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      in Television

      Review: ‘Designing Women,’ With 30 Years of Pent-up Angst to Air

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      Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s popular TV series comes to the stage with its sisterhood intact. But at times this revival feels a lot like a pretext to vent.The women of Sugarbaker and Associates are ready to unload, and it’s easy to see why — the last time we heard from them was almost 30 years ago, when the hit sitcom “Designing Women” went off the air. That’s a lot of time to keep things bottled up. But now Julia, Suzanne and Mary Jo are back (Charlene is mostly on break), and reigniting the flame of Southern-style sisterhood in a new play.You read that right: “new” and “play.”With a few exceptions like “The Addams Family” and “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical,” most TV-to-stage adaptations tend to be spoofs, more or less authorized — think “Bayside! The Musical!” and drag versions of “The Golden Girls.”The “Designing Women” premiere production at TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark. — a capture of which is now streaming — is the work of the TV series’s creator, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. And it is a freshly baked script, not a few old story lines stitched together. The Atlanta ladies are not flashing their signature big clothes and big hair because the play takes place in 2020. Our gals have barely aged, though, making the project less a sequel than a reboot. (Why should Batman and Spider-Man be the only ones who get to repeatedly reinvent themselves?)Set around the time of last year’s presidential election, “Designing Women” feels as if Bloodworth-Thomason has revived her intellectual property for the sole purpose of getting a lot of anger and frustration off her chest. The show (directed by her husband, Harry Thomason) trades plot for a series of scenes that are merely vehicles for a barrage of references to every other hot-button issue, catchphrase or triggering (to liberals) event of the Trump era, including and certainly not limited to voter suppression efforts, covfefe, sexual harassment, QAnon, Covid-19, boat parades and, of course, Donald J. Trump.The play is set in motion — so to speak, because, again, no plot — when everybody’s favorite interior-design firm welcomes a new receptionist, Haley McFee (slapstick whiz Kim Matula). She is the baby sister of Charlene Frazier (Debra Capps) but most important, she is a well-intentioned naïf whose Christian beliefs don’t quite match the lefty politics of Julia Sugarbaker (Carmen Cusack) and her associates Mary Jo Shively (Sarah Colonna) and Cleo Bouvier (Carla Renata).Carmen Cusack and R. Ward Duffy deliver some of the show’s amusing bits of physical comedy.Philip ThomasThe new employee is particularly taken aback by Cleo, an outspoken Black lesbian who is a cousin of one of the original characters, Anthony Bouvier. “Her number one hobby is going to be praying for me not to burn in hell,” Cleo says of Haley. “Because it’s the number one hobby for all evangelicals. It’s like their golf.”Ba-dum-bump. And there is a lot more where that came from, as the play is made up almost exclusively of jokes — and since Bloodworth-Thomason does not have to deal with CBS prudes anymore, she can use all the profanity and sexual single entendres she wants. The sheer quantity of wisecracks means that quite a few of them land, with Renata and an excellent Amy Pietz (as Julia’s self-absorbed, vain sister, Suzanne) making especially tasty meals of them.There are also some amusing bits of physical comedy, including during the scenes between Julia and an anti-Trump Republican by the name of Wynn Dollarhyde (R. Ward Duffy) — their romance is similar to the hot-and-heavy relationship between the outspoken liberal Diane Lockhart and the silver-fox conservative Kurt McVeigh on “The Good Wife.”Still, the pacing, or lack thereof, is a problem, especially for those of us streaming at home, without the company of laughing strangers provided by a theater. The show is uncomfortably overlong at two and a half hours — definitely not sitcom length — and sags when it should zip. Bloodworth-Thomason might be able to achieve a tidier running time if she writes a sequel set under a less willfully inflammatory president.Designing WomenThrough Oct. 24 at TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark.; digital streaming through Oct. 24; theatre2.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Review: In the Disturbing ‘Dana H.,’ Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

