Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Where Jerry Zaks Goes to Escape the ‘Pure Pleasure’ of the Theater

      by

      The director of ‘The Music Man’ pays more attention to the furnishings onstage than to those at home. But that suits him fine.Jerry Zaks has never been much for turning an apartment into a home.He likes things clean, and he likes things comfortable. But beyond those basics, his interest kind of stalls out. An actor turned four-time Tony Award-winning director, he’s too wrapped up in second-act curtains to ponder living room curtains.“I think most of my places have looked like the dorm when I was in college, because I’ve been too busy working and getting the work done,” said Mr. Zaks, 75, who most recently shepherded the Broadway revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and the musical adaptation of the film “Mrs. Doubtfire” (which resumes performances April 14 after a Covid-related hiatus). Among his two dozen other directing credits: “The House of Blue Leaves,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” the Steve Martin comedy “Meteor Shower” and the 2017 revival of “Hello, Dolly!”The celebrated Broadway director Jerry Zaks, whose current projects are “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” lives in a two-bedroom apartment  on the Upper West Side. Photographs, ephemera and Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of himself, hang in his kitchen.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I’m going home,” he continued, “I’m not escaping from anything except pure pleasure, which is the theater or my rehearsal room.”Jerry Zaks, 75Occupation: DirectorMaking the scene: “I’ve never paid a lot of attention to how my apartment looks. I’ve paid more attention to the set design of my show. I love participating in the creation of the world that is going to house the show I’m doing.”Since moving to New York in 1969 after graduate school, Mr. Zaks has lived uptown and down, in hovels and in storied buildings like the El Dorado, where the apartment he shared with his wife, the actress Jill Rose, and two daughters overlooked Central Park and was big enough that he could chalk up a constitutional — he is an obsessive walker — simply by striding from one end of the space to the other.Mr. Zaks has a unique copy of “Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports.” It contains a meticulously crafted gag entry written by a friend about one Jerry Zaks, “after Tiger Woods, the most exciting amateur golfer of the 1990s…”Katherine Marks for The New York TimesBut time marches on, and with the dissolution of his marriage, Mr. Zaks did, too. He moved to one rental near the El Dorado, then another, to stay in proximity to his children, now adults. In 2008, he found a more permanent perch, in the shape of a two-bedroom co-op with prewar details, on West End Avenue.At the time, Mr. Zaks was in Los Angeles directing episodic television, and his then girlfriend had taken up the apartment search, sending him photos and descriptions of appealing prospects.“When I came back to New York, I went once and took a look, and said, ‘Let’s do it,’” recalled Mr. Zaks, who commented very favorably on a renovation by the seller that combined the kitchen and dining room into one warm, open space.That same girlfriend helped Mr. Zaks outfit the apartment. “On stage, I want to know how I get in and out of the living room. I want to know how the couch relates to the table,” he said. “But for my own apartment, I didn’t really get involved. She would show me pictures, and I would say, ‘This looks good.’”A caramel-colored leather sofa and easy chair looked good to Mr. Zaks. So did an Arts-and-Crafts sideboard, a free-standing bookcase of similar style and a rectangular wood dining table.Among his favorite possessions: a travel bar set once owned by Zero Mostel.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“Some of the earliest work on ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ ‘Meteor Shower,’ ‘The Music Man’ and ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ was done around that table,” he said. “I don’t need an office. I just need a good kitchen table.”Mr. Zaks would like to be a minimalist, but not quite yet. In a corner of the kitchen, which is painted a nice shade of coral, a tall stack of scripts and research material related to “The Music Man” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” seems to be awaiting further instructions. “I haven’t thrown them out yet because I can’t,” he said.Covering the walls are framed notes and letters of appreciation from colleagues like Neil Simon and Harold Prince (“I loved him because he was the last person in show business to call me ‘kid,’” Mr. Zaks said). There are several Al Hirschfeld caricatures, including one of Mr. Zaks in 1980, when he appeared on Broadway in the musical revue “Tintypes,” as well as ephemera like a two-page spread from the script of Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker.” (The source material for “Hello, Dolly!,” it was a gift from the administrators of the playwright’s estate when Mr. Zaks’s “Dolly” revival opened.)The cache of show posters — “my little shrine to myself” — represents Mr. Zaks both as performer (fun fact: he was a replacement Kenickie in the original production of “Grease”) and director. “This is a partial display including my greatest successes and, well, let’s put it this way: You’ve got hits and you’ve got misses,” he said. “Hits are better, but you’d be a fool not to remember the misses, because you work just as hard on them.”All pretty impressive, but nothing has quite the resonance of a photograph of a 20-something Jerry Zaks posing with his parents and Zero Mostel. Mr. Zaks was playing Motel the tailor in a tent-theater summer tour of “Fiddler on the Roof”; Mr. Mostel was reprising his Tony-winning performance as Tevye, while taking on an additional role: rumbustious mentor to his young castmate.Meet Mr. Zaks’s friends Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony and George. Katherine Marks for The New York Times“When I was a junior at Dartmouth and declared I was going to be an actor, my parents were very disappointed — a waste of an Ivy League education and all that,” Mr. Zaks said. “They were afraid for me. They were Holocaust survivors, and there was a Nazi around every corner.”But of course, they came to see their son in action, and afterward, went backstage to meet Mr. Mostel. “For 20 minutes, they spoke Yiddish to Zero, tummeling back and forth,” he recalled. “And finally my father asked, ‘Is my son going to be all right in this farkakte business?’ And Zero answered, ‘He’s going to be more than all right.’ And then we took the picture.”“That was the beginning of my parents accepting what I was committed to,” added Mr. Zaks, who counts among his favorite opening-night gifts a travel cocktail bar set that once belonged to Mr. Mostel.A while back, he was returning from a favorite neighborhood spot, Silver Moon Bakery, when he ran into a fellow co-op resident, Melissa Gooding, who was out walking her dog. “She moved in shortly after I did, but we didn’t get to know each other closely until last year,” Mr. Zaks said.He now divides his time between their two apartments. On the mantel in Ms. Gooding’s apartment are Mr. Zaks’s four Tony statuettes, along with a Mr. Abbott award, a tribute named for the legendary man of the theater, George Abbott. On a wall in the hall is a framed photo snapped by the stage doorman at the Winter Garden Theatre, home of “The Music Man”: Mr. Zaks huddling with Ms. Foster and Mr. Jackman at the end of a performance.“It’s hard to talk about without getting emotional,” he said. “This is my everything.”“The relationship I have with my actors is the most precious thing I have outside of family,” he continued, “and it’s encapsulated in this one image.”Mr. Jackman and Ms. Foster had the photo blown up as a gift for Mr. Zaks. He may not care much about décor, but he knows what makes him feel at home.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Man Cave’ Review: Things That Go Bump in the American Night

