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      ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

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      Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      This Play Is Touring Europe. But No One’s Going Anywhere.

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      By 2024, the British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” will have been shown in 10 countries. Yet neither Mitchell, nor any cast or crew, will cross a single border.The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theater?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, in conjunction with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “touring score” — an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production — that is handed to local artists in theaters at each stop. But those artists have creative control, too: “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by the American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, will have a different director and look everywhere it goes.This commitment to zero travel is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt for climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have started to rethink their reliance on easy, yet environmentally costly, international travel.At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where the show opens Thursday, Mitchell’s vision has been reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. “You have the artistic freedom to make your own show,” Mitchell’s instructions read, “while working within the parameters outlined below.” Those include casting, music and technical requirements — down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a member of lacasadargilla who directed the Milan version, called Mitchell’s production, which she saw over Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero.” Now, it felt as if she and Mitchell were co-directing from a distance, she said.The Rome-based theater collective lacasadargilla rehearsing  “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan. All the show’s electricity is generated from stationary onstage bicycles.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt is an unusual production model in European theater, where directors tend to have the final word on every iteration of their work. The goal, Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to figure out new avenues for theater-making in the face of an environmental threat. “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies, systems, structures, or control, because the subject is so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “You have to relinquish artistic control.”Mitchell, who is 57 and renowned across Europe as a theater and opera director, said that she could afford to experiment with what she called “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not at the beginning, so I don’t have anything to lose if I mess up artistically. I’d like to keep the young generation free of that, and they just get the outcome.”The “Sustainable Theater?” program started with virtual conversations. To come up with a feasible production model, Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, the French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel, held online meetings twice a month for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller, the artistic director of Vidy-Lausanne Theater, and Caroline Barneaud, its director of international projects.The team also linked up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to evaluate the theater’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-evaluation process is a requirement for the Vidy-Lausanne’s European partners, which include theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall has also signed up.)Production-wise, the partners signed on sight unseen: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they might create a single production (and script) together. Instead, each theater will get two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a work by Bel, called “Jérôme Bel,” will also be restaged by participating theaters.The play is about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment. A tree onstage represents the only tree left on the planet.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis for a decade, onstage and off. She stopped flying entirely in 2012, she said, after meeting the British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. The zero-travel rule for “Sustainable Theater?” was her idea — and “irritated people, definitely, to begin with,” she said. Since she is based in Britain, she directed “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely over Zoom ahead of its Lausanne premiere last September (which she attended virtually).Cameras were positioned inside the theater to relay rehearsals to Mitchell, and operated by a dedicated technician. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room, and you can’t pick up the little micro-conversations that are going on. We had to have a different protocol of communication,” she said. “You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”Barneaud, from the Vidy-Lausanne, said that the experience was a positive one for the theater’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. The sound engineer, for instance, had to act as ‘ears’ for the composer, Paul Clark, since he wasn’t in the room.”Out of the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few are set in stone. One is to take performances entirely off the electrical grid. Instead, to generate electricity, Mitchell positioned stationary bikes onstage that performers ride throughout the show. Mitchell said this was about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are tutorials in the touring score on how to build the bikes, too.)The Milan version, made for a larger stage than in Switzerland, and with more elaborate sets, employs four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the show’s requirements still forced its members to rethink some habits, Ferlazzo Natoli said: “Normally, we work much more with video, but video consumes a lot, and it requires a stable quantity of energy.”Working with constraints had proved stimulating, she added. “It’s so exciting, because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before.”Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, left, a lacasadargilla member, directing the show in Milan. ”We discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before,” she said.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe artists and producers involved all stressed that the model they had developed was just one option to limit theater’s impact on global warming, rather than a one-and-done answer. “I think we’re really at the beginning of this journey,” Claudio Longhi, the director of the Teatro Piccolo, said. “This project is a way to ask questions, a provocation.”When the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” premieres on Thursday, Mitchell will be watching — over Zoom, of course. But there will be no notes from her afterward, she said. “It belongs to the local artists in Milan. They’re free to do whatever they want.” More

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      New Takes on Old Myths (With No Gods or Dragons)

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      A theatrical reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” and a feminist revision of some Greek classics show how ancient legends can illuminate contemporary obsessions.ZURICH — At the start of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” a new play at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, the writer Necati Oziri makes the audience a promise: During the next four hours, we won’t hear a single phrase from Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy about gods, giants, dwarves and dragons.In an eloquent and deeply personal address, Oziri, a young German playwright, describes his conflicted feelings at being asked by Christopher Rüping, an in-house director at the Zurich theater, to tackle Wagner’s epic in a new stage work.After Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist gloss in the book-length essay “Rein Gold,” and a “Ring” rewrite with an environmental message by Thomas Köck last season in Berlin, Oziri is the latest in a recent series of playwrights who have mined Wagner’s dramas for contemporary relevance. Although he rejects Wagner’s text, Oziri takes the composer’s characters and themes seriously, and treats them, for the most part, with respect.In his lengthy prologue, Oziri grapples with the perceived elitism of opera and the difficulty of approaching a work regarded as the apotheosis of German genius. He compares himself to a “cultural terrorist planning an attack at the opera.”Oziri then introduces “The Ring’s” dramatis personae through a series of involving monologues for the seven actors who share the stage with him and the American poet and rapper Black Cracker, who D.J.s for much of the evening. (The original soundtrack, contributed by eight artists and musical groups, quotes Wagner only a handful of times.) The house lights remain on for much of the lengthy production, with the entire cast onstage to listen to one another’s speeches.Rüping is particularly adept at creating a relaxed and even playful environment for the piece to develop organically and at an unhurried pace. The down-to-earth performances and the pulsating music help make this a loose-limbed production that quickly settles into a comfortable groove. In the best possible way, the production cuts the myth down to size.As Alberich, the dwarf who sets the saga in motion by forging an all-powerful ring from stolen gold, Nils Kahnwald delivers a rancor-filled monologue about loneliness. Maja Beckmann’s Fricka first appears on a video screen to record a message to her husband, Wotan, the chief god, recalling the bliss of their early love. Wiebke Mollenhauer, as Brünnhilde, the daughter whom Wotan punishes for disobedience, bids a tearful farewell to her Valkyrie sisters and rails against the patriarchy. “The only way to rise to the throne is by sitting on daddy’s lap,” she says, bitterly. When Wotan finally appears, toward the end of the evening, he unleashes an epic whine that parodies white male fragility.Matthias Neukirch’s comically raving, mansplaining performance in that role won him spontaneous applause at the performance I attended, but the segment feels less original or pointed than some of Oziri’s other writing, for instance a soliloquy he gives the exploited giants who construct Wotan’s castle, Valhalla. Oziri recasts them as Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers who were invited — as cheap labor — to help rebuild West Germany in the postwar period.This isn’t the first time that Rüping, one of Germany’s most celebrated young directors, has created startlingly contemporary (and lengthy) theater out of ancient myth. His 10-hour, classically inspired “Dionysos Stadt,” unveiled at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2018, is a monument of recent German-language theater. (The epic production will return to Munich later this season). “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines” at Munich’s Residenztheater, directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach.Sandra ThenAnother young German director, Elsa-Sophie Jach, attempts something like a feminist version of “Dionysos Stadt” with “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines,” at Munich’s Residenztheater. With its long narrations, installation-like set and percussive live music, there’s much about the production that feels similar to Rüping’s work.In the intimate confines of the