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      In a Double Bill, the Avant-Garde Meets a Very Good Girl

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      Excellent performances, including one by a well-behaved dog, warm up two experimental plays upstate.CHATHAM, N.Y. — There is nothing less avant-garde than a dog. Put one onstage and the artiest notions immediately dissolve into Instagram moments.Or at least that was my experience with a play called “The Art of Theater,” running through Sunday on a double bill with one called “With My Own Hands” at PS21 in this Hudson Valley town. “The Art of Theater” stars Jim Fletcher — a stalwart of the New York avant-garde scene — and Delia, a local newcomer best known (according to her owners) as “a smart if goofy black Labbish sort of beast.”You don’t have to be W.C. Fields to know who wipes the floor with whom.Even without canine competition, the avant-garde has been having a hard time of late. By “of late” I mean both the last several decades and the last two years. The political, aesthetic and social disruptions that have often bred theatrical experimentalism can just as easily suppress it; take a look at the plight of the Belarus Free Theater, banned by the Lukashenko government in its home country, forced into exile and now seeking a new base in Europe.But the Covid pandemic has done even more than dictators to push avant-garde theater off the map. In New York, the three big January showcases of experimental work were once again radically curtailed: the Exponential Festival retreating to online production; Prototype and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival folding entirely.Well, almost entirely. “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” both by the French playwright, director and choreographer Pascal Rambert, survived the Under the Radar cancellation at this supercool avant-garde hothouse in Columbia County.And supercool it was on Saturday afternoon — just 4 degrees outside — when, despite free hot toddies and cocoa, an audience of about 25 sat not just masked but variously scarved, coated and hatted as the program began in PS21’s black box theater.“With My Own Hands,” which came first, is not exactly a warming experience. This 1993 specimen of the classic avant-garde — if that isn’t a paradox — consists of an intense, disturbing and mostly impenetrable 45-minute monologue delivered at breakneck speed by a character bent on suicide. At least that’s what I think was going on; the script, mimicking the disorderly and pressurized output of a mind in fatal distress, speeds right past pauses and punctation as it twists multiple points of view into a furious screed:“M. says to me you’re getting on everyone’s nerves you smother anyone’s slightest desire to listen stop bawling someday I won’t stand for it anymore and I’ll lock you up pants down in a dark room facing yourself facing myself I write to Hans facing myself here I am facing myself while the bombs come down around me I sunbathe here.”Ismaïl ibn Conner in “With My Own Hands.”Steven Taylor As a technical matter, speech like that cannot be easy to perform, but Ismaïl ibn Conner, under the playwright’s direction, shapes each clause, no matter how bewilderingly it butts up against others, into razor-edged shards of anguish. Grandiosity, paranoia and pathos flicker like pages in a flipbook, sometimes (in Nicholas Elliott’s suitably grim translation) coalescing into memorably awful images. “Tear all the memory wires out of your head,” the character begs himself, or perhaps the audience.But if the actor’s grasp on the character is astonishing, the character’s grasp on the audience — as is too often the case with the avant-garde — is weak. To make up for it, the playwright eventually brings out the gun you’ve been expecting all along.In a way, a gun onstage is not unlike a dog: It rips the fabric of theatrical artifice, replacing it with its own kind of drama. A gun’s drama, though, is usually dull, with only two possible outcomes: It gets used or it doesn’t. But as “With My Own Hands” transitioned (cleverly) into “The Art of Theater” — a 30-minute monologue from 2007, in which an actor played by Fletcher muses aloud to his dog about acting — it was the dog’s drama that took on living dimension.Not just because the script invests her with human intelligence. (“Theater is low,” the actor instructs. “Speak low. And if you bark — bark low.”) Rather, Delia, a 4-year-old rescue with a sweetheart face and very good manners, can’t help insisting on the canine kind of intelligence. Though she generally sits and listens as required, there is no suppressing her brilliant improvisational skills. Do I smell peanut butter? Let’s get some! Was that a noise in the audience? Let’s investigate! She is less the straight man in the actor’s tale than he is in hers.Fletcher, best known to New York playgoers as Jay Gatsby in the Elevator Repair Service production of “Gatz,” speaks beautifully and never barks. Still, I didn’t find the actual text of “The Art of Theater” — again translated by Elliott and directed by Rambert — very fascinating. The actor’s thoughts about his art, and the theater types he usually works with, are unsurprising except when occasionally off-putting.“I never liked old women,” he says. “Old women are so boring.”But the contrast Rambert draws between this self-involved sourpuss and a good girl like Delia is a brilliant way of making you think about performance. Not just what it costs the performer — though it’s poignantly true, as he says, that “as an actor you have understood that you are a dog and that you will be abandoned.” In that sense, all people are at the mercy of masters; even the character in “With My Own Hands” is “a man trapped in a dog’s body.”A dog is not trapped in a dog’s body, though. She is her body. She doesn’t have actorly affectations or a good side to turn to the light. She is simply happy to make her people happy; in a way, that’s her job, and Delia is very good at it. When, late in the play, Fletcher picks her up in his arms for a slow dance, she licks his face as they sway.On a very cold day in a rather cold genre, that was finally warmth enough. More

