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      ‘Barococo’ Review: Fop Till You Drop

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      Happenstance Theater traps five pretentious aristocrats in a comedy of bad manners that could use more luster and more bite.Playing parlor games, dancing the minuet, making snide comments — aristocrats sure do know how to party. But there’s always a chance that by the end of the night someone will lose their head …The dandies and dauphins of the 1 percent prance to 59E59 Theaters for Happenstance Theater’s “Barococo,” A satire of upper-class privilege zhuzhed up into an often absurd comedy of manners, “Barococo” has fun and laughs, but doesn’t always have the glamour you’d expect from this exaggerated snapshot of genteel life.The play’s title is a portmanteau of “Baroque” and “Rococo,” the 17th- and 18th-century periods of ornate European art, fashion, architecture and music. “Barococo” takes place during a soiree hosted by the noble Dauphine Marionette (Sarah Olmsted Thomas). In attendance are the self-important actor Astorio Cavalieri (Mark Jaster), the pretentious Duc Leslie Pamplemousse de Citron-Pressé (Alex Vernon), the petty elder Countess Olympia Stroganovskaya (Sabrina Selma Mandell) and the vacuous outsider Baroness Constance Blandford Plainview (Gwen Grastorf).Luccio Patatino von Dusselkopf (Caleb Jaster) serves as the entertainment, accompanying the party games with the sounds of Handel and Bach on harpsichord and cello.Happenstance, a Washington-based physical theater troupe, devises productions with its cast, and there’s no plot to speak of in this brief 65-minute show, directed by the company members Jaster and Mandell.We simply watch these daft noblemen and women play charades, dance and trade riddles in a desperate attempt to stave off ennui. Leisure is a trap — literally. It soon becomes clear that these aristocrats are unable to leave the party.So the surprise of “Barococo” is how it actually resembles Sartre’s “No Exit,” or, more fittingly, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film “The Exterminating Angel,” which was recently adapted into an opera. There’s the same idiocy and, sometimes, cruelty beneath the fawning and posturing. Somewhere outside this room is the real world, where finery and foppishness won’t save these characters from an uprising of the plebs.The actors distinguish themselves through affectations: a raised eyebrow, a bow, a giggle, a swept leg, a daintily dropped handkerchief, a cleared throat. Pantomime and awkward silences are emphasized more than dialogue, and to great comedic effect — the show really takes off during an extended silent sequence in which the partygoers gorge on an unseen feast; outrageous feats of physical comedy soon devolve into violence and then total chaos.As the Dauphine and Cavalieri, Thomas and Jaster make starving for attention into a show of flamboyance — she tittering shamelessly and he performing a full actor’s warm-up for a simple game of charades. Grastorf is a worthy straight woman, her bearings painfully stiff and face twisted into an expression of constant bafflement.From left: Vernon as a pretentious duke, Mandell as a petty countess, Jaster as a pretentious actor and Thomas as the hostess of the soiree.Richard TermineAnd yet, for a show all about excess, the production is oddly spare. The set design is virtually nonexistent — unadorned floors and walls dotted with a harpsichord, some stringed instruments, a fencing sword mount and a table with quills and an inkwell. In a program note the directors write that they chose this minimalist approach “to focus on period restraint, manners and style,” but the empty space feels like too stark of a contrast; some embellishments would do the production good.The same can be said of Daniel Weissglass’s austere lighting and the costumes, designed by Mandell. The cuffs and collars and doublets, and curled and powdered wigs, are perfectly serviceable but could use more rococo ornamentation, with brighter colors, opulent fabrics and jewels.The script itself could use some trimmings, too. There is plenty of delicious humor to chew on at “Barococo.” But more context on the outside world, and the lives of these characters, might individualize the gossip and quibbles, and give the satire more bite. Right now the show is little more than rich people dawdling and preening on a stage.BarococoThrough March 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ Postpones Broadway Reopening Until April

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      The musical, which closed temporarily last month as the Omicron variant spread, had hoped to reopen in March.The Broadway musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which closed temporarily last month as Omicron battered New York, announced Friday that it would postpone its reopening until April 14, a month later than anticipated, to give the theater economy a bit more time to rebound.“The good news is that it looks like the virus is calming down, but there are still a lot of unknowns,” said the show’s lead producer, Kevin McCollum. “It was just clear that April was a better time to open, given the trends with tourism, and thinking about when families and groups will start to feel comfortable.”The hiatus left the show’s cast, crew and musicians without work (at least at “Doubtfire”), but McCollum said he thought it was the best way to attempt to preserve their jobs longer term. And on Friday, he said he had invited the entire cast to return, and was hopeful that they would do so.The musical, adapted from the popular 1993 film, has traveled a bumpy road: After an out-of-town run at 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle, it began previews on Broadway on March 9, 2020, just three days before the coronavirus pandemic forced all theaters to close. After a 19-month hiatus, the show resumed previews last October and opened Dec. 5, to mixed reviews, just as Omicron was causing cases to spike again.