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      When Britney Came to Brecht’s House

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      The Berliner Ensemble, once known for reverent productions of plays by its founder, Bertolt Brecht, has come roaring into a new decade.BERLIN — In August, the Berliner Ensemble started its season with a bang: a new production of “The Threepenny Opera” that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office smash.Since then, the theater, founded by Bertolt Brecht in what was once East Berlin, has been on a winning streak. This is quite a turnaround for a company that, until recently, was considered tame and even old-fashioned.Yet as of this season, the Berliner Ensemble is perhaps this city’s most consistently exciting playhouse, a place where repertory staples and new works are invigorated by extraordinary actors and innovative directors. Over a single weekend this month, I took in three very different new productions, out of a whopping 20 premieres planned for the season.Along with the new “Threepenny Opera,” the clearest indication of the course that the theater has charted was Christina Tscharyiski’s new version of Brecht’s “The Mother,” a Lehrstück, or “learning play,” from 1932 that the playwright intended to awaken both class consciousness and critical thinking about workers’ struggles.Tscharyiski expands on Brecht’s discussion of the exploitation and dehumanization of the proletariat by adding fresh texts that boldly bring the work into the 21st century. The six actors, playing a variety of roles, hold forth on capitalism’s relationship to feminism and digitization. If this sounds pedantic, I assure you that it is anything but.The production is subtitled “Instructions for a Revolution,” and its nimble players deliver their speeches with manifesto-like zeal. Yet there’s nothing dry or plodding about the production’s forays into theory, especially not with the backing of a rock band performing Hanns Eisler’s original music. And there’s nothing stiff about the eye-popping production, thanks to Janina Audick’s cheeky and colorful set, bare but for a few well-chosen signs and props, and Verena Dengler’s eclectic patchwork costumes.The ensemble in “The Mother — Instructions for a Revolution,” directed by Christina Tscharyiski.JR Berliner EnsembleTscharyiski, a young Austrian director, is the latest in a series of inventive artists who have been invited by the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, Oliver Reese, to establish a “new Brecht tradition at the house,” as he told The New York Times in August. In recent seasons, Reese has enlisted a number of progressive theatermakers to help remove the mothballs from a number of Brecht’s plays at the house, which has had a longstanding tradition of effective, if dated, stagings.This is Reese’s fifth season running Brecht’s old house, and the first under his leadership when the Berliner Ensemble has truly gained definition and focus.Beyond engaging distinctive young directors like Tscharyiski, who also oversaw a staggeringly wild production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Schwarzwasser” earlier this season, and Ersan Mondtag, who has applied his neo-Expressionist gloss to works by Wagner and Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble’s current success is due largely to its troupe of 27 full-time actors, one of the largest in Germany’s theater system. Reese has made a point of casting shows from the company’s acting reserve. Four out of the six actors performing in “The Mother” belonged to the company’s ensemble. I encountered a dozen more house actors the following evening in Mateja Koleznik’s broodingly atmospheric production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” in which no fewer than a dozen ensemble members are part of the sizable cast.Miller’s allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts plays out on a fixed set whose wood panels and green tiles suggest the hallway of a Soviet-era school gymnasium or courthouse. In a program note, Koleznik writes that she conceived of the play’s setting not as Salem, Mass., in 1692 or America in 1953, but rather a “retro future dystopia” that recalls “The Handmaid’s Tale.”Her production achieves a remarkably effective mood of gothic menace, thanks largely to Raimund Orfeo Voigt’s handsome yet confining set, Ana Savic-Gecan’s severe costumes and Rainer Casper’s chiaroscuro lighting. Then there is Michael Gumpinger’s sinister music, chanted by a five-woman chorus credited as “the girls of Salem.” Clad in green schoolgirl uniforms, they loll in chairs, balance upside down and hang from doorways like acrobatic Balthus models.Having effectively established its horror atmosphere, however, the production has little to say about the play itself. Most of the actors, locked into the prison of this claustrophobic production, seem on their own when it comes to embodying Miller’s characters and their thorny relationships. Yet two ensemble members of different generations steal the show.Lili Epply in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” directed by Mateja Koleznik.Matthias HornBettina Hoppe, 47, makes for a tightly coiled Elisabeth Proctor. With modesty and restraint, she breathes convincing life into her pious character, whose fortitude and inner pain are the emotional core of the production. As her rival, Abigail Williams, the Proctors’ former maid and the ringleader of the “bewitched” girls, Lili Epply, 27, a new ensemble member, deftly shifts between the character’s various states — girlish, seductive, defensive, vindictive, and drunk on power — without ever hamming things up.After the vast panorama of “The Crucible,” with its 21 performers onstage, the focus narrowed again for the most unexpected entry of the weekend: “It’s Britney, Bitch,” a one-woman show for the actress Sina Martens, directed by Lena