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      ‘The Collision’ and ‘The Martyrdom’ Review: A Nun Ahead of Her Time

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      A classic text by the 10th-century Saxon nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim inspires two new plays being performed as a double bill at 59E59 Theaters.Three nuns hard at work at their convent look up to discover that the sky is falling …It could be the beginning of a joke, or a New Yorker cartoon. But it’s the opening scene in “The Collision and What Came After, or, Gunch!,” a play being presented alongside “The Martyrdom” by Two Headed Rep at 59E59 Theaters. Despite the comic potential of this setup, these works, inspired by the writing of the 10th-century nun and playwright Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, are neither as funny nor — at two hours and 40 minutes — as snappy as they could be.In “The Collision,” written by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, the patient Sister Gudrun (Emma Ramos) and the critical Sister Anise (Lizzie Fox) try to teach the young Sister Gunch (Layla Khoshnoudi) the responsibilities of the ideal nun: doing chores, praying, hand-copying Bibles — you know, the usual. But Gunch is foul-mouthed, blunt and curious about more than just God. “All of nature is vile and fecund and touching itself,” she says with lustful wonder, recounting a time she watched one goat mount another.When a giant meteorite lands near the convent, the abbess goes the way of the Wicked Witch of the East and Gunch suffers a fatal attack that she miraculously survives. The event forces the characters to reconsider the lessons in faith they’ve been taught — which messages are prophetic and which ones heretical, and why.The script has a few delicately written passages, for example, when Gudrun describes “gray-black clouds” that gather “as if trying to bind the sky like a wound.” The performers also have some standout moments: Halima Henderson, who plays a couple of secondary characters, has a priceless bit as a messenger with no grasp of social cues. And Khoshnoudi, with her dreamy glances and devilish grin, could have her own play, her own TV series, in fact, as the delightfully peculiar Gunch.As for the story itself, it’s zany, though to what end isn’t always clear; Lily Riopelle’s direction, which incorporates physical humor and playful props (a severed hand, a dead pigeon and a chicken called “little queen,” designed by Liz Oakley), often reads as amateurish. Though the play gets a lot of mileage from its narrative twists and turns, which pull the story into the realms of science fiction and absurdism, the script can’t successfully pull off its final maneuver, an explicit criticism of institutional religion and a grand statement on storytelling.“A story is a snake, and we are mice inside it, swallowed whole but still alive,” a character says at one point. That sentiment can be applied to this play, which swallows its characters — and some narrative logic — in its bizarre contortions.If “The Collision” is more enamored with its quirks than with cohesive storytelling, then “The Martyrdom” is its antipode, a play so procedural that it leaves little space for strangeness and wonder.After a brief intermission, the four actresses return for this second play, the full title of which is so long that reading it requires its own intermission: “The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told Throughout the Last Millennium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius.”Layla Khoshnoudi, left, and Halima Henderson in “The Martyrdom.”Ashley Garrett“The Martyrdom,” directed by Molly Clifford, is based on Hrotsvitha’s play “Dulcitius,” about three pious sisters who try to remain chaste despite the intentions of lascivious politicians. “Dulcitius” appears throughout the course of “The Martyrdom,” though in different pieces and different forms.With translation by Lizzie Fox and new text by Amanda Keating, “The Martyrdom” is a history lesson, celebrating the legacy of Hrotsvitha, who is considered to be the first female playwright to have her work recorded, by providing a timeline of major incarnations of “Dulcitius.”So the show begins in a monastery during Hrotsvitha’s lifetime, where a council or monks reviews the playwright’s work. Then centuries later, Hungarian nuns write a modern, vernacular adaptation of “Dulcitius.” Then there are the French artists who use marionettes to tell the tale of the three sisters. Then the British suffragist in the 1800s, and an American nun at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. It’s a clever move for such dated material: In each scene the characters act out parts of the play, each version reflecting the changing context of the material over time. After each section, a fourth-wall-breaking educational moment occurs when the actresses provide more details about Hrotsvitha’s text and its various productions.The result, unfortunately, is colorless and, like “The Collision,” unnecessarily long. “The Martyrdom” tries to stretch out scenes of Hrotsvitha’s play across history to suit its structure, despite the fact that the play’s plot is already pretty anemic, so there’s not enough action to go around.It doesn’t help that Cate McCrea’s set design for the tiny theater, which seats about 50, is rather bland: a plain back wall, a long rectangular bar that bisects the length of the stage, serving as a table or desk or bench as needed.Somewhere between “The Collision” and “The Martyrdom” is a holy middle ground of oddity and structure, chaos and order, that would make even a Saxon nun from the 10th century say, “Amen.”The Collision / The MartyrdomThrough Feb. 5 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. 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      Chita Rivera’s Book Will Introduce Fans to the Real Her

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      Over the last seven decades, the Broadway star Chita Rivera has taken on and defined some of American musical theater’s most iconic roles: Anita in “West Side Story,” Rose in “Bye Bye Birdie,” Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”In her forthcoming memoir, Rivera introduces her fans and readers to a character she has rarely played in public: her alter ego of sorts, Dolores. And Dolores, which is Rivera’s given name, can be a little prickly, according to Rivera’s co-author, the journalist Patrick Pacheco.When they first sat down to discuss the memoir in the summer of 2020, Pacheco asked Rivera what people didn’t know about her.“She said, ‘Well, I’m not nearly as nice as people think I am,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Great, let’s introduce the public to her.’”In her still-untitled book, which is due out in 2023 from HarperOne and will be released simultaneously in English and Spanish, Rivera describes her unlikely path to stardom. Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in 1933, Rivera grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother worked as a government clerk and her father was a clarinet and saxophone player for the U.S. Navy Band.She was so rambunctious and theatrical at home that her mother enrolled her in ballet school. She won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and went on to land roles in musicals like “Call Me Madam,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Can-Can” and “West Side Story,” where she delivered a breakout performance as Anita in the musical’s original production. Over the decades, she has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards and has won twice, and received a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2009, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Early in her career, Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, worked to defy the stereotypes that were imposed on her in a largely white creative industry.“She was always very empowered from the beginning to play anything she felt she was capable of playing,” Pacheco said.Some of the theater world’s most influential composers and choreographers were drawn to Rivera’s magnetism and perfectionism. In her memoir, she describes working with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Bob Fosse, Hal Prince and Fred Ebb, and her experiences with stars and castmates like Elaine Stritch, Dick Van Dyke, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr.Rivera, who turned 89 this month, has done career retrospectives before, including “The Dancer’s Life,” a musical celebrating her career. But while friends and colleagues had nudged her over the years to write a memoir, she never felt compelled to until recently.“I’ve never been one to look back,” Rivera said in a statement released by her publisher. “I hope my words and thoughts about my life and career resonate and readers just might discover some things about me they never knew.”Though she’s had a lasting influence on theater as a performer, Rivera is not a writer, and Pacheco was a natural collaborator — he first met her in the 1970s and had already interviewed her extensively in 2005 when he was brought on as a researcher for “A Dancer’s Life.”He and Rivera would meet or talk on the phone once or twice a week as they were working on the book, and he urged Rivera to open up about her private life and to be candid about her not-so-nice side, Pacheco said. “Let’s put them in the room with Chita,” he remembered telling her, “but let’s also put them in the room with Dolores.” More

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      Citing Pandemic, This Year’s Obie Awards Will Include Streaming Theater

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      The Obie Awards, an annual ceremony honoring theater work performed Off and Off Off Broadway, this year for the first time will consider digital, audio and other virtual productions.The awards administrators decided to expand their scope in recognition of the adaptations made by many theater companies during the coronavirus pandemic, which prevented most New York theaters from staging in-person performances for at least a year, and in many cases considerably longer. Numerous theaters pivoted to streaming, and some experimented with audio.“We wanted to make sure that the work that did happen was eligible,” said Heather Hitchens, the president and chief executive of the American Theater Wing, which presents the awards. “The Obies respond to the season, and to the evolving nature and rhythms of theater.”This year’s Obie Awards are expected to take place in November, which would be 28 months after the last ceremony, reflecting the extraordinarily disruptive role the pandemic has played in theatermaking. The ceremony will consider productions presented by Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway theaters between July 1, 2020 and Aug. 31, 2022.The exact date for the ceremony has not been chosen, but Hitchens said she expects it to be in-person (the last one was streamed) and she expects it to have a host (or hosts).This year’s Obie Awards will be the first presented solely by the Wing, which also founded and copresents the Tony Awards. The Obies were created by The Village Voice and first presented in 1956; in 2014, as The Voice struggled, it entered a partnership with the Wing to preserve the ceremony, and now The Voice has granted the Obies trademark to the Wing, Hitchens said.The Obies, always a mixture of prestige and quirkiness, have long been distinguished by their lack of defined categories — each year, the judges decide what works to recognize, and for what reason. This year’s awards will be chaired by David Mendizábal, who is one of the leaders of the Movement Theater Company, and Melissa Rose Bernardo, a freelance theater critic. The judges will include David Anzuelo, an actor and fight choreographer; Becca Blackwell, an actor and writer; Wilson Chin, a set designer; Haruna Lee, a playwright; Soraya Nadia McDonald, the culture critic for The Undefeated; Lisa Peterson, a director and writer; Heather Alicia Simms, an actor; and Kaye Voyce, a costume designer. More

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      Los Angeles Is Changing. Can a Flagship Theater Keep Up?

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      LOS ANGELES — For 55 years, the Center Theater Group has showcased theater in a city that has always been known for the movies. Its three stages have championed important new works — “Angels in America,” “Zoot Suit” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” to name three of its most acclaimed offerings — while importing big-ticket crowd pleasers from Broadway (coming this spring: “The Lehman Trilogy”).But this Los Angeles cultural institution is at a crossroads as it goes through its first leadership change in 17 years, and confronts questions about its mission, programming and appeal in a changing city, all amid a debilitating pandemic.Michael Ritchie, the organization’s artistic director, announced last summer that he would retire nearly 18 months before his contract ended in June 2023; he stepped down at the end of the December, citing the need for the organization to move in a new direction in response to social changes and debate about the theater’s future. The organization, which is a nonprofit, is using the transition to consider how to adjust to what is sure to be a very different post-Covid era — a sweeping discussion that theater administrators said would involve some 300 people, including its board of directors, staff, actors, director and contributors.“At the age of 50, you start to think about the next chapter,” said Meghan Pressman, the managing director of the Center Theater Group. “There’s so much happening now. Coming out of a pandemic. Coming out of a period of a racial crisis. Years of inequity.”“We are no longer your mother’s C.T.G. anymore,” she said.The obstacles are considerable.The Ahmanson Theater, in downtown Los Angeles, had to cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” in December.Ryan MillerLike theaters everywhere, Center Theater Group — the Ahmanson Theater and the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center downtown, and the Kirk Douglas Theater 10 miles to the west in Culver City — is grappling with empty seats, declining revenues and the coronavirus. The Ahmanson cut short a run of “A Christmas Carol” with Bradley Whitford in December, canceling 22 performances after positive coronavirus tests in the cast and crew at the height of what in a normal year would have been a holiday rush.The cancellation cost the Center Theater Group $1.5 million in lost revenues, including ticket returns. That came after the organization was forced to make millions of dollars in spending cuts over the course of the pandemic, cutting its staff to 140 this season from 185 and reducing its annual budget to $47 million for this fiscal year, $10 million less than the budget for the fiscal year before the pandemic.And the theater group is struggling to adjust to sweeping reassessments of tradition that have emerged from social unrest across the country over the past two years. It was reminded of this new terrain by the uproar that greeted the announcement of a 2021-22 season for the Taper and the Douglas, 10 plays that included just one by a woman and one by a transgender playwright. Jeremy O. Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” which was on the schedule, announced that he would withdraw his play from the season before agreeing to go forward only after the Taper pledged to program only “women-identifying or nonbinary playwrights” next season.The Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture since the Mark Taper Forum, above, and the Ahmanson opened in 1967 at the Los Angeles Music Center.Tom BonnerThe Center Theater Group has been a hugely influential force in Los Angeles culture for decades.It “is still the flagship theater company of L.A.,” said Stephen Sachs, the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theater, an influential small theater on the East Side of the city. “I think it’s at a moment of reckoning, like everything that is theater in Los Angeles. The C.T.G. is the bar that we compare ourselves to. They set a standard for L.A., not only for ourselves but for the country.”The Music Center, the sprawling midcentury arts complex on top of Bunker Hill, across from Frank Gehry’s billowing Walt Disney Concert Hall, is at the center of cultural, arts and society life in Los Angeles. The project was driven by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the cultural leader who was the wife and mother of publishers of the Los Angeles Times, and also houses the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was the site of the Academy Awards off and on from 1969 to 1999. “Before the Music Center, it was really a cultural wasteland,” Marylouise Oates, who was the society columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s, said, referring to the city.Theaters across the country are struggling to find the balance between pleasing and challenging their audience as they confront declining ticket sales and the threat of competition in the form of a screen in a living room. Theater here has also long existed in the shadow of Hollywood, to the annoyance of those involved in what is by any measure a vibrant theater community.“I don’t see how anyone can say it’s not a theater town,” said Charles Dillingham, who was the managing director of the Center Theater Group from 1991 through 2011.The Kirk Douglas Theater, in a former movie palace in Culver City, opened in 2004.Craig SchwartzFor its first 40 years, the theater group’s personality — adventurous and daring more often than not — was forged by Gordon Davidson, who was recruited by Chandler to be the first artistic director at the Taper. He was of a generation of force-of-nature theater impresarios, like Joseph Papp in New York and Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis.“I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper. “I’ll never forget Gordon sitting down, taking out his buck slip and saying, ‘What do you need?’”The Taper opened with the “The Devils,” by the British dramatist John Whiting, about a Catholic priest in France accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun. The subject matter caused a rustle, but Chandler, who died in 1997, stood by Davidson.“She wasn’t always happy,” said Judi Davidson, who was married to Gordon Davidson, who died in 2016. “She said, ‘I’ll make a deal with you. You tell which plays I should come to and which plays I shouldn’t come to.’ ”The Taper staged “Zoot Suit,” by Luis Valdez, in 1978, a rare production of a work by a Latino writer, which went on to Broadway; as well as a full production of both parts of “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, in 1992, before it moved to Broadway. “I could not have created ‘Twilight’ anywhere else,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who wrote and acted in “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” at the Taper.Jay Thompson In recent years, the theater has come under criticism for too often catering to an older audience hungry for the comfort of familiar works. Still, under Ritchie, who declined a request for an interview, it presented the premieres of acclaimed works, including “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which had its world premiere at the Douglas before moving to the Taper.Harris, the writer of “Slave Play,” said the Center Theater Group had responded quickly when he objected to the overwhelmingly male lineup of writers. “When I raised my issues and pulled my play, they didn’t act defensively,” Harris said. “They acted. Other places would have let the play move on and figure out a way to blame me.”The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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      How Joel Coen Made ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’

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      When your whole filmmaking career has been one of unexpected twists and turns, how do you surprise yourself? Adapt a Shakespeare play.You make enough movies about people chasing after things — outlaws, money, a kidnapped baby — and eventually someone comes chasing after you. In Joel Coen’s case, his pursuer was William Shakespeare.As Coen put it recently, “Shakespeare is unavoidable.” He gave a resigned chuckle and added, “For better or worse.”In a filmmaking career of nearly 40 years, Coen has chronicled a spectrum of well-spoken criminals and enlightened dudes in stories inflected with varying amounts of brutality and absurdity. He has directed 18 features and written several others with his brother, Ethan.Having built a filmography characterized by unexpected twists and turns, Joel Coen has himself taken what may seem like a surprising pivot away from that body of work. His latest film, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” is a shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of the Shakespeare play, presented in black and white.The movie, released theatrically in December and on Apple TV+ earlier this month, stars Denzel Washington as the murderous nobleman of the title and Frances McDormand as his scheming spouse, Lady Macbeth. It has already received numerous postseason plaudits and is considered a strong contender for Academy Award nominations; reviewing the film for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called it a “crackling, dagger-sharp screen adaptation.”Coen is a dedicated theatergoer and an avid reader, though not one with any special knowledge of or affinity for Shakespeare. “I came to it as an amateur,” he said. “I’m still an amateur.”But look closer at “Macbeth,” and there are aspects of the play that make it fitting and perhaps inevitable subject matter for Coen. “It’s a murder story,” he said. “In a way, it’s even a horror story.”Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the film. Washington said Coen told him to avoid “stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.” Alison Rosa/Apple and A24This somber tale may have proved an ideal escape for the director, coming at an unfamiliar juncture when Ethan had decided to take a break from film. Just when Joel was seeking new approaches to his cinematic craft as a solo director, his inspiration emerged from a foundational text of English literature.“It was a deliberate choice to do something I had not done,” Coen said. “It was an opportunity to go out of the wheelhouse that I’d been in before. It’s something that demanded I do that.”Coen, 67, was speaking earlier this month in a video interview from California. His demeanor suggested a mixture of Harold Ramis and Larry David; he could be avuncular and witty, but also defensive and averse to self-mythologizing.A kind of interplay between high and low, serious and preposterous, foul and fair would seem to be omnipresent in the Coen brothers’ filmography, which has won them four Oscars, but Joel is not necessarily inclined to consider the through lines in their work.He acknowledged that he and Ethan had made some quirky films over the years but said that “it was a mistake to think that any of it is planned.”He added, “There’s never been any real design or architecture to what we’ve done.”But even that absence of strategy was upended after their 2018 western anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” when Ethan decided to focus on other endeavors.Joel said that their partnership was flexible enough to accommodate this kind of disruption.“It’s not like when we first got together, we planned on working together for 40 years,” he said. “It just kind of happened that way. When we said, ‘Let’s do some other stuff separately for a little while,’ it’s not like there’s any plan for how long and what that would mean.”Joel said that making a movie without Ethan was like “having one eye put out” but added that there was “probably something healthy in taking a break.”At the very least, it gave Joel the space to contemplate alien terrain like “Macbeth.” This was a thought he’d been kicking around since at least 2016, when McDormand, his wife and frequent collaborator, asked him about directing a production of the play, in which she had starred for Berkeley Repertory Theater.Directing “Macbeth” for the stage did not appeal to Coen — “I don’t think I’d know what to do,” he said — but as a film, he saw its potential to allow him “to retreat from a lot of the ways I’d been working before.”“I wanted to go as far as I could away from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” he said. “I was trying to strip things away and reduce things to a theatrical essence, but still have it be cinema.”Coen and McDormand on the set. She is a producer on the film. The director explained, “I’ve always worked with members of the family.”Alison Rosa/Apple and A24On a visual level, that meant leaning into the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s play, avoiding depictions that would provide too much specificity about when or where things are taking place.“There is nothing certain about this movie, nothing sure about where it’s set,” said Bruno Delbonnel, the film’s cinematographer, who also worked with the Coens on “Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”“We were creating this world where you never know if you’re looking up or down,” Delbonnel said. “You never know if it’s night or day.”That also meant digging down to find an essential Coen-ness in “Macbeth.” Carter Burwell, who has composed the scores for almost all the Coens’ films since their 1984 debut, “Blood Simple,” said that their movies are consistently concerned with “the pathos of people desperately trying to impose meaning on this life, this meaningless universe.”The stories they have told — including “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — put the viewer “in the position of seeing everything that’s going on and the poor characters being helpless,” Burwell said. “The characters think they’re smart, they think they’re on top of things. And we can see that, in fact, they’re just flailing helplessly.”Unlike, say, the brothers’ 2010 take on “True Grit” — when he deliberately did not watch the 1969 version — Joel Coen immersed himself in influences on “Macbeth”: He considered cinematic adaptations by Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” which transposes the drama to feudal Japan. He looked at films from Carl Dreyer, Masaki Kobayashi and F.W. Murnau, and read up on Edward Gordon Craig, the early 20th-century stage designer.And when paring down “Macbeth” to under two hours, Coen didn’t hesitate to unsheathe his sword, citing Welles’s 1948 version as a gold standard of sorts. “That’s a wacky movie,” Coen said. “Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting and inventing with Shakespeare. It was kind of liberating. You look at that and go, well, all right, he’s doing it.”McDormand, who has won three Oscars for her performances and a fourth as a producer of “Nomadland,” joined “Macbeth” as its leading lady and as a producer, for self-evident reasons. “I’ve always worked with members of the family,” Coen said.He had few words about the exit of Scott Rudin, who had produced Coen films like “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” and who left this project and several others following a series of news media reports about his abusive behavior. “It’s a whole other discussion,” Coen said. “I don’t know what else to say.”Coen and Delbonnel spent several months designing the aesthetic of their “Macbeth” and planning the shots for when filming took place in Los Angeles. Delbonnel said that Coen brought him in much earlier and more extensively than in movies Joel had directed with Ethan.But in a fundamental way, Delbonnel said, Joel was no different than on previous films: “Sometimes he’ll ask you a question and say, ‘What do you think if we do that?’” Delbonnel said. “But then there’s a moment where he decides, OK, that’s what we’re going to do. And he knows exactly where it’s going.”Coen consulting with the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel on a scene involving Kathryn Hunter. Nothing is certain in the film, not even where it’s set, Delbonnel said.Alison Rosa/Apple and A24Not that there was much hesitation in casting Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, as the title character. Washington said he was just as eager for the role, as he’d never worked with either Coen but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous” films.“You’ll laugh or you’ll see somebody get their head blown off, possibly at the same time,” Washington said. “‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ is one of my favorite movies. I don’t even know why. It’s just so weird.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      At the Exponential Festival, Case Studies in Category Busting

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      Two years into the pandemic, this festival, which has gone virtual for now, abjures traditional theatricality and performance.You know a show was hatched during the pandemic when it incorporates QR codes.At the start of Christina Tang’s streaming “Traffic,” part of this year’s Exponential Festival, that code took me from a YouTube page to one where I could pick a screen name and a number. A model of a car with my number was then placed among others on a board-game-like grid filmed from above. Participants could choose from a series of prompts (“pull forward,” “honk,” etc.) and disembodied hands would move the cars, or not, on the grid.At the same time, a series of messages in another window was going on and on about someone named Angela, who was dead, or not — or maybe a ghost. Since I was simultaneously trying to watch the cars and follow the comments in the chat box, I quickly lost track of the Angela side of things. (It’s best to experience “Traffic” with two screens; I spent the 45-minute running time toggling between my laptop and phone.)The overall effect was like a puckish re-enactment (with a soupçon of Battleship visuals) of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” in which a monstrous, paralyzing traffic jam devolves into violent chaos. Except that 55 years after its release, Godard’s movie remains more trenchant, formally and politically, than “Traffic” — though it ends on a suggestion of existential dread — or any of the other six shows I caught at Exponential.Unlike its higher-profile January siblings, the Under the Radar and Prototype festivals, which canceled their 2022 editions, the smaller, nimbler Exponential — which focuses on emerging experimental artists — managed to go ahead by pivoting to a free digital format. (It runs until Monday, and most of the programming will remain available on its YouTube channel for the foreseeable future.)“Traffic” was not the only project to borrow from gaming. In “Still Goes (The Game),” much of the screen is taken up by the explorations of two dogs, Spot and Lysol, who become humanoids and set off to wander in a digital world. The creators, Nola Latty and Thomas Wagner, play the game in a smaller window and comment on the proceedings. “Still Goes” evades deeper issues relating to the differences between species and unfurls like a lo-fi sandbox adventure.But it did leave me with questions: How is this theater, or even performance? Why do I feel like I could be watching Ryan Trecartin videos instead?From left, Arjun Dhawan, Nancy Nogood and Anna Dresdale in “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report.”Walter WlodarczykI mention Trecartin because throughout Exponential, I felt as if theater was trying to play catch-up with the art world. The performing arts have been undergoing an identity crisis during the last two years, and my lack of engagement with much of what I was watching this past week might have been because I had mismanaged my expectations.Even after two years of pandemic-related disruptions have forced us to start rethinking paradigms and reconsidering assumptions, it’s still hard to shake habits that were formed when a few Greeks started hanging out in amphitheaters. I had been expecting what Exponential participants might consider calcified (to them) ideas of performances, but the festival appears unconcerned with antiquated borders separating installations, video, live performance, theater, music, movement. Or at least this virtual edition accelerated Exponential’s evolution toward not caring about those borders.Fine, but if only there had been more wit, style, imagination.While one of the festival’s most anticipated selections, Leonie Bell with Local Grandma’s “We Live to Die: The Grieving Widows Club” does not open until Monday, the pieces I caught mostly fell short of their proclaimed ambitions. Many show descriptions nowadays, especially on the outer limits where Exponential dwells, tend to read like grant applications promising the excavation of Big Subjects. The reality usually turns out to be merely ho-hum — call it the “all bark and no bite” syndrome.We were informed, for example, that Joe Hendel’s “Artificial (Man) Intelligence” is about “a menagerie of cyborg males living in the uncanny valley, exposing their cut up, hybrid psychologies to the world in order to gain a sense of control over their cybernetically deterritorialized destinies.” What we got was a shapeless digital montage of anxieties, with many lines pulled from subreddits like r/MensRights and r/CircumcisionGrief. The original posters’ toxic brew of insecurity, resentment and hostility was confounding, but it’s unclear what the show was trying to tell us about it.Self-indulgence also hampered Braulio Cruz and John-Philip Faienza’s “Flow My Tears,” in which Cruz mused out loud for nearly an hour. Relief occasionally came in the form of electronic-music breaks. The more beat-oriented ones successfully evoked the pulsing atmosphere of a dank Berlin club — the kind of experience in which you can lose yourself, until a guy sidles up next to you to share his important thoughts. “Flow My Tears” went on to display some doom-scrolling and concluded by breezily taking Philip K. Dick’s name in vain.Justin Halle’s “Case Studies: A New Kinsey Report,” directed by Dmitri Barcomi, took a more playful approach under the glamorous guidance of the drag queen Nancy Nogood — the closest the festival came to an old-school theatrical creation. Like “Traffic,” “Case Studies” incorporates a QR code, but no technology could make up for a rambling script that lacked rigor (a problem that plagued almost every project). Still, it’s hard to be entirely let down by a show that features a dance to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Emotion.”In addition to “Traffic,” another work got close to fulfilling its ambition: River Donaghey’s inventive “RecursiveCast,” in which Tad and Tammy (Spencer Fox and the Exponential artistic director Theresa Buchheister) host a podcast dedicated to a science-fiction series titled “Recursive.” The show is structured like a series of podcast episodes, with the visuals duplicating a Spotify page. Donaghey nails the sci-fi lingo, with casual references to a dodecasphere, for instance, adopting as fans’ tendency to assign great importance to details.“RecursiveCast” shares with “Traffic” a structural descent into uncontrollable disarray, with the world falling apart despite our best attempts at finding some sort of order, whether by trying to escape from a commuting disaster or by scrutinizing triviality. If there’s a lesson to be drawn, it’s that technology may have allowed the Exponential Festival to happen against daunting odds, but hey, we’re all doomed! More

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      Martyrs, Converts and Pious Frauds: Religion Takes Center Stage

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      Three Paris productions — including Ivo van Hove’s take on “Tartuffe” at the Comédie-Française — explore questions of the divine.PARIS — When Molière first presented “Tartuffe,” in 1664, Louis XIV is said to have laughed his head off at the play’s satire of religious zealots. The zealots in question were less amused: “Tartuffe” was swiftly censored and only re-emerged five years later, in an expanded and softened version.The 1669 “Tartuffe,” in five acts, is the classic play everyone in France knows, about a pious fraud who weasels his way into a bourgeois family’s home and attempts to steal both wife and fortune. Yet this month, 400 years after the birth of Molière, the original — or a reconstruction, at least — returned to the stage in a sleek and moody production directed by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française.“Tartuffe” opened France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial, an event that is no small matter for the Comédie-Française: The house’s permanent ensemble was born in 1680 from the fusion of Molière’s own acting troupe and the players of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The Comédie-Française considers Molière its founding father, and ensemble members know their way around his wittiest lines like no one else.Van Hove at least gave them something new. The 1664 version of “Tartuffe” was recreated a few years ago by two researchers, Georges Forestier and Isabelle Grellet, using Molière’s own sources. To understand what the play might have been like in three acts, they went back to commedia dell’arte and other 17th-century stories, which the plot of “Tartuffe” partly mimics.The result is a genuinely intriguing alternative to a familiar narrative, but it will take further stagings to reveal its potential, because van Hove’s directing choices are idiosyncratic. His “Tartuffe” has the familiar look of many van Hove productions: dark and minimalistic, here with no wings on the sides of the stage and a metallic platform along its length for entrances and exits.The transitions are especially awkward, with asinine titles projected onto a screen (samples: “Is Madam right?”; “Love, or submission?”) and bombastic sound effects marking the beginning of new episodes. Most of the cast wear suits; at times, when they stiffly convene for family conversations, it feels as if Molière’s characters have landed in the middle of the HBO series “Succession.”From left, Claude Mathieu, Denis Podalydès, Loïc Corbery, Julien Frison and Dominique Blanc in “Tartuffe.”Jan VersweyveldIt’s a shame, because there is much of value in seeing some of the play’s characters through a new lens. Tartuffe, for instance, is more clearly a destitute figure than usual. Christophe Montenez — who was also a highlight in “The Damned,” another van Hove production for the Comédie-Française — is fascinatingly strange in the role, at once lonely and creepy.Yet the actors wrestle with Molière’s text, in part because of van Hove’s deadly serious approach. Throughout the performance I attended, “Tartuffe,” which was written as a comedy, elicited little laughter from the audience; when it came, it felt like an automatic reaction to familiar lines, rather than a reflection of what was happening onstage.Van Hove also sees a love story where there isn’t one. In his production, Tartuffe doesn’t just try to deceive Orgon, the man of the house, and seduce Elmire, his wife; Elmire actually falls for Tartuffe, an absurd development since she is the one to uncover his hypocrisy at the end of the play. This forces Marina Hands, as Elmire, into an acrobatic performance in which she by turns refuses Tartuffe, gives in, and silently apologizes for betraying him. Tartuffe verbally abuses Elmire on two occasions (to the point that she cowers in a corner) before she snuggles up to him. Is it Stockholm syndrome? In any case, this diminishes what is typically a powerful, and very funny, female character.At least this “Tartuffe” is a reminder of just how mordant and modern Molière’s take on religious piety was. As the church’s anger over the play showed, this was a controversial position in the 17th century. On the other hand, Racine and Corneille, who make up French theater’s trinity of classic playwrights with Molière, both wrote religious plays dramatizing their faith in line with church dogma.Those plays are rarely seen today, but “Polyeucte,” a 1641 work by Corneille inspired by the life of a Christian martyr, is back onstage at the Espace Bernanos, a Roman Catholic cultural center. It depicts the religious conversion of Polyeucte, a nobleman, and the initial despair of his wife, Pauline, and his father-in-law, whom the Roman Empire has tasked with persecuting Christians. Directed by a veteran actress, Rafaële Minnaert, the production, a straightforward delivery of Corneille’s text in Roman-inspired costumes, contrasts sharply with “Tartuffe.”Aloysia Delahaut, left, and Romain Duquaire in “Polyeucte,” directed by Rafaële Minnaert.Matthieu Maxime ColinWhile the cast is often overemphatic, Aloysia Delahaut carries the day as a dignified Pauline. For nearly the entire play, Corneille’s rhymed alexandrines are skillful enough to make you think “Polyeucte” warrants more performances. Then, at the end, both Pauline and her father abruptly convert to Christianity, their strong stance against it forgotten. This makes “Polyeucte” feel preachy — a cardinal sin by contemporary standards — which helps explain why it, and other religious works, are so little performed.Still, contemporary theatermakers are finding ways to weave religion into topical dramas. The playwright and director Hakim Djaziri tackles the subject especially openly as a way of understanding major political debates in France. After “Unbalanced,” a play about his own youthful religious radicalization in an underprivileged Paris suburb, he has turned to the real-life story of a white woman who converts to Islam in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” currently at La Scène Libre theater.In a series of smartly constructed vignettes, we see Audrey grow up with an alcoholic mother and a violent stepfather, seeking meaning in the religion of a friend whose happy family she admires. Yet soon enough, she is roped into a violent take on Islamism by characters she meets online. She ends up in Syria, as the wife of a Frenchman who has vowed to fight for the Islamic State.Karina Testa, left, and Arthur Gomez in “Audrey, the Diary of a Convert,” written and directed by Hakim Djaziri.JMD ProductionIt is a lot to get through in 90 minutes, and the Syrian scenes especially feel overly expository, but Djaziri delivers a lot of emotion with the performances of his small yet brilliant cast. Karina Testa captures Audrey’s childlike need for love and meaning, while Arthur Gomez shines in a range of characters, from friends of Audrey’s to extremists.As they do every night, Djaziri and his actors stayed onstage after the performance I caught for a discussion with the audience. He spoke candidly of his own experience of radicalization, and said he felt compelled to respond, through theater, to Islamophobia in France’s public sphere. With “Audrey,” he does this subtly, by depicting the peaceful facets of Islam as well as the hypocrisy of its radicals. After all, the Tartuffes of today need their own plays, too.Tartuffe or the Hypocrite. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Comédie-Française, through April 24.Polyeucte. Directed by Rafaële Minnaert. Espace Bernanos, through Feb. 13.Audrey, the Diary of a Convert. Directed by Hakim Djaziri. La Scène Libre, through March 26. More

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      Review: In ‘Skeleton Crew,’ Making Quick Work of Hard Labor

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      Dominique Morisseau’s 2016 play, now on Broadway, is a swift, well-crafted look at factory workers trapped in an economic “dumpster fire.”The construction of the joke is perfect: A 60-ish woman in the grungy break room of a metal stamping factory lights a cigarette beneath a sign that says “No Smoking Faye” — the “Faye” part added by hand in big, angry letters.Naturally, as we soon learn, she is Faye.So begins “Skeleton Crew,” a play by Dominique Morisseau that in considering the ways we must sometimes break rules, breaks none itself. It’s so adroitly built and written — and, in the Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday, so beautifully staged and acted — that you hardly have time to decide, until its brisk two hours have passed, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. Even then, as in life, you may not know for sure.Start with Faye, who has worked at the factory for 29 years; she plans to hang on until, at year 30, her pension bumps up significantly. As played by Phylicia Rashad in a wonderfully ungrand performance, wearing flannel shirts, big jeans, work boots and a look of sour contentment, she would appear to have her life under firm control — and, as union rep and auntie of the break room, her co-workers’ lives as well. Dispensing wisdom and correcting their foolishness, she models candor and self-reliance, even when, as “Skeleton Crew” in good time reveals, the two come into conflict.You might call Faye’s specialty, like the play’s, clarity about moral ambiguity. And in Detroit in 2008, with the national economy a “dumpster fire” (as a TV news snippet tells us) and the auto industry in particular collapsing, there’s plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.For Reggie, the unit foreman and author of the no smoking sign, the pressure is almost too much to bear. Burdened with advance knowledge that the factory will shut down within the year, it falls to him to keep efficiency high as workers are let go. But despite his tie and white collar, his is a blue-collar soul, and the terrific Brandon J. Dirden shows just how close the contradictory pull of job and community comes to strangling him as he tries to protect the skeleton crew that remains.Boone and Adams in Dominique Morisseau’s play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAside from Faye, that crew includes Shanita (Chanté Adams) and Dez (Joshua Boone), both under 30 and thus with more (or is it less?) to lose than Faye. Theirs is a classic “B plot,” but the comic and romantic contrast their story provides is more complex than its bald structural purpose suggests.Yes, Dez has a longtime crush on Shanita, who is pregnant by a different man. Sweetly, he walks her to her car every day; tartly, she even lets him. But both have existential worries that interlock with and deepen the play’s larger issues. How can Shanita raise a child alone if the bedrock of her self-confidence — her job — crumbles beneath her? How will Dez survive in a world that sees his labor no less than his existence as expendable? (Though all four characters are Black, racism is more of a given than a theme.)These questions do not seem likely to be answered satisfactorily when, with perfect timing, a gun comes into the picture.In truth, some of the plot devices, the neat parallels and red herrings, are, like Faye, a bit creaky with use. But that doesn’t stop them from working; indeed, it’s a pleasure to surrender to classic craftsmanship. Though you can certainly sense Morisseau’s debt to August Wilson in her dramaturgy — “Skeleton Crew” is part of a trilogy of works set in Detroit, as Wilson had his Pittsburgh Cycle — you also sense the brute efficiency of problem plays by Ibsen and the best television procedurals.Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, improving in many ways on the one he directed for the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016, makes the most of the larger space and the excellent new cast. Michael Carnahan’s set, expanding in grunginess on his earlier version, turns grime into a kind of pulp poetry, from the peeling linoleum to the succulents striving to survive in a barely translucent window. The costumes, by Emilio Sosa, provide both psychology and sociology even in a limited range of sartorial gestures: a “Juicy” sweatshirt for Shanita, a fleece sweater-vest for Reggie.I was less convinced, as was also the case downtown, by the interludes of robotlike popping and waving (choreographed and performed by Adesola Osakalumi) that, along with Nicholas Hussong’s projections, suggest the harsh and repetitive labor taking place beyond the break room. Instead of enhancing our understanding of the characters, these dance moments, however astonishing, seem unrelated and unspecific, detracting from the play’s insistence on valuing workers, not just work.Dirden and Rashad use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt its considerable best, “Skeleton Crew” practices that preachment; its characters are not just building blocks in a moral tale but a pleasure for actors to perform and thus for audiences to experience. Especially in the scenes between Faye and Reggie, when Rashad and Dirden get to use every tool their years onstage have put at their disposal, you can’t look away from the many things they’re doing at once. Collegiality, scorn, fear, affection — and a shared history saved for a late reveal — all come into it. What comes out of it is the richness of great performance.If the play itself is sometimes over-rich, it is not underfed. Real things are at stake for characters who expect a respectable reward for labor and loyalty. That their expectations are so rudely disappointed makes it harder to do the right thing in a world that doesn’t, and tragedy could easily ensue.Perhaps what ultimately tips “Skeleton Crew” in the other direction is the way it abjures cynicism in favor of connection. Though Faye at one point says “I don’t abide by no rules but necessity,” it turns out — in a perfectly turned final surprise — that necessity is sometimes a synonym for love.Skeleton CrewThrough Feb. 20 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More