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      Debra Messing Masters Baking for ‘Birthday Candles’

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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

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      ‘Music Man’ Sets Box Office Record for a Reopened Broadway

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      The Hugh Jackman-led revival has 76 trombones, 110 cornets, and took in $3.5 million in ticket sales last week, more than any show since the pandemic began.Broadway has a new box office leader: A starry revival of “The Music Man” grossed $3.5 million last week, the most of any show since theaters reopened after the long pandemic shutdown.The musical, with a cast led by the ever popular Hugh Jackman, is outselling “Hamilton” and every other show, triumphing over tepid reviews as it plays to full houses and sells tickets at top-tier prices.Data released Tuesday by the Broadway League showed that “The Music Man” had grossed over $3 million for five weeks in a row.The industry’s three big mainstays remain strong: Last week, “Hamilton” brought in $2.3 million, “Wicked” was at $1.9 million and “The Lion King” at $1.8 million.The box office numbers were the first for individual shows to be publicly released by the League since March of 2020, and suggested, as expected, that the relatively small number of mostly big-name shows that survived the Omicron spike of the coronavirus late last year are fairly hardy, and most appear to be bringing in more money than they are spending on a week-to-week basis. The industry faces another stress test ahead, as the number of shows increases; no one knows whether there is enough audience to support the newcomers as well as the established productions.Among the highlights, according to the new information: A revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Plaza Suite” starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick is starting very strong, reflecting the enormous appeal of the two stars, who are married to each other and have not appeared together onstage for years. The play, still in previews, grossed $1.7 million last week, which is a huge number for a small-cast play in a modest-size venue.“The Music Man,” which also stars the gifted Sutton Foster, had the highest average ticket price, at $283, and the highest premium ticket price, at $697. “Plaza Suite” was also selling notably high-priced premium seats, at $549, reflecting Parker’s popularity.The numbers do show signs of concern for some shows. “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical,” played to houses that were only 55 percent full last week, grossing $778,000. And a new musical, “Paradise Square,” started slow in previews — the show drew large audiences (it was 97 percent full) but with unsustainably low ticket prices (it grossed just $355,000, with an average ticket price of $47). And sales for shows including “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Come From Away” and “Chicago” have notably softened since before the pandemic.But there is also good news for other shows. In particular, the newly released box office data suggests that “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” has benefited from its decision to consolidate from a two-part play to one part during the pandemic. The show grossed $1.7 million last week; the two-part version had been bringing in around $1 million during non-holiday weeks before the pandemic.By the end of last week there were 22 shows running in the 41 Broadway houses, up from a low of 19 earlier in the year. The average ticket price was a healthy $136, and 92 percent of all seats were occupied, although there were fewer spots to fill overall because so many theaters did not have shows in them. More

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      Review: ‘Bruise & Thorn,’ a Gay Fantasia at a Laundromat