Brasch, that is both a homage to the pop star and a plea that we take Spears seriously. Ultimately, Marten presents the singer as more of a badass than a victim: “‘Toxic’ was way earlier than your ‘toxic masculinity,’” runs one memorable line.Alone onstage in the Werkraum, the company’s tiny supplementary venue, Martens sings, dances and even crawls her way through the 70-minute evening, donning a long blond Barbie wig or bald cap to slip in and out of the pop star’s skin. The dialogue is drawn from both Spears’s statements in court and freshly composed texts by four writers.One is an imagined missive — in language reminiscent of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” — to Jamie Spears, who controlled much of his daughter’s personal and professional life during a 14-year conservatorship that was dissolved this past November. At other times, Martens grapples with Spears’s double role as a model of female empowerment and a symbol of a crassly sexist culture, reflecting on the news media’s fixation with her breasts and virginity. Why is it so difficult, Martens ponders in one monologue, for society to take female suffering seriously? “Janis Joplin didn’t die from melancholy,” she says. “Janis Joplin died from heroin.”Breaking up all the talk are arrangements of several Spears hits in all but unrecognizable versions by Friederike Bernhardt that turn the pop chartbusters into gloomy cabaret ballads. At the end of the evening, Martens appears in a red jumpsuit like the one Spears famously wore in the music video for “Oops … I Did It Again” to dance the original choreography while lip-syncing along with the pop anthem. Through their mandated masks, the compulsorily vaccinated audience members, sitting shoulder to shoulder, cheered Martens on. Like the Berliner Ensemble’s other new productions I attended, “It’s Britney, Bitch” was sold out: no mean feat in normal times, but little short of miraculous during the pandemic’s latest surge.Die Mutter — Anleitung für eine Revolution. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 11.Hexenjagd. Directed by Mateja Koleznik. Berliner Ensemble. In repertory.It’s Britney, Bitch. Directed by Lena Brasch. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 27. More

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      As Broadway Struggles, Governor Hochul Proposes Expanded Tax Credit

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      With Omicron complicating Broadway’s return, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed more assistance for commercial theater, which her budget director called “critical for the economy.”As Broadway continues to reel from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to expand and extend a pandemic tax credit intended to help the commercial theater industry rebound.Ms. Hochul on Tuesday proposed budgeting $200 million for the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit, which provides up to $3 million per show to help defray production costs.“They were starting to recover before Omicron, and then, as you have all seen, a lot of these performance venues had to shut down again, and those venues are critical for the economy,” the state budget director, Robert Mujica, told reporters.The tax credit program, which began last year under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was initially capped at $100 million. Early indications are that interest is high: Nearly three dozen productions have told the state they expect to apply, said Matthew Gorton, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency.The Hochul administration decided to seek to expand the tax credit program — and to extend the initial application deadline, from Dec. 31, 2022 to June 30, 2023 — as it became clear that Broadway’s recovery from its lengthy pandemic shutdown would be bumpier than expected.Shows began resuming performances last summer, and many were drawing good audiences — Ms. Hochul visited “Chicago” and “Six” in October, while Mr. Gorton saw “The Lehman Trilogy” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”But the industry is now struggling after a spike in coronavirus cases prompted multiple cancellations over the ordinarily lucrative holiday season, and then attendance plunged. Last week, 66 percent of Broadway seats were occupied, according to the Broadway League; that’s up from 62 percent the previous week, but down from 95 percent during the comparable week before the pandemic.“Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Jeff Daniel, who is the chairman of the Broadway League’s Government Relations Committee, as well as co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents touring shows in regional markets. Mr. Daniel, still recovering from his own recent bout of Covid, welcomed the governor’s proposal, and said the League would work to urge the Legislature to approve it.“Every show we can open drives jobs and economic impact,” said Mr. Daniel, who noted the close economic relationship between Broadway and other businesses, including hotels and restaurants. “If we can maximize Broadway, we maximize tourism.”Under the program, shows can receive tax credits to cover up to 25 percent of many production expenditures, including labor. As a condition of the credit, shows must have a state-approved diversity and arts job training program, and take steps to make their productions accessible to low-income New Yorkers. More

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      Conrad Ricamora on His Bumpy Road to ‘Little Shop of Horrors’

