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      in Movies

      The Black List, Founded in Hollywood, Expands Into Theater

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      The Black List, an effort to boost the careers of undiscovered writers by drawing attention to high-quality unproduced scripts, was formed 17 years ago with a focus on Hollywood. Now the organization is looking to extend its work into theater.The project’s leadership announced Tuesday that it would begin inviting playwrights and musical writers to share their work with gatekeepers in the theater, film and television industries, with the goal of helping them find representation, get feedback and land productions in the theater world or jobs in the film and television world.Four well-regarded nonprofit theaters, Miami New Drama in Florida, the Movement Theater Company in New York, Victory Gardens in Chicago and Woolly Mammoth in Washington, have each agreed to commission a new play or musical from a writer whose work surfaces through the project. The commissions are $10,000 each.“Our fundamental belief is that there’s a lot of amazing playwrights whose opportunities don’t befit their talents,” said Franklin Leonard, who founded the Black List. “If we can rectify that, that’s something we should do.”The Black List started as an annual survey of scripts that Hollywood executives liked but hadn’t turned into films, and the organization says that 440 of those scripts have since been produced. Then the Black List added a for-profit arm that allows writers to post scripts online to bring them to the attention of industry professionals, and which also allows writers, for a fee, to seek script evaluations from readers who work in the industry.(Evaluations cost $100, of which $60 goes to the reader.)Leonard said he and Megan Halpern, the Black List executive spearheading the theater expansion, have been talking with theater industry leaders for months about the idea of broadening the Black List’s scope, with the goal of helping undiscovered playwrights and musical theater writers find work in theater and, possibly, also in film or TV.“What we’ve heard is that people want to find new playwrights, but the reality of wading through the slush pile is insurmountable,” he said. More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Just for Us’ Reaches Across the Chasm

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      The return of this brisk, smart provocation of a monologue is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show.On a narrow, curving street in the West Village of Manhattan, a sign of hope: A production that went dark just before Christmas, as the Omicron variant descended on the city, has opened back up at the Cherry Lane Theater.Sure, that’s what the comedian Alex Edelman’s publicists said would happen when his solo show, “Just for Us,” abruptly cut short its run there in December, promising a Jan. 24 return. But when a production goes into pandemic hibernation, it’s easy to worry that it won’t emerge again.The return of “Just for Us,” then, is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show. A brisk, smart provocation of a monologue, it’s about race and identity in American culture, and about the tantalizing impulse to reach across the chasm to the hard-core bigots among us.Such as the white supremacists who, Edelman tells us, tweeted a public invitation to a meeting they were having in Queens — though when he took them up on it, he went as an infiltrator. Hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish, he didn’t exactly have unity on his mind. But then he spied an attractive woman he calls Chelsea, and decided to chat her up.“I thought to myself, with no irony: You never know,” he says, and widens his eyes at his own idiocy.He twines the story of that prepandemic gathering, which began with the assembled racists grousing about the then-recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with a recollection from his early childhood: the time his mother, seeking to comfort a bereaved friend, decided that their Orthodox Jewish family would host a Christmas celebration for her, complete with presents and a tree. With a dreidel on top.Is the dreidel detail true? An embellishment? Either way, it works. Tom Stoppard makes a similar joke in his recent epic play “Leopoldstadt,” only there the tree topper is a Star of David. The two shows are apples and oranges, but antisemitism and assimilation are major themes in both. Stoppard is writing about historical Nazis, while Edelman disparages the 21st-century bigots as “Nerf Nazis”: pathetic wannabes. “These are not life’s winners,” he says.Directed by Adam Brace, “Just for Us” is an inherently political piece from a comedian who says he has tended to avoid talking politics onstage. (“Because it bums everybody out!” Edelman booms near the start.) It’s about whiteness, the privileges that accompany it and the hierarchy that — as he saw growing up in Boston — rates Mayflower-descendant types as an aspirational American ideal.More philosophically, the show pokes and prods at empathy and morality, and the ways that othering whole categories of people makes it easy to dehumanize them. Which is a sharply relevant observation in the midst of this ideologically polarized public health crisis.“It’s so hard to hate up close,” Edelman says, but of course that isn’t true for everyone. The white supremacists at the meeting, it turns out, seemed to have no problem with hating him. Which rankled, because part of him wanted them to like him. And yes, he knows that’s absurd.Edelman ends “Just for Us” on a deliciously funny high: by recounting his petty, perfect act of vengeance against the white supremacists. The show itself counts as another revenge — bigger, bolder and with the audience at the Cherry Lane firmly on his side.Just for UsThrough Feb. 19 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Stephen Sondheim Leaves Rights to His Works to a Trust

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      Stephen Sondheim left the rights to all of his work — including his contribution to musicals such as “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” as well as any unfinished shows — to a trust that will manage his estate.The trust will now determine what happens to the acclaimed composer and lyricist’s intellectual property, as well as all other property that he left behind when he died last fall.The plan for handling Sondheim’s assets is described in a probate petition signed last month and filed with Sondheim’s will in New York Surrogate’s Court. The filings were previously reported by The New York Post.The probate petition says that the estimated value of Sondheim’s personal property at the time of his death was between $500,000 and $75 million, but three estate lawyers advised caution in interpreting those numbers, which they said are often rough estimates, and which would not reflect the value of any property Sondheim had placed in a trust during his lifetime.“$75 million is the estimated ceiling of the value of the assets that were in his name, which pass under the will to the Stephen J. Sondheim Revocable Trust,” T. Randolph Harris, a partner in the law firm McLaughlin & Stern, said when asked to help interpret the filings. “Although it is possible that his estate contains other assets not passing under the will, it appears likely that the $75 million in the probate document filed with the court constitutes the bulk of his estate.”Sondheim, who had spent much of the pandemic at his country house in Roxbury, Conn., died in Connecticut on Nov. 26. The cause of death, according to a death certificate, was cardiovascular disease.The court filings include two documents — a will, written in 2017 with the estate lawyer Loretta A. Ippolito, that leaves all of his property to the revocable trust, and a probate petition, put together by Sondheim’s longtime friend and lawyer F. Richard Pappas, that lists beneficiaries of that trust.Alison Besunder, an estate lawyer at Arden Besunder, said reliance on a revocable trust was a common estate planning technique. “Among other benefits, a revocable trust affords privacy to public figures and celebrities in the administration of their affairs,” she said.The beneficiaries of the trust include a number of prominent organizations: the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Irish Repertory Theater and the Dramatists Guild Fund; the Museum of the City of New York is listed as a “contingent beneficiary,” but the filing does not specify what the contingency is. The trust will also benefit a Stephen Sondheim Foundation, once that is created.A dozen individuals are also listed as beneficiaries, including friends, neighbors and former assistants. Among them: Sondheim’s husband, Jeff Romley, and one of Sondheim’s best-known collaborators, James Lapine. (Sondheim and Lapine shared a Pulitzer for writing “Sunday in the Park With George”; their other collaborations included the musicals “Into the Woods” and “Passion.”) Also listed as beneficiaries: Peter Jones, a playwright who was once romantically involved with Sondheim; Steven Clar, who was Sondheim’s assistant; Peter Wooster, a designer who lived in a small house on Sondheim’s Connecticut property; and Rob Girard, who is Wooster’s gardener.“The probate papers tell you who the beneficiaries are, but not who gets what, and that’s the point here,” said Andrew S. Auchincloss, an estate lawyer with Schlesinger Lazetera & Auchincloss. “It’s being kept private.” Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Jonathan Freeman, Jafar in ‘Aladdin,’ Hangs Up His Cobra Staff

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      He is, as Iago puts it in the classic Disney film, the “all-mighty evil one.”“A vile betrayer!” the sultan says.And, for a brief time, as he himself proclaims, “the most powerful sorcerer in the world!”(MUAHAHAHA!)Jonathan Freeman first voiced the Disney villain Jafar in the animated “Aladdin” movie back in 1992, continued to sneer in the subsequent films and then went on to originate the role in the Broadway production, which opened in 2014. He has wielded his cobra staff in hundreds of performances since, playing the role for nearly eight years.The show’s director, Casey Nicholaw, left, surprised Freeman during his final curtain call.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThat is until Sunday night, with the show that he decided would be his last.Backstage that evening, Freeman’s dressing room was mostly cleared out. The walls were bare, the day bed was gone. Tokens of appreciation included flowers, gifts of alcohol and a note of thanks from the ushers.An insert in the Playbill alerted audience members that Freeman would be taking his “final bow” in “Aladdin.” The show said he is the only person in the Disney universe to have brought an animated character he voiced, to life, onstage — a capstone to a career that includes credits in 11 Broadway shows.Freeman and Don Darryl Rivera, who plays Iago the parrot.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOne of the evening’s many hugs from members of the cast and crew.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAfter the performance ended, cast and crew members took a moment to honor Freeman during the curtain call.“I just had to come tonight to just acknowledge this wonderful man,” the show’s director, Casey Nicholaw, said. “We’re really going to miss you here so much.”Freeman, 71, replied, “No one wants to see a villain cry.” He added that “nobody does this on their own.”Then Freeman formally passed his cobra staff — “by the power vested in me by Mickey Mouse,” he said — to Dennis Stowe, the Jafar standby who will assume the role this week.After a few short speeches backstage, where most crew members were wearing T-shirts that featured Jafar’s silhouette, and many hugs, Freeman sat down for an exit interview in the nearby Disney Theatrical offices.“I rediscovered time during the pandemic,” Freeman, 71, said. “And what I discovered about rediscovering time was that it was very nice to have it.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThese are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’ve been some version of Jafar for 30 years. How are you thinking about letting go of Jafar — and letting go of a part of yourself a little bit?After it appeared that the show was going to be successful and Disney wanted to have multiple productions, it’s kind of like this little island of Jafar that I lived on by myself for a while, it kept breaking off and splintering off. And I was happy and thrilled, to be honest, just to be able to know that I had gotten to a certain place where it becomes some kind of a template that could be reproduced by other people. So that’s nice — that’s nice to know it’s still going on.“I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain,” Freeman said of his character. “It had to do with the arch of the eyebrow, it had to do with the sneer.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhy leave now?Well, actually, when we started the 2020 season year — our year really starts in February — I was thinking that maybe it would be my last year doing it.And then the pandemic happened, and then there was nothing. No one knew — was it going to be two months, six months? So, I think I thought, “Well, if they start again, I can’t not go back and try to pick up the pieces” because I would just be evaporating then in the middle of this pandemic. It would just be too weird. And I didn’t want to leave right before the holidays because that means putting the company into rehearsals. And so I thought wait until after the first of the year and February is the end of the contract anyway. It just seemed like the right time.In addition to the cobra staff, Freeman’s costume includes a cape, rings and cuffs.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhat do you think you were able to bring to Jafar onstage that perhaps you could not in voicing him for the movie?When we first started in Seattle [a pilot production of the show in the summer of 2011], there was only myself and one other person in the room who was connected to the original project, which was [the composer] Alan Menken. So when we got the first read-through, it was like a glass of cold water in my face, because I was hearing new voices doing these characters that I’d been hearing for so many years.With new voices came new ideas, and people were physically different in it. So I had to figure out how I would fit in. And I did kind of have to do a little bit of re-creation.It’s showtime: Freeman in an elevator at the New Amsterdam Theater, on his way to the stage.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow do you think your view of Jafar — and “Aladdin” — evolved over the years?As far as Jafar goes, I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain. I never thought of him as being North African, Middle Eastern, Asiatic, South Asian. I never thought of any of those things. I always thought of him as being a villain. The makeup that I put on was never meant to be race. It was always villain’s makeup. It had to do with the arch of the eyebrow, it had to do with the sneer.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Theater

      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Fires Its Harry Potter

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      The Broadway production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” has fired the actor playing the title character, citing unspecified concerns about his conduct.The show on Sunday issued a statement saying that James Snyder, who played the title role for about a year before the pandemic and then rejoined the show when it restarted last fall, had been terminated following a complaint by Diane Davis, the actress playing his wife, Ginny. (The play begins 19 years after the conclusion of the Harry Potter novels, by which point the boy wizard has become a married man, with children of his own.)The show said that Davis had made a complaint “regarding the conduct of fellow cast member James Snyder” Nov. 19, a week after it had resumed performances following the lengthy pandemic shutdown. A spokesman declined to provide any further details, but the statement noted that the show has “strict prohibitions against harassment in any form.”The production said that, once it received the complaint, it suspended Snyder and commissioned “an independent investigation by a third party,” and that when the investigation was completed “the producers decided Mr. Snyder should not return to the production and terminated his contract.” Steve Haggard has been playing Harry Potter during Snyder’s suspension, and will continue doing so. Davis has taken a leave of absence, the producers said.Snyder, 40, previously starred in “Cry-Baby” and “If/Then” on Broadway, and also appeared in “In Transit.” He did not respond to an email seeking comment. More

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      in Television

      Brian Cox Takes Stock of His Eventful Life on Stage and Screen

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      I’m such a fan of the HBO series “Succession,” about a morally depraved, megarich media family, that I hum its theme song in the shower and have taken to wearing commanding pantsuits. So when I picked up “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” the new memoir by Brian Cox, who plays the family’s tyrannical patriarch, Logan Roy, I was desperate for tidbits to tide me over during the long wait for Season 4.Well, there aren’t many. Cox writes gruffly of a newcomer director on the show giving Kieran Culkin, who plays his youngest son and is an ace at mixing up the script, notes to “slow down.” “Now, this is an actor who’s calibrated the patterns of his character’s delivery over the course of two previous seasons,” the author thunders, or so I imagine (as Roy, he’s a big thunderer). “He’s not going to suddenly slow down just because you’ve given him a note.”Brian Cox, whose new memoir is “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox confides furthermore that he doesn’t really relate to the intense, Method-like “process” that Jeremy Strong uses to get into the character of Kendall, Logan’s middle son. Fans already knew about Strong’s tactics from a profile of him in The New Yorker that was chewed over for weeks after it was published in December. Some perceived condescension in the article toward Strong’s working-class background, including an anonymous Yale classmate having marveled at his “careerist drive.”The heated discussion was fascinating and perplexing. When did acting become so bougie and aspirational? Wasn’t a working-class background once a key element of the Hollywood success narrative — getting yanked out, discovered and made over by the savior figure of agent or studio executive? Think Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach, son of a tailor’s presser), Lana Turner (miner’s daughter), Ava Gardner (child of sharecroppers) and all those other glamour figures of yesteryear.A humble background didn’t hinder Cox, who has gone from leading man of the British stage to one of America’s most prolific and consistent character actors — what is sometimes called a “jobbing actor,” though he now has the clout to negotiate a chauffeur, nice hotels and a double-banger trailer. Nobody rescued Cox, the consummate utility player. “I knew that simply wasn’t my ballpark,” he shrugs, on the subject of Hollywood stardom. “Besides, I’m too short.” He’s written two previous memoirs, one that tracks him to Moscow to direct “The Crucible” and another about the challenges of “King Lear.” Taking stock at 75, he’s not so much a lion in winter (indeed, he was fired as the voice of Aslan in the Narnia movies) as a seasoned workhorse finally able to enjoy a victory gallop.Cox writes eloquently about his origins in Dundee, Scotland, as the youngest of five children who occasionally had to beg for batter bits from the local chip shop. His parents met at a dance hall; his mother had been a spinner at jute mills and suffered multiple miscarriages and mental illness; his father, a shopkeeper and socialist, died when Brian was 8. Getting plunked in front of the telly rather than taken to the funeral was formative. So were later escapes to the movies, particularly ones like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960), starring Albert Finney: “a film that wasn’t all about the lives of posh folk in drawing rooms, or struggling nobly in far-off places, or having faintly amusing high jinks on hospital wards,” Cox writes. “It was all about working-class people — people like us.” A kind teacher told him about a gofer gig at the local repertory theater and boom, he was home.Brian Cox and his fellow cast members of the HBO show Succession.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox went on to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and perform in esteemed halls like the Royal Court, learning the classics but also grooving nicely with the rise of the angry young man and kitchen-sink realism led by the playwright John Osborne, with whom he became friends. Before very long he was working with his gods, including Finney.At a time when theater, the fabulous invalid, is straitjacketed by the pandemic, it’s heartening and a little wistful-making to have it recalled in all its messy midcentury glory. Cox fluffed a flustered Lynn Redgrave’s wig; got felt up by Princess Margaret backstage; narrowly escaped dying in a plane crash on his way to audition for Laurence Olivier. Years later, as Lear in a wheelchair, he “frisbeed” his metal crown into the first row at the National Theater, injuring an audience member. He once compromised his testicles during a naked yoga scene. In the leaner years, he booked bikini waxes and cohabited with an army of cockroaches in a sublet apartment. There was drunkenness aplenty; one actor playing the priest in “Hamlet” got so soused he tumbled into Ophelia’s grave.Cox, who prefers cannabis to drink, can ramble on a bit. If times ever get lean again, it’s easy to imagine him doing bedtime stories for a sleep app. He salts all the idolatry with disdain. On Kevin Spacey: “A great talent, but a stupid, stupid man.” On Steven Seagal: “As ludicrous in real life as he appears onscreen.” On Quentin Tarantino: “I find his work meretricious. It’s all surface.” (Though he’d take a part if offered.) He’s softer on Woody Allen, owning up to himself dating an 18-year-old when he was in his 40s. “It seems that everybody in this book is either dead or canceled,” he notes with some rue. He’s preoccupied with making a “good death,” cataloging friends’ ends with an almost clinical relish (cancer, emphysema, suicide, a heart attack so massive it threw the victim “clean across the pebbles”).Like many actors, Cox treads more nimbly on the boards than in his personal life. He admits he wasn’t fully present for family tragedies, like his first wife’s stillborn twins and their daughter’s anorexia. “And that’s my flaw,” he declares. “It’s this propensity for absence, this need to disappear.” He loves the part of Logan partly because, when not thundering, he’s “reined in and bottled up.” But on the page, at least, he is present, lively and pouring forth, though the hints of his distinctive burr may send you heading for the audiobook instead. More

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      in Theater

      A Reimagined ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ for the Covid Era

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      Robert O’Hara directs a trimmed-down revival of Eugene O’Neill’s classic, with a colorblind cast and a weary eye on the pandemic and the opioid crisis.Of the time-honored classics of American theater, Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one that usually takes its own concept of time seriously. A four-act work based on the playwright’s own dysfunctional parents, it follows the disintegration of the Tyrone family — by disease, ego, addiction and codependency — through the course of a claustrophobic August day at their seaside home in Connecticut. Widely considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, it typically runs just under four hours.The writer and director Robert O’Hara, a Tony nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” is doing it in under two.Presented without an intermission by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has reunited O’Hara with fellow “Slave Play” alums, the actor Ato Blankson-Wood and the designer Clint Ramos, for a shortened production that confronts the play’s themes head on and brings them into 2022.“There is so much velocity in the writing that it moves at a fast clip, and with so much richness,” O’Hara said after a rehearsal last week. “The family doesn’t get an intermission throughout this one long day, so it’s quite interesting to get to sit with them in real time.”The decision to trim the material happened early and organically, O’Hara explained. “Once you put the knife in, you’re just like, ‘Are we going to pretend that we’re not editing this?’” he quipped. It was then bolstered by his wariness of having people gather for too long, given the latest Covid-19 variant.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“For me, it feels like a Covid production of ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ built for right now,” he said. “We didn’t want to ask an audience to sit for four hours in a theater, just because that’s the way it’s usually done. If anyone’s coming in looking for that experience, they should know that it’s not this.”He began conceiving the production, now in previews and opening Jan. 25, before the pandemic. Initially he was hesitant to tackle the play because of the demands placed upon producing classics.“It’s difficult to get these big chestnuts if you’re going to do it Off Broadway,” he said, referring to the challenges of securing production rights. “You can ask, but someone’s usually holding them in order to bring them back in a big way.”O’Hara credits the actress Elizabeth Marvel, who portrays the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, as instrumental to getting the production off the ground.“We started just talking about this play, but then the world made its urgency all the greater,” Marvel said. “I’ve seen probably 11 or 12 productions in my lifetime, and it’s always the same: in the same drawing room with billowing curtains, and with period corsets.“But there’s absolutely no reason,” she continued, “it can’t be right here, right now. It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out.”In addition to contemporary allusions to the opioid crisis, reflecting Mary’s own addiction, the production is set amid the coronavirus pandemic. The youngest Tyrone son, Edmund (Blankson-Wood), afflicted by what is traditionally hinted to be tuberculosis, now wears a face mask. Projections at the beginning of the play display C.D.C. announcements and news footage from the early days of the pandemic, including surreal revelations like the Bronx Zoo tiger testing positive for the virus.“We wanted projections to be a dreamlike window into Mary’s psychological space, especially when she succumbs to her addiction,” Ramos said on a video call. “The visual landscape, through Yee Eun Nam’s projections, gets very dreamy and dense to directly represent that.”Marvel, left, as the morphine-addicted mother, Mary, and Blankson-Wood as her sickly son Edmund.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMarvel’s husband, the actor Bill Camp, plays the family’s patriarch, James, and he was cast as the eldest son, Jamie, in a 1996 production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The edited script, he said, “became about distilling the story’s actions rather than experiencing the longness of the situation.”“The family’s desires and dysfunctions are streamlined in a way that is already in the writing; we just hit it really fast,” he added. “It’s in your face, just like everything that is happening is in our faces now, and we don’t have time to sit around and meander our way into those things; they’re immediate.”Jason Bowen rounds out the Tyrone clan as Jamie: a colorblind casting choice (Bowen and Blankson-Wood are Black, Camp and Marvel are white) that O’Hara said is intentional, though not one he wanted to factor into the DNA of the production.“I was never going to do this play with all white people; it wasn’t anything that I had to think about,” O’Hara said. “Elizabeth had mentioned Ato, being a fan of his, so we only held auditions for Jamie, and Jason killed it. There was no manufacturing of the cast’s racial dynamics for any reason other than wanting the best actors we could find.”Bowen notes that the heft of the story’s themes, as written, override any possible racial interpretation the cast could’ve envisioned.“It’s a play about a family as they navigate addiction, and that’s something that transcends any racial aspect that we could even attempt to investigate,” Bowen said. “The play’s not about that. Robert could’ve come in with some conceptual idea he wanted to introduce, but it’s still going to boil down to these relationships.”Blankson-Wood, who was performing a return engagement of his Tony-nominated role in “Slave Play” while rehearsals for “Long Day’s Journey” took place during the day, said that being able to act in a production that did not take his own race into account was “liberating.”“The fact that I do not have to carry how I, as a Black person, fit into this family is just pure acting to me, because it focuses only on the imaginative truth of the work,” he said. “From an outsider’s perspective, I get the impulse to want to understand the racial dynamic, but that’s something I’m excited for the audience to do; that’s their job.”O’Hara, who directed an audio production of another American classic, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” as part of Williamstown Theater Festival’s Audible season in 2020, will direct an audio presentation of the production once the Minetta Lane run closes Feb. 20. He said Audible’s expansive reach helped in securing the rights to the radically altered production, which might have been denied to a regional theater.“What’s amazing about this turn to streaming and digital is the democratization of theater, so more people will be able to access it,” Blankson-Wood said. “Though I do feel pretty strongly about sitting in a dark room with other human beings. But, with an audio production like this, when you take all the scenery and stuff away, and there’s only talking and listening, it deepens the work.” More

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      in Music

      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

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      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More