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      Deirdre O’Connell brilliantly lip-syncs the testimony of a woman abducted by a white supremacist in a play by Lucas Hnath.Dana Higginbotham had recently lost her job as a chaplain in the psychiatric unit of a Florida hospital when, in 1997, she was abducted by one of her former patients, a methed-up ex-con named Jim.For the next five months she lived in captivity, in a blur of hide-outs and motel rooms, as Jim, called Cowboy by his associates in a white supremacist crime syndicate, dragged her along on his “jobs,” sometimes by the hair.Though she was “never not covered with bruises,” and often signaled her distress nonverbally, almost no one tried to help her; eventually, in a kind of transference or Stockholm syndrome, or what she calls adaptation to maladaptation, she came to see Jim as her “protector” because certainly “the cops weren’t.” Indeed, the police had little power, and thus little interest in, the world beneath our own she had somehow fallen into, a world where “everything that was suppose to be right was not.”I’m quoting Higginbotham verbatim, dropped d and all, because that’s the way her words come to us in “Dana H.,” the profoundly disturbing new play by Lucas Hnath that opened on Sunday at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. It’s her voice, recorded over a period of several days in 2015, we hear on tape, telling the story of those five months in Jim’s thrall — and the two-and-a-half years hiding from him on a construction gang afterward.Yet this is not simply verbatim theater of the kind the Civilians, the “investigative” company that commissioned and developed “Dana H.,” has pioneered in works like “Gone Missing” and “This Beautiful City.” Nor is it like “Is This a Room,” the verbatim drama by Tina Satter that opened on the same stage last week and will now alternate performances with “Dana H.,” each playing four performances a week.In Hnath’s play, the transcript is not dramatized as it is in those others, with actors speaking and performing each role. Rather, just one actor, Deirdre O’Connell, embodying Higginbotham, lip-syncs the entire 75-minute text, brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor.Call it Thriller Karaoke, a form in which the story is almost as dangerous as the mode of storytelling. You worry that O’Connell will fall out of sync with the recording, which never stops once the play begins. Gradually, though, as her inerrancy becomes clear, you let go of that concern and switch to related ones: Why tell the story this way in the first place? What do you get from the astonishing feat, besides astonishment, that you wouldn’t get if the same material had been acted out as it might be in a typically effective television procedural?One thing you get, or rather don’t, is the violent imagery that in a literal representation can short circuit other values. Higginbotham’s tale is so brutal that, were it visualized, you would spend the entire play worrying about her survival.Instead, the director Les Waters, in his nerves-of-steel staging, offers just one spot of blood to stand for the rest. The story is still plenty savage, but by placing O’Connell, a beloved New York theater veteran, in a comfortable-looking club chair, in the middle of a generic motel room, he in some way abstracts and domesticates it. (The diorama-style set design is by Andrew Boyce, the shadowy-then-glary lighting by Paul Toben.) You are implicitly asked to focus not on the terror of her experience but on the terror of her survival.O’Connell lip-syncs most of the show nonstop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd your own: While mimicking Higginbotham’s mental dissociation, the uncanniness of the lip-sync destabilizes most other notions of normalcy in the world as well. It suggests an underlife, parallel to the comfortable, familiar one, that threatens at any moment to erupt through the rather thin barrier of routine, just as Higginbotham’s voice seems to erupt through O’Connell’s body in the process of possessing it.The question of voice is obviously central to Hnath’s concern here, only in part because Higginbotham — it’s no spoiler to say — is his mother. At the time of the abduction, he was a thousand miles away, a freshman at New York University, apparently knowing nothing of what was going on in Florida. She did not want him to know: Jim held her son’s safety over her head, she says, to enforce compliance. “Everything I ever did was all based on what was for Lucas, you know?”In the silence that follows that line, you can almost hear the eternal maternal follow-up plaint: “But what has he done for me?”To say he has honored her story, though that’s true, is the skimpiest possible way to look at the achievement of “Dana H.” When the play ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2020, after productions in Los Angeles and Chicago, I was electrified by the way O’Connell turned herself into a kind of musical instrument, letting the recording of Higginbotham “play” her. With her own voice shut off, she emphasized the other tools at her disposal, so that even the