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      Hip-hop, impromptu duckwalks and loving shade fill C. Julian Jiménez’s new play about two cousins dreaming of escaping their day jobs.At a combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell in Jamaica, Queens, the gender-fluid Thorn works on a rap — hinged on the line “I gotta leave New York City” — that will hopefully lead to an escape by way of an “America’s Got Talent” victory. Because Thorn, a trans woman, is played with irresistible magnetism by the nightlife performer Jae W.B., it’s almost impossible not to back her.“Bruise & Thorn,” an eccentric new play by C. Julian Jiménez now being presented by Pipeline Theater Company at A.R.T./New York Theaters, gives the character a chance to freestyle, vogue and charm her way into the audience’s heart.Never mind that her cousin Bruise (a very appealing Fernando Contreras) has to hold down the fort at the laundromat where they both work while Thorn dreams up her speedy liberation. Saving up for his own aspirations of culinary school, Bruise’s tender gay heart must make room for Old Fart (Lou Liberatore, very funny), the homeless man he allows to rest in the laundromat bathroom, and his demanding boss, Mrs. Gallo (a fiery Zuleyma Guevara), who’s roped him into her cockfighting racket.Hanging outside is Lizard (Carson Fox Harvey), a sketchy figure who dangles his commitment to Thorn on the condition she drop the in-between-ness of her identity — it’s implied she sometimes uses he/him pronouns to appease him — and live as a man. Lizard’s character is not as thoroughly realized as the rest, perhaps by design, to keep him an enigma, but his ratty plaid boxers convey more than enough. (Costumes are by Saawan Tiwari.)On top of its well-realized performances, “Bruise & Thorn” counts a memorable authenticity among its best qualities; the work is very queer, very Latinx, very New York City. Filled with hip-hop, impromptu duckwalks and loving shade, Jiménez’s humor is performed with contagious enthusiasm by his two leads. At the start of the play, when the characters’ personalities are being introduced, it is almost impossible to believe W.B. and Contreras did not compose the material themselves, they inhabit it so naturally.Mixing resourcefulness with playfulness, the production eschews realism for gay fantasia; Sasha Schwartz’s laundromat set looks like a McDonald’s playground designed for the Teletubbies. Multicolored splotches adorn the floors, with washers and dryers and multipurpose cardboard boxes that lend a fitting oddball charm to the final scenes: a series of drag ball competitions representing cockfights (with the birds fabulously played by androgynous dancers) and a climactic argument between the two cousins.Once the balls are introduced, Jiménez’s play becomes even less interested in realism, employing fantasy as a literal way of getting these characters out of their situations. It can feel like a bit of a narrative cop-out — I’m still not sure how, exactly, some of these plot threads are resolved — but the scenes are satisfying enough to wash away most concerns.These flights of fancy are fundamental to the play’s queerness, but Jesse Jou’s unhurried direction drains momentum from the characters’ risky decisions. Whereas the initial hangout scenes let the cast’s whip-smart comic delivery and charisma dictate their pace, the tenser ones later on are allowed too many pauses, too much scoffing and hesitation, as if to telegraph gravity through passivity.Jiménez is smart in not promising more than this lighthearted play can handle when it comes to the ideas of gender, identity and class it evokes. For all their dreaming, “Bruise & Thorn” knows exactly how to stay woke.Bruise & ThornThrough March 27 at Mezzanine Theater at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; pipelinetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Up Next for Jessie Buckley of ‘The Lost Daughter’: More Movies, and Music

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      The actress Jessie Buckley is a natural brunette, but her hair is currently chopped into a ragged black bob and her nails are painted the same emerald green that the writer Christopher Isherwood gave Sally Bowles, the glamorously in-denial singer, in his 1937 novella of the same name. “Different hair for every job,” says Buckley, characteristically wry over a video call from London. “People think you’re very transformative.” Later, she’ll go onstage in “Cabaret,” the musical adaptation of Isherwood’s story of Weimar-era doom, at the Playhouse Theatre’s Kit Kat Club, alongside Eddie Redmayne. And in a few weeks, she’ll fly to Los Angeles for the 94th Academy Awards: Her performance in “The Lost Daughter” garnered her a nomination for best actress in a supporting role. Her brother had delivered the news to her over text the day before. “I thought he was joking,” she says. “It’s just something that doesn’t happen in life.”Buckley, photographed for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, wearing a Celine by Hedi Slimane shirt.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaBuckley with her musical collaborator Bernard Butler. Buckley wears a Miu Miu sweater, $1,430, and shoes, $875, miumiu.com; and Celine by Hedi Slimane pants, $1,250.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaExplore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage.A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.Buckley, 32, has been earning praise for her deft portrayals of maddening, messily vital characters, but her own career trajectory has been disciplined, even conventional: drama school (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) to theater (Shakespeare’s Globe), theater to indies, indies to Hollywood. She was born in Ireland’s County Kerry and seems to fulfill a kind of Yeatsian fantasy of the woman from the west who’s gifted in song. Raised in an artistic household with four younger siblings — her mother is a musician and teacher, and her father is a poet and bar manager — she moved to London as a teenager, where she finished second on a TV talent series called “I’d Do Anything.” YouTube videos show her delivering a tune from “Oliver!” with the same blend of power and vulnerability she’d bring to later roles.It’s Buckley’s voice, after all, that astonished audiences in 2018’s “Wild Rose,” a movie in which she plays an aspiring country star. This summer, she and Bernard Butler — a veteran musician, songwriter and producer — are set to release a 12-track album called “For All Our Days That Tear the Heart” on the British label EMI. “I feel a bit shy about it,” she says. “It was a really pure, beautiful, untainted thing, and a bit of a secret.” Over the past two summers, she and Butler would meet weekly to drink tea in his kitchen and discuss, among other things, lines of poetry. At the end of the day, they’d record whatever they’d made on an iPhone, just one or two takes, “and then we’d say goodbye,” says Butler. The finished album conveys the intimacy of two friends finding private meaning through creativity.Buckley, photographed for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, wearing aMiu Miu sweater; and Celine by Hedi Slimane pants.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaIn the fall, Buckley will travel to Spain to film Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s “Hot Milk.” This year will also see the release of the Sarah Polley-directed “Women Talking” — starring Buckley, Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand as members of a remote religious community disturbed by sexual violence — and Alex Garland’s “Men,” in which Buckley portrays a widow alone on holiday.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      ‘At the Wedding’ Review: Cocktails, Dancing and an Albatross

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      A trenchant new comedy by Bryna Turner features Mary Wiseman in a comic tour-de-force as the guest most likely to make a scene.“I’m starting to think this wedding needs a villain,” says Carlo, as if the one she has semi-crashed were a murder mystery.Certainly there are plenty of suspects behaving badly, chief among them Carlo herself, a freelance snark machine with a hole in her heart and an alcohol-fueled taste for the piercing aperçu. She terrifies the children’s table with a hellish lesson about the fate of romance: “the worst pain you’ll feel in your life.” She’s also, uh-oh, the bride’s former lover — you know, the one who neglected to R.S.V.P.Though it’s not by a long shot the first time a comedy has mined the nuptials-with-an-ex-to-grind setup, Bryna Turner’s “At the Wedding,” which opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, offers a fresh and trenchant take on the genre. And in Carlo, the bruised heart of the story, it offers the actor Mary Wiseman, with her curly red mop piled high like a lesbian Lucy, a brilliant showcase for her split-level comic genius.I say split-level because, with Wiseman, there’s always one thing going on verbally upstairs and another going on emotionally in the basement. Sipping from an endless succession of wedding libations at some kind of barn in Northern California, her Carlo makes like a porcupine, shooting quills in the form of quips. Was not the ceremony, she gaily asks another guest, “aggressively heterosexual”? (Her ex, Eva, has married a man.) “I almost thought they were going to start checking for her hymen right there in front of us.”The lines are funny; Turner has a boxer’s sense of the two-punch rhythm of jokes. But it’s Wiseman, who first stole the spotlight as a brilliantly dim belle in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” who makes them hilarious by making them sad at the same time. Though focusing her ire on the wedding as a false celebration — “I’ve seen more convincing fire drills,” she says — Carlo is really gnawing at the scar of attachment itself. For those who are no good at staying in love, gift-grabs like this are worse than embarrassments; they’re torture.The sprightly, 70-minute LCT3 production, directed with wit by Jenna Worsham, gives us both of those elements right away. A gigantic, labial paper-flower chandelier hangs from the ceiling of the set, by Maruti Evans; a jaunty but ominous “Til Death” sign radiates its neon message amid Oona Curley’s string lights and lanterns. But neither the play nor the design completely endorses Carlo’s one-sided view. The eclectic playlist (sound by Fan Zhang) is exactly the kind you’d want to dance to, and the flattering costumes (by Oana Botez) are the kind you want people to dance in.It’s especially smart that Eva (Rebecca S’manga Frank) is allowed to look glorious in a truly elegant gown; she’s no comic-book bridezilla, and though we never learn exactly what happened in her relationship with Carlo, it’s evident she had good reason to end it. And if Carlo, in grief, has become an admonitory fury — Turner explicitly compares her to the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem, accosting wedding guests with her ghastly story — her legitimate beefs never completely obscure our view of the other partygoers as jumbles of kindness and monstrousness.The play is structured to reveal that contradiction in a series of well-acted, one-on-one encounters with Carlo. An undermine-y bridesmaid named Carly (Keren Lugo) tells her that “it wouldn’t be any failure if you decided to leave,” but later returns to comfort her. Eva’s sloshed mother, Maria (Carolyn McCormick), dismisses the R.S.V.P. gaffe but then dismisses Carlo herself. A guest named Eli (Will Rogers) confides that he intends to propose to his partner at the party, thus (as Carlo warns him) “emotionally hijacking” the festivities — which is apparently her job, not his. Yet he is far more complex than he at first seems.Rebecca S’manga Frank, left, plays Wiseman’s ex, but she is no comic-book bridezilla.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSo is Leigh (Han Van Sciver), an androgynous Lothario who uses they/them pronouns. Leigh’s flirtation with Carlo — suggesting they ditch the party for a romp somewhere else — at first seems innocent enough, even though Leigh’s brother is the groom. When that innocence is later brought into question, and the selfish side of sexual freedom surfaces, the play still refuses to disown Leigh completely.If Turner’s faith in her characters is not always returned — Maria, who gets only one scene, feels underwritten, and Leigh, despite Van Sciver’s foxy performance, never quite coheres — her faith in the audience is an entirely successful investment. Her jokes often have long lead times, the setup in one scene, the payoff in another. The plot, too, keeps well ahead of you, trusting you will survive in pleasurable uncertainty until its loose threads are eventually gathered. In one case, it takes almost 40 pages of script for a throwaway line spoken by the overburdened waiter (Jorge Donoso) to deliver its needle-prick of a reward.That authorial patience is part of what makes “At the Wedding” so fresh; though there are plenty of one-liners, it is not a yuk-yuk comedy foisting its laughs at you or over-signaling its intentions. (“Bull in a China Shop,” Turner’s professional playwriting debut, seen at LCT3 in 2017, was a bit more raucous and insistent.) Also revivifying is the way Turner reshapes the wedding genre for our time, inviting new characters to the party.She does this far too thoughtfully and skillfully for it to seem trendy or polemical. Rather, the broadening is central to the play’s examination of how our traditional ways of uniting people function in a world that has always been more diverse than its institutions.For “At the Wedding,” those institutions include more than just marriage, which many queer people can now choose if they want, in forms that, like Eva’s spectacular gown, are custom fit. They also include love itself, and the loss of it. For Carlo, and for all of us sometimes, love is the albatross strung around our necks, and the sad story we are cursed to tell ever after. It’s funny if it’s not you.At the WeddingThrough April 17 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Peter Bowles, Actor in ‘To the Manor Born,’ Dies at 85

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      In a six-decade career in TV, film and onstage, he played comedy and drama, hapless heroes and villains, often with the air of the archetypal English gent.Peter Bowles, a dapper British character actor who was best known for his role as an arriviste in the popular British television sitcom “To the Manor Born,” died on Thursday. He was 85. The cause was cancer, according to a statement to the BBC from his agent. No further information was available.In a six-decade career, Mr. Bowles, who was the son of servants and grew up without indoor plumbing, appeared in a merry-go-round of productions in television, film and onstage, alternating between comedy and drama, hapless heroes and villains. Whatever character he played, he often projected the air of what his agent called “the archetypal English gent.”Mr. Bowles’s well-known television credits included roles in “Rumpole of the Bailey,” “The Bounder,” “Only When I Laugh” and the recent series “Victoria.” He wrote and starred in “Lytton’s Diary,” about the life of a newspaper gossip columnist. And he achieved success in “The Irish R.M.,” in which he played a British Army officer sent to Ireland as a resident magistrate. The New York Times called the show “devilishly hilarious.”But he was best known for his portrayal of Richard DeVere in “To the Manor Born.” DeVere, the son of Czech-Polish émigrés, is the nouveau-riche owner of a supermarket who buys a grand English manor house from its original owner, Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, played by Penelope Keith. She moves to a nearby small cottage, from which she eyes DeVere’s activities with considerable disapproval.In a 1981 photo, Mr. Bowles and Penelope Keith, who played the original owner of the country mansion in “To the Manor Born.”United News/Popperfoto via Getty Images“The show was a reflection of the disruptions to the English class system by the recently elected Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper’s daughter who had poshed up her voice but was committed to social mobility,” Mark Lawson wrote in an appreciation of Mr. Bowles in The Guardian on Thursday.“The casting of the charming Bowles,” he added, “helped to offset the potentially nasty snobbery of the premise.”The sitcom aired from 1979 to 1981 in Britain, where it routinely drew audiences of 20 million, astronomical by British standards. Like other British series he was in, it later aired in the United States on PBS.Peter Bowles was born in London on Oct. 16, 1936. His father, Herbert Reginald Bowles, was a valet and chauffeur to a son of the Earl of Sandwich; his mother, Sarah Jane (Harrison) Bowles, was a nanny employed by the family of the Duke of Argyll in Scotland. (The two met when they both worked for the family of Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper baron and cabinet minister under Winston Churchill.)During World War II, when Peter was 6, the family moved to one of the poorest working-class districts of Nottingham, in the English Midlands, where their house had an outside toilet and no bath.After appearing in amateur plays in Nottingham, Peter won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where his fellow actors included Alan Bates, Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney, with whom he shared a flat.Mr. Bowles started onstage with the Old Vic Company in 1956 with small parts in Shakespeare dramas. Over time, he starred in 45 theatrical productions. He was seen in the early 1990s by the director Peter Hall, who then cast him in a string of plays in London’s West End.Mr. Bowles and Judi Dench in 2006 in a London revival of Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever.” Over a long career, he bounced from the stage to television to the movies. Catherine AshmoreAfter Mr. Bowles left the theater for television and comedy, the BBC famously pronounced that he would never work again in drama. But after several television successes, he defied that prediction and returned to the theater as Archie Rice, a failing music-hall performer, in John Osborne’s “The Entertainer” in 1986; he was the first actor to play the part in London since Laurence Olivier in 1957.Other stage roles included his portrayal of the art dealer Joseph Duveen in “The Old Masters” (2004), a play by Simon Gray about Duveen and the art critic Bernard Berenson, directed by Harold Pinter; and of the “seriously posh, clipped-voice husband” Peter Bliss, as The Times described him, in Peter Hall’s 2006 London revival of Noël Coward’s comedy of manners, “Hay Fever” (also set in an English country house).He continued to act in movies, too, with roles in: “Eyewitness” (1970, released in the U.S. as “Sudden Terror”); “The Steal” (1995); “Color Me Kubrick” (2005) and “The Bank Job” (2008).He is survived by his wife, the actor Susan Bennett, and three children, Guy, Adam and Sasha. More

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      Review: In ‘What You Are Now,’ Memory Is a Dangerous Thing

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      In Sam Chanse’s affecting play, a daughter tries to understand her mother, who resists any reminder of her escape from the Khmer Rouge.Trying to understand our parents’ past lives can feel like fumbling through the dark, especially for the children of immigrants. Recollections are selective, and many people have lived through things they’d rather forget. The challenge — and heartbreak — of bridging that chasm is the subject of “What You Are Now,” an affecting study of memory and migration by the playwright Sam Chanse that opened on Thursday night at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan.Pia (Pisay Pao) knows hardly anything about her mother’s experience fleeing Cambodia in 1975, amid the country’s deadly takeover by the Khmer Rouge. But the pain of her mother’s experience has shaped Pia’s life, like an imprint, she says, seared into her cells. It’s why Pia is pursuing neurological research, looking for a scientific solution to her mother’s mental suffering.Pia’s mother (Sonnie Brown) carries herself like a ghost, looking lost behind the eyes and staunchly resisting any reminders of Cambodia. She’s also held herself at arm’s length from Pia and her brother Darany (Robert Lee Leng), whom she raised on her own in small-town Massachusetts. (The height of their mother’s physical affection is a stiff-elbowed pat on the shoulder.) If Pia can’t enter or soothe her mother’s mind, she channels that desire into studying the brain.Chanse’s play shifts back and forth over a 10-year span in Pia’s study of memory and its potential for manipulation. When she speaks to her mom on the phone from the lab, their conversations are limited to the mundane, like what’s for dinner and how Pia’s career is advancing. But when Darany’s ex-girlfriend (Emma Kikue) comes around gathering testimony for a nonprofit from survivors of the Khmer Rouge, Pia’s mother refuses to open up about the past.“What You Are Now” isn’t propelled by incidents or dramatic action, but ideas about how the mind works and the gradual revelation of personal histories. Pia dates and breaks up with a co-worker (Curran Connor) with whom she cleans rat cages. Darany and his girlfriend, who is half white, smoke pot and swap stories of how they relate to their shared Cambodian heritage. Pia’s mom loses her temper when she walks in on her kids dancing to Cambodian rock.As Pia, Pao is spiky and guarded, observing and responding to her mother’s behavior with the cool remove that a scientist might keep for her subject. As her chill (and way cooler) older brother, Leng makes for a loose and grounded contrast, all street-slang and curious heart. And Brown is quietly arresting as a woman both fragile and imperious, slouched like a comma but with a will of steel.Directed by the Civilians artistic director, Steve Cosson, the smartly minimal production unfolds against a cool-gray monochrome interior, like a slate wiped clean. Frames that might display family portraits hang empty, and what could be a wall clock has no markings of time (the set design is by Riw Rakkulchon). Characters appear isolated in the dark, as they connect at a distance on the phone or retreat into their own perspectives (the lighting design is by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).Pia explores whether it’s possible to alter what we remember, and memory’s relationship to identity, by delving into empirical study rather than excavating and sorting through emotions. The play includes perhaps one too many descriptions of real-life experiments, which are limited in dramatic potential.But “What You Are Now” excels in unforced revelations about the human struggle to connect, and to share the messy and sometimes painful stories that make us who we are. Everything we hear and experience, and how we remember it, reshapes our brains, Pia says. It’s a scientific testament to the power of storytelling to change minds.What You Are NowThrough April 3 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      With Its Future Uncertain, the Humana Festival Will Not Return in 2022

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      The showcase of work by contemporary American playwrights will not take place this year, either in person or online — and after that, it’s up in the air.Opportunities for emerging playwrights to break into the industry are few — and now there’s one less.The Humana Festival of New American Plays, one of the premiere showcases for new work by contemporary American playwrights, will not take place this year, either in person or online, Actors Theater of Louisville confirmed in a statement this week. When the theater announced its fall and spring programming in September, it did not include the annual event, and the status of the 2022 festival had remained unclear.“In order to uplift, celebrate and expand the tremendous legacy of the festival, it is necessary to reimagine a 21st-century model that is sustainable, equitable and radically accessible,” Robert Barry Fleming, the theater’s executive artistic director, said in the statement. He did not specify what that might look like.The last in-person festival was held in 2019. Actors Theater, a regional company, canceled the 2020 festival because of the pandemic, scrapping five world premieres, though it pivoted to streaming some of the plays that had managed to open. In 2021, the theater hosted a virtual exhibition of digital plays, virtual reality productions and an interactive video game, with premieres scattered throughout the year. (A number of them are still available online.)Amelia Acosta Powell, the theater’s impact producer, whose focus is on outreach to donors and audiences, said a decision had not yet been made on whether the festival would return — or what form it would take — in future years.Instead, she said, the theater is focusing on developing work from the virtual exhibition held last year, including an in-person production of “Still Ready,” originally a musical docu-series celebrating Black artistry, that will have its premiere at Actors Theater in May.Fleming told WFPL, the Louisville NPR affiliate, in October that festival organizers believed it was less important to try to cram the development of new plays into “a six-week kind of window” than to be “contributing to the canon, and continuing to innovate.”The Humana Festival, which was founded in 1976, typically takes place over multiple weeks in March and April at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky. It attracts an international audience and has hosted the premieres of work by Anne Washburn, Will Eno and Sarah Ruhl.Since 1979, the festival has been sponsored by the Humana Foundation in Louisville and has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Powell declined to share the cost of producing the event, or to specify how much the foundation contributes, but she said it had been less than half of the overall cost, with the remainder coming from Actors Theater’s operating budget, as well as from other corporate, foundation and individual gifts.Mark Taylor, a spokesman for Humana, a health insurance company based in Louisville, said that the foundation’s most recent grant to the theater ended last year. “Humana and the Humana Foundation look forward to continuing to support the arts in Louisville and other communities in creative new ways,” he said in an email. Several of the more than 400 plays presented at the festival have gone on to win wider accolades — “The Gin Game” by D.L. Coburn, “Dinner With Friends” by Donald Margulies and “Crimes of the Heart” by Beth Henley, all won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — and the event is often regarded as a milestone in the careers of emerging playwrights. Programming is a mix of short pieces, 10-minute plays, one-acts and full-length shows.Recent world premieres have included Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” Lucas Hnath’s “The Christians” and Eno’s “Gnit.”Washburn, the author of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” has premiered work at the festival. She said that what was most beneficial about the event was the collegiality — the impromptu meetings with critics, directors, apprentices and fellow playwrights — in a setting outside New York.“You’d have playwrights from around the country, but it’s also super set in Louisville,” she said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “You’d explore the city, have lots of bourbon and banana pudding, and the playwrights would get together and drink and despair about the world.”It was also one of the few places where an up-and-coming playwright could get work produced, she added.“New York was much less set up for new plays,” she said. “There were very few of these smaller, secondary stages or development production programs. A lot of playwrights started at Humana when they couldn’t get a production in New York. It’s a big deal, but it doesn’t have the same pressures as a singular opening.”Eno, whose play “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” was a finalist in 2005 for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, said in an email that it would be disappointing if the festival didn’t return as an in-person event.“Playwriting is almost impossible, and this just makes it a little harder, and a little less, I suppose, heralded, or communal,” he said. “It’s like the death of a hardware store or a coffee shop people liked.”Powell, the impact producer, said that it was unlikely that any future iteration of the event would be structured as it was prepandemic, but that the theater recognized the value of certain aspects of the annual gathering, which “we would hope to capture in new ways.”Among them: giving artists from around the country the opportunity to collaborate in the development of their works-in-progress, as well as to “engage in creative and intellectual discourse.”But the in-person aspect of the gathering, Eno said, can’t be replicated.“We all learned something over the last couple years about the importance of people, people gathering, physically assembling for some higher or greater or more mysterious purpose,” he said, “And it’s too bad it won’t happen anymore at Humana.” More