      by

      John J. Caswell Jr.’s play is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre.Late on a thundery monsoon evening in a well-appointed basement in Sedona, Ariz., the ghosts are restless. Or something is — thumping and scratching inside the walls of a congressman’s gated home, where Imaculada, the housekeeper, has been holding down the fort alone.When her friends Rosemary and Lupita show up unannounced, fleeing domestic danger, the noises don’t take long to creep them out.“You’re supposed to disclose your home’s paranormal status to guests upon arrival,” Rosemary chides, dryly.But this is just what she needs: a place rife with spirits that might be enlisted for vengeance on her live-in boyfriend, a police officer who has beaten her bloody yet again. On the internet she found “a little witchcraft” that she’s been wanting to try.“It’s called death walking,” she says. “Energy harnessing, engaging spirits in highly active spaces to do your bidding in exchange for eternal release from their own purgatory.”“Man Cave,” John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at the Connelly Theater, is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre, and it works on both levels. Its characters are Mexican American women on the economic fringes, and its concerns are theirs: work, love, heritage, survival; how to be safe, and feel at home, in their own country.Unfolding in the congressman’s man cave (designed by Adam Rigg), with its cowboy-movie posters and mounted elk head, the play is also a contemplation of what the United States was built on, what’s buried underneath — and which insistent, haunted voices it’s determined not to hear. (Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting is vital to the chilling of our spines.)Directed by Taylor Reynolds for the theater company Page 73, the show cultivates a scary mood even before it starts, thanks to Michael Costagliola’s supremely clever sound design, which thrums ominously as the audience settles in but cuts to an unnerving quiet in the opening scene. We are primed to be startled by the slightest noise, and so we are. And because the audience is expecting, even hoping, to be frightened, its attention has a tautness that’s sustained throughout the play.That’s helpful with a show that takes its time, as “Man Cave” does — sometimes to the point of bagginess — letting the friends bicker and snipe over the course of a fraught weekend. Why, Rosemary (Jacqueline Guillén) wants to know, is Imaculada “cleaning house for an overtly racist politician”? Is Imaculada (Annie Henk) right that something is trying to kill her? And where is her missing 20-something son?Why is Lupita (Claudia Acosta), Rosemary’s sober girlfriend — her tender romantic refuge from the abusive cop — suddenly drinking again? How gross is it, exactly, that Rosemary has brought a bag of the cop’s fingernail clippings for the spell she means to cast? What has drawn her to the spirit world, when that used to be her mother’s thing?Her mother, Consuelo (Socorro Santiago), an undocumented immigrant, raised Rosemary to assimilate. But when Consuelo arrives at the congressman’s house, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her its paranormal status. She has a supernatural sensitivity to the dead.“I can hear them screaming in my head,” she says.A program note explains that Caswell wrote “Man Cave” over the past five years — a time of immense social and political turmoil in the United States. If the play sometimes feels bloated, it may be from absorbing so much anger and anxiety from the air. But its shape also feels like an act of resistance to the constraints of theatrical convention.On a wall of the man cave, near the elk head, hangs a rack of vintage rifles, emblems of American cowboy culture. This isn’t Chekhov, though, and those guns never go off. They just stay in plain sight, silently menacing.Man CaveThrough April 2 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Misdemeanor Dream,’ Speaking to the Unseen