smallest shifts of posture and expression became immensely expressive.Those effects have grown more complex in the Broadway production, shifting its weight in the process. More often now, O’Connell seems to work against the apparent veracity of the text: miming Higginbotham’s odd laughter a little more vividly, underlining moments in which she doubts her memory. Though I never previously questioned any aspect of the story, I now found myself wondering whether a woman so traumatized could be a reliable narrator and whether a play is “true” just because its words are.Hnath is at pains to signal that it is, in part by exposing his technique at every turn. We see O’Connell put on her earpieces at the beginning of the play and take them off at the end. Beeps indicate spots where the transcript has been edited. (The sound design and skin-crawly music are by Mikhail Fiksel.) The interview was conducted by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, rather than by Hnath because, as he explained to The Times, he wanted his mother to tell the story “to someone who knew nothing.” That way there would be no shortcuts that might introduce doubt.And yet it is the introduction of doubt, despite all those dams put in place to block it, that I find so wonderfully complicating now. Tiny strange moments Hnath chose to leave in the transcript — references to Higginbotham’s having “played around in” Satanism when she was young, or to her fantasy that converting Jim “would be a great addition” to her “ministry” — make you wonder about her reliability, and what even stranger material was cut.Through such holes in the storytelling, the play’s richest emotions seep. Near the end, when Higginbotham is contacted by Jim’s father, apologizing for what his son did to her, Cosson, on tape, asks if that “helped in any way.” She says it did: “It kinda felt almost like a family. The way a family should have reacted — if I had one.”You may well gasp louder than at the reveal of a corpse.That’s when I realized that “Dana H.” is not just the story of a woman brutalized by a psychopath; it is also the story of a mother abandoned by a son. What else would a playwright do to make reparations but write a play about just that, in the process returning to her what the world had stolen: her voice.Dana H.Through Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      in Music

      Glimmerglass Festival Unveils Its Leader’s Final Season

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      Francesca Zambello, who has overseen a dozen editions of the opera festival in upstate New York, will depart next summer.Next summer, the Glimmerglass Festival of opera and music theater in Cooperstown, N.Y., will return indoors in full force for the farewell season of its artistic and general director, Francesca Zambello, the festival announced on Friday.Zambello, 65, who is also the artistic director of Washington National Opera and an independent stage director, will have led Glimmerglass for 12 seasons when she leaves. In an interview, she said it was the right moment “for a page turn,” and that since she has been with the Washington company for less time, “I decided to extend my contract and devote myself there.”“Part of my heart is super sad, but I also think I don’t want to repeat myself,” she added. “I don’t want to be one of those people. I just want new challenges.”Among the hallmarks of her tenure at Glimmerglass have been the addition of original youth operas each season; an initiative at Attica Correctional Facility; a broadened repertoire that includes Broadway musicals, concert programming and new works; and the introduction of high-profile artists in residence such as Christine Goerke, Eric Owens and, for the 2022 season, Denyce Graves.Graves is scheduled to direct a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” during next summer’s festival, which will run from July 8 through Aug. 21. It will be something of a homecoming for this mezzo-soprano: Carmen was one of her signature roles. Graves is also set to reprise her performance from this past summer’s outdoor premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” Sandra Seaton’s play about the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, with music by Carlos Simon.The 2022 program also includes a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” originally scheduled for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic; the premiere of “Tenor Overboard,” a Rossini pastiche with a book by Ken Ludwig, the Tony Award-winning playwright of “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Crazy For You”; and a double bill of Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s “Taking Up Serpents” and the premiere of Damien Geter’s “Holy Ground,” with a libretto by Lila Palmer. (Sankaram, the festival’s composer in residence next summer, also wrote the season’s youth opera, “The Jungle Book.”) More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’ a Vivid Tale of Profit and Pain

