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      Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’

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      Her new play, “Confederates,” straddles two eras, exploring what liberation means to a present-day academic and an enslaved woman in the 1860s.In 2016, Penumbra Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Dominique Morisseau to write a play as part of the American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The remit: to create a work about the Black experience of the Civil War.Morisseau had one question: “What were the Black women doing?”“Confederates,” her new play at the Signature Theater, is one answer. Toggling between the present day and the 1860s, the play — now in previews, with a premiere on March 27 — follows Sandra, a superstar academic played by Michelle Wilson, and Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), an enslaved woman who spies for the Union Army. While the title evokes the Confederacy, it also teases a bond between the two women.“This is what it means to be at this institution,” Sandra says. “To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here.”From left: Andrea Patterson, Kristolyn Lloyd and Elijah Jones in “Confederates,” opening March 27 at the Signature Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara echoes her: “This what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy.”Even as “Confederates” evokes dramatic works as varied as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern drama “An Octoroon,” Adrienne Kennedy’s devastating tragedy “The Ohio State Murders” and David Mamet’s academic two-hander “Oleanna,” Morisseau renders each scene in her distinctive empathetic, tragicomic style.Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”Morisseau was speaking from an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, near both the Signature and Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where her play “Skeleton Crew,” part of a trilogy of works set in her native Detroit, recently wrapped. Her 15-month-old son napped in the next room.During a 90-minute video call, she discussed “Confederates,” which will also be presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in August, as well as microaggressions, macroaggressions and what empowerment looks like for her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Confederates,” Sandra and Sara are living about 160 years apart. What joins them?They’re united in the history of Black women fighting for freedom. They’re united in being the most socially expendable.Sandra, the professor, is subject to frequent microaggressions. For Sara, the enslaved woman, the danger is physical and more overt. Do you understand these threats as related?The kind of racism that Sara experiences — you could be hanged, you could be dragged, you could be murdered — that overt racism is not most people’s experience of racism. There is the kind of racism that breaks the body, that attacks the body. Then there’s the other kind that kills the spirit. The one I engage with the most often is the latter. But the micro always leads to the macro. Microaggressions lead into aggressive actions.Eventually, all of these are harmful and deadly.In your research, did you find many examples of Black women spying for the Union?I did not find lots of examples. I would find little pieces. Those kinds of stories are under-told. But they tell me that we were not passive. We were never passive.Brandon J. Dirden and Phylicia Rashad in Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” whose run just ended at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou have written plays set in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the ’00s. Did you know that you would eventually write about the 1860s?I never thought about it, to be honest. When I was approached to specifically write about this era, I said to myself, I don’t want to just write about slavery. That’s not what I’m interested in. I am, however, interested in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the phrase coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, which is the impact of being descendants of the enslaved and the traumas that have happened since, without treatment or healing.When you accepted the commission, were there certain stories or stereotypes that you wanted to avoid?I didn’t want to show defeat or agreement with the enslaved culture. There is no agreement.As an undergraduate, did you experience institutional racism?My experience at school taught me that no one’s here to protect me. There’s no agency for me here. I’m going to have to do for me in school, if I want to not be squashed, if I want to see myself as an artist.Theater can also be a racist space. I remember an essay you wrote in 2015 about white privilege, with the headline: “Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theater Patron, and What That Says About Our Theaters.” Has theater changed since then?I have actively worked to shift that culture at least around my own work. I have a Playwright’s Rules of Engagement insert that I put inside the program of every show that I do. Because I was policed for my own laughter. [The insert includes instructions such as, “You are allowed to laugh audibly” and “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”]I have seen attempts to diversify boards, to have a wider outreach to donors. Then there’s the bottom-up approach: I would like to see more artists taking more agency over themselves and their art. There’s a culture of silence that has been perpetuated. There’s this feeling of expendability that artists get. Like, you cannot speak up, because you will then not have jobs anymore. And that’s crazy.