      by

      This experimental work, presented by La MaMa and the Indigenous theater ensemble Spiderwoman Theater, is full of enchanting stories but is missing a few threads.The fairies have stories to share. At least the ones in “Misdemeanor Dream,” who tell tales in English and Native languages, but also via movement and dance, of the births of constellations, the celestial romance that begets all sentient life. But the thicket of music, overlapping dialogue, sounds and projections in this experimental work, presented by La MaMa and the Indigenous feminist theater ensemble Spiderwoman Theater, doesn’t always come together to convey these enchanting stories; in fact, this patchwork often makes the show indecipherable.At that start of the play, a group of fairies from this realm and other realms emerge from the bowels of a large, multicolored cloth tunnel that leads from backstage to the front. They dance around a red cardboard tree that commands the center of the stage; it seems like an artifact of a mythical world, with multipatterned and brightly colored leaves that hang like shimmering Christmas ornaments. (The set and installation design is by Sherry Guppy, Penny Couchie, Sid Bobb and Mona Damian, in collaboration with Aanmitaagzi, an Indigenous company from Nipissing First Nation in northeastern Ontario, and in partnership with Loose Change Productions.)The fairies, dressed just as eclectically as the leaves, with red capes, feather boas, blue tutus, pink wings and light-up sneakers (costumes by Damian), go from recounting traditional Native creation myths, sometimes in the original languages of the cast’s nations (including Algonkian, Ilocano and Ojibwe), to personal stories. The ensemble members, who wrote the script together and are directed by Muriel Miguel, comprise 12 Indigenous actors of different ages, performing onstage and via projections. All the while they interrupt each other with fragmented thoughts and exclamations, that is, when the storytellers aren’t being interrupted by sudden blasts of pop music.This collage-style of storytelling is called “story weaving,” a method that Spiderwoman Theater developed in the 1970s. The technique is just one example of the influence of the company, which has been a pillar of New York’s experimental theater scene for decades. After all, attending a theatrical production whose cast members are of different ages and genders and are from Indigenous nations across the United States, Canada and the Philippines is, unfortunately, a novelty in a predominantly white art form.Clockwise, from bottom left, Matt C. Cross, Donna Couteau, Marjolaine Mckenzie, Henu Josephine Tarrant and  Gloria Miguel.Lou MontesanoHowever, the story weaving in this production leaves too many loosely tied or unconnected threads, and the heart of the show — accounts of communal traditions and personal experiences — ends up getting lost. This isn’t helped when the performance elements don’t readily cohere around a narrative structure. We aren’t grounded in specific settings, or much acquainted with particular characters; everything is so free-floating that there’s not much to hold onto.Some more structure would serve the production well in other areas too. The choreography, by Couchie, could be more fluid in its transitions from traditional dancing to the more contemporary, impressionistic gestures. The movement could also better suit the range of ages and abilities of the actors onstage; there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to a show whose performers represent several generations.The costumes, music and projections similarly seem to function more as pastiche than the means toward illuminating or furthering the story. That would explain the ungainly juxtaposition of, say, a mythic story about a lynx woman and a story about a woman’s love for the actress Julia Roberts, Native round dancing and air guitar, or a reflection on the sounds a decapitated body makes scored to Gene Autry’s performance of “Peter Cottontail.”From left, Tarrant, Mckenzie, Cross and Villalon.Richard TermineThe result is a show that undercuts itself, as in one of the final scenes, when Nisgwamala (Gloria Miguel) delivers a monologue that suddenly breaks from the show’s allegorical and abstract style and lands with an explicit plea for us to love each other in our troubled contemporary world. Any resonance the monologue may have is challenged by what comes next: lively pop songs by the Bee Gees and Cher.The costumes are showy, though if one of the performers could be voted Best Dressed it would be Gloria, Muriel Miguel’s sister and one of the co-founders of Spiderwoman. At a spry 95, she is a dazzling participant, wearing a cosmic star-spangled dress with sleeves adorned with what look like tiny wind chimes hanging from her wrists; every movement of her arms is accented with an airy tinkle and chime.“Misdemeanor Dream,” which runs a brief 85 minutes, is supposedly inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” though the influence of Shakespeare seems to be another thread lost in this story weaving. The work attempts to use a fluid approach to storytelling to reflect stories that have transcendent themes: bodies change, spaces shift and we slip from one realm to the next like one slips from the waking world into the province of dreams. This kind of storytelling, and these Native stories, are essential in theater, but if you’re going to introduce the audience to the reports, fabrications and hearsay of the fairies and spirits of those alternate realms, make sure there’s some tether — even the faintest little thread — to keep us from getting lost in the magic.Misdemeanor DreamThrough March 27 at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘A Song of Songs’ Makes a Sacrament of Remembrance