Marstall, a small Residenztheater stage in the former imperial stables, six actresses cavort around a hot-pink fountain as they recount the myths of Echo, Medusa, Cassandra, Medea, Philomela and Penelope — some of antiquity’s best-known and bloodiest. There’s no shortage of killing, sexual violence and wanton cruelty in these tales, often narrated in the first person, about women who suffer at the hands of gods and men. (The performing text is itself a patchwork of ancient and modern texts, from Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sappho up to modern feminist authors, including Christa Wolf and Hélène Cixous.)Although these stories are well known, the actresses succeed in making us feel discomfort and rage at the sickening violence enacted against women over and over. By giving voice to wronged or misunderstood female figures, “The Outrageous Ones” sticks it to the patriarchy, as represented by Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo.It’s a stylish and assured production. An onstage band, Slatec, helps to channel the female fury with its dynamic improvisations. The eclectic quartet — two sets of percussion, synthesizers and a trombone — performs what might best be described as techno meets big band.The musicians drive the evening with momentum and energy, while the band’s colorful outfits contrast with the somber black worn by the actresses for most of the performance — as does the blood that shoots out of the fountain by the gallon toward the end of the evening. Aleksandra Pavlovic’s playful set and Barbara Westernach’s stark, dramatic lighting help turn the small brick interior of the Marstall into a kooky nightclub with a haunted-house vibe.As the performance draws to a close, however, it strains for relevance by including the real-life story of Nevin Yildirim, a woman who in 2015 was sentenced to life imprisonment in Turkey for killing a man who had raped her. Jach’s decision to add Yildirim to the pantheon of cruelly mistreated queens, princesses and nymphs feels out of place. Such editorializing seems tendentious, as if Jach and her performers lacked faith in their classical material. Before this modern-day interpolation, however, the production speaks up for the silenced women of antiquity in sensitive, eloquent and artistically unexpected ways.“Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths,” wrote the American literary scholar Joseph Campbell. Can it be any wonder that theatermakers continue to turn to our most ancient legends to dream through our contemporary worries, obsessions and fears?Der Ring des Nibelungen. Directed by Christopher Rüping. Schauspielhaus Zurich. Through March 27; guest performances at the Wiener Festwochen June 1-3.Die Unerhörten. Directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach. Residenztheater Munich. Through April 26. More

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      James Earl Jones Will Have a Broadway Theater Named After Him

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      The landmark theater will be renamed in honor of the 91-year-old actor who has made 21 Broadway appearances and won two competitive Tony Awards.The Shubert Organization, which is Broadway’s biggest landlord, will rename one of its 17 theaters after the actor James Earl Jones, fulfilling a promise made when Black artists pressed for greater recognition in the wake of the 2020 protests against societal racism.The organization said Wednesday that it would name the Cort Theater, a landmark 110-year-old house located on West 48th Street, after Jones, a two-time competitive Tony Award winner who, over six decades, has appeared in 21 Broadway shows.“He’s an icon — he really is one of the greatest American actors, and this is just a perfect match,” said Robert E. Wankel, chairman and chief executive of the Shubert Organization.In a telephone interview, the 91-year-old Jones said he was honored by the news. “It means a lot,” he said. “It’s too heavy for me to try to define.”The James Earl Jones Theater will be the second Broadway house named for a Black artist; the August Wilson, operated by Jujamcyn Theaters, was renamed for the American playwright shortly after his death in 2005. The Shubert Organization last summer pledged to name a theater after a Black artist as part of an agreement with the advocacy organization Black Theater United; the Nederlander Organization has also promised to take such a step.Jones, best known as the voice of Darth Vader in the “Star Wars” films, has had a long and illustrious career on Broadway. He first worked there in 1957, as an understudy in a short-lived play called “The Egghead,” and then starting in 1958 he had a role in “Sunrise at Campobello,” which ran for 16 months at the Cort Theater.Jones recalled that in “Sunrise at Campobello” he had a line — “Mrs. Roosevelt, supper is served” — that he struggled to deliver because of a speech disorder. “I almost didn’t make it through because I’m a stutterer,” he said. “But it became a lot of fun eventually.”Jones’s most recent Broadway performance was in a 2015 revival of “The Gin Game.” He won his two competitive Tonys for best actor, in 1969 for “The Great White Hope” and in 1987 for originating the role of Troy Maxson in Wilson’s “Fences.” In 2017 he won a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.The Cort, which seats 1,084 people, is among Broadway’s oldest theaters; it is currently undergoing a $45 million renovation and expansion, and is expected to reopen later this year, at which time there will be a rededication ceremony. Until now, the theater has been named for John Cort, a onetime vaudeville performer who, by the early 20th century, controlled multiple theaters across the country. Cort was the first operator of the Broadway house that has borne his name. More

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      I Love London Theater. But Not London Theatergoing.