“There are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists,” Morisseau said, referring to efforts she’s made to counter harmful behavior in the industry.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLate last year, you spoke up. You pulled your play “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen Playhouse, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.” What empowered you to do that?I’ve always been an activist. I just inherently have not ever been OK with things that aren’t right. What made me feel even more empowered in this moment is that I am now visible. And there are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists. So there is not a chance in hell that I can watch harmful behavior happen and be unaccountable. I will not write about Black women being harmed and learning to take agency for themselves — that’s what “Paradise Blue” is about — I’m not going to have that onstage and the opposite happening for them offstage.I’m not trying to create a culture of people pulling their plays. This is one of the hardest decisions you should have to make as a playwright. It was brutal. It was exhausting for me. I never want to have to do that again.Before the pandemic you made your Broadway debut, writing the book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” Did that change anything for you?“Ain’t Too Proud” happened, a MacArthur happened, quite a few things happened, right at the same time. It’s brought more faith about me as an artist from institutions. I don’t know if I’m a safe bet. I don’t think I’m a safe bet. But I’m worthy of a bet in general. I’m enough of an interesting voice. I’m definitely asked to write more musicals.And what did it mean to have “Skeleton Crew” move to Broadway?With Broadway comes more resources behind your work. I remember when I first saw “Ain’t Too Proud” staged, I was like, everybody deserves all those resources behind their imaginations, just once in their life. To be able to get it twice in my life is amazing.“Skeleton Crew” will always be one of my favorites because I know where it came from. I know where I was when I wrote it and I know who I wrote it for. The biggest thing for me, as a Detroiter, is to make Detroit visible. We had Detroit night on Broadway. It was like a family reunion up in there. It was the most Detroit behavior I’ve ever seen on Broadway. It was epic. More

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      ‘This Space Between Us’ Review: A Do-Gooder Faces a Chorus of Resistance

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      Peter Gil-Sheridan’s comedy for Keen Company raises a range of topical issues but fails to cover new ground.Liberals are often criticized for their hand-wringing and failure to walk the walk. But the progressive lawyer at the center of Peter Gil-Sheridan’s “This Space Between Us” intends to lead a life of purpose. “Maybe we could all stand to feel a little more guilty,” he says, without telling us exactly why.His career move from cushy corporate job to international aid work, which rattles his loved ones, could be a compelling, if familiar, indictment of modern-day complacency. But there is neither urgency nor bite in the fallout of his decision, which the playwright uses as a jumping-off point for tired topical debates that rarely get off the ground.“This Space Between Us,” an occasionally amusing but stalled new comedy that opened on Wednesday night at Theater Row, begins, ironically enough, at the races, where Jamie (Ryan Garbayo) delivers the news to his family. His dad (Anthony Ruiz), a conservative Cuban immigrant whose small business recently went bankrupt, doesn’t get how Jamie could give up easy money. Neither does his mom (Joyce Cohen), who says that if they fall on hard times she and her husband may have to work at Home Depot to get by without his help. His boyfriend, Ted (Tommy Heleringer), and his best friend Gillian (Alex Chester) selfishly don’t want to lose him when he is ultimately relocated to Nairobi. His aunt Pat (Glynis Bell), both supportive and wise, tells him to go with God (she’s a nun).Subsequent scenes offer different contexts for clashing opinions, mostly cross-generational, about what people are allowed to say these days and why others might be offended. The play’s title largely seems to refer to the gap in understanding that widens as history barrels forward and people scramble to keep up.“I’m from another time,” Jamie’s father says as he tinkers with his broken watch. “Why doesn’t anyone know how to laugh anymore?”Various points of view collide but these moments fail to generate tension or momentum. Ted is hospitalized with a bad cold, seemingly for the sake of revealing to Jamie’s family that Ted is H.I.V. positive, and explaining what it means that his viral load is undetectable. Jamie and Gillian, who are both mixed race, briefly argue about what it means to pass as white but not identify with white culture. Sister Pat is made to answer for the homophobia of the Roman Catholic Church.All the while, Jamie’s motivation for changing careers doesn’t seem to get much deeper than his vague desire to do good. He even goes as far as to ask, in so many words, how anyone could throw a party when there are people starving in Africa, the continent often serving here as a stand-in for global misfortunes.This Keen Company production, directed by its artistic director, Jonathan Silverstein, is pleasantly modest but almost too straightforward. Though the furniture changes, one hulking constant is a racetrack scoreboard that spans the back of the stage, limiting an already tight playing space with a too obvious metaphor. (The set design is by Steven Kemp.) Between scenes, chyrons on the scoreboard display an assortment of headlines — a natural disaster in Bangladesh, racist remarks from Mitch McConnell — that contribute to the generalized atmosphere of bad news.The theater sporadically goes dark as Jamie is spotlighted mid-action, looking out at the audience to the sound of a heart beating (lighting design is by Daisy Long, sound by Luqman Brown). It’s a play for drama and connection, for the audience to identify with someone who’s voiced a general dissatisfaction with the status quo.But real-world problems, overwhelming as they may be, have stakes, specificity and individual flavor. Bridging the space between us takes not just naming, but inhabiting them.This Space Between UsThrough April 2 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Onstage, the French Election Is a Landslide Win for Cynicism