      by

      Grief for a lost love is the unhealed wound at the core of this play by Agnes Borinsky, which takes a disquieting turn into the underworld.A few sheets of colored tissue paper, weighted down by a trinket to keep them from fluttering off. This is what audience members find on their seats upon arrival at “A Song of Songs,” Agnes Borinsky’s new theater piece inspired by the biblical Song of Songs, and it’s something of a puzzle. What to do with them?The answer comes at the top of the show, when Borinsky — one of a cast of three in this production, staged in a former Roman Catholic church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — mimes instructions to us for a quick craft project. Following along, we form our sheaves into simple offerings for the altar in front of us. Then row by row, we walk up and place them there, in a shrine to the dead.It feels awkward and uncertain, stumbling through these prescribed motions of lamentation. But grief for a lost beloved turns out to be the unhealed wound at the aching core of “A Song of Songs.” We are, it appears, merely re-enacting it.Directed by Machel Ross and presented by the Bushwick Starr and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, this play-as-ritual is meant as a kind of remix of the Song of Songs, which my Oxford World’s Classics edition of the King James Bible calls “notoriously, the one piece of erotic literature in the Bible.” But its carnality is drenched in joy, and in the comfort of lavished affection. Its verses revel in love and cherishing.So does “A Song of Songs,” at least at first. Though it’s too stylized to be sexy, its lovers, Nadine (Borinsky) and Sarah (Sekai Abeni), fall for each other in an all-consuming way, besotted to the point of unreason.“I took a pair of your gym shorts so I could smell them at work,” Sarah confesses, hiding her face. “This is completely terrifying.”Their fragmented story, and the loss of their transformative love, constitute the main narrative of “A Song of Songs.” Performed in brief scenes of monologue and dialogue, with occasional voice-overs and snatches of song, it makes a sacrament of remembrance. The set (by Frank Oliva, who also designed the lushly atmospheric lighting) takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space, and the actors’ flowing robes hint at religious garb. (Ross also designed the costumes.)Agnes Borinsky, Ching Valdes-Aran and Abeni. The set, by Frank Oliva, takes full advantage of the architecture of a once-sacred space.Luke OhlsonIn Sarah’s steady love for her only child, and Nadine’s abundant love for her many friends, Borinsky’s script considers more than just romantic attachment. Nadine’s godmother, Trudy (Ching Valdes-Aran), a revolutionary who loves with abandon, represents a fourth and more diffuse kind of passion: for society as a whole.Onstage at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Trudy’s is the most tentative thread of a production that does not entirely cohere. Patches of it can be hard to follow, and the acoustics sometimes swallow lines before they can land. Yet “A Song of Songs” possesses a surprising ritual power.As the play takes a disquieting turn into the underworld of Greek mythology, it stealthily leads each person in the audience toward a meditative consideration of their own mourning for those they have lost, to death or otherwise.The evening’s first participatory moment, when we placed our offerings on the altar, was preparing us for this: a second interlude when we are all asked to join in — wordlessly, each adding a token of love and sorrow to the set. (I’m not telling you what.) Delicately done, it is far more personal this time, and because of that, deeply affecting.“A Song of Songs” is a communal rite about the void left by the absence of people we love, and the universality of the pain that brings. More consolingly, it’s also about the beauty that can grow because of love, even if that love comes to grief.A Song of SongsThrough March 27 at El Puente’s Williamsburg Leadership Center, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Radio Drama for a Podcast Age: How Amazon’s Audible Moved Into Theater