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      While full of fine shows, a long-awaited binge was also full of stress about how loosely audiences followed rules about staying healthy in a pandemic.LONDON — On the February morning when England’s National Health Service pinged me, saying I’d been identified as a contact of someone who had tested positive for Covid, I freaked out completely.Not out of fear of getting sick; I’m boosted, and I think if I got the virus I would probably be fine. But the last time I came to London, in September, my euphoric playgoing trip was thrown into disarray when I tested positive post-arrival, which banished me to a hotel room for 10 solitary, asymptomatic days. Was I about to get stuck here again?I’d only seen one friend this trip and he was OK, so it had to be a stranger, this person with Covid. My mind scrambled to figure out where our paths had crossed. Based on the time frame that the N.H.S. suggested, I would bet it was at a small, crowded theater two nights earlier — my prime suspect being the guy in front of me who’d sneezed mid-show. That’s when I noticed he wasn’t wearing a mask.Which made him pretty unremarkable here, in a city with genuinely world-beating theater but audience Covid safety protocols ranging from lax to cavalier, and getting looser. Over my 12-day visit, which included some gorgeous productions I am grateful to have seen, that lack of stringency dampened my anticipation of shows, my enjoyment of them — and ultimately my interest in going to them.Because even in this not-yet-over pandemic with its ever-shifting rules, I’m used to feeling safe at the theater; used to feeling like we are all looking out for one another, trying to keep everyone onstage and backstage and in the house healthy, in pursuit of this art that we love. It’s not a minor thing, this feeling; it’s rooted in empathy.And on a purely practical level? We Americans do have to test negative before we’re allowed to fly home — on planes that are still nowhere near as crowded as they used to be.TRAVELING TO SEE THEATER is one of those prepandemic habits that has yet to return for most of us, and it’s been driving me a little bit crazy.I am one of those people — maybe you are, too — who reads the news about which plays are being done in which far-flung places and aches to be in the room with them, burns with envy of those who can be, keeps checking and rechecking the mental calculus of “Can I risk it yet?” against “Can I bear one more second not to?” Evelyn Miller and James McAvoy in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” The production was wonderful, but the audience at a return performance — not so much.Marc BrennerSo when my editor, wanting a profile of the actor James McAvoy, emailed to ask if I would be willing to do the interview in London, where he is starring in Jamie Lloyd’s electrifying production of “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the West End, my answer was an all-caps, unfettered yes. It is one of my favorite cities, and I missed it. The time to risk going, it suddenly seemed, was now.I would need to see that “Cyrano” again — twist my arm — because it had been more than two years since I’d caught it in early previews during its original run. To take full advantage of the slog across the Atlantic, I would stay a while and see a slew of other shows — starting, just hours after passing through customs at Heathrow, with a matinee chosen to go easy on my jet-lagged brain.That was “& Juliet,” a pop-musical riff on “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shaftesbury Theater, where we did have to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to get in, and the people near me were wearing masks. It was a jolt, though, in a more than century-old West End theater that couldn’t be described as airy, to see whole groups of people walk in and take their seats barefaced.Assembling onstage before the performance began, the actors did try, in a spirit befitting their frolic of a show, to encourage safer behavior. One briefly held up a chalkboard with a hand-lettered message: “Hello,” it said, which got cheerful hellos back from the crowd. Another brief chalkboard, another message: “Thank you,” which got some applause.But the wordless chalkboard in between those two — bearing a friendly pastel drawing of a mask — got only silence. Which, in the circumstances, counted as a response.“& Juliet” turned out not to be my cup of tea. Still, I’d have stayed if I’d been able to stop thinking about the ventilation, wondering what I was breathing and whether it was worth it.I decided it wasn’t and fled at intermission, back onto the street, back into the open air.Heather Forster and Samuel Creasey in “The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage.”Manuel Harlan“THE BOOK OF DUST: La Belle Sauvage,” that night at the Bridge Theater, was leagues more rewarding. Adapted by Bryony Lavery from Philip Pullman’s fantasy prequel to “His Dark Materials,” and staged by Nicholas Hytner with beguiling visuals, it’s the character Lyra Belacqua’s origin story.The stagecraft is more enchanting than the narrative, but what marvelous stagecraft it is: projections conjuring a watery world, life-size boats moving through it with a choreographed fluidity more persuasive than I’d ever witnessed onstage. And of course the spectral puppets, glowing from within.The lovely guy next to me, masked when he wasn’t snacking, told me he felt perfectly safe at the Bridge precisely because it was airy — not like some old West End house, he said. Until that evening, he hadn’t been to any theater since the pandemic began. (You can see “The Book of Dust,” whose Bridge run has ended, in a National Theater Live recording.)It makes me happy when I’m in London at the same time as an Emma Rice production. This trip it was her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” at the National Theater: a 19th-century classic warmed with music and breathed to life as if it had taken as its cue something Charlotte Brontë once wrote about the novel: that it “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”The moor is a kind of Greek chorus in the play, while the storytelling is nimble and full of fun; Katy Owen is comic perfection as Little Linton, the pampered princeling of Wuthering Heights. But when Catherine (Lucy McCormick) dies and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter) cries, “Catherine Earnshaw, haunt me!,” his jagged grief rips through us, straight to the soul.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in the Old Vic production of Caryl Churchill’s two-hander “A Number.”Manuel HarlanIn Caryl Churchill’s brisk two-hander “A Number,” given a stellar production by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic, every moment of Paapa Essiedu’s beautifully modulated performance has a similar visceral reach, right into the center of us. Opposite Lennie James as a father who secretly replaced his original son with a clone, Essiedu plays three disparate but genetically identical men with an unshowy humanity that pops against Es Devlin’s stylized tomato-red set.OF EVERYTHING I SAW, though, the production that brought me there is the one that left me absolutely stunned. The first time I saw “Cyrano de Bergerac,” on Thanksgiving Day 2019, the production was still a work in progress.This time, I left the Harold Pinter Theater with a sensation through my limbs like an electrical charge. We are all bodies in space at the theater, and I responded to this “Cyrano” on a cellular level.I saw other shows, too: at the Hampstead Theater, Florian Zeller’s weary new psychological drama, “The Forest,” about a man whose seemingly perfect life is blown up by his infidelity (but at least the cast includes Gina McKee and Finbar Lynch); at the Almeida Theater, Omar Elerian’s overlong take on Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” with the reliably first-rate Kathryn Hunter in slapstick clown mode; and, at the Donmar Warehouse, “Henry V,” starring Kit Harington and featuring — this will sound strange, but it is absolutely true — the most entrancing stage rain I have ever seen. I was able to snag a ticket (a terrible one; I spent a lot of time with actors’ butts blocking my view) the day a lethal storm blew into Britain and people canceled plans.Kit Harington, center, in the Donmar Warehouse production of “Henry V.” The theater was one of the few that explicitly requested that attendees wear masks.Helen MurrayI’d canceled my own theatergoing plans earlier that week, when the N.H.S. texted me about that contact and told me to take rapid tests for five days. In my initial flood of anxiety, I nixed a train trip to Bristol and returned my ticket to see Mark Rylance there in “Dr. Semmelweis” — a play about a pioneer in the prevention of needless infection.Then, at the pharmacy, a clerk handed me a free box of seven rapid tests, from the N.H.S. — a perk of pandemic life in England that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, would announce the end of for most people days later, along with other precautions including contact tracing.Apparently I was fine. Each time I took a test, the result was negative — and each time I reported that online to the N.H.S., the automated response reminded me to “wear a face covering in crowded settings.”It boggles my mind that so many theatergoers in London, sitting side by side for hours, don’t bother with that elementary precaution — if not for themselves, then for the actors, who are not masked, and for other people in the audience who might be medically vulnerable, not able to be vaccinated yet or in close contact with people in either of those groups. It is such a simple kindness. It is also an act of inclusion.The only theater that I saw actively request it was the Donmar, and people complied. Elsewhere any such request was timid, and certainly not face to face. When major West End theater operators said recently that they would no longer require mask wearing or proof of vaccination from audience members, I had to wonder how a mask policy could count as mandatory if it had gone unenforced.One night I went to the Duke of York’s Theater to see “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel. The show hadn’t started yet when I noticed that the guy on one side of me wasn’t wearing a mask. Then a barefaced guy sat down on my other side. I thought: If this were the subway, I would get up immediately. So I left.HOW DOES A CITY — or an industry — that wants to welcome the world and its wallet not worry about things like that? The contrast between playgoing in New York and in London isn’t about quirky cultural differences. These are fundamentally divergent ways of navigating the pandemic.One is cautious, cognizant of the frailty of bodies; of the gaps that remain in our knowledge of Covid and long Covid; of the fact that we learn of new variants only after they start spreading. The other seems heedless — telling the audience, in effect, that they can take their chances or stay home. I wonder how many people, surveying the options, have decided to keep their money and keep safe.I spent a bit more of mine, returning to the Pinter for “Cyrano.” A good single seat had opened up, and I grabbed it. I didn’t want to wait until the show got to Brooklyn to see it again. But I wish I had.The audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen. I kept looking at the performers, doing their jobs so gloriously on that stage, and wondering how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with their health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.The next night, my last in London before I flew back to New York, I didn’t go to the theater. Unthinkably, it had lost its appeal. More