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      As the presidential vote approaches, theaters and comedy venues are addressing the campaign. Many shows reach a similar conclusion: Don’t trust politicians.PARIS — If elections are spectacles, France’s presidential campaign, caught between voter apathy and war in Europe, has so far struggled to connect with its audience. Yet on French stages, a number of artists are making hay out of the upcoming vote — and the picture is hardly flattering.Across comedy and drama, performers and directors of varied backgrounds seem to agree on one thing: The country’s politicians are uniformly terrible and their performances a little too close to theater to be trusted.Not that the political calendar is headline material in every playhouse. While many prestigious French theaters that receive public funding pride themselves on staging political works, they tend to refer to current events only obliquely. For highbrow theatergoers here, a lack of intellectual distance suggests a lack of taste. Shows actually addressing the presidential campaign are mostly found elsewhere, in smaller venues that rely on box-office revenues.Two of them, the Café de la Gare and the Théâtre des Deux Ânes, are comedy venues. On the nights I attended, they drew large, albeit different, crowds. While visitors to the Café de la Gare skewed younger, the silver-haired audience at the Théâtre des Deux Ânes, in the Pigalle district of Paris, appeared to include many regulars, who cheered for several comedians as soon as they appeared onstage.The jokes were dissimilar, too. At the Deux Ânes, the show “Elect Us” strings together five comic and musical acts, ranging from witty (Florence Brunold’s parody of a history lesson, with “Macron the First” as a Jupiterian king) to downright misogynistic. Every female politician mentioned throughout the performance was described as either an airhead or physically unattractive. Some of their male peers, on the other hand, were more gratifyingly characterized as “too smart” (Macron) or as a Casanova (the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour).Guillaume Meurice in “Meurice 2022” at the Café de la Gare.MagaliThe shows on offer at the Café de la Gare, on the other hand, tried to turn these tropes on their head. “We’ve Reached That Point!,” written by Jérémy Manesse and directed by Odile Huleux, envisions a television debate between two fictional contenders during the next presidential election, in 2027. One of them is a woman, well played by the deadpan Florence Savignat, who maintains a purposely bland persona to avoid personal attacks. In another show at the venue, “Meurice 2022,” the well-known comic Guillaume Meurice — a daily presence on a popular radio station, France Inter — plays a presidential candidate whose patronizing rhetoric is ultimately undermined by the feminist manager in charge of running his events, played by Julie Duquenoy.Still, despite their contrasting values, all these shows portray the French political class as far removed from the audience and its concerns. The historical left-right divide, which has been in flux since Macron won office as a centrist and far-right figures started gaining ground, often gave way onstage to an “us versus them” dynamic, with acts that riffed on the public’s perceived disdain for every presidential candidate.Meurice’s cartoonishly out-of-touch character, for instance, isn’t affiliated with any party. One recurring gag is that every time he mentions another politician, he describes that person as “a personal friend,” from far-left figures to Macron and Zemmour — the implication being that they all belong to the same social group. By way of parody, “Meurice 2022” also offers empty slogans like “The future is already tomorrow” and “Winning now.”From a comedy perspective, it works. Yet “Meurice 2022” speaks to a larger malaise in the country, which “We’ve Reached That Point!” makes even more explicit. The plot revolves around the improbable notion that the two 2027 contenders, unbeknown to them, have been given a newly discovered truth serum before the start of their live debate. When the serum kicks in, suddenly they find themselves blurting out their real feelings about the hot issues of the campaign.Manesse, a shrewd writer, inserts several coups de théâtre along the way, which makes for a genuinely entertaining play. Yet the premise remains that no politician could possibly be telling the truth.From left, Emmanuel Dechartre, Alexandra Ansidei, Christophe Barbier and Adrien Melin in “Elysée” at the Petit Montparnasse theater.Fabienne RappeneauWhen politicians are portrayed as liars, the age-old comparison between politics and theater is never far away — and in Paris, two plays about former French presidents are also leaning into it. “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French,” directed by Léo Cohen-Paperman, shows Jacques Chirac, the French head of state from 1995 to 2007, as a deeply theatrical figure, as does “Élysée,” a play about the relationship between Chirac and his predecessor, François Mitterrand, who was elected president in 1981.Audience members looking for policy analysis will be disappointed. “Elysée,” directed by Jean-Claude Idée at the Petit Montparnasse theater, is mostly uninterested in Chirac’s and Mitterrand’s politics. The playwright, Hervé Bentégéat, focuses on what they have in common: a wandering eye, for starters, in some cringe-inducing scenes with the only woman in the cast, and the fact that they are “good comedians.” Cue the unlikely bargain they reportedly struck in 1981 to help the left-wing Mitterrand get elected — a cynical long-term calculation for Chirac, a right-wing figure.Julien Campani as Jacques Chirac in “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French” at the Théâtre de Belleville.Simon Loiseau“The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French,” at the Théâtre de Belleville, is the more compelling show, despite some inconsistencies. It is the first installment in a planned series of presidential portraits, “Eight Kings.” (The president-as-king metaphor has a life of its own in France.) In the opening scene, which manages to be brilliantly funny while recapping Chirac’s life, Julien Campani and Clovis Fouin play overenthusiastic Chirac fans who have created a zany 24-hour theater production about his life. Cohen-Paperman then segues into far more traditional vignettes drawn from Chirac’s youth and career.Campani is impressively convincing in the title role, but “The Life and Death of J. Chirac, King of the French” never really explores what Chirac achieved, or didn’t achieve, as a politician. Instead, it posits politics as a game of chess, with Chirac on the lookout for the next useful move.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      in Movies

      Cities and States Are Easing Covid Restrictions. Are Theaters and the Arts Next?

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      Cultural institutions face tough decisions: Is it safe to drop mask and vaccine requirements, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?When music fans walked beneath the familiar piano-shaped awning and into the dark embrace of the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village this week, a late-pandemic fixture was missing: No one was checking proof of vaccination and photo IDs.A special guest visited to herald the change. “Good to be back out,” Mayor Eric Adams of New York told the overwhelmingly maskless audience Monday, the day the city stopped requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants and entertainment venues. “I consider myself the nightlife mayor, so I’m going to assess the product every night.”It is a different story uptown, where Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and vaccines and the Metropolitan Opera goes even further, requiring that all eligible people show proof that they have received their booster shots — safety measures that always went beyond what the city required but which reassured many music lovers. “We want the audience to feel comfortable and safe,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.With cities and states across the country moving to scale back mask and vaccine requirements as coronavirus cases fall, leaders of cultural institutions find themselves confronted once again with difficult decisions: Is it safe to ease virus safety measures, and would doing so be more likely to lure audiences back or keep them away?Their responses have varied widely. Broadway will continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least the end of April. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington announced that it would drop its mask requirement for visitors to its museums and the National Zoo on Friday, following moves by major art museums in places like Chicago and Houston. Some comedy clubs in New York that ditched masking mandates months ago are weighing whether to continue to require proof of vaccination.“At the beginning of this, many arts organizations were having to develop their own policies before there were clear government guidelines,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “As we come out of this, again, you’re finding arts companies having to find their own way.”The Metropolitan Opera continues to require masks and proof of vaccination and booster shots, and to limit food and drink consumption to one part of the opera house.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesIn interviews, leaders of almost a dozen cultural groups across the country emphasized the need for caution and carefulness. But they noted that each of their situations are distinct. In museums, patrons can roam large galleries and opt for social distance as they please. In theaters and concert halls, audience members are seated close together, immobile for the duration of a performance. Opera houses and symphony orchestras tend to draw an older and more vulnerable audience than night clubs and comedy clubs.The feedback arts leaders say they are getting from visitors has differed: Some said that they had felt increasing pressure to ease their rules in recent weeks, while others said the vast majority of their audience members have told them that they were more likely to visit venues that continue to maintain strict health and safety requirements.“For every one person who complains about the mask requirement, we have probably about 10 people who express unsolicited gratitude for the fact we are choosing to still have masks in place,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director and chief executive of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles. She said she would be “surprised” if her organization changed its masking rules before Broadway does.On Broadway, which was shut down by the pandemic for more than a year, officials have said that theater operators would continue to require masks and proof of vaccination through at least April. “We do look forward to welcoming our theatergoers without masks one day soon, and in the meantime, want to ensure that we keep our cast, crew and theatergoers safe so that we can continue to bring the magic of Broadway to our audiences without interruption,” Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said in a statement.The Metropolitan Opera, which was the first major arts institution to require people entering their opera house to be both vaccinated and boosted, never missed a performance during the height of the recent Omicron surge, and is in no rush to ease its safety measures. “For us, safety comes before Covid fatigue,” said Gelb, the general manager. “So we’re going to err on the side of caution.”But the company has eased some of its backstage protocols: Soloists were not required to wear masks during recent stage rehearsals of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which helped some work on their diction as the company sang it in the original French for the first time.Like the Met, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are also maintaining their mask and vaccine mandates for the moment. Carnegie Hall continues to require masks and proof of vaccination, but recently dropped its policy of briefly requiring booster shots. Masking and vaccine rules also remain in place at the San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera and Center Theater Group.Two of New York’s premier art-house cinemas are taking different approaches — at least for now. Film Forum’s website says that proof of vaccination is no longer required and that masks are encouraged but not required. Film at Lincoln Center will continue to require proof of vaccination and masks through Sunday, but plans to relax its policy next week.The Metropolitan Museum of Art has stopped checking vaccine cards but is still requiring masks indoors.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA recent poll conducted by The Associated Press found that half of Americans approve of mask mandates, down from 55 percent who supported the mandates six months ago and 75 percent who supported them in December 2020.Choosing what to do is not easy.Christopher Koelsch, the president of the Los Angeles Opera, said that the surveys he has reviewed suggest that roughly a third of audience members would only come to performances if a mask mandate was in place — but that roughly a third would refuse to come if masks are required.“No matter what decision you make,” he said, “there are people who are going to be upset with you and believe that you are making the wrong decision.”Some museums are in an in-between moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stopped checking vaccine cards as of Monday but still requires masks. And the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City is likely to lift its mask mandate this month, said Julián Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director.As mask mandates fall in schools, restaurants and other settings, he said, he felt “almost forced” to follow suit. “What I’d like to see us do is keep this as a suggestion,” he said of wearing masks indoors.Other art venues have already changed their rules. Officials at the Art Institute of Chicago said the museum eliminated its requirements for masks and vaccines on Feb. 28 in line with new governmental policies. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — one of the first major American museums to reopen after the country went into lockdown in March 2020 — also relaxed its most recent mask mandate last week. As it did previously in the fall, the museum is now recommending — but not requiring — masks for visitors and staff.“We’ve had an increasing number of visitors and staff inquire about why we haven’t — or when are we going to — relax the mandatory mask requirement,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director.At the Broadway Comedy Club in New York, patrons have been allowed inside maskless for some time. But Al Martin, the club’s president, said he has been debating whether to stop requiring that his guests be vaccinated.On one hand, he said, checking people at the door required him to add staff members, which costs money. And he estimated that he has lost roughly 30 percent of his audience because of the mandate. On the other, he said, he liked having a city vaccine mandate to fall back on. “It gave a degree of safety and assurance to people,” he said.He ultimately decided to do away with the vaccine mandate at his club as of Monday despite his personal concern that the city “might have been slightly premature” in rolling back the rules.He reserves the right to change his mind about his club’s policy, he said.“If I see my business drop 40 percent because people are not feeling safe in my venue,” he said, “we’re going back to the vaccine passport.” More

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      Tony Awards to Announce Prizes in June at Radio City Music Hall

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      The 75th ceremony, honoring plays and musicals staged on Broadway, resumes its traditional calendar after a few years of pandemic disruption.This year’s Tony Awards will take place on June 12 at Radio City Music Hall as the theater industry seeks to settle in to some sort of new normal following the enormous disruption of the coronavirus pandemic.The ceremony — like the one last September that coincided with the reopening of many theaters after the lengthy lockdown — will be bisected, with one hour streamed by Paramount+, followed by a three-hour broadcast on CBS that is likely to be heavy on the razzle-dazzle.The Tonys, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an important moment for the theater community because the awards are valued by artists and because the event serves to market the art form and the industry. The awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.This year’s ceremony — the 75th since the Tonys were established in 1947 — will honor shows that opened between Feb. 20, 2020, and April 28, 2022. That unusually long eligibility window includes the 15 months when all theaters were shut down to protect public health. (Last year’s Tony Awards ceremony was a much-delayed event that considered only the reduced slate of shows that managed to open before the pandemic cut short the 2019-20 theater season.)The nominators, for the first time since 2019, will have a robust slate of options to consider in all categories.This season features nine new musicals, including the fan favorite “Six”; the critical darling “Girl From the North Country” (which opened one week before theaters shut down); the Michael Jackson jukebox musical, “MJ”; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Strange Loop” (which arrives next month).In the play category, this season brought a record number of works by Black writers, the best reviewed of which were “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage; “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu; and “Skeleton Crew,” by Dominique Morisseau. They will face stiff competition from “The Lehman Trilogy,” a widely hailed exploration of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power.The musical and play revival categories are strong as well.Many of the contenders have yet to open. Because of concerns about when audiences would return in large numbers, and then the arrival of the Omicron variant, numerous producers opted to open as late as possible in the season: 16 shows are still to open before the eligibility period closes.The nominees are to be announced on May 3, determined by a nominating committee made up of about 37 actors, theater administrators and others with a close knowledge of the art form but no financial involvement in the eligible shows.Then voting will take place, electronically. There are about 800 Tony voters, many of whom work in the industry and some of whom are employed by or have invested in nominated shows; they can only vote in categories for which they have seen all the nominees, and there are a few specialized categories in which only some voters are allowed to vote.The show, directed by Glenn Weiss, will air live nationally, with the streaming portion starting at 7 p.m. Eastern and the broadcast portion (which will also be streamable) starting at 8 p.m. More

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      Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ Casts a Long Look at Hate

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      Lloyd Suh’s play is a riff on the arrival of the real Afong Moy, possibly the first woman from China in the United States, and a lens on contemporary racism.Afong Moy is known as “The Chinese Lady,” but really she is just a girl — 14 when she arrives alone in New York in 1834, brought by a pair of merchant brothers who struck a deal with her father in China to put her in a museum for two years, on display.Possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, she is marketed as a curiosity. Crowds pay to ogle her as she brews tea, eats with chopsticks and walks around the room on her bound feet. It’s a performance of cultural identity, and she is happy to enact it — enthusiastic, even, at the start. Cheerfully naïve, unsuspecting of the world’s cruelty, she views herself as an educator, fostering understanding.“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says to her gawkers, who are also us: the audience at the Public Theater, watching Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” a moving and often sharply funny riff on the story of the real Afong Moy, traversing 188 years of American ugliness and exoticization in 90 swift, heightened minutes. A two-hander, it hopes with all its battered heart that we will, by the end, see Afong in her full humanity, and through her see this nation with clearer eyes. But it is not optimistic.“The Chinese Lady” was first staged in New York in 2018, when Ralph B. Peña directed a profoundly affecting, smaller-scale production for his Ma-Yi Theater Company at Theater Row, on 42nd Street. That was of course before the pandemic — before an American president scapegoated an entire population by calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and before physical attacks on people of Asian descent became an ever-present threat in New York and across the country.Peña’s current Barrington Stage Company-Ma Yi production, presented by Ma-Yi and the Public, retains the same gorgeous cast, with Shannon Tyo as Afong and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung, her cynical, deadpan interpreter. (Cindy Im and Jon Norman Schneider play the roles at some performances.) On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s gilt-framed set — simpler and more capacious than the one she designed for Theater Row — the show is more anguished, more mournful, more urgent than before, and sometimes that makes it heavy-handed.History is told through the eyes of Tyo’s character, Afong Moy, who arrives in the United States to be on display at a museum.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTyo and Isaac’s chemistry, though, has only deepened. In their bickering, their loneliness, their not-quite-solidarity, they remain entirely winning and occasionally devastating. (From here, proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the show.)When they are cut loose from each other, after decades of symbiosis — and years at a P.T. Barnum museum — there is no more forlorn sight than Atung alone, a tiny cog in Barnum’s exploitative machine.Long gone by then are the glamorous days when Afong toured to far-flung American cities and met a president — “your emperor, Andrew Jackson,” she calls him, to us. (If that’s an endearing misunderstanding of his title, it’s also a pretty accurate read on his expansionism.) In a revolting re-enactment, we watch him touch her foot: a cowboy barbarian looking down on her even as he sexualizes her.Afong, for all her childlike naïveté when she first arrived, has always been hungry for knowledge of the United States. She speaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Manifest Destiny; the Chinese men building the railroad out West; the people who were already living on these lands in 1492. She finds the country fascinating, and its self-mythologizing wildly overblown.It is not the place where she thought she would spend her life; she believed she would return to her family, not make a home in a place where she is not sure she belongs. When she realizes she will have to do that utterly on her own — breaking out of the box where American culture wants to keep her, under its hostile gaze — she becomes a roiling force of indignation and self-determination.That happens in the play’s penultimate scene, and Tyo absolutely kills it. So it’s unfortunate that the final scene undermines her with ill-conceived design.As Afong recounts horrific 19th-century acts of brutality against Chinese Americans, projections (by Shawn Duan) that had been subtle and mostly static throughout the show start flashing historical headlines and illustrations, then news coverage of contemporary anti-Asian attacks.The impulse is understandable — to make utterly clear that Chinese Americans, long the targets of racist violence, are still menaced as outsiders in their own country. But the intimate power of Suh’s text and Tyo’s performance would have made that connection potently on their own.The production’s final, upstaging image is a wall of disembodied eyes: a digital crowd, creepy and cold. It’s meant, presumably, to expand our sympathy into the wider world. But whatever moral reckoning the play sets in motion occurs between Afong — living, breathing avatar of generations — and the audience. Yet the lights go dark on her.We do, by the end of the play, fully see Afong Moy. In that last moment, let us look.The Chinese LadyThrough April 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Jane Anger,’ Michael Urie Shines as Shakespeare

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      Talene Monahon aims to give Shakespeare his comeuppance in this comedy at the New Ohio Theater.In “Jane Anger,” a new comedy by Talene Monahon, everyone is fed up with the endless waves of sickness and quarantine. The year is 1606, and we are in England, which is enduring another outbreak of the plague. But for one man, a late-career William Shakespeare, there are graver concerns: writer’s block.Portrayed as a vain, out-of-touch celebrity by Michael Urie, Shakespeare struts and frets about the dozens of plays his rivals must be writing, angrily tossing the contents of his chamber pot out his window and onto the street below. In an effort to revitalize his career, he settles on adapting “King Leir,” claiming his version — with a slightly different spelling — will be “naturally superior because of the language and the dialogue and the general vibes.”Another (fictional) obstacle to his livelihood lurks outside, one that this uneven play, which opened on Monday night at the New Ohio Theater, clumsily tries to imagine could be his legacy’s true downfall: Jane Anger, a former lover seeking to strike a bargain with him in order to have her proto-feminist pamphlet published.This one-act work — whose full title is “The Lamentable Comedie of Jane Anger, that Cunning Woman, and also of Willy Shakefpeare and his Peasant Companion, Francis, Yes and Also of Anne Hathaway (also a Woman) Who Tried Very Hard” — creates a tidy blend of the past and present. Social and comedic sensibilities converge to highlight the pervasiveness of misogyny and the differing chances of survival across class lines in times of disease. Billed as a “feminist revenge comedy,” this workshop production, first developed online last October, succeeds at creating smart, lightly absurdist humor, but misses the mark in its attempt at a revisionist redemption.It doesn’t help that the play is mostly dedicated to its two male characters: Shakespeare and his servant, Francis (a show-stealing Ryan Spahn). Described as having “the off-putting air of an aged eunuch,” Francis is an unkempt, overeager fan of the writer and his occasional sexual overtures read less as genuine pining and more like a fan’s willingness to ingratiate. Urie (at the top of his game) and Spahn are a longtime couple, and their chemistry lends their characters’ farcical setups an easy, endlessly watchable flow.Amelia Workman as the title character in the play.Valerie TerranovaThough their dynamic is appealing, it takes up most of the play’s run time, practically swallowing the production whole, and leaving little room for the play’s women to make much of an impact.In creating Jane, Monahon (“How to Load a Musket”) has some fun compounding fact and fiction. Jane Anger is the, most likely pseudonymous, name of the author of the first English-language essay to defend womanhood, released in 1589. Here, she is revealed to be the “Dark Lady” about whom Shakespeare wrote a couple dozen sonnets, now working as a cunning woman, a type of medieval folk healer who also developed spells to counter witchcraft.As Jane, Amelia Workman plays up the double meaning of this cunning woman by delivering an arched eyebrow that rivals Joan Crawford’s. But in trying to explode the Western canon through her own feminist intervention, suggested in the first of Jane’s many fourth-wall breaks, Monahon ultimately fails to give Workman much to chew on other than audience-pandering quips. (She’s aided by Joey Mendoza’s set, a medieval apartment with a central window through which she must hoist herself, and Nic Vincent’s lighting, which brightens to involve those present in Jane’s queries.)We know Shakespeare’s behavior is sexist, so why didn’t Monahon address her critiques directly to the men onstage, in true, anachronistic fashion?Not all is lost, however. Monahon is clearly a gifted comedy writer, and a sweet stage presence, too. She shows up, late in the play, as Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s neglected wife. Monahon giddily mines comparisons between her character’s earnestness and her modern namesake, and her sharp writing blends Shakespearean lowbrow humor with contemporary concerns. Under the direction of Jess Chayes, the production has a liveliness that the exceptional cast runs away with, delivering Monahon’s mile-a-minute gags with zest.Jane AngerThrough March 26 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Conrad Janis, Father on ‘Mork & Mindy’ and Much More, Dies at 94

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      His role on the hit sitcom was just one of more than 100 film and television credits; he was also a fine jazz trombonist and co-owner of an art gallery.Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.Dean A. Avedon, his business manager, confirmed the death.Mr. Janis, a child of the noted art collectors and gallerists Sidney and Harriet (Grossman) Janis, moved easily between the worlds of high art, jazz and acting, sometimes switching one hat for another in the same evening.“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”The key to juggling three areas of expertise, Mr. Janis told Newsday, was keeping his personas separate.“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.Mr. Janis, an accomplished trombonist as well as a busy actor, peformed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. Among the other members of the band, seen in performance in 1980, was his fellow actor George Segal, who played banjo and sang.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via AlamyConrad Janis was born on Feb. 11, 1928, in Manhattan. His parents had a successful shirt-making business early in their married life, which gave them the wherewithal to begin collecting art and, in 1948, open the Sidney Janis Gallery, which became, as The New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He particularly studied the music of the influential New Orleans trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory.“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.His acting developed alongside his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned, got in, and spent two years with the tour, advancing to a leading juvenile role. He started doing radio voice work at the same time.“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York Times in a 1945 interview.He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.It was the first of more than 100 film and television credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.“All through the ’50s,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1981, “I was in so many TV shows as a young musician on drugs, desperately trying to kick the habit, that I’m sure I helped cement in the public’s mind a relationship between musicians and dope. All they cast me in were shows in which I did or didn’t kick the habit. I was always saying, ‘Hey, man, I just got to have a fix.’”He continued to play small parts on TV in the 1960s and ’70s before landing his best-known role, Mindy’s father. His character operated a music store, but although “Mork & Mindy” ran for four seasons, he never got a chance to play his trombone on the show, something he regretted.“The producers wouldn’t go for it,” he told The Albany Democrat-Herald of Oregon in 1990. “We had a really cute script where I got together with my old Dixieland jazz band, but they didn’t think it was funny enough.”Mr. Janis with Thomas Scott, left, and Steven Scott in the 1996 movie “The Cable Guy.”He continued to work in television after “Mork,” with appearances on “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Frasier” and other shows. His later movie appearances included small roles in “Mr. Saturday Night” (1992) and “The Cable Guy” (1996). He sometimes collaborated with his wife, Maria Grimm, including directing two movies she wrote, “The Feminine Touch” (1995) and “Bad Blood” (2012).Mr. Janis’s acting career also included a dozen Broadway credits, among them the Gore Vidal play “A Visit to a Small Planet” in 1957 and a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969.Throughout his musical and acting adventures, Mr. Janis also kept a hand in the art world.Arne Glimcher, the founder and chairman of Pace Gallery and a friend of Mr. Janis’s for almost 60 years, said Mr. Janis worked for his father at the Sidney Janis Gallery and was responsible for certain artists there, including Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann.“His knowledge of 20th-century art and Modernism was really encyclopedic,” Mr. Glimcher said in a phone interview.When Sidney Janis reached 90, he turned the Janis Gallery over to Conrad and his brother, Carroll, who kept it going until 1999.Mr. Janis’s first marriage, to Vicki Quarles, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ronda Copland. Ms. Grimm, whom he married in 1987, died in September. He is survived by his brother; two children from his first marriage, Christopher and Carin Janis; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Glimcher said that in recent years some of Mr. Janis’s old jazz pals would come to his home in Beverly Hills on Thursdays and play. When his wife died, Mr. Glimcher said, Mr. Janis gave her a jazz funeral, then changed the location of those jam sessions.“Every Thursday,” Mr. Glimcher said, “he took the jazz band to her mausoleum and played there.” More