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      The play, tracing the rise and fall of the fabled financiers, finally opens on Broadway after successful runs in London and at the Park Avenue Armory.Much of what happens in “The Lehman Trilogy” is invisible to the eye, which is not the way prestige drama usually works onstage.Directed by Sam Mendes, this British import, which reaches across 164 years of American history to trace the family saga behind the fallen financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers, was a scalding-hot ticket during a brief prepandemic run at the Park Avenue Armory. Yet it offers almost nothing in the way of spectacle, and only the slightest of costume changes: a top hat here, a pair of glasses there.In the captivating production that opened on Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater, it relies largely on an unspoken agreement between actors and audience — to imagine together, and let fancy crowd out fact.Sort of the way that heedless investors looked right past all warning signs in the faith-based run-up to the stock market crash of 2008. Illusion is illusion, after all, and financial markets, like the theater, require a certain suspension of disbelief — though when the fantasy bursts in theater, the fallout is less ruinous. When investors halted their collective game of make-believe 13 years ago, mammoth financial firms like Lehman Brothers met their swift demise, and the world’s markets suffered the aftershocks.“The Lehman Trilogy,” though, is not actually a number-crunching play; reports that Jeff Bezos took in a recent performance should not cause you to infer otherwise.Written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, it is a vividly human tale, nimbly performed by three of the finest actors around: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, who, in making his Broadway debut, has replaced the original cast’s Ben Miles. (I did not catch Beale, Godley and Miles at the Armory; it was too scarce a ticket, and too pricey.)Slipping in and out of myriad roles, the actors spend the bulk of their time narrating, standing outside their characters. We, in turn, spend most of our time envisioning the fleet-footed story they conjure with words over three-plus hours (including two intermissions) that feel nowhere near that long.Our eyes track these witchy actors as they move through Es Devlin’s revolving glass-and-metal office set, while our minds persuade us that the story is unfolding in a succession of disparate spaces that resemble it not at all.A peculiarly gentle interrogation of the American dream’s descent into many-tentacled nightmare, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins as so many stories of this nation do: with an intrepid immigrant’s arrival. A young man from Bavaria stands before us, suitcase in hand, freshly landed in New York Harbor and certain he is worldly after 45 days at sea.From left, Godley, Beale and Lester in the play. Their feats of storytelling are the primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe year is 1844, he is Heyum Lehmann, and in a moment we will see him reborn as Henry Lehman — his Ellis Island moniker bestowed by a port official too obtuse to comprehend the newcomer’s real name.On first impression, Henry (Beale) is darling, funny and utterly sympathetic. When his younger brothers, Emanuel (Lester) and Mayer (Godley), follow him across the ocean, we feel a similar warmth toward them.This is where the mechanics of the play, with these deft and lovely actors breathing such life into the brothers, coax us into an ease at odds with moral logic as we watch their genteelly brutal acquisition and stockpiling of wealth.The brothers settle in antebellum Alabama, where even the earliest iteration of the family firm, a shop selling fabrics and clothing, relies on a local economy built on slavery. As the Lehmans grow more ambitious, they start buying and selling cotton from the plantations, making their first fortune on it.Seldom do we hear a voice of conscience — like the local physician who tells a dispirited Mayer, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the collapse of the South’s economy should not have come as a surprise.“Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” the doctor says. “The roots run so deep you cannot see them, but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.”That is, of course, a warning that the pattern of reckless profit and resulting pain will repeat: in the 1929 crash, which Lehman Brothers managed to survive by morphing yet again, and in the 2008 crash, which it didn’t. It is also a signal that the founders of the firm — whose deaths, when they come, are meant to move us, and do — were not the ethical betters of their more vulgar descendants.With a subdued, filmic score by Nick Powell, played live by Candida Caldicot on an upright piano, “The Lehman Trilogy” is structured in three parts. It follows Emanuel and Mayer to New York, and their family through successive generations, whose principals we first meet in childhood.So here is Emanuel’s son Philip (Beale), a future shark, as a gape-mouthed tot prodded to parade his smarts for guests. Here is Philip’s son Bobby (Godley) as a buoyant 10-year-old, whose father mercilessly dismantles the boy’s love for horses as creatures rather than commodities.And most enchantingly, here is Mayer’s son Herbert (Lester), a future governor and senator, as a thumb-sucking 3-year-old playing with his father’s beard, and later as a fair-minded 9-year-old at Hebrew school, objecting to the divine massacre of the innocent children of Egypt.No matter how horrid some of the Lehmans become (not Herbert, though; never Herbert), knowing them young cushions our feelings toward them later. That’s human nature. What’s unsettling is which people in this saga of capitalism we see portrayed, which people the play helps us to imagine clearly and which people we are asked to imagine vaguely or not at all. Proximity shapes our sympathies.“The Lehman Trilogy” exists because of the cascading financial disaster that extinguished Lehman Brothers in 2008, yet its perspective is very much from the top of that deluge. Any harm bucketing down below is at best an abstraction, just as it is in 1929, when the play shows us suicides of despairing stockbrokers but none of the pain radiating through lower social strata. And slavery, the founder of the family’s feast, is kept in soft focus, off to the side.The primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” then, is to witness the superb Beale, Godley and Lester in their feats of storytelling — and to conspire with them in imagining the play’s tarnished, if not truly vanished, world.When intermission comes and the auditorium lights turn on, gaze up at that glass set. You’ll see an awfully comfortable-looking audience reflected there.The Lehman TrilogyThrough Jan. 2 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; thelehmantrilogy.com. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      On London Stages, Brevity Reigns Supreme

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      A new work by Caryl Churchill, the final installment in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell saga and a Larry Kramer play deploy their running times with varied success.LONDON — Theatrical convention has never mattered to Caryl Churchill, the questing English playwright who at 83 continues to display a maverick intelligence. “What If If Only,” her new play for her longtime home, the Royal Court, runs only 20 minutes — which is six minutes longer than was widely reported when the three-performer drama was first announced.But Churchill manages to communicate so much about love and loss and the possibility — just maybe — of a brighter tomorrow that the play, on view through Oct. 23, seems utterly complete. Theatergoers could add value by combining this premiere with the British debut of the American writer Aleshea Harris’s blistering (and 90-minute) “Is God Is,” also playing on the Court’s main stage.The text of Churchill’s play gives its characters names like “Someone” and “Future,” but the director James Macdonald’s ever-spry production cuts through any potential opacity. You understand in an instant the inconsolable despondency of John Heffernan, playing (superbly) a man in a one-sided conversation with someone dear to him who has died; a reference at the outset to painting an apple calls to mind Magritte, whose surrealism Churchill echoes.Jasmine Nyenya, left, and John Heffernan in Caryl Churchill’s “What If If Only,” directed by James Macdonald, at the Royal Court Theater.Johan PerssonHeffernan is visited in his bereavement by a beaming Linda Bassett, a mainstay of Churchill’s work here playing one of several versions of the future in a hypothetical multiverse that evokes the recently revived “Constellations,” a play that was first seen at the Court. Bassett reappears later, this time known only as “Present” and promising a reality that, “of course,” contains war — what reality doesn’t, she asks — alongside “nice things” like “movies and trees and people who love each other.” Are those verities enough in themselves to provide comfort? “What If If Only” isn’t sure, preferring not to traffic in certainty but in the mystery of existence that Churchill has once again marked out as her magisterially realized terrain.Events, by contrast, couldn’t be more linear in “The Mirror and the Light,” the third and final installment in the saga of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, as filtered through the beady eye of the novelist Hilary Mantel. The first two books in her trilogy were adapted into a pair of plays that ran in the U.K. and on Broadway, and this third play, at the Gielgud Theater through Jan. 23, presumably has Broadway in its sights as well. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.Whereas “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” were adapted for the stage by a seasoned playwright, Mike Poulton, the completion of the triptych has been whittled down for theatrical consumption by Mantel herself, in collaboration with her leading man, Ben Miles, reprising the role of Cromwell. Both are first-time playwrights working with a skilled director, Jeremy Herrin, who has staged all three plays.The result is a lot of filleting for a book in excess of 700 pages, and you often feel as if you’ve boarded a speeding train that is racing through its narrative stops. Keen-eyed playgoers might want to supplement this show with a visit to the popular musical “Six,” which chronicles Henry VIII’s much-married life from the ladies’ perspectives: Equal time seems only fair.This non-singing account of the story begins at the end, which is to say with Cromwell not far from his beheading in 1540. We then rewind to allow for a speedy recap illustrating how Henry VIII’s once crucial aide-de-camp reached this baleful state. No doubt in an effort to avert musty history’s cramping the theatrical mood, characters’ relationships to one another are neatly laid out, leavened where possible with jokey repartee. Dream sequences bring in such ghostly personages as Cardinal Wolsey (a droll Tony Turner) and Cromwell’s father, Walter (Liam Smith).The aim is presumably a modern-day equivalent of the history play cycle of which Shakespeare was the master, as makes sense for a drama presented on the West End in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The problem is a narrative compression so extreme that the story barely has time to breathe, paired with an ensemble overly prone to shouting: Nicholas Boulton’s blustery Duke of Suffolk is on particular overdrive throughout.Things improve with Nathaniel Parker’s increasingly irascible Henry VIII, who is seen changing wives — scarcely has he married the ill-fated Jane Seymour (Olivia Marcus) before he’s on to Anna of Cleves (a cool-seeming Rosanna Adams) — while Miles’s Cromwell watches from the sidelines, too often this time a supporting player in his own story. Christopher Oram won a Tony in 2015 for his costumes for the two-part “Wolf Hall,” and his work here similarly suggests a Holbein portrait or two come to life.For sheer illumination, however, it’s left to Jessica Hung Han Yun’s elegant lighting to sear the stage, lending intrigue and import even when the hurtlingly superficial play has careered off course.Ben Daniels, left, and Dino Fetscher in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Helen MaybanksA grievous chapter from our own recent history is on view through Nov. 6 on the Olivier stage of the National Theater, where the protean director Dominic Cooke (“Follies,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) has revived the AIDS-era drama “The Normal Heart.” This is the first major production of Larry Kramer’s momentous 1985 play since its pioneering author died last year.Kramer’s crusading spirit lives on in the impassioned Ned Weeks (the English actor Ben Daniels, in fiery, wiry form), the author’s obvious alter ego, who is seen galvanizing a reluctant New York community (The New York Times included) about the peril posed by AIDS in the early years of that pandemic. The production employs a peculiar Brechtian device that has each scene introduced by the actors in their own accents before they morph into their characters: All that does is illustrate the difficulty some of the cast has with the American sounds required.Still, there’s no denying the roiling fury of a wordy play running close to three hours that now as then works as both a call to arms and a requiem: a testament to the durability of people under siege as well as to their fragility. “There’s so much death around,” says Ned, a remark that Churchill’s “Someone” would himself surely recognize, even as both characters find themselves in plays that pulsate with life.Liz Carr in “The Normal Heart.” The production is the first major presentation of the momentous 1985 play since Kramer died last year.Helen MaybanksWhat If If Only. Directed by James Macdonald. Royal Court Theater, through Oct. 23.The Mirror and the Light. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. Gielgud Theater, through Jan. 23.The Normal Heart. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through Nov. 6. More

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      Review: ‘By Heart’ Commits Community to Memory