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      Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent

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      Curtains are rising again after the Omicron surge caused widespread cancellations, but attendance has fallen steeply. Nine shows are closing, at least temporarily.The reopening of Broadway last summer, following the longest shutdown in history, provided a jolt of energy to a city ready for a rebound: Bruce Springsteen and block parties, eager audiences and enthusiastic actors.But the Omicron variant that has barreled into the city, sending coronavirus case counts soaring, is now battering Broadway, leaving the industry facing an unexpected and enormous setback on its road back from the pandemic.In December, so many theater workers tested positive for the coronavirus that, on some nights, half of all shows were canceled — in a few troublesome instances after audiences were already in their seats.Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.Broadway shows have been using social media to remind potential ticket-buyers that performances are still happening. The revival of “Company” is among many using the hashtag #BroadwayIsOpen.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut there’s a new problem: Audiences are vanishing.During the week that ended Jan. 9, just 62 percent of seats were occupied. That’s the lowest attendance has been since a week in 2003 when musicians went on strike, and it’s a precipitous drop from the January before the pandemic, when 94 percent of seats were filled during the first week after the holidays.The casualty list is growing. Over the last month, nine shows have decided to close their doors, at least temporarily. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a huge hit before the pandemic, announced last week that it would close until June; on Sunday “Ain’t Too Proud,” a successful jukebox musical about the Temptations, closed for good.Box-office grosses are falling off a cliff. The all-important Christmas and New Year’s weeks, which producers count on each year to fatten their coffers in anticipation of the lean weeks that follow, generated just $40 million this season, down from $99 million before the pandemic. Requests for ticket refunds are now so high that on some days some shows have negative wraps, meaning they are giving back more money than they are taking in.“This is the worst I have ever experienced,” said Jack Viertel, a longtime executive at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway houses.Over the long run, industry leaders say, there is every reason to remain bullish about Broadway. Until the pandemic, the industry had been enjoying a sustained boom, fueled by a rebound in the popularity of musicals and by New York’s gargantuan growth as a tourist destination. And this downturn might not last long: There is some evidence that the Omicron surge may be peaking, at least in some parts of the country, including New York.The musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the Temptations, was a hit before the pandemic, but decided to close after coronavirus cases forced the show to cancel multiple performances over the holidays.  An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before it eases, the slump will cost investors tens of millions of dollars, and will push theater workers back into unemployment, as dwindling attendance forces productions without abundant reserves to close. And the distress is not just financial: Artists spend years developing shows before they get to Broadway, so a premature closing is a crushing blow.“It’s harrowing, and there will be a lot of damage done,” Mr. Viertel said. “Some shows will be put out of business permanently, and this will be career ending for some individuals.”Dominique Morisseau, the playwright who wrote the book for “Ain’t Too Proud,” and whose new play, “Skeleton Crew,” is now in previews following two virus-related delays, called this moment “extremely painful.” “My play is about plants shutting down during the auto industry collapse, and factory workers wondering every day, ‘Is it shutting down?’” she said. “Now that’s how we’re coming to work.”The Broadway League, which represents producers, has asked labor unions to consider pay cuts to help shows survive this rough patch. At one point, in a step previously reported by The Daily Beast, the League asked workers to accept half-pay when Covid-19 forced performance cancellations; there have also been discussions about offering lower pay for scaled-back performance calendars.“We’re doing everything we can to keep as many shows open as possible,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, citing safety protocols and marketing efforts as well as labor discussions.The talks stalled as unions sought more financial information.A revival of “The Music Man” canceled multiple performances just days after starting previews when both of its stars tested positive for the coronavirus, but it is now up and running again.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“It’s fair to say that all the unions recognize that shows remaining open is important — that represents jobs for actors and stage managers and everyone else who makes a living in the live theater,” said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity. But Ms. Shindle noted that Broadway shows had received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid last year, and that the industry is no longer even disclosing weekly box-office grosses for individual shows, as it did before the pandemic. “Pretty universally, the unions’ response has been that if you want us to make financial concessions, we need financial transparency,” she said.Meanwhile, shows are collapsing. There are always closings in January, a soft time of year for Broadway, but this season a crush of announcements started in December, usually one of the most lucrative months. The musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Diana,” “Flying Over Sunset,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” all decided to close earlier than planned after Omicron hit. And three other shows, including “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Girl From the North Country” as well as “Mockingbird,” said they would close for a few months and then attempt to reopen.“If it means that shows get to come back, hooray,” said Jenn Gambatese, the lead actress in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “The alternative was, run another week and buh-bye.”More and more theaters are now dark. By next Sunday, there will be only 19 shows running in the 41 Broadway theaters. Cast and crew members from shuttered productions are trying to figure out whether they even worked enough weeks to qualify for unemployment; those who do will get less assistance than they did earlier in the pandemic, because the maximum weekly benefit in New York is now $504, down from $1,104 when the federal government was offering a supplement.This is a good time for bargain hunters: Discounts are available for many shows at the TKTS booth, and NYC & Company’s annual Broadway Week, which offers 2-for-1 tickets to most shows, has been extended to 27 days. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe surviving shows seem to have figured out how to avert the cancellations that bedeviled the industry last month.One reason: So many workers have already tested positive, and are now back at work (and, notably, no performers are known to have been hospitalized during this latest round). More important: Productions have trained and hired additional replacement workers, including for crew members.Playbills are regularly stuffed with cast-change inserts. One night, Keenan Scott II, the playwright of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” kept his show afloat by going on to replace an actor who tested positive. “Come From Away” saved a performance by deploying eight swings, including alumni and a touring performer who had never worked on Broadway. At “Wicked,” a longtime understudy who had left Broadway to become a software engineer in Chicago returned and performed as Elphaba.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      Paul Carter Harrison, Whose Ideas Shaped Black Theater, Dies at 85

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      In his essays and plays, he provided a framework that linked playwrights like August Wilson to African rituals and mythologies.Paul Carter Harrison, a playwright and scholar who in books, essays and award-winning plays provided a theoretical structure for the Black performing arts, linking works by writers like August Wilson to a deeply rooted structure of African ritual and myth, died on Dec. 27 in Atlanta. He was 85.His daughter, Fonteyn Harrison, confirmed the death, at a retirement home, but said the cause had not been determined.In plays like “The Great MacDaddy” and books like “The Drama of the Nommo: Black Theatre in the African Continuum,” both in 1973, Mr. Harrison went beyond the social and political realism of many of his contemporaries, demonstrating how Black American culture is — and, he said, must be — rooted in African tradition, even as it mixed with white, Eurocentric traditions.“The Great MacDaddy,” for example, is on the surface a paraphrased retelling of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” with the hero setting off across the country to find his father’s secret moonshine recipe. But it is also, and more fundamentally, informed by West African myths about a leader being tested — by demons, by departed elders — to prove himself worthy.“He was always interested in what he called the deep structures of Black life,” Sandra Richards, an emerita professor of theater at Northwestern University, said in an interview. “And for him, those deep structures have to do with ritual and myth.”Though “The Great MacDaddy” won him an Obie Award, Mr. Harrison was equally well known, if not better known, for his theoretical work. Starting in the late 1960s, when he was a professor of theater at Howard University in Washington, he strove to give Black theater an intellectual construct akin to what already existed for Greek theater or Shakespeare.His career was, he said in a 2002 interview, “a continuous preoccupation with trying to retrieve out of this particular experience we call the American experience some traces of our Africanness in the work that we do.”He argued that those myths and rituals were then evoked through aspects of performance, like rhythm and body movement — whether onstage, in church or in everyday life.“He talked about Black performance traditions such as Carnival, which are rooted in rhythm, drums and movement,” said Omiyemi (Artisia) Green, a professor of theater and Africana studies at the College of William & Mary. “You see these kind of elements moving in the Black church as well. All of these things, that movement working together with the language working together with the drums, these things conjure the presence of spirit.”Melvin Van Peebles joined the cast onstage when the Classical Theater of Harlem staged his “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 2004. Mr. Harrison had helped conceive the show, which was first presented in Sacramento in 1970 and later seen on Broadway.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesMr. Harrison went on to identify and promote those writers and directors who he felt were already engaged in a similar project, among them Melvin Van Peebles, whose Tony-nominated musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” Mr. Harrison helped conceive, and especially August Wilson, a close friend and intellectual compatriot, whose work he believed came closest to aligning contemporary Black arts with its African roots.“More so that anyone else, Paul Carter Harrison was intimately familiar with what was in August Wilson’s toolbox,” Sandra L. Shannon, an emerita professor of English at Howard and the president of the August Wilson Society, said in an interview.Mr. Harrison wrote a series of anthologies highlighting the work of like-minded playwrights and scholars. And while never combative, he could be vocal in his criticism of Black playwrights and directors he felt were operating too close to the white idiom.“African American art runs the risk of losing its uniqueness and soulfulness if it fails to relate the past to the present,” he wrote in “Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum” (1974).The problem, he argued, was that the Black theater struggled within the confines of the larger, white-dominated culture industry, which tended to ignore authentic expressions of African cultural forms while pouring money on sanitized tellings of the African American experience.To make room, he supported Black theater groups like the New Federal Theater and the Negro Ensemble Company, and he mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard, and Talvin Wilks, a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.Mr. Harrison mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard University.Elijah Nouvelage/Invision, via Associated Press“He was essential in building those relationships and those connections, and was always trying to affirm an understanding of the lineage and the role that any generation could play inside of that,” Professor Wilks said. “He showed that we were all connected through these African diasporic traditions and connections, whether we understood that or not.”Paul Carter Harrison was born on March 1, 1936, in Manhattan. When he was 7, his father, Paul Randolph Harrison, died. His mother, Thelma Inez (Carter) Harrison, worked for the New York City government.He fell in love with the theater early, taking in plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. But while he admired those white playwrights, he said, they left him cold. More compelling for him were the rhythms of gospel music, storefront chatter and Black political rhetoric, through all of which ran what he called a “mythopoetic” thread unspooled over centuries.He enrolled in New York University, having already fallen in love with the jazz clubs around its Greenwich Village campus. But when he decided to pursue a career in psychology, he transferred to Indiana University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957.He returned to New York to get a doctorate in psychology at the New School for Social Research. He completed a master’s degree in 1962, but by then he had rediscovered his love of theater, and took a year off to write.He moved to Spain, then the Netherlands, where he fell in with a circle of writers and artists, including the actress Ria Vroemen, whom he married in 1963. They separated in 1968 and later divorced.Along with his daughter, he is survived by his second wife, Wanda Malone, and a grandson.Mr. Harrison was prolific, writing plays, essays and movie scripts, and in 1968 Howard invited him to join its theater department. He arrived for his interview just days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which set off unrest, including looting and burning, on the streets just outside the university’s gates.Inside them, he found a student body already putting the heady ideas of Black thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka into action. The Black Arts Movement was transforming wide swaths of literature and performance, and Mr. Harrison was eager to be a part.Inspired, he began writing essays that tried to give an intellectual framework to what he was seeing onstage. Already well versed in European traditions, he explored African myths and rituals, identified their vitality in art forms like jazz, and advocated for a new generation of artists to embed them within their own work.He also shook up the Howard theater scene. The department, he said in a 2002 interview, had mostly put on plays by white writers. He insisted on replacing classical works with plays by Black writers, including himself — a position that soon brought him in conflict with the department chair.Mr. Harrison quit in 1970 and planned to return to Europe. But he received an offer to teach at California State University, Sacramento, a job that would get him close to the vibrant Black arts scene in the Bay Area, and he accepted.He later taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Columbia College Chicago, where he remained until he retired in 2002.By then, Mr. Harrison had become something of an intellectual father figure for a generation of Black writers, directors and performers, who flocked to hear him speak. Unlike them, however, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to be known through his work.“I’ve never been an actor,” he said in a 1997 interview. “I’m principally a playwright. I like anonymity. I’m a good deal more reserved.” More

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      One Indelible Scene: When the Show Must Go on in ‘Drive My Car’

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      Through a staging of “Uncle Vanya,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi creates an intimacy for his characters that lets the artifice of cinema fall away.I’m going to talk about how the movie ends, but I’m not going to spoil it.The plot of “Drive My Car” doesn’t really work that way in any case. Adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (working with Takamasa Oe) from a novella by Haruki Murakami, the film is an adventure of gentle turns and an occasional swerve, with big surprises and small revelations scattered like scenery on a long road trip. You may be startled at how quickly it all goes by; the movie lasts almost three hours, but the time passes easily.A brief, tactful summary may be in order, a kind of Google Maps précis of the route. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director and actor, is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress, who is having an affair with a younger colleague. The couple had a young daughter who died some years before, and when Oto dies suddenly, she leaves Yusuke paralyzed with grief. Or so we surmise. He has a tendency to camouflage his feelings behind a facade of calm, punctuating his habitual reticence with an occasional flash of irritation or sardonic humor.He keeps working, taking up a residency at a Hiroshima arts center, where he will direct an experimental production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” I don’t think I can spoil that one either. The great works are like that, and one of the marvels of “Drive My Car” is the way it illuminates and refreshes a sturdy old classic, deriving some of its own power, novelty and mystery from Chekhov’s well-thumbed text.A little bit more about “Drive My Car,” though. In Hiroshima, Yusuke is assigned a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who shuttles him to rehearsals, errands and social engagements in his beloved red Saab. Like Yusuke, she has suffered a terrible loss, and their shared grief — or rather, their common state of raw, lonely, unacknowledged anguish — becomes the foundation of a delicate and improbable friendship.Unacknowledged anguish underlies the relationship between the characters played by Nishijima and Toko Miura.Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe story of that bond culminates in an intensely emotional scene in a snowy field — tears are shed, and Yusuke at last gives voice to his hitherto unarticulated pain — that would surely be an Oscar-night showstopper. (And if the academy has the good sense to nominate “Drive My Car” for best picture and Nishijima and Miura for acting, maybe it will be). But what I want to talk about is what happens next.Which is that the show goes on. As the “Uncle Vanya” opening night approaches, we have been privy to some backstage intrigue and immersed in Yusuke’s unusual approach to the play. The cast includes actors from various countries, all of them speaking Chekhov’s dialogue in their native languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Once an audience is present, supertitles are projected on a screen behind the stage. The English-language viewer, already reading subtitles, learns to listen for the tones and rhythms of the different languages, including the swish and tap of signing hands.That may sound forbiddingly cerebral, like the kind of high-concept aesthetic undertaking that tends to be more interesting in theory than in practice. It turns out to be the opposite. “Uncle Vanya,” a play about how hard it is to hold onto a sense of what matters in life, has rarely felt more vital or immediate, as if it had not been written in the 1890s but rather lived in front of our eyes.Yusuke, white powder sprinkled in his hair and a mustache pasted to his lip, is playing the title role, a 47-year-old man driven almost to madness — almost to murder — by unrequited yearning and existential disappointment. His appearance onstage is an unexpected development, the payoff of a subplot that I will leave to you to discover.“Uncle Vanya” being performed in a scene from “Drive My Car.” Sideshow and Janus FilmsYusuke has stayed away from acting since Oto’s death, and as “Uncle Vanya” unfolds, the shock to his system seems apparent. After Vanya’s Act III rant about his squandered prospects and bitter regrets — “If I’d lived normally, I might have been another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky!” — he steadies himself against a table in the wings, seeming to struggle for breath and composure.Perhaps Vanya’s plight reminds him of his own, or perhaps the demands of acting are too much to bear. The first Russian production of “Uncle Vanya” was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the progenitor of Method acting, in which the actor plumbs his own experience to locate the emotional truth of the character. Knowing what we know about Yusuke — having seen him weeping in the snow in the previous scene — it’s easy to grasp why he would be overcome by Vanya’s torment.But he’s also a professional, and the scene proceeds briskly through a montage of the performance. We see the onstage action from the side, then on a video monitor in the green room, observing the movement of props and bodies rather than absorbing the movement of Chekhov’s drama. The film seems to be settling into a muted denouement.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Clare Barron on ‘Shhhh’ and How Playwriting Is Her ‘Kink of Exhibitionism’

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      The playwright says her semi-autobiographical works, including her new play for Atlantic Theater Company, help to provide a measure of clarity about painful experiences.In the early months of the pandemic, the playwright Clare Barron published an essay titled “Not Writing,” which she accompanied with photographs of her cats, empty La Croix cans and unwashed laundry. “I haven’t written a play in four years,” she wrote. “I don’t know if I’ll write a play ever again. Who cares.”On Friday, the Atlantic Theater Company will premiere Barron’s new play, “Shhhh,” which she also directs and stars in. It’s not new new — Barron, 35, wrote it in 2016. But like all of her work — which includes “Baby Screams Miracle,” “Dirty Crusty,” “I’ll Never Love Again,” the Obie-winning “You Got Older” and the Pulitzer-nominated “Dance Nation” — it feels new: vibrating, visceral, almost worryingly alive.Part drama, part confession, part incantation, “Shhhh” tells the story of Shareen (Barron), a writer with a mysterious illness, and her sister, Sally (Constance Shulman), a postal worker who also makes A.S.M.R. videos and hosts meditation rituals. (The play refers to this character as Witchy Witch.) It returns to the themes and ideas that fascinate Barron: power, pleasure, desire, pain and all of the very weird things that a body can do. “It’s probably why I’m a theater artist,” Barron said, “to get to keep playing with the body in public.”In a conference room at the Atlantic’s offices in Chelsea, Barron — masked, fleeced, unguarded — discussed writing, not writing and creating such passionately personal work. “It’s not like I love it,” she said. “It makes me sick to my stomach. But then I kind of want to do it anyway.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to publish “Not Writing”?I’ve always had a little bit of impostor syndrome and shame around not being a daily writer. My romantic image of a writer was like, they get up at 5 a.m., they put the coffee on, they work for three hours and take a break for breakfast — that kind of thing. I just have never wanted to write every day. I want to go out and do things and see people and have experiences. I’ve always felt like, “Oh, am I a fake writer? Am I not a real writer?” I have to wait for plays to incubate inside of me. Sometimes that means four come out in two years. Sometimes that means one comes out in seven years.I started to find success as a playwright in my late 20s, and my mental health was just completely plummeting. I got diagnosed as bipolar right before the 2016 election. And I just haven’t been able to write sometimes because of mental health. It is really freaky when everyone’s expecting you to function at a really high level. And you’re like, “I can’t feed myself right now. I can’t shower myself right now.” I’m not going to always be able to be functional, and I’m not going to always be able to be efficient, and I’m not going to always be able to be productive, and I’m just going to have to make peace with that.Barron at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. She is also directing and starring in her new play.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesDo you think you would have been diagnosed earlier if you weren’t working in theater?Being a theater artist delayed my diagnosis 100 percent, because it is such a weird lifestyle. You’re allowed to be really emotional. When you’re crying for no reason, theater people are great! And the schedule’s really off and on. So it actually works really well with a manic burst.Did you worry about what treatment would do to your process? I understand that even while you haven’t written plays, you have kept writing, mostly pilots for television.Limiting your creative ability or even your creative desire is a really common fear for anyone looking to go on psychiatric medication. I had that fear. And as years went by and I didn’t write new plays, it mounted. I was doing writing as a job. But what I wasn’t able to do was inspiration, personal revelation. I got a little freaked out, like, “Oh, did I lose it?” But being able to be in a TV writers’ room and still produce episodes was really helpful.How did you take care of yourself during the pandemic?Everyone had a different trial. I was single and lived alone. So what I was struggling with was no in-person social support, and just being really isolated. It just was incredibly lonely. I took a ton of baths. I drank a ton. I’d started doing craft projects. Everything from painting rocks to felting. I felted these little stuffed animal creatures.You wrote “Shhhh” in 2016. I remember you describing it in 2019 as a #MeToo play.I never knew how to talk about this play. So I would try out different tag lines. It’s a little bit of a collage play; it’s a little bit of a spell. It is a play about sexual assault, but very, very buried and strange. It’s a play about rape culture, but slightly more casually.When did you know that you wanted to direct it? And that you wanted to play Shareen?You’re talking to me right before we go into tech [rehearsals]. So I’m like, “What am I doing? This was a huge mistake.” I’ve been interested in directing for a while, and I’ve experimented with it a bit. The acting thing came separate. I wrote the play because I was sexually assaulted, but I was not able to say it. It was therapy for me to write this play. And that character, Shareen, is so me, everything that happens to her. It’s not autobiographical, but it’s in my skin and in my bones. We did this reading at my agent’s office where I just read it, and it just felt right and easy. Now it feels hard and scary. But in that moment, it felt like the right choice.“Shhhh” reminded me of one of your earliest plays, “Dirty Crusty,” and its fascination with the body as a site of both pleasure and disgust.I can’t quite get over that. Theater is the body; it is the body in front of other bodies. I like the body to be vulnerable onstage, present onstage, seen onstage, animal onstage — those are all things that turn me on. Growing up in a Christian community and feeling like I wanted to save my virginity until I was married, it took me forever to undo that knot and not feel like I was going to go to hell if I had sex. There’s something, like, compulsive in my theater work where I just keep trying to undo that knot and do things onstage that I never thought I would do. And when I finally did have sex, I just remember my utter shock when I realized that, like, sex was flesh and not magic.Like most of your plays, “Shhhh” has some intimate scenes. Has the pandemic influenced that staging?There’s also spitting and eating and sharing food. All of that feels really different now. In our rehearsal process, we’ve been doing sex scenes in masks. In some ways, it’s nice. There’s an added layer of care and sensitivity. It might feel a little wild to be doing it in front of an audience.There’s magic in this play — incantation, ritual. Is magic something you believe in?I think I believe in magic. I believe in things more than I can understand. Divine coincidence, chanting. Yeah, I do believe in magic. I play with that, too, because theater does feel like a ritual. It’s a little bit like, what can we conjure?You tend to write from a personal place. Where does autobiography end and art take over?Every single play that I’ve ever written starts with something that happened in my life that was super painful. Maybe this is my kink of exhibitionism: I get off on writing about these things super baldly. When a play goes well, I think of it almost as a yeast starter. When you work with the materials, it just changes. But I’m kind of shameless about it. “I’ll Never Love Again” is literally my diary. It’s not even hidden, which is why I don’t get upset when people are like, “Oh, I think this is autobiographical.” Because that’s not a bad word to me. I feel like I’m exposing myself over and over again, hoping to have some kind of like clarity.Is there a fear that you’ll run out of material?I don’t think I’m afraid of that. I just think I might have to wait for it. Life is just so painful and throws you so many curveballs, there always is another thing to write about. It’ll be a blessed thing if I have nothing to write about. More

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      ‘Mockingbird,’ Once a Broadway Smash, to Pause Production Amid Omicron

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      “Girl From the North Country,” a musical using the songs of Bob Dylan, also closed, with hopes of reopening in the spring, as the surge in virus cases continues to upend the theater industry.The producers of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a hit play that had been packing in audiences before the pandemic, announced Wednesday that they would shut down the show until June, lay off the cast and crew, downsize the production and then reopen in a smaller theater.At the same time, “Girl From the North Country,” a heart-tugging musical that uses the songs of Bob Dylan to consider the Depression-era plight of a group of down-on-their-luck Midwesterners in the town where Dylan was born, said it would end its Broadway run on Jan. 23, and would try to reopen in another theater this spring.They became the seventh and eighth Broadway shows to announce temporary or permanent closing dates since early December, when the Omicron variant sent coronavirus cases soaring in New York. Their plans for short-term layoffs follow an example set by the musical “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which recently said it would close for nine weeks.The “Mockingbird” move is dramatic, especially for a show that had been playing to capacity crowds before the pandemic. The show had been contemplating for some time whether a move to a smaller theater could make it more sustainable for a long-term run, and the decision to do so now allows it to avoid a period when attendance on Broadway is soft, and expected to remain so, because of the Omicron surge.“Mockingbird” plans to end its current run on Sunday and resume performances June 1 in the theater where “Girl” has been playing. “Mockingbird,” one of the rare nonmusical productions to realistically anticipate a long stay on Broadway, has been playing since late 2018 at the Shubert Theater, which has 1,435 seats. It plans to move to the Belasco Theater, where “Girl” has been running, and which has about 1,000 seats.“Mockingbird,” of course, is adapted from the novel by Harper Lee, which is one of the most popular in American history — just last month, New York Times readers chose it as the best book of the last 125 years. The play, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, had been selling strongly and is set to expand; a North American tour and a London production are both scheduled to begin in March.“Mockingbird,” which has long since recouped its $7.5 million capitalization costs, originally had Scott Rudin as its lead producer, but he stepped back from active producing after accusations of bullying, and the production is now overseen on a day-to-day basis by Orin Wolf as executive producer and Barry Diller as the lead producer.The show originally starred Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch; he returned to lead the cast when the Broadway shutdown ended, and the character is now played by Greg Kinnear, who is expected to return when the show does.“Girl From the North Country” has had a tough run on Broadway: It opened on March 5, 2020, just a week before the coronavirus pandemic forced all theaters to close. And then it was deemed ineligible to compete for that season’s Tony Awards, because too few voters had managed to see it before the industry shut down (it is eligible to compete this season).Caitlin Houlahan, left, and Colton Ryan in 2020 in the musical “Girl From the North Country.” The show is closing, but hopes to reopen in the spring. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical, with a book by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, resumed performances Oct. 13, 2021, but, with its dark tone and small scale, never really found its footing, despite strong prepandemic reviews in outlets including The New York Times, in which critic Ben Brantley called the show “profoundly beautiful.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The Omicron surge. More

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      In London Theaters, the Show (Sometimes) Goes On

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      A surge in coronavirus infections toppled production after production, but two stage adaptations — of a movie and a blockbuster novel — recovered and endure.LONDON — The show goes on, or these days maybe not. The uptick of coronavirus infections in the last month has upended live performances as severely here as on Broadway. During the holiday season, productions toppled one after another, unable to continue because of outbreaks in their casts or crews. Barely had Rebecca Frecknall’s revelatory revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne, opened to rave reviews before it lost a spate of performances, a scenario repeated on and off the West End.Shutdowns affected big productions like “Moulin Rouge!,” the epic Tony-winning musical whose much-delayed London opening is now scheduled for Jan. 20. But they also occurred at fringe theaters like the Bush, where a two-hander called “Fair Play” closed within days of its premiere. (The run has since resumed.) Elsewhere, the organizers of the VAULT festival decided “with broken hearts,” they said in a statement, to cancel what would have been the 10th anniversary edition of that important showcase for new work.The Royal Court and the National Theater, two prominent state-funded playhouses, shut their doors altogether during the lucrative holiday period, and, over in the commercial sphere, Andrew Lloyd Webber closed his new musical, “Cinderella,” until February. “I am absolutely devastated,” the composer wrote on Twitter on Dec. 21.So you can imagine my delight this week to find the Donmar Warehouse back in business after being caught up in the closures, presenting the stage premiere of “Force Majeure,” adapted from the 2014 movie. (The play is scheduled to run through Feb. 5.) The audience at the 251-seat theater had to show proof of vaccination or a negative antigen test before entry, and we remained masked throughout — something that, until recently, has been an all too rare sight here. (At “Cinderella” back in August, I clocked scarcely a single mask.)I’m not sure that the playwright Tim Price’s adaptation, alas, is worth all the protocol. Those who know the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Cannes Grand Jury prize-winner will recall its portrait of a marriage in free fall, which is sometimes bitterly funny but, more often than not, disturbing and even eerie. Set during five days in the French Alps, “Force Majeure” tells of a husband and wife and their two young children whose ski holiday doesn’t quite go as planned.Caught up in a controlled avalanche that appears to be out of control, Tomas abandons his family in the moment of crisis — or so claims his wife, Ebba, who is shaken by his behavior. Before long, Tomas’s ready smile turns to howls of grief and an awareness that their relationship has been altered for keeps.The theatrical version’s director, Michael Longhurst, has turned the Donmar stage into a miniature ski slope, and the backdrop of Jon Bausor’s clever design shows off the snow-capped mountains essential to the action. What transfers less well is the darkening, ambiguous tone of a film that, in Price’s stage iteration, seems both more literal and more vulgar: Much is made of one character’s priapic tendencies. The couple’s stage children are sullen brats who would have been better off left at home, and the film’s extraordinary ending aboard a wayward bus has been discarded in favor of silly shenanigans in an overcrowded elevator.As the hapless couple, Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshal, both fine actors, slalom their way between affection and recrimination in what plays for the most part as a routine domestic comedy. Tomas’s breakdown — harrowing to watch onscreen — elicited laughs from some spectators the other night.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi and Tom Larkin as Tiger Head in “Life of Pi,” directed by Max Webster, at Wyndham’s Theater.Johan PerssonThe stagecraft is more of an occasion at another play whose performances were interrupted late last year: “Life of Pi,” at Wyndham’s Theater, improbably brings to theatrical life the 2001 novel by Yann Martel that inspired the acclaimed 2012 film for which the director Ang Lee won an Oscar.In that version, 3-D plunges the moviegoer directly into the turbulent waters of a tale told largely at sea, as the teenage Pi, a zookeeper’s son, finds himself cast adrift on a lifeboat with only animals for company — chief among them a Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker. Not to be outdone, the play brings together veterans from the world of video and puppetry who work alongside the director Max Webster and the designer Tim Hatley in conjuring an array of beasts before a rapt audience. The cast list includes six puppeteers for the tiger alone, overseen by the puppetry and movement director Finn Caldwell, who also designed the puppets with Nick Barnes.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4The latest Covid data in the U.S. More

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      Love, Trust and Heartbreak on Two Stages

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      The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More