“If there was an award for worst timing for a producer, I will take that award,” McCollum said. “My timing was terrible.”But McCollum said he believes that the show will work if given a chance, and that he is committed to trying to preserve the jobs of his company, many of whom have been working on the show for several years.“The easiest path would have been to say, ‘OK, we’re done,’ but the show was telling us we’re not done,” he said. “We just never got our sea legs because of Omicron.”One additional advantage to reopening in April: Tony nominators and voters who did not catch the show before it began its hiatus on Jan. 10 will now have another chance to do so before casting their ballots. (This year’s Tony calendar has not yet been announced, but the season is expected to end in late April, followed by nominations, voting and an awards ceremony.)“Mrs. Doubtfire” was written by Karey Kirkpatrick, Wayne Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, and directed by Jerry Zaks. A second production of the show is scheduled to begin performances in Manchester, England, in September.“Mrs. Doubtfire” was the first of three Broadway shows to announce a temporary closing as the Omicron surge caused audiences to dwindle — “To Kill a Mockingbird” closed on Jan. 16 and said it would reopen at a different theater on June 1, while “Girl From the North Country” closed Jan. 23 and said it hoped to reopen in the spring. (Six other shows closed for good.)Unions representing actors and musicians did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the “Mrs. Doubtfire” plans. D. Joseph Hartnett, the stagecraft department director at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), said that his union, which represents stagehands, had not had yet heard from the show and “presumes the production has and still is officially closed.” More

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      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Looking Straight at the Struggles of Old Age

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      In two Paris theater productions, there’s no sugarcoating the physical decline that comes at the end of a long life.PARIS — There is something piercing, almost brutal, about watching someone struggle to walk, eat or even sit down. When faced with the physical decline that often comes with old age, many of us instinctively avert our eyes. In Paris, however, two theater artists are forcing audiences to look.In “A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad,” a new play by the writer and director Carole Thibaut, the members of an extended family gather around their ailing matriarch — who may or may not have passed away. And mortality looms even larger in “A Death in the Family,” a new play by the British playwright Alexander Zeldin, which is primarily set in a French nursing home.If there is such a thing as an overly naturalistic play, “A Death in the Family,” which had its premiere at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, may represent it for some people. In truth, nothing much happens for long stretches. Zeldin convincingly portrays daily life, down to the bland furniture and wall colors, in an institution for residents at the end of their lives: The most dramatic event of all awaits, but in the meantime, the days must be filled.There are slow, silent meals, and group activities to make viewers in good health wince — especially those closest to the actors, in seats onstage. Is it compassion we feel as we watch the residents working hard to follow basic dance movements to a children’s song? Or panic, at the thought of a potential future we would rather ignore?Zeldin has experience when it comes to discomfort. The “Inequalities” trilogy he created between 2014 and 2019 (composed of “Beyond Caring,” “Love” and “Faith, Hope and Charity”) turned the spotlight on casualties of government austerity policies in Britain, including workers with insecure contracts and homeless families. His work found eager audiences abroad, and an invitation from the Odéon led him to stage his first production in French — a language he speaks fluently.Marie-Christine Barrault in the foreground with, from left, Mona, Ferdinand Redouloux and Catherine Vinatier in “A Death in the Family,” written and directed by Alexander Zeldin at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.Simon GosselinThe realities of old age have been in the spotlight lately in France. This month, the government began an investigation into one of the country’s largest nursing home providers after a journalist published a book accusing the company of mistreating residents.For the theater world, the upheaval caused by the pandemic has provided unlikely opportunities to reconnect with older audiences. In summer 2020, the first professional performance after France’s stringent initial lockdown was held at a nursing home in Chalon-sur-Saône, in the east, and a number of performers have brought readings and small-scale performances to hospitals.With “A Death in the Family,” Zeldin has done the reverse, bringing older people to perform in one of Paris’s most prestigious playhouses. He and his team did extensive research in local nursing homes, and out of 13 roles in the play, a handful are taken by older amateur performers. (Eight actors alternate in these parts.) This is no walk in the park in a pandemic: The premiere had to be postponed three times because of coronavirus safety measures.Other than the fact that the amateurs have fewer lines than their experienced colleagues, it is nearly impossible to tell the two groups apart, with strong performances across the board. On the night I attended, Francine Champion — making her stage debut at the age of 93 — caught the eye as one of the nursing home residents. So did the veteran actor Annie Mercier, while Nicole Dogué and Karidja Touré brought touching empathy to their roles as nursing assistants.One resident serves as the main character: Marguerite Brun, who is introduced at her overwhelmed daughter’s home. Zeldin’s typically sharp and economical dialogue fails him in some scenes involving Marguerite’s family, with lines that don’t land quite as naturally in French as they do in his English-language productions. Still, casting Marie-Christine Barrault, an Oscar nominee in 1977 for the film “Cousin Cousine,” as the initially prickly Marguerite was an inspired move. Her radical vulnerability as the character declines, especially in the nearly silent scene in which Dogué gives her a bed bath with a kind, unspoken sense of intimacy, is likely to linger in many people’s minds.“A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad” attempts to portray many generations at once.Jean-Pierre Estournet“A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad” lacks the laser directorial focus of “A Death in the Family,” but it is far less bleak. The imminent death of the main character, Galia, is treated as an opportunity for her family to rally and find meaning in their shared history, however painful.As Galia, Monique Brun is the glue that holds the cast — and the performance — together. She spends much of the show in a red armchair center stage. Her deep, exuberant voice projects no self-pity, even when she may be speaking from beyond the grave, since the timeline is blurred. Yet she is deeply affecting, too, when she gets out of the chair at night and walks slowly and stiffly, reminiscing quietly with one of the loves of her life.“A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad” is a little chaotic when it comes to the rest of the characters, perhaps because it attempts to portray so many generations at once — and to tie them to real historical events, like the rise and decline of the local coal industry. The production has been in Paris at the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, but it was inspired by the history of the city of Montluçon, in central France, where Thibaut has been the director of the Théâtre des Îlets since 2016.Years of research went into this ambitious project, and plenty of details ring thoughtfully true, like the death of Galia’s fictional parents during World War II. During one interlude about the city’s economy, tiny bottles of local wine are even handed out to the audience. But the dialogue doesn’t quite flow, with tonal changes, heavy-handed voice-over commentary and tangential stories about, for instance, one granddaughter’s anger at the casual misogyny of the older men in the family.It’s all believable, and Thibaut has been a major voice for feminism in the French theater for years. Yet “A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad” has more emotional heft when it focuses on the rite of passage underway for Galia and her family. Like Zeldin, Thibaut doesn’t shy away from portraying death, and however hard it is to look, there may be closure in following them down that path.A Death in the Family. Directed by Alexander Zeldin. Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, through Feb. 20.A Century — Life and Death of Galia Libertad. Directed by Carole Thibaut. Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, through Feb. 26. More

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      5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

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      “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” More

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      How Jonathan Larson Taught Me to Become a Better Critic

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      In the film version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” about a composer who dreams of Broadway, a “Rent” die-hard discovers more to love in musical theater.I watched “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Netflix’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical, four and a half times in the span of three weeks. I’ve listened to the soundtrack three times, with the exception of the opening song, “30/90.” That I’ve listened to at least a dozen times.When you replay a song that often, whole verses start to inscribe themselves into your memory. You begin to see beneath the surface, unearthing the bones of the music: a key change, a tempo shift, a bluesy bass line that sashays in and is gone in an instant.When I talk about Larson’s work, I get romantic. That’s been the case since I was 15, thanks to his Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Rent,” and now, thanks to “Tick, Tick … Boom!” But there’s a vital difference in the way I engaged with his work then versus now: Then, it was as a fan just beginning to discover an art form that would shape her personal and professional life; now, it’s as a critic who better understands the possibilities of musical theater.But I still have a ways to go — I’m continually learning how to be a better fan and critic of the theater, and 26 years after his death, Jonathan Larson is my unlikely mentor.Larson, left, with the director Michael Greif before the final dress rehearsal of Larson’s breakthrough show “Rent.”Sara Krulwich/TheNew York Times“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Larson’s precursor to “Rent,” is a musical about the playwright’s attempts to get his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia,” produced. His ambitions and anxieties create tension with his girlfriend and his best friend, whom he pushes to the sidelines.Though Larson’s show stars a composer named Jon and is, in large parts, autobiographical, the film — written by Steven Levenson and directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda — bridges the gap between the writer and his work, making Larson himself the protagonist. We shift back and forth between his staged production of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the correlating events in his life.The film casts an affectionate eye on Larson’s life and legacy. Larson (Andrew Garfield, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for the role) is an innocently aloof artist and yet also intimately present, transparent to the audience through his songs, which seem to erupt from the top of his head in an effervescent gust of rhythm.Garfield bounces across the screen with the energy of a child on a trampoline; his downright kinetic performance is a flutter and flush of gestures, limbs jerking and flailing in all directions. In some scenes, Larson stops to consider a thought or a phrase; his head cocks to the side and his jaw relaxes open, just slightly, as though to make room for new lyrics to fly out. It’s kooky. And endearing.As is the world Miranda builds: a bespoke version of 1990 New York City for theater nerds, where André De Shields strolls in as a haughty patron at the Moondance Diner, where Bernadette Peters is having her coffee and where three of the original “Rent” cast members (Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) are bums singing on the street.That I even recognize so many of those faces is because of Larson.The original cast of “Rent,” which went on to a long Broadway run. Several of the performers show up in “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already written about my love for “Rent,” a love I share with my mother — how it provided a Bohemian fantasy that could be the repository of my teenage insecurities, anxieties, rages and woes. I also discovered the musical around the time I was taking baby steps toward becoming a critic, writing arts pieces for my high school newspaper.Larson taught me that the constellation of notes in a score has space enough to hold immense grief and irrepressible delights. That a musical doesn’t have to be breezy and carefree, nor campy and dated. It could be bold and contemporary — even tragic. Or as strange and subversive — “Rent” is full of sex and drugs, bonkers performance art and mentions of B.D.S.M. — as any form of art.The musical, I came to appreciate, has a nested structure: The book is the spine, and each song in the score contains its own micro-narrative, its own voice, conveyed through music.I still love “Rent” like I did when I was 15, but as my affections for it have aged, they’ve taken on the sepia tone of nostalgia.I’m not the same person I was a teenager — thankfully. I’ll raise a glass to la vie boheme but won’t stay out with the eclectic crowd at the Life Cafe for quite as long.Watching the “Tick, Tick … Boom!” movie for the first time, I immediately fell hard for “30/90,” which felt adapted from my own experience. Long before I became a critic, I was an artist, and I’ve always worked under a self-imposed sense of urgency; when I was a kid, I expected to be a famous poet, journalist and novelist by the time I was 25.When I turned 30, in the middle of our first pandemic summer, I had a monthlong existential crisis. Hitting that milestone age, as Larson sings in “30/90,” means “you’re no longer the ingénue.” I still fret needlessly about time and mortality, clinging to the same clichéd, self-important worries about one’s legacy that so many artists do, Larson included.Garfield, as Larson, struggles with anxiety about not fulfilling his creative dreams at an early enough age. Macall Polay/NetflixAt some point, as I rewatched the film after an anxious and depressed afternoon, I recalled how I used to do the same with “Rent.” Again Larson helps, not just in those joyless moments of mental panic but also in the moments of joy, when I sing along to the new film’s “Boho Days” while preparing dinner, shimmying over the kitchen counter.This is love.But I must admit that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” gave me pause when Larson’s work is being workshopped by Stephen Sondheim and a theater critic. Sondheim recognizes the potential in Larson and in the piece, while the critic quickly dismisses it. Seeing the critic’s closed-mindedness and pretentious posturing, I wondered: Have I done that? Have I failed a work of art in this same way?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Wolf Play’ Review: What Keeps a Family From Falling to Pieces?

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      Hansol Jung’s new play looks at the broken adoption of a little boy who is plucked from South Korea and moved to one American home, then shunted to another.Sand-colored with beady black eyes and a throaty howl, the character at the center of “Wolf Play” is and is not what he seems. Wolf, who serves as the narrator, is a simple but expressive puppet made of wood, cardboard and papier-mâché in this probing and playful exploration of family by Hansol Jung.Loose-limbed and rising just a few feet off the floor of the tiny stage at Soho Rep, Wolf represents a 6-year-old boy who undergoes one wrenching separation after another. The American couple who adopt him from South Korea decide they can’t handle him and the demands of their newborn too, so they find another family for the boy by advertising on a Yahoo message board.An abandonment so awful and absurd calls for fierce survival instincts. Perhaps that goes to explain why the boy isn’t a boy at all, but a wolf who longs for a pack, as Mitchell Winter, the adult actor maneuvering the puppet, insists.Wolves get a bad rap, Winter tells the audience, which is seated on either side of the stage. The lone ones may snatch red hoods, but they don’t make mischief for its own sake. It’s a natural response for familial creatures left to fend for themselves, crouched defensively much of the time. “But stories need conflict,” he says, “and, boy, do wolves know how to fight.”“Wolf Play,” which opened on Monday, proposes that “the truth is a wobbly thing.” In Jung’s freely associative landscape, that means allowing a puppet to be a boy, a boy to be a wolf and a wolf to be an actor in a knit cap with pointy ears (costumes are by Enver Chakartash).The play directed by Dustin Wills and presented with Ma-Yi Theatre Company, portrays a traumatic situation, but with an antic disposition and a goofy heart. How would a boy respond to these wounds but with growls, howls and swinging paws? It seems too much for one being to process, yet there’s a lightness here that chases away the shadows.Wolf, a volatile and reactive jumble of joints, is handed off by Peter (Aubie Merrylees), the father who adopted him, to Robin (Nicole Villamil) and her wife, Ash (Esco Jouléy). Robin is eager to become a mother, while Ash is a boxer prepping to go pro and reluctant to take on a distraction like a child. Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer), who is Robin’s brother and Ash’s coach, seems supportive of the adoption — until Wolf’s position in the pack seems to threaten his own.If the play has a love plot, it’s between Wolf and Ash, a prototypical fighter with a tough exterior and soft center. Ash is nonbinary, and is the first person to whom the boy speaks out loud. “Wolf Play” suggests there’s an animality connecting us that transcends gendered social scripts; kinship and love are wild and don’t play by any rules. Peter, however, objects to the absence of a conventional father in the boy’s new home.Performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong and suited to the production’s intimate scale. Winter’s double feat as an energetic narrator and a sensitive puppeteer is so nimble that the boy often appears to be a separate living thing, endearing one moment, a terror the next (Amanda Villalobos is the puppet designer).But casting a wolf as a protagonist becomes a tricky gesture when expressing inner feelings is limited to encyclopedic facts about the species. (“Wolves are cautious, the masters of survival.” “Wolves suck at being alone.”) Though Jung’s narrator seems to promise access to the story’s emotional core, there is only so much that taxonomy can illuminate.Wills’s production has the exuberant restlessness of a crayon drawing tacked to the fridge, chaotic but underlaid with a careful internal logic. A door on wheels, mismatched chairs and blue balloons (from Wolf’s “welcome home” party) are roving fixtures of You-Shin Chen’s set. Barbara Samuels’s lighting makes prodigious use of tone and darkness, while the sound design by Kate Marvin inspires the grating quality of a child’s crying.If stories need conflicts, as Wolf suggests, the climactic ones here — a bout in the ring, the inevitable custody battle — ultimately feel manufactured and somewhat beside the point. There’s an unruly quality to Jung’s idea of what theater can be, jagged and untethered, coy and dreamlike. It’s thrilling to see that potential unleashed on the vagaries of love, even if it’s not so easily tamed.Wolf PlayThrough March 20 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: A ‘Merchant of Venice’ That Doubles Down on Pain

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      John Douglas Thompson stars in Arin Arbus’s caustic and assertive new production of the Shakespeare play.More than 30 years ago, John Douglas Thompson, then a successful salesman at a Fortune 500 company, saw a play in New Haven, Conn. When it was over, he offered up a prayer: “Please, God, make me an actor. Teach me how to do that, and make this possible for me.”Thompson told me this five years ago, on the floor of a Broadway lobby after finishing a performance of August Wilson’s “Jitney.” And I remembered it last week, watching him as Shylock in Arin Arbus’s caustic, provocative production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” at Theater for a New Audience.That prayer has been answered.Since 2009, when he played Othello — also for Arbus, also at Theater for a New Audience — audiences have recognized Thompson as an outstanding classical actor, perhaps the greatest Shakespeare interpreter in contemporary America theater. There are actors of greater plasticity, better grace, lusher voice. But Thompson, a virtuoso of psychological insight and emotional specificity, makes each centuries-old line sound like it has occurred to him in the moment. In his distinctive sandpaper rasp, he takes what’s timeless and transmutes it to the present. To watch him work is to feel fluttery, lightheaded. Blessed, maybe.“The Merchant of Venice” is a fairy tale with a corrosive center, a chocolate filled with battery acid. Its plot joins two folk tales, three love stories and a nerve-splintering trial scene that puts “Perry Mason” to shame. It concerns a melancholy Christian merchant, Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), who borrows 3,000 ducats from a Jewish usurer, Shylock (Thompson), to fund his friend Bassanio (Sanjit De Silva) — a close friendship that Arbus renders as explicitly romantic. Shylock forgoes interest in favor of an unusual condition: If Antonio forfeits, Shylock will extract a pound of flesh from his body.From left, Thompson, Maurice Jones, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Nate Miller, Alfredo Narciso and Varín Ayala in the production, which emphasizes the awfulness of everyone in Venice, not Shylock alone.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDespite his relationship with Antonio, Bassanio is wooing Portia (a flexible and elegant Isabel Arraiza). To confound her suitors, her father has set them a challenge. They have to choose among three caskets: one gold, one silver, one lead. If a suitor chooses correctly, he will find Portia’s portrait. Otherwise, he has to leave, with the promise that he will never marry. The plots combine in that harrowing courtroom scene, where Portia gives her “quality of mercy” speech.Over the past century, scholars have debated whether “Merchant” should be staged at all, particularly after the play was deployed in Germany in the 1940s as Nazi propaganda. Every responsible production has to contend with its uneasy legacy.Arbus’s solution is to emphasize the awfulness of everyone in Venice, not Shylock alone. Mercy? Look elsewhere. On Riccardo Hernandez’s set, a doge’s palace given a Brutalist remodel, and under Marcus Doshi’s grim lights, the characters demean and betray one another. Even the virtuous Portia displays casual racism and less-casual hypocrisy. No one else behaves any better. Emily Rebholz’s costumes — athleisure, Vans, a hoodie with “Brooklyn” printed on it — confirm this atmosphere of treachery as neither long ago nor far away.Casting Thompson complicates the prejudices at work in the play, superimposing Blackness on Shylock’s Jewishness. Black Jews of course exist, but despite the interpolation of some lines from a Yom Kippur prayer at the play’s end, it is this Shylock’s Blackness and not his Jewishness that Arbus’s production emphasizes. “By casting a Black man as Shylock in America in 2021, one becomes painfully aware of the connections between Shakespeare’s 16th-century Venice and our world now,” she said in a news release.This pays certain dividends, giving some lines particular resonance, as when Shylock, in his speech to the Venetian court, says:You have among you many a purchased slave,Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to youLet them be free! Marry them to your heirs!Why sweat they under burdens? Let their bedsBe made as soft as yours?In laying bare Antonio’s prejudices during the first act, Thompson mockingly assumes the cringing tones of a racist caricature, a barbed and devastating choice that shows his anguished self-awareness. He knows how the others see him and how they want him to behave. He refuses. But in exacting revenge on those who perceive him as less than fully human, he loses his own humanity, which is his tragedy.And yet, this doubling feels like displacement — diminishment, perhaps — especially as it sidesteps the thorny questions of the play’s own attitudes toward Jews. Threats against American Jews have risen precipitously in recent years, as has online harassment. The hostage situation at a Texas synagogue last month was a sobering reminder of hatred with a long history. None of this necessarily makes Arbus’s focus on Blackness wrong. (And who would deny Thompson any role he wanted?) But anti-Blackness and antisemitism aren’t identical. And both continue. Which is to say: Wasn’t this painful enough? Weren’t we aware already?The Merchant of VeniceThrough March 6 at Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More