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      The actor reflects on continuing the Off Broadway revival’s hot streak, and fighting against the stereotypes facing Asian American actors.Since it opened in October 2019, Michael Mayer’s well-received “Little Shop of Horrors” revival has drawn quite the handsome string of leading men: Jonathan Groff was the first to step into Seymour Krelborn’s Converse sneakers, and he was followed by Gideon Glick and Jeremy Jordan. This reflects the casting evolution of the character, a painfully shy plant geek. Not many roles have been played by both Rick Moranis (in the show’s 1986 movie adaptation) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in a 2015 concert production).When asked about joining this, ahem, hot streak, Conrad Ricamora burst out laughing. “I played a nerdy IT guy for six years on ‘How to Get Away With Murder’ so I don’t know if there’s a full consensus that I’m in the Jake Gyllenhaal Hall of Fame of Hot Actors,” he said.Since Jan. 11, Ricamora, 42, has been taking center stage at the Westside Theater, and while he displays serious comic muscle, he also taps into the character’s painful loneliness. When he sings “Someone show me a way to get outta here / ’Cause I constantly pray I’ll get outta here” in the opening number, the ache is palpable.This versatility won’t be news to those who have seen him onstage before — yes, Oliver stans, he can sing! There was the way Ricamora would summon a shamanic intensity as the magnetic political leader Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne and Fatboy Slim hit show that opened at the Public Theater in 2013. And then there was his ardent romanticism as the doomed Burmese scholar and lover Lun Tha in the 2015 Lincoln Center production of “The King and I” — oh, those duets with Ashley Park’s Tuptim!Chatting after a recent rehearsal, the actor was candid about the obstacles he had to overcome on the road to Skid Row, the derelict neighborhood where “Little Shop of Horrors” is set.Ricamora as Seymour, with his seemingly innocent plant, in the Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors.”Emilio MadridThere was, for example, the time the director of his first professional show, a production of “Anything Goes” in North Carolina, asked if he could sound more Chinese. “We call it ‘ching chong’ in the Asian acting community — ‘they want you to be ching-chong-y’ ” said Ricamora, who is half-Filipino. “It didn’t feel great.”Even with the production of “The King and I,” which had great resources, he talked about being frustrated by what he felt was a lack of attention to dialects. “I didn’t want to make any waves because I wanted this job — I still had debt, so much debt,” he said. “And No. 2, I thought the best way to work was to say yes to everything because then they would tell other people that you’re easy to work with.” (The financial pressure was assuaged only after he started making “TV money,” as he put it, on the show “How to Get Away with Murder,” in which he played the computer whiz Oliver Hampton for six years.)It was a relief for Ricamora to be cast in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s “Soft Power,” a deliciously acid meta-musical from 2019 that looked at mythmaking and the way American culture deals with ethnic clichés — including a whole Rodgers and Hammerstein pastiche number about correct Chinese pronunciation.“He’s kind of a charisma machine,” the playwright David Henry Hwang said of Ricamora, who starred in Hwang’s “Soft Power.”Cole Wilson for The New York TimesOne day, Tesori asked the largely Asian American cast what it had cost them to tell such a personal, emotional story in the show. Reliving that moment, Ricamora turned her question on its head, and was once again overcome with the pain and anger the question had unlocked as he thought about the cast getting the still-rare opportunity to play fully human characters after so many years of stereotypical roles.“What does it [expletive] cost me, us all of my Asian American brothers and sisters?” he recounted, his voice shaking. “Here’s what it costs us: Women are constantly made to play prostitutes and just sexual beings. As Asian American men, we’re constantly asked to get rid of our sexuality completely and to be the butt of the joke and to be treated as third-class citizens.“When you see Asian Americans standing up onstage in the theater, they’re overcoming so many years of people telling them to push that aside and be a stereotype,” he continued, tearing up. “We all wonder, ‘When are we going to get a chance to exist fully?’ And ‘Soft Power’ felt like that for all of us.”It had been a long ride up to that moment — yet for quite a while, Ricamora’s life was focused not on theater but on tennis.“You don’t know how many times I wrote over and over again ‘I’m going to win the U.S. Open’ in my journal in college,” he said, laughing. “Wanting to get to Broadway was never a goal of mine because I didn’t know it existed. I grew up on Air Force bases in very toxic masculine culture, so there was no theater. There were no arts at all.”His military dad, who had emigrated from the Philippines, moved the family around until settling for a longer spell in Florida, where young Conrad attended middle and high school. His mother, who is white, had left when he was an infant, and his father remarried when Conrad was 8.He majored in psychology at Queens University of Charlotte, N.C., which he attended on a tennis scholarship. And then he had an epiphany: In his junior year he took a theater class and was assigned a monologue from Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky,” about a teenage boy attempting to connect with his estranged father. “I remember thinking, ‘This is my experience — I just have to stand here and say these words because I know what this person is talking about,’” he said. “The electricity I felt in that moment, that connection between actor, playwright and audience is something I’ve been chasing ever since.”Ricamora as the Filipino politician Ninoy Aquino in “Here Lies Love,” the musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRicamora with Francis Jue in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s  musical “Soft Power.