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      In Tiago Rodrigues’s show, audience members learn a Shakespeare sonnet together — line by line, over and over.Literature is the great love of my life. And yet I’ve never liked memorization or recitation: Shel Silverstein and Maya Angelou in grade school, Yeats and my own slam poems in college. It was laborious, and the words always seemed to slip away back to the page when I wasn’t looking.But the playwright and actor Tiago Rodrigues has changed my mind. In “By Heart,” his trenchant Brooklyn Academy of Music debut, he invites 10 audience members to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. As he coaches them through the lines, he breaks to talk about memorization as a personal and sometimes even revolutionary act, annotating his exercise with historical anecdotes, quoted excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ray Bradbury, and his own life. He talks, for example, about his grandmother Candida, a voracious reader who learns she’s going blind and asks Rodrigues to help her pick a book to learn by heart before her vision completely fails.Rodrigues uses his memorization exercise to create an intimate performance that connects people through text. Though perhaps “performance” isn’t quite the right word; Rodrigues, who was recently appointed as director of the Avignon Festival in France, chafes at any claims of theatricality in his production. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, he sits on a stool among a semicircle of chairs and a few stacks of books on wooden crates. “Everything will be calm and normal,” he reassured the audience at the show I attended. “I’m also allergic to interactive theater.”Rodrigues then asks for volunteers, and breaks down a poem line by line with the 10 of them, leading like a conductor. He gestures with certain phrases — large swoops and waves of the forearms, and flicks of the wrists, punctuated by sharp breaths, to indicate “repeat, repeat, repeat.”That repetition gets tiresome, especially because the show ends only when the 10 volunteers can recite the poem in full. (The running time is estimated between 90 minutes and two hours; on my night, it was closer to 90.) In these moments, the show lags, but Rodrigues doesn’t waver from his leisurely pace. Because isn’t that part of the whole process — that slow, seemingly endless, line-by-line, word-by-word breakdown until the day of the show or assignment?The difference here is what Rodrigues leads us to in the end: a statement about how the texts we hold in our memory become the “decoration for the house of our interior,” according to the literary critic George Steiner, whom Rodrigues quotes at length.At one point, Rodrigues — who has presented “By Heart” in France, Spain, Canada and his native Portugal — reflects on how miraculous it is to be in a space with other (masked, vaccinated) people after months of isolation and fear. True, but more miraculous still was the communal act of translation that allowed each of us to inhabit the text.The sonnet is now changed. I don’t just think of how it might sound in my own voice, but also recall the woman at one end of the semicircle who stumbled through the fifth line of the poem. I hear the charged delivery of the woman in the third chair, and the speedy, confident recitation of the man in Seat 7. And I think of Rodrigues’s grandmother, trying her best to transform herself into a book in which great words — large, heady words and sleek, shiny words and words of love and death — may reside.After the show, as I waited for the subway, I read the poem aloud — once, then twice and again. The train pulled up, and I was so engrossed in the text, I nearly missed it. So give me some lines to memorize. I’m now a believer.By HeartThrough Oct. 17 at the BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Thoughts of a Colored Man’ Preaches to the Choir

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      Keenan Scott II’s play, incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America.Seven Black men step onto the stage in the opening of Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” Over the course of the play, each will reveal a personality and history, but not a name, though later they will introduce themselves as Love, Happiness, Wisdom, Lust, Passion, Depression and Anger. Wearing different combinations of black, gray and red, they stand staring at a hulking billboard that reads “COLORED” in declarative black caps.One of them then asks the question that begins the play: “Who is the Colored Man?”It’s a question that Scott’s Broadway debut, which opened on Wednesday night at the John Golden Theater, doesn’t quite know how to answer. Incorporating slam poetry, prose and songs performed by its cast of seven, “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which first premiered in 2019 at Syracuse Stage in a co-production with Baltimore Center Stage, aspires to be a lyrical reckoning with Black life in America but only delivers a gussied-up string of straw-man lessons.Set in present-day Brooklyn, amid the many symbