no prosthetics or wigs. Aging, then, is effected through body and voice, plus subtle changes in hairstyle and eyewear.“I’m not 107,” Messing said. “I don’t know anyone who’s 107. So part of it is trusting that the homework will protect me and support me.”It’s working, for Haidle anyway. “Whatever she’s doing,” he said, “it’s like a magic trick.”Part of this trick: Messing listens to the script every night while she sleeps. (“So intense,” Haidle said.) This, she believes, helps her learn lines. It also makes her feel that she is doing her utmost. “Doing the work gives me peace,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s helping or not, but putting it on and falling asleep to it, I like to think that it’s getting embedded in a deeper way.”Nothing about her approach seems light. Typically, actors move through technical rehearsals casually. But during a recent one — as Messing and a co-star, Enrico Colantoni, worked through a scene — she seemed to give a full performance for each pass. She even wanted him to do a real kiss.“Kiss me,” she insisted. “Kiss me, come on.” Under her sweater, blue this time, she was wearing a pain relief patch, because hunching over as a 107-year-old, as she had done in rehearsal the day before, had put a lot of strain on her lower back.Baking has required extra preparation. It’s a science, Messing said, and science was never really her thing. It doesn’t help that each stir, crack and sprinkle is precisely timed to Ernestine’s milestone events.“The milk is the thing that really just makes me want to go to a sanitarium,” she said.But Messing has practiced — and practiced, and practiced — and she believes that by the time the play opens, she will be able to bake the cake comfortably, reliably linking each step to Ernestine’s sweet and bitter journey through life.Still, there are limits. “Frosting?” she said. “Forget it.”At home, she has finally made the cake successfully and marveled at how humble staples — butter, sugar, eggs — combine into something astonishing, a moment of transcendence wrested from the ordinary. So even though allergies and intolerances and an eating plan she adopted around the time she turned 50 mean that Messing avoids nearly all of the ingredients, she tried a bite.“I was like, This is so delicious,” she said. “I was like, Oh yeah, I get it.” More