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter completing his degree, he started acting in local community theater and moved on to professional productions. Low point: that “Anything Goes.”High point: “Shakespeare’s R & J,” in which he played Juliet opposite Evan Jonigkeit’s Romeo in 2008. “For a queer person, it blew my mind away,” Ricamora said of the Philadelphia production. “It felt like it exploded the world open for me. There was so much more that I could be accessing in my work.”He was almost done with his graduate studies in acting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, when he saw the casting call for “Here Lies Love” and traveled to New York to audition.“Immediately you just could tell you’re in the presence of someone really special and — I hate to use this word — starry,” the director Alex Timbers said over the phone. “There was a real connection with the role, but also something where you want to be a part of that actor’s career early on because they’re going to go to extraordinary places.”Hwang was similarly impressed: “He’s kind of a charisma machine.”And still, the outpouring unleashed by Tesori’s question is haunting. Yes, Ricamora is succeeding three Tony-nominated actors in “Little Shop of Horrors,” but it’s also hard to not feel a little frustrated for him: Why did it take so long to land a starring role? Why aren’t actors like Ricamora, Jason Tam (“Be More Chill”) or Telly Leung (“Allegiance”) better known?“There haven’t been those roles for Asian romantic leads, that more or less hasn’t existed,” Hwang said. “Even when you get a role like Lun Tha, which is sort of in that direction, it’s still not the center.”He added: “It’s hard for Asian women in a different way: They tend to be over-sexualized, portrayed as either lotus blossoms or dragon ladies, as we like to put it. So they are limited as well but in a different set of stereotypes.”Tom in “The Glass Menagerie” is one of the characters Ricamora said he’d like to play. Cole Wilson for The New York TimesNever mind the quality: even the quantity is lacking. According to a report by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition, only 6.3 percent of all available roles in New York City went to Asian American actors during the 2018-19 season.A partial solution is exactly what Ricamora is doing now: putting his stamp on an iconic role such as Seymour. He allowed that he was “white-knuckling it a little” after being propelled onstage following just two weeks of rehearsal, so for now he is focusing on making the role his — “I’ll fill it out more and more as the run goes on,” he said.For Tammy Blanchard, who has played Seymour’s love interest, Audrey, from the start: “Conrad is very deep, very centered. Jeremy was very comedic, but you also had this sense of feeling for him. I think that Conrad’s going to be more what Michael Mayer originally intended with Jonathan Groff — a dark, kind of emotional journey.”And when that experience concludes, Ricamora is ready to tell more stories.“I’d like to play Tom in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ or Hal in ‘Henry IV, Part One’ — my daddy issues run deep,” Ricamora said, with a laugh, of his dream parts. “But especially after doing ‘Soft Power,’ I think the roles are still being written by playwrights I haven’t even met, by Asian American playwrights that I haven’t even met.”The challenge is obvious for that last demographic: The coalition’s report points out that Asian American playwrights, composers, librettists and lyricists made up only 4.4 percent of all writers produced on New York stages in 2018-19. When a promising slate of Asian American-steered productions was lined up, at long last, in 2020, Covid-19 hit.Ricamora is willing to do his part there, too, though in television for now: He and his friends Kelvin Moon Loh and Jeigh Madjus just sold “No Rice,” a half-hour comedy series that they are writing, executive producing and starring in. “The title comes from what people on Grindr or Tinder or Match or whatever would put,” he explained, referring to racist shorthand descriptions. “Around 2015-2016 and earlier, it was all over the dating apps — people would freely write ‘no rice,’ ‘no spice,’ ‘no fats,’ ‘no fems.’” (He would not reveal yet where it will air.)In the meantime, he is happy to be back onstage, battling a bloodthirsty plant and singing of loneliness and ache. “I love coming back to theater so much because you get to show up every day,” Ricamora said. “Theater grounds you — eight shows a week is no joke.” More

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      ‘This Beautiful Future’ Review: Love Glows in War’s Shadow

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      Theaterlab stages a gimlet-eyed romance involving a girl and a young Nazi soldier in Occupied France by the playwright Rita Kalnejais.In the tiny lobby of Theaterlab, on West 36th Street, you need to show proof of a booster vaccine before you can get your tickets. You have to wear a high-grade mask, too, though if you show up unequipped, the person at the box office will cheerfully hand one over.If the wartime teenagers at the center of Theaterlab’s current play, “This Beautiful Future,” could project themselves across the decades to our time, they might recognize that spirit of getting on with things, carefully.Not that Elodie (Francesca Carpanini), a 17-year-old in Chartres, France, has much patience for caution herself. It is August 1944, a critical point in World War II, but she is smitten with a boy, and that overrides everything big and scary that the grown-ups have set in motion in the world.Otto (Justin Mark) is 16 and new in town, bashful and awkward and easy to tease. The first time they speak, Elodie razzes him reflexively. But there is a sweetness to him that she falls for, and on the night when they meet in an abandoned house with thoughts of sex and romance swirling in their heads, she wants him to dance with her.