      by

      A company known for audiobooks is mounting starry live productions — and recording them, too.Elizabeth Marvel took off her shoes, stretched out her arms and started describing her horrible dreams. Ato Blankson-Wood offered thoughts on astrology. Bill Camp, cradling a guitar in his lap, asked if someone could go get coffee, while Jason Bowen adjusted his chair.Then, after a bit of banter about the sounds of snacking, the actors nimbly slipped into character, adapting the mien of the four troubled Tyrones in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning classic, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”With just a few performances left of their intimate, searing revival at the Minetta Lane Theater, a small Off Broadway house in Greenwich Village, they were now a half mile east, at the Cutting Room Studios, futzing with headsets and repositioning microphones as they recorded the production for the company that had underwritten it: Audible.The cast staged an abridged version of the classic play before live audiences at the Minetta Lane Theater, then recorded an audio version for distribution by Audible.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn a move that echoes the radio dramas of yore, and at a moment when audio is enjoying an unexpected boom, Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, is making a bold push into theater.The company, which created its theater division just five years ago, has already released 93 audio theater works, and this month it added a theater tab to its app.Along the way, it has become a big player in the theater world: commissioning new work from 55 playwrights; presenting 25 shows in person at the Minetta Lane, which it is leasing; and becoming one of the most active commercial producers in the city. In 2020, Audible took on the entire season of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival, remotely rehearsing and recording all seven shows when the pandemic made it impossible to stage them in person.It also has producing credits on two Broadway shows, “Sea Wall/A Life” and “Latin History for Morons,” both of which the company also recorded and released on audio.The pace of production has been quickening — Audible released 24 theater works last year, up from nine in 2018 — and the complexity of its theater work is increasing, as the company becomes more technically sure-footed and more confident in its audience’s openness to multicharacter soundscapes.From “Coal Country”This documentary play, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and with songs by Steve Earle, explores the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine disaster through the words of survivors and family members. The Public Theater presented the play in person prior to the pandemic; then Audible recorded and streamed it, and now Audible is producing a return in-person engagement at the Cherry Lane Theater.The Audible effort is a descendant of the old-fashioned radio drama, which began in the 1920s and featured work from playwrights including Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller and directors such as Orson Welles. The form has continued to thrive in Britain, thanks largely to the BBC, but it faded in America after the mid-20th century, becoming a niche sustained by organizations including National Public Radio, which aired Earplay from the 1970s through the 1990s, and L.A. Theater Works, which has more than 600 audio titles in an expanding catalog featuring works by Dominique Morisseau and Tom Stoppard, as well as Miller and Ibsen.The pandemic renewed flirtation with the form: When theaters were closed to protect public health, many turned to audio, as well as video, to continue making work and reaching audiences. But Audible, which says it has subscribers in 175 countries who listened to 3.4 billion hours of audio last year, has the potential to have much further reach because of its huge base of subscribers, and the deep pockets of Amazon.“There’s a lot of audio drama being made by independent people for love, not money, but Audible is able to invest a lot more than independent productions are,” said Neil Verma, an assistant professor of sound studies at Northwestern University who has written about radio drama. “They have the opportunity to experiment, to attract more expensive talent if they want, and they also have the ability to distribute in a way that other entities don’t.”Audible has released plays in Spanish and Hindi, as well as in English. “Our theater titles have been listened to by millions globally,” said Kate Navin, the artistic producer of Audible’s theater division, which has five full-time employees. “We end up getting in front of a lot of people.”Verma said that one looming question is how long Audible will stay committed to theater. “They’re a tech company, so they try a lot of new things that survive or dissolve,” he said. “Radio drama has never been central to the mandate of any of the entities that have made it — it’s always been a side element of whatever the larger project is — so in that sense it’s always a little vulnerable.”Ato Blankson-Wood, the fourth member of the cast, as seen from the control room.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesHeadquartered in Newark, Audible was founded in 1995 by Don Katz, and was purchased by Amazon in 2008 for $300 million. Katz is an avid theatergoer, and Audible quickly turned to actors to voice audiobooks; then, when Audible started creating original content, Katz thought playwrights were better suited than screenwriters to crafting purely narrative stories. And he knew they could use the money.“There was always a purely aesthetic vision, and also a business idea that lives in parallel, which includes the fact that theater is without a really sophisticated electronic analog to supplement its existence,” he said. “Because we were able to have the person in the seat be multiplied, we could inject a new revenue stream into the world, and one that would go directly to writers and actors.”Katz hired Navin, a former theater agent, to run Audible’s theater division. To begin, the company announced that it would allocate $5 million to commission audio plays from emerging writers; since then it has commissioned plays from established ones as well.From “Evil Eye”“Evil Eye” is one of dozens of audio plays commissioned by Audible. Written by Madhuri Shekar, it is an epistolary dramedy about a woman determined to find a husband for her daughter. Amazon, which owns Audible, adapted the audio play for film.