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      ‘Out of Time’ Review: Once Sidelined, Now Taking Center Stage

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      Five Asian American actors, all over 60, deliver monologues that touch on grief and heritage, on adult children and cultural cancellation.She is absolutely elegant, and completely isolated — a documentarian, microphone clipped to her chest, talking to an unseen camera about the last time she hugged someone.This will be the final film in the long career of this quietly charismatic woman, and the first in which she steps into the frame to center the narrative on herself. Although her real subject, she says, is someone near to her, now lost.“My Documentary,” written by Anna Ouyang Moench and performed by Page Leong, is the captivating opener to “Out of Time,” a collaboration between the National Asian American Theater Company and the Public Theater that gathers five new solo shorts by Asian American playwrights into a single program.The five performers are Asian American actors, all over 60, deep into careers in which their odds of working have been far tougher than for their white contemporaries. In “Out of Time,” they step into the frame — figuratively speaking, mostly — to tell wide-ranging stories that touch on grief and heritage and the pandemic, on adult children and cultural cancellation, on making art and pulling off an optical illusion.Not all of the art-making succeeds in Les Waters’s uneven production at the Public, but every actor is one you’ll want to see again, and that is a large part of the point. So is the potent sense of worldviews and experiences that the American stage has generally ignored.“My Documentary” is a beautiful piece of writing. A life story that’s a love story, too, it has a bruised awareness that “misunderstanding something very important as you’re living it” is a human tendency. In Leong’s hands, the nameless documentarian is compelling in a lean-forward way: Funny, sharp and warm, she has a whole cogent argument against hugging at work, and remembers her own sons in their earliest years as “agents of chaos” in her life. Connection and solace are what she’s seeking with her film. They’re also what the monologue brings.A series of long, sheer fabric curtains (by the design collective Dots) form most of the set for “Out of Time,” and when we first glimpse Mia Katigbak in Mia Chung’s play “Ball in the Air,” it is through them as she crosses upstage, intently playing with a paddle ball. You know the kind: wooden paddle, rubber ball attached by a string.It’s an intriguing start, and Katigbak — a founder of the National Asian American Theater Company and a dependably excellent mainstay of downtown theater — is a fine paddle ball player, it turns out. But the monologue is all confusion, written in short chunks that seem to come from three different strands of narrative that aren’t so much braided together as stacked on top of one another: one about an election, one about a friendship gone wrong, another about a car ride, if I’ve parsed them right. They might make perfect sense intercut in a film. Here they blend together muddily.Rita Wolf, behind a curtain and onscreen, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s monologue, “Black Market Caviar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe sole moments of clarity concern the optical illusion: a ball that Katigbak seems to make disappear in midair. (Steve Cuiffo, New York theater’s go-to magic guy, is listed in the program as a consultant.) Later, speaking directly to the audience, she tells us how it works. You’ll come away with that knowledge, anyway.The program’s rough patch continues with the next play, Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Black Market Caviar,” a gorgeously layered monologue foiled by Waters’s staging. Performed by Rita Wolf, it is a message of love and comfort spoken by a woman named Carla, 30 years in the future, to her younger self. In the script, Backhaus says that Carla appears in “a portal from somewhere that opens before you on December 31st, 2019.”Maybe it was the urge to mix things up that enticed Waters to place Wolf at such a chilly distance from the audience, veiled behind a curtain, seated in profile and talking to a video camera. We see her in close-up on a screen downstage, her image frustratingly out of sync with the sound of her voice, which travels faster. But is watching someone on video what we’ve come to the theater for?The screen prevents the vital communion between actor and audience, making it harder to hear Backhaus’s play — about a genetic predisposition toward cancer passed down from one generation of women to the next in Carla’s family, and about undoing the trauma that came from keeping that scary fact a secret.“Don’t succumb to the fear,” Carla counsels, surely knowing that the mere fact of her being alive so far in the future is heartening.“Be afraid,” she says, “and live your life.”The program bounces back with Naomi Iizuka’s “Japanese Folk Song,” starring Glenn Kubota as a silver-haired retired banker named Taki, speaking to his grown daughter about his life — and his loathing of jazz, including the Thelonious Monk song that gives Iizuka’s monologue its name.The script carries a poignant dedication, “to Takehisa Iizuka (1934-2020),” and the playwright has said that Taki is strongly influenced by her father. The character tells the audience, in a quick prologue to the play, that he is not the real Taki but rather a stand-in who looks like him. This, then, is theater as a tender, comic, aching act of remembrance.Leonie, the famous septuagenarian novelist in Sam Chanse’s “Disturbance Specialist,” the final monologue, is very much not retired, though a younger generation who deems her tweets problematic is trying to make her go away. In response, Leonie has shown up defiantly at her alma mater to give a speech.Performed by Natsuko Ohama, it’s a thoughtful play, discursive and entertaining, with sympathy for a lifelong artist-activist who worked hard to earn a place at a table where white men were so much more freely welcomed, and who abruptly finds that place threatened. Yet Leonie, for all her indignation, recognizes that her detractors may have a point.She was young and furious once, too. And she knows that, even at her age, she must adapt to thrive.Out of TimeThrough March 13 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      The Past Pushes Back in 2 Shows With Contemporary Blackness in Mind

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      New productions of “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More” aim to reflect our current racial politics. The results are uneven.On a recent weekend, I eagerly set out to see two new productions that prominently center Blackness: the director Arin Arbus’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and “Black No More,” a new musical with a starry creative team that was inspired by a satirical 1931 novel about race in America.“The Merchant of Venice,” a Theater for a New Audience production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, came first. Here, Arbus strong-arms contemporary politics into the work, which she places in a modern-day setting. The tension between Arbus’s direction and the text is most apparent in a scene in which Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, in arguing he should be repaid after a merchant defaults on a loan, cites laws about the enslaved:You have among you many a purchased slaveWhich, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to you‘Let them be free, marry them to your heirs.Why sweat they under burdens?’In this race-conscious production, the speech takes on a different meaning. Since the actor playing Shylock is John Douglas Thompson, Shylock’s Jewish identity is subordinated to another one: a Black identity.While “Merchant” reflects our current racial politics and sensibilities through the director’s vision, “Black No More,” the New Group’s musical, relies on the major ways in which its script deviates from the original novel. Both shows function almost as reactionary works of criticism, “Merchant” critiquing Shakespeare’s text and “Black No More” critiquing the bleak satire of the novel. And though each production brings art from the past to the present, sometimes in brilliant ways, the antiquated plots, themes and characters aren’t always easy to recontextualize. The past pushes back.In this “Merchant,” Antonio, the title character, and Bassanio, the best friend to whom he offers his fortune and very nearly his life, are lovers. The women — the heiress Portia, her maid Nerissa and Shylock’s daughter, Jessica — are married in the end, as is typically the rule in Shakespeare’s comedies, but are unhappy and wise to their husbands’ misogyny and other faults. And then Shylock and his daughter (and Shylock’s Jewish friend Tubal) are all Black, which brings in the history of racial discrimination, slavery and prejudice.Arbus shifts the focus of the text so Shylock — performed by Thompson with devastating pathos — isn’t the antagonist who stands in the way of the central characters’ happiness, but the tragic heart of the play. Though there’s still the matter of the dual Black and Jewish identities; of course Black Jews exist, but the conflation addles the themes of the production and bends the original text in directions it can’t actually go.While the text specifically speaks of anti-Semitism, the pivot to include anti-Black racism overwhelms it. Arbus does try to balance the two identities, especially in the final scene, in which Shylock and his daughter (beautifully portrayed by Danaya Esperanza) recite a Hebrew prayer; the exceptional performances almost make up for the fact that the scene feels out of place, like a last-ditch effort to assert that this is still also a play about anti-Semitism.Blackness is already in the play, in the form of racist throwaway comments about “Moors” that Arbus’s direction highlights to the degree she can. So Portia’s matter-of-fact dismissal of any dark-skinned suitors as she speaks to Nerissa (played by the Black actress Shirine Babb) is challenged by Nerissa’s disapproving glare. And when Jessica’s suitor, Lorenzo, disdainfully jokes about Shylock’s servant impregnating a Moor, Jessica silently steps away in disgust.Racism against Black people was assumed in Shakespeare’s time, so in a contemporary race-aware production that stays loyal to the text, the characters’ reactions to it must be limited to pauses and glances.Perhaps a contemporized version of this problematic play must be edited beginning with the language, mixing in modern-day parlance, as James Ijames did in his “Fat Ham,” or revised by artful omission, as in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Because there’s a limit to Arbus’s approach even within these textual constraints; Nerissa and Jessica can silently respond to a comment about Moors, but no one speaks about or refers to Shylock’s Black identity, just his Jewish one. It’s odd to showcase Blackness without having a Shylock who can explicitly speak about his Blackness. It then feels as if his two identities are at war. To which should we direct our attention, because the text can’t hold both?These thoughts lingered as I headed to the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan to see “Black No More,” whose short run ended this weekend.Unlike “Merchant,” “Black No More” isn’t loyal to the original text, George S. Schuyler’s novel of the same name. But it does take the book’s basic plot and characters. (“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” Tariq Trotter, who wrote the show’s lyrics, said in a recent interview. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”)In Schuyler’s novel, a Harlem man named Max Disher undergoes a scientific procedure that turns Black people white. The process, invented by a Black scientist named Dr. Crookman, becomes so popular that it affects Black businesses and institutions, labor politics and more. The newly Caucasian Max changes his name and moves down South to find and marry the racist white woman named Helen who had previously rejected him. He eventually becomes the leader of a white supremacist group and profits off racist rhetoric.Brandon Victor Dixon as Max Fisher in the musical “Black No More.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Black No More” the musical, directed by Scott Elliott and with a book by John Ridley (“12 Years a Slave”), softens — and in some cases eliminates — Schuyler’s biting critique. The novelist didn’t just target racist whites but also Black identity, and Black leaders and institutions that claim to support the Black community while actually damaging and profiting off it.In the novel, characters mostly act in their self-interest, especially when it comes to money; in many ways the villain is capitalism. (Schuyler was a vocal socialist at the time he published the book.) In the musical, things are simplified: Dr. Crookman (played by Trotter) is a devil figure offering a Faustian bargain.There aren’t many sympathetic characters in the text, which the musical changes. Helen, now a liberal at heart, falls in love with Max when he’s still Black and reveals she’s only pretending to be racist around her conservative family.In the book, Max’s best friend, Bunny, follows his lead, also turning white and serving white supremacists for profit. In the musical, Bunny (now Buni) is a Black woman who acts as Max’s moral compass; she defends Blackness and calls out Max for betraying his race. Schuyler’s book disregards women, and the intersection of race and gender, altogether. In the musical, Buni gets a song about the burdens Black women bear for their families and communities, but her character is thinly written, just bolstering Max’s story.The influential Black artists who worked on the show appeared eager to transform the original work into a piece that celebrates Blackness. Trotter’s lyrics, Bill T. Jones’s choreography and the music by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser and Daryl Waters were lovingly appreciative of Black movement and sound, with R&B, soul, hip-hop, spoken word, step and lindy hop forming an extravagant collage. And some numbers — like the oddly triumphant final song of Black solidarity — and a new Black activist character named Agamemnon, seem incorporated to counter the cynicism of Schuyler’s work.It’s understandable, especially given the way Black Lives Matter has shaped the cultural conversation about inequality faced by Black people; it would be outré to produce a true adaptation of a work like Schuyler’s, which has no redeemable Black characters and berates pillars of the Black community as vehemently as it does white institutions.And so Max, our Black-turned-white protagonist, is given a guilty conscience; he’s made sympathetic just long enough so he can be the martyr, shot down in the middle of a fourth-wall-breaking monologue that’s meant to be a bridge between the 1931 story and 2022 audiences.In art, context is key. But depending on the work and what new context the director or playwright wants to bring to it, some changes can feel too forced, too transparent. “Expectation from you all is … what? For me to give a moving soliloquy on race in America?” Max says in his final monologue. He’s no longer speaking from the world of the musical but from today. “Still we can’t put all our nonsense behind us,” he says. And the bullet that takes him down? It doesn’t come from Schuyler’s time; it’s shot from 2022. It just goes to show that when past and present collide, it may not be pretty. More

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      Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

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      Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More