“I don’t usually dance,” he says.“Why not?” she asks.“’Cause the girls say no.”Smart girls.Despite the enchanting haze of wistfulness that hangs over “This Beautiful Future,” by Rita Kalnejais, an Australian playwright based in London, the play is a gimlet-eyed romance. Its lovers are as young and unworldly as Liesl and her Nazi boyfriend, Rolfe, in “The Sound of Music.”“This Beautiful Future” achieves a remarkable, aching alchemy, not because Elodie and Otto are star-crossed but because they’re ordinary, and because if not for the war, they might have retained their innocence.Carpanini and Mark, with Austin Pendleton and Angelina Fiordellisi in their karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set.Emilio MadridOtto is a Nazi, a member of the occupying force; Elodie pushes away her discomfort at that. She is too naïve to realize that her Jewish neighbors who were arrested will not be coming back, or that Otto — the kind of wide-eyed, easily led soldier who fanboys the strongman he calls “Mr. Hitler” — has shot local people dead.Kalnejais frames their story with a benevolent pair of elders, played in Jack Serio’s wonderfully cast production by Angelina Fiordellisi and a rumpled-to-perfection Austin Pendleton. From their upstage karaoke booth on Frank J. Oliva’s set, they watch over the young couple with sympathy and concern. Between scenes, they sing (or, in Pendleton’s case, speak-sing) songs from Elodie and Otto’s time and our own, and utter laundry lists of simple things they would change if they got a do-over in life.“I wouldn’t lose sleep over money,” he says. “Or being unlovable.”“I’d sleep knowing it all changes by morning,” she says.Elodie and Otto, just starting out, don’t have that kind of wisdom yet. But they do have hope, and you can hear it in their plans for a sunny future together. They have no idea how vulnerable they are, or how brutal the world is prepared to be.Otto might have some clue, though, if only he would listen to himself.“There’s nothing cruel about choosing who lives and who dies,” he says, defending his mission. “We’re not just randomly picking people off. I couldn’t do that. This is about choosing a future where everyone’s clean.”What might this morally warped boy have been — what might the world have been — if Hitler had taken an office job instead of going into politics? “This Beautiful Future” wants to know.With an ending that’s gentle and wondrous and fragile as new life, it is a play about choosing, step by step, a genuinely better future — and about what might have been, what never should have been and what can’t ever be taken back.This Beautiful FutureThrough Jan. 30 at Theaterlab, Manhattan; theaterlabnyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Philippe Gaulier on the Art of Clowning and Sacha Baron Cohen

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      The French master teacher Philippe Gaulier has worked with stars like Sacha Baron Cohen. But at 78, are his methods, which include insults, outdated?ÉTAMPES, France — It’s unlikely anyone alive has made more clowns cry than Philippe Gaulier.In a supposedly more sensitive era, hundreds of people regularly travel from all around the world to a small town an hour outside of Paris to study clowning with Gaulier, a gruff 78-year-old éminence grise known for his blunt, flamboyantly negative feedback. Wearing a pink tie, beret and stern look over a bushy white beard on a recent tour of the school, he looked the part of the guru — a mischievous one. He pointed at a large photo of himself teaching in China and joked he was “Clown Chairman Mao.”In his office, sitting across from his wife, Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, a former student who is now a colleague, he made no apologies for his pugnacious style, saying students who are not funny have a choice: “You have to change or leave the school. You are boring. If you want to stay boring all your life, you will never be a clown.”Gaulier has been teaching clowns for about half a century, but his stature has grown in recent years, becoming an influential and divisive figure of considerable mystique, the Dumbledore of round red noses. The primary reason for his raised profile is the success of Sacha Baron Cohen, a former student who praised Gaulier on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2016 and described receiving bad reviews from him in a 2021 appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”“I was always interested in comedy, but it was Gaulier who helped me understand how to be funny,” Baron Cohen wrote in the preface to Gaulier’s book “The Tormentor.”Clowns remain a staple of the circus, but the reach of the ancient art is much wider these days, with a growing theatrical scene as well as performers crossing over into other forms. The alumni network at Gaulier’s school, where many make lifelong connections, is expansive — spanning film and theater (Emma Thompson, Kathryn Hunter), circus and live comedy, with students like the Los Angeles comedian Dr. Brown becoming gurus themselves. Another protégé, Zach Zucker, is the host of Stamptown, a popular showcase of cutting-edge comics in Brooklyn, its name inspired by the town of Gaulier’s school. “He has become the name to drop,” Geoff Sobelle, an acclaimed performer and former student, said about Gaulier’s reputation among clowns.In a two-hour interview last month, Gaulier, speaking in English, came off less like a teacher than a very funny insult comic, teasing and trash-talking, tossing jabs at everyone from Slava Polunin, the Tony-nominated Russian clown (“For children who has problem to sleep, can be good”) to the legendary mime Marcel Marceau (“He’s a maniac with his gestures”). Asked if someone can be funny who didn’t make him laugh, he said it was possible, before turning back to me, gesturing at my clothes: “It’s