“I had seen firsthand how hard it was for playwrights to stay in theater,” Navin said. “So many playwrights were leaving for film and TV. I was struck that this might be an opportunity that would give them more options.”Audible’s initial audio-bound, in-person productions were starry solo shows, including “Harry Clarke,” featuring Billy Crudup, and “Girls & Boys,” featuring Carey Mulligan. But the Williamstown season forced a faster-than-expected reckoning with complexity — the slate of productions included “Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club,” a 13-performer play, and “Row,” a new musical.Some of Audible’s offerings, like “Long Day’s Journey,” are recorded in studios; others, particularly comedies like Faith Salie’s “Approval Junkie,” are recorded before live audiences.During the pandemic, when theaters were closed, Audible’s theater division employed more than 300 artists, Navin said. Now, she said, it must figure out what role to play in a post-lockdown world. “We don’t want volume for the sake of volume,” Navin said.For now, the company has been upgrading its technology, outfitting the Minetta Lane for 3-D audio recording. And it is beginning to imagine whether it could produce a musical. “Interest is high,” Navin said. “But that’s a post-pandemic conversation.”After the actors recorded the play, sound effects would be added in post-production.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesJason Bowen, shown here, and Ato Blankson-Wood played Jamie and Edmund, the two sons in the Tyrone family.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesAudible is an unusual player in the theater world because it is not primarily a theater company. The company’s main source of revenue is from members who pay to listen to audio titles.That means box office revenue is not a make-or-break factor for Audible’s theater productions, which allows the company to do risky work, and, even more distinctively, to stage short-run productions, which in turn allows them to attract film and television stars who have limited time in their schedules. The economics of most commercial play productions generally require stars to commit to runs of at least 15 weeks; because Audible isn’t looking to recoup costs from ticket sales, it can accept fewer. “Long Day’s Journey,” for example, had planned only a six-week run, which was shortened to five when the start of performances was delayed by concerns about the Omicron variant.“They don’t need to make a profit off of everything they do,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater. “What they need is for each project to elevate the brand, and that means they can look with a less bottom-line-driving frame at the works they create.”The “Long Day’s Journey” director, Robert O’Hara, was piped in to the recording session to give feedback. Amir Hamja for The New York TimesAnother upside: Artists are paid more for shows that are recorded as well as staged in person.“The pay is wonderful, and the reach is grand,” said Robert O’Hara, whose planned Williamstown production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” wound up being made for audio by Audible, and who went on to direct the “Long Day’s Journey” at the Minetta Lane and on audio.O’Hara, like other artists interviewed for this story, said Audible has been admirably hands-off. “I’m not getting dramaturgical notes from Audible,” he said. “They don’t have a take on ‘Long Day’s Journey.’ They allow the artists to be the artists.”His “Long Day’s Journey” staging, although backed by an audio company, had a number of striking visual moments, from its quiet opening to projections used onstage. “For me, audio was not the end destination,” he said. “Audio was the gravy on top. I was doing a stage production.”Marvel, who compared Audible to the Medicis, the historic Italian banking family associated with arts patronage, said the shorter run of an Audible production was a plus for her: “It’s a wonderful time model, where you’re not giving four to six months of your life to a play. It’s a reasonable amount of time to give, which, as an actor who is a parent and has to make income in other ways, is realistic and helpful.”There were other pluses. Marvel said she wanted to be part of trying new forms for theatrical storytelling. “We all have to look forward and just keep opening the iris for new ideas and new ways to work and new ways for people to access work,” she said.Marvel and O’Hara also both said that they weren’t sure other producers, either commercial or nonprofit, would have taken on the risk of the abbreviated, contemporary version of “Long Day’s Journey” that Marvel had long wanted to make. “I don’t think there’s another place I could have gone,” O’Hara said. “No one in their right mind would let me cut this play and modernize it.”Kate Navin, center, the head of Audible Theater, conferred with Erik Jensen, one of the writers of “Coal Country,” as that play, already recorded for audio, rehearsed for an in-person production at the Cherry Lane Theater.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“Long Day’s Journey,” with four actors and a rich soundscape, is being followed by a live production of “Coal Country,” the first show Audible is presenting in-person outside the Minetta Lane. The show is an eight-actor documentary play, with music written and performed by the singer-songwriter Steve Earle, about the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia. It was first produced by the Public and opened in March 2020, but a week later the pandemic cut short the run.“It was heartbreaking for us,” Earle said. “It was four years of work, and we got it up and had great reviews and were selling out, and then we opened and closed.”While live performances were almost entirely shut down, Audible reassembled the cast and recorded the show, to the relief of its creators. “For us, it has always been incredibly important that this play be seen, heard and experienced outside of New York, and particularly in Appalachia,” said Jessica Blank, the production’s director. “Audible immediately made the play accessible to people who wouldn’t have had access to it otherwise.”Now Audible is presenting a second in-person run of the Public’s “Coal Country” production at the Cherry Lane Theater, through April 17. Earle, who moved to New York hoping to break into the theater business, and who is working on a musical adaptation of the film “Tender Mercies,” said he was relieved to have Audible’s support.“I have long experience with taking corporate money to make art, because I come from the record business,” he said. “Anything that makes theater available to everybody, I’m all for.” More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      An Exiled Theater With a Warning for Europe

      by

      The Belarus Free Theater’s members fled repression at home. The company’s latest show imagines a nightmare future of authoritarian Russian rule.LONDON — When the players of the Belarus Free Theater began working on “Dogs of Europe” three years ago, they thought it was a play about a dystopia.Set in 2049, it imagines the continent cut in half by a wall. On one side sits a Russian superstate, where a dictator has eliminated almost all opposition, and where people cannot speak their native languages or even perform folk dances. On the other side sits a Europe that failed to realize the Russian threat, or stop it from absorbing Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States and beyond.Yet at a rehearsal in London last month, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, the play’s nightmare world didn’t feel so far-fetched.Maryna Yakubovich, an actor in the production, which opens Thursday at the Barbican theater in London, said that rehearsing the play had sometimes felt like a premonition. “It’s, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s started to happen,” she said.Nicolai Khalezin, left, and Natalia Kaliada, founders of the Belarus Free Theater.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesNatalia Kaliada, one of the Belarus Free Theater’s founders, said that when she and her husband, Nicolai Khalezin, decided to stage the play, they thought it would be a “warning shot” about the dangers of undemocratic leaders left unchecked. But planned performances in London and New York in 2020 were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now that warning shot appears to be too late.As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, the Belarus Free Theater’s performance may seem accidentally timely. But it is only the company’s latest attempt in its 17-year existence to warn about rising authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.The company knows those dangers all too well. Since forming in 2005, it has faced repression in Belarus, which is ruled by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who is known as “Europe’s last dictator” in part for his government’s clampdown on opposition and its stifling of free expression. The troupe has long been effectively banned from performing in Belarus, but it continued to do so in secret venues in Minsk, the capital, even after Kaliada and Khalezin were forced into exile more than a decade ago. The couple settled in London — where they developed close ties to theaters including the Young Vic and the Almeida — but continued rehearsing with actors in Belarus via Skype.Those clandestine shows, in venues including a converted car garage that once belonged to the American Embassy, also won the troupe high-profile supporters in the United States. In 2015, The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Ben Brantley, visited the company in Minsk, and praised its “spirit of defiant, exultant fraternity” adding that this was something “you rarely find among the young these days in money-driven, shockproof Manhattan.”A rehearsal of “Dogs of Europe” in London this month.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesNow, even that window to perform in Minsk has closed. The theater’s entire 16-member acting troupe fled Belarus last year to avoid potential jail time for opposing Lukashenko’s regime.The Belarus Free Theater was now homeless, Kaliada said. “We are refugees.”She added that she had hoped its members would be granted asylum in Britain, so they could set up a refugee-led theater there, but the process can take years and asylum applicants are almost always banned from working. After its four-performance run at the Barbican, the company would most likely set up base in Warsaw, a city with numerous refugees from both Belarus and Ukraine, Kaliada said, but added that a final decision had not yet been made.The company’s finances are precarious, Kaliada said, though she had a clear vision for the future. As well as finding a performance space, the company would establish a school where its members could give acting classes to refugee children, she said. All of its future plays would be live-streamed back to Belarus, so the company would keep reaching people there.“It’s a pretty tough time,” Kaliada said. “We’re trying to solve many issues at once.”The company’s experiences over the past two years show how quickly fortunes can change in Eastern Europe. In August 2020, Belarus — a country of some nine million people — looked on the verge of a turning point after Lukashenko declared victory in a vote widely dismissed as fraudulent, leading to mass street protests. It was a “beautiful, powerful,” moment, Kaliada said: It felt like her country was waking from a bad dream, she said.Then a brutal police crackdown against the protesters brought those hopes to an end.Sveta Sugako, left, the Belarus Free Theater’s production manager, and Nadia Brodskaya, its general manager.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the company’s actors were arrested during the period of repression around the election. Sveta Sugako, the company’s production manager, said she spent five days in prison in a tiny cell with 35 other women. None of them were given any food or drinking water for three days, she added. After Sugako refused to sign a confession saying she had taken part in the demonstrations, a police officer grabbed her and choked her, she said.Sugako said she had not wanted to leave Belarus, even after that experience. “I was ready to sit and wait in jail,” she said, but other Belarus Free Theater members persuaded her to go, pointing out that the company had no future if all of its actors were behind bars.Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4On the ground. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      LeBron Fandom, and the Making of a Friendship in ‘King James’

      by

      Rajiv Joseph’s new play, which chronicles the bond between two LeBron James fans over 12 years, is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf in Chicago.CHICAGO — When the actor Glenn Davis talks about his new play, “King James,” he gets some variation on this question: “So, are you playing LeBron James?”Not quite.“I’m 5-10,” Davis said, laughing. “He’s 6-9.”And there’s also this: James, the basketball superstar who broke hearts in Cleveland when he left to play for Miami 12 years ago, is not the protagonist of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James.” Rather, the play, which is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater Company here, tracks the friendship between two young men in Cleveland, Shawn (played by Davis) and Matt (Chris Perfetti of “Abbott Elementary”), over a dozen years.Told in four quarters that span James’s rookie season to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016, “King James,” directed by Kenny Leon, explores how fandom can create a lifelong connection between two people who otherwise have little in common.“Rajiv’s first draft had a lot of basketball in it,” said Davis, 40, a longtime friend of Joseph’s and for whom the role of Shawn was written. “But as each new draft came in, the specifics about basketball began to disappear because Rajiv wanted to make sure this play was about friendship.”“Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them,” said Rajiv Joseph, the playwright.Lyndon French for The New York TimesKenny Leon is directing his first Steppenwolf production, and said he’s cherishing the opportunity to help develop Joseph’s work.Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe play, which is in previews and will open March 13, was originally slated for Steppenwolf’s 2019-20 season before the pandemic forced its postponement. It now arrives at the same time as several basketball-themed TV projects, including Adam McKay’s HBO mini-series “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” about the team led by Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1980s, and the upcoming Apple TV+ documentary mini-series “They Call Me Magic,” about Johnson’s life on and off the court.In “King James,” Joseph uses James’s career as a window to examine the emotional nature of fandom, and how it can facilitate relationships and increased openness among people, particularly young men.“At least in the sort of heteronormative world in which I grew up, it was a struggle for young American men to communicate emotion,” Joseph, 47, said over coffee at Steppenwolf’s Front Bar before a recent rehearsal. “Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them.”Growing up in Cleveland in the 1980s and ’90s, Joseph was surrounded by passionate sports fans.“We were a Cleveland family — we watched the Cavs, we watched the Indians, we watched the Browns,” he said. “And all of our moods fluctuated accordingly.”In the play, LeBron James’s infamous “Decision” announcement looms large for two fans of the Cavaliers.Lyndon French for The New York TimesHe began writing “King James” in the summer of 2017, a year after James had led the Cavaliers to the championship, making them the first Cleveland team to win a major championship in 52 years. He drew from his experience as a Cleveland native inundated with the reactions of friends and family to “The Decision” — a live prime-time special in 2010 in which James, a free agent after seven seasons with the Cavaliers, announced he was leaving his hometown team to “take my talents to South Beach,” as James infamously put it.“I thought this would be an interesting way of exploring my own relationship with LeBron,” said Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010 for his play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” (He previously collaborated with Davis on that production, which ran on Broadway in 2011.) “This play is a sort of alchemy of stories I’ve heard, conversations I’ve had with people and the general sense of being a young person in Cleveland Heights and those heightened emotions that come out when you start arguing about sports.”The cast and creative team of “King James” had widely varying basketball knowledge — and loyalties. Davis, who was a high school basketball player in the Chicago area but gave up the sport to pursue a theater career, is a lifelong Bulls fan. Leon, who grew up in Florida, has been a Los Angeles Lakers fan for 35 years. Perfetti, 33, who is from upstate New York, grew up in a home “where there was always some sports game on television,” but he didn’t begin following basketball seriously until about six months ago.They watched James’s announcement together — which was Perfetti’s first time seeing it. But, for Joseph and Davis, the special was a reminder of a milestone moment in the basketball world, one in which every fan remembers where they were and what they were doing when they found out.“It was traumatic,” Joseph said. “But when you watch LeBron from then, you realize he was such a different person than he is now — like we all are. If any of us look back at when we were 25, I bet we’d kind of wince at some of the things we did and said.”“Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon (above left, with Joseph) said, referring to August Wilson. “Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThis is Leon’s first time directing at the Steppenwolf Theater. When he was contacted last October, Leon, a Tony-winning director whose most recent Broadway production was “A Soldier’s Play” in 2020, already had about a half-dozen projects in the works, including upcoming Broadway productions of Adrienne Kennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders,” starring Audra McDonald, and a revival of “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death,” Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 musical. (Leon, 66, is also the co-founder and artistic director emeritus of True Colors Theater Company, which is based in Atlanta.)But he said he jumped at the chance to oversee the production after its previous director, Anna D. Shapiro, resigned as the Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August. (Davis and Audrey Francis, both Steppenwolf ensemble members, replaced Shapiro as artistic directors.)“You don’t get a lot of opportunities to work with a living playwright on a new play that you think is beautiful and will have a great life,” Leon said as he nursed a cocktail after a rehearsal late last month. “The last time was when I worked with August Wilson on his last play, “Radio Golf,” leading up to the Broadway production [which opened in 2007].”The value of having Joseph in the room for rehearsals, Leon said, was that if he didn’t understand a character’s motivations for doing something, he could ask.“A lot of Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon said. “I can tell him what I feel. Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”And there were plenty of nips, tweaks and tucks to the script in the month leading up to the first performance. It was especially helpful, Joseph said, to have Perfetti’s perspective as an N.B.A. outsider in a play with some deeply insider references. (The Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s use of Comic Sans font in his letter to Cleveland fans after James’s departure, in which he lambasted James for his “disloyalty,” gets a shout.)“There’s lots of lines in the play where he was like, ‘Why am I saying this?’,” Joseph said of Perfetti. “And some of those lines were cut because of that.”“King James” plays out in four quarters, from LeBron James’s rookie year to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016. After Chicago, the play will have a run in Los Angeles.Lyndon French for The New York TimesBut audience members don’t need to be basketball fans to understand the larger points. The play’s first quarter, for instance, ends with Matt and Shawn — who to that point had been strangers — making plans to attend a season of Cavaliers games together. The action then picks up six and a half years later, when the two men are best friends.“With my best friend, the first and second quarter in our relationship feels like it went by that quickly,” Davis said. “That’s how it happens, you know?”Though Matt is white and Shawn is Black, Joseph decided not to make race a focal point of the show — at least, not right away. It eventually factors into their reactions to James’s return to Cleveland in the third quarter, but Joseph said that, having grown up in the diverse suburb of Cleveland Heights — where the play takes place — it “just made sense to me, before I even knew what the play would be about, that it would be a Black guy and a white guy.”“I didn’t anticipate any kind of racial tension in the play,” he said. “But the more I thought about what I was writing about, it just comes out and you allow for the story that wants to be told.”Following its five-week run here, “King James,” commissioned by Steppenwolf and the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, will transfer to the Mark Taper Forum there in June, with Davis and Perfetti reprising their roles, and Leon again as director. Both Leon and Joseph are hoping for an eventual Broadway transfer, too.It will be special, everyone involved agrees, to present the show in the city where James currently plays. But Leon said it’s important to remember that “80 percent of the audience will be the same,” referring to the audience members who will not be passionate fans of the local team. “We’re going to try to strike those universal chords,” he said. “That’s what makes the play work. Somebody has to be able to say ‘Oh, that’s how I treat my friend’ or ‘That’s how it was when I didn’t see my mother for 10 years.’”Joseph, who has never met James, said he would be “thrilled” if James were to see the show during its Los Angeles run, which will coincide with the N.B.A. finals.“But, on the other hand, I hope he can’t come because he’s still playing,” he said. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

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