possible that you with your glasses, your hair, that you are funny,” he said, before the punchline. “And someone really well-dressed is, too. The opposite of you.”He’s allergic to anything that smacks of pretension, which inevitably inspires one of his favorite expressions: “of my balls,” as in Slava is a “poetic clown of my balls.”Compared with other clowning teachers, Gaulier said he does not emphasize technique or physical virtuosity. His pedagogy aims for something more intangible, nurturing a childlike spirit, a sense of play onstage. The most important quality in a clown is keeping things light and present, and, as he said with the utmost respect, stupid. Finding “your idiot,” as he calls it, is the essence of clowning, which, unlike comic acting, requires a performer to stick with the same character. “A clown is a special kind of idiot, absolutely different and innocent,” he said. “A marvelous idiot.”Gaulier “helped me understand how to be funny,” Sacha Baron Cohen has written.Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesGaulier said he could put a red nose on anyone and tell how they played as a 7-year-old. Students, who do in fact do exercises in red noses, describe this in gushing terms.“He liberated me,” said René Bazinet, a highly respected German-Canadian clown who has worked for years with Cirque du Soleil. “In my first year, I had to read a poem, and he kept stopping me, saying, ‘Why are you clearing your throat? Say the poem. Why are you doing this? Why that?’ And one moment, my brain just opened up. His way of attacking the falseness was a relief to me. I was becoming an idiot.”This process can sometimes sound like a masochistic cleansing ritual. “He just insults his students all day long until they start laughing and their ego gets out of the way,” Bazinet said. “You are taking your ego to the slaughterhouse.”Former students inevitably have stories of bruising feedback, usually told with the affection of grizzled war veterans. Kendall Cornell, who leads an all-female clown troupe, Clowns Ex Machina, recalled a lot of tears, but also a “mind-blowing” experience that taught her things she didn’t learn in other classes. There’s even a Facebook group that collects insults called “Philippe Gaulier Hit Me With a Stick.”The criticisms include “You sound like overcooked spaghetti in a pressure cooker” and “You are a very good clown for my grandmother.” He frequently focuses on the eyes. “If you are funny,” he told me, “you have funny eyes.”Gaulier is even stingy with compliments for his most successful alumni. Asked about Baron Cohen as a student, he said: “Nice boy. Tall.” Pressed for more, he added, “He’s a guy who when he understands something, he’s going to sell it. That’s enough.”When he was 8, Gaulier, who grew up in Paris near a circus, was kicked out of school for punching his gymnastics teacher. Seven decades later, he has no regrets. “He was a bastard,” he said, explaining that the instructor made students march like in the army. “I hate the military. Teachers, too.”His ambition was to be a tragic actor, but every time he tried to do serious work in drama school, he said with resignation, everyone laughed. This led him to a class with the renowned mime and master teacher Jacques Lecoq, whose pioneering training was rooted in clowning, improvisation and mask work. Gaulier became a performer who, with his partner, Pierre Byland, had a hit clown show, during which he broke 200 plates every night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Kite Runner’ Is Coming to Broadway

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      The 2007 play based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel has been widely produced, including on the West End in London. It will come to Broadway in July.A stage adaptation of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner” will be presented on Broadway in July.The play, which began its life in California in 2007 and has been widely produced since, is planning a limited run, from July 6 to Oct. 30.The announcement is encouraging news for Broadway, which has been clobbered by closings as the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil the industry. But there remain many producers with the appetite and the financing to bring new shows to Broadway as others end their runs.The “Kite Runner” novel, written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2003, is a coming-of-age story about a man born in Afghanistan whose life is haunted by his failure to protect a childhood friend. The novel, a surprise hit, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted into a film in 2007.The theatrical adaptation was written by Matthew Spangler, and was first staged in 2007 at San José State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. It had an initial professional production in 2009 at the San Jose Repertory Theater, which no longer exists, and has since been staged in multiple countries around the world.The Broadway version will be directed by Giles Croft, who has been directing productions of the play since 2013, when he oversaw a run for the Nottingham Playhouse in Britain; he has since directed productions in the West End and on tour in Britain.The play is slated to run at the Hayes Theater, which, with 600 seats, is the smallest on Broadway. The theater is owned by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, which will rent the space to “The Kite Runner.”The lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner; Daryl Roth will serve as executive producer. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the producers are seeking to raise up to $5.75 million, but a spokesman said that the actual Broadway capitalization is likely to be closer to $4.6 million. More

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      in Music

      After ‘Clyde’s,’ Lynn Nottage Just Has Two Shows Onstage. ‘Whew!’

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      With one play closed, Nottage can focus on “MJ” on Broadway and “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater. And maybe even catch her breath.It was just a flute of champagne after Sunday’s final Broadway performance of her play “Clyde’s,” but Lynn Nottage was genuinely happy to have it — not only to toast the end of the limited run with the rest of the company, upstairs at the Hayes Theater, but also to sneak a brief, rare moment of indulgence in a schedule that’s lately been too crammed for a glass of wine.Starring Uzo Aduba as the owner of a sandwich shop staffed with people who have served time, and Ron Cephas Jones as a culinary artist who leads the workers in a quest for the perfect sandwich, “Clyde’s” started a remarkable season for Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. For four days this month, until “Clyde’s” closed, she had three new shows onstage in New York; the others, still in previews, are the Broadway musical “MJ,” about Michael Jackson, and the opera “Intimate Apparel,” adapted from her play of the same name, at Lincoln Center Theater.For months she shuttled among them, dashing back to “Clyde’s” for talkbacks and to catch performances when understudies went on. All while teaching full time at Columbia University and, in October, releasing the short film “Takeover,” produced by her company Market Road Films, for the Op-Docs series of The New York Times.Nottage shares a toast with actors and staff after the final performance of “Clyde’s” at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the champagne toast on Sunday evening, Nottage came downstairs for an interview in a lounge at the theater to talk about her season and about “Clyde’s,” which she called “Floyd’s” when it had its premiere in Minneapolis in 2019, and renamed following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.So how are you?I’m very overworked. [laughs] I was just describing this particular moment as like making art in the eye of a hurricane.You’ve decided to make a lot of art in the eye of a hurricane.It’s a lot of art, yeah. It’s the moment in which I was invited to make art, but it’s also the most difficult, fraught, complicated moment in theater history. It would be stressful, you know, making three shows without the added element of Covid. But add that sort of special ingredient, and it’s very complicated.Are you getting the time to savor this?I started rehearsal in October for both shows, “MJ” and “Clyde’s.” From October to December, I was rehearsing and teching and seeing the shows at night, and teaching full time at Columbia. I did not have a single day off. And then in mid-December, we began rehearsals for “Intimate Apparel.” But strangely, in the Covid shutdown, when for 10 days we didn’t have “MJ” going, I suddenly had just a little bit of a pause. I could breathe.Is there joy in it?This is the dream. I feel immensely proud of all three of the works of art that I have created. They’re so different and they represent different aspects of who I am as an artist in different parts of my brain. Part of the joy of making all three of these pieces of art at the same time is that it allows me to leave one space and enter another completely different space and then, you know, leave that space and enter another one. And so I never get bored.A curtain call, from left, with Edmund Donovan, Ron Cephas Jones, Uzo Aduba, Kara Young and Reza Salazar.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Clyde’s” is a comedy.It is a comedy. It’s also a feel-good play. And particularly at this moment I think that audiences need something that is healing and soothing, and that allows them to open up their hearts and allow laughter in. And that’s what I was hoping to do.It was a long journey with this play, yes?It doesn’t seem like a super long journey to me. This journey was just interrupted because of world circumstances. We’ve been through a lot. The world changed in ways that now seem incomprehensible to me. I mean, I kind of can’t believe that we lived through it. I’ll be an old lady with my grandchildren, like: “Yes, let me tell you about Covid and Donald Trump.” [laughs] You know, it’s sort of similar when I think about my grandmother talking about the Depression and the war, and it just seemed like, “How did you survive?” Now I know.Did you think that when you finally got to do “Clyde’s,” we would be out of the pandemic?I think all of us thought that. There was a moment of incredible optimism. And still, when we began “Clyde’s,” we had all of the Covid protocols in place and the Covid officer, and we wore masks throughout rehearsals and the actors were permitted to take off the masks on the stage. And that felt like a victory, like, OK, we’re moving through this difficult moment. And audiences were coming back and you’d walk through this theater district and it felt vibrant and alive. And you know, there were sprinklings of tourists, and restaurants were packed. You couldn’t get reservations.I think that something like “Clyde’s” in any other climate would have been a hit, and it would have continued to run. We always had a limited run, and we ran through that period of time. But I think that any other time, we could have kept going. It just kind of breaks my heart to make something that I feel is connecting with audiences in a moment in which audiences feel reluctant to come to theater. But for us, I think one of the real positive notes is that we were able to simulcast.Nottage strolls with Kate Whoriskey, right, the director of “Clyde’s.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTell me about that.We became sort of the beta test for Broadway. Like, can this concept work? Can you do live theater that’s projected into people’s living rooms and people actually tune in and have an experience? And what we discovered is, yes. So many people who were either fearful to come to the theater, or had Covid and couldn’t come to the theater, bought tickets and had an experience that wasn’t live in the fact that their bodies were in the theater and they were exchanging energy with the actors, but it still had the kind of spontaneity, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. I think it’s going to be an interesting bonanza for theater.How different is your experience of this season from a normal season?Under normal circumstances, after shows you go out for drinks with people. There’s a real sense of community. You see people from other shows. You feel really very much part of a season. But here, every show is an island because of Covid. People do the show and they go home.Where did you get your work ethic?It’s fear. It’s fear that it may all go away. There was a moment in my life in which my father had an accident which didn’t permit him to work, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, suddenly had to support the entire family. And I saw how hard she worked and I thought, Oh my God, that could happen to me. You know, that any moment your circumstances can change. And you find yourself in dire straits. And I thought, OK, I’m just not going to let that happen.How old were you then?I was maybe 11 or 12.By now, the fear can’t be about being in dire straits. Can it really?Yeah, I mean, it’s not rational. [laughs] It just is a fact.But I’ve always worked. This is why I think I write about working people — that’s what I do.Nottage leaves a message on the wall at the Hayes Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSo now that you’ll be slacking with just two shows in previews —With just two shows, it’s like, whew! But teaching begins again next week. And they want us to teach remotely, and I have a class that’s not a remote class. It really is about being immersed in experiences. I’m like, what am I going to do?I have to figure it out, but I don’t have time to figure it out. I’m like, OK, tomorrow morning I will wake up and from 7 to 8:30, I’ll figure it out. More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Witness,’ Seeking a Haven for Jewish Refugees

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      The experience of Jews who fled Germany in 1939 aboard the St. Louis luxury liner is the subject of a new production from the Arlekin Players Theater.Aboard the luxury liner St. Louis, more than 900 passengers waited helplessly at sea. In May 1939, on the eve of World War II, they were Jewish refugees fleeing post-Kristallnacht Germany. Despite having papers meant to let them into Cuba, they were barred from disembarking once they got there.Hoping for a haven, the boat lingered for a while off the Florida coast, while news stories chronicled the passengers’ increasing desperation. Yet the United States also refused the refugees. As the St. Louis carried them back to Hamburg in early June, The New York Times called it “the saddest ship afloat.”That ship is the setting for “Witness,” a livestreaming documentary theater piece from Arlekin Players Theater in Needham, Mass., where the cast performs in front of green screens. Conceived and directed by Igor Golyak, Arlekin’s artistic director, the production bears witness to stories from wave after wave of Jewish refugees over many decades, and to what it sees as the eternal outsider experience of Jews in the United States.But before its ghostly shipboard vaudeville begins, we watch the Emcee (Gene Ravvin) take a smoke break, venting about the wisdom of presenting this piece in this moment.“The Holocaust, the St. Louis,” he says. “I don’t know if this is my thing. I don’t know if we need to talk about it now. I don’t.”When I watched “Witness” on my laptop Friday night, that bit of fretful grousing had a very different feel than it surely would the next day, when a man in Texas took four hostages during a service at a synagogue, and a nearly 11-hour standoff with state and federal law enforcement officers ensued. Suddenly, once again, the urgency of discussing antisemitism was palpable, and not just to people who feel the menace of that bigotry all the time.Written by Nana Grinstein, with Blair Cadden and Golyak, “Witness” is part variety show, pitting passengers against one another for an unnamed “fabulous prize.” The contest results are decided by the audience members, who vote on their screens after each act. The winner, the night I saw it, was the remarkably graceful “Skating on Glass,” set to voice-over memories of Kristallnacht.With scenography and costumes by Anna Fedorova, virtual design by Daniel Cormino and excellent sound by Viktor Semenov, “Witness” often has the digitally buffed surreality of a video game, which might sound like an insult but is not. Like a lot of online theater, it also has a slight trying-too-hard feel.Before the show starts, audience members are urged repeatedly to allow their computer’s camera to show them onscreen with the rest of the crowd during the performance. (There is no hint that acquiescing is optional, but it is.) When the wall of viewers periodically appeared, though, it often looked like people were reading something on their screens — which they might have been, since “Witness” offers chances to click for more historical context. As a visual, it didn’t exactly foster a feeling of connection.“Witness” is an experimental production, with different energy to each of its three acts, the second of which is all audio, like a radio play. Where this multilayered show loses dramatic potency is in the last act, when contemporary characters take over. They talk about antisemitism in the 21st-century United States, but without depth, and only barely connect it to the hatred against other marginalized groups.Even so, this piece does indeed bear witness to what happens when danger threatens Jews for being Jewish, and the culture shrugs.“It was supposed to be different in America,” the Emcee says. “And now look.”WitnessLivestreaming through Jan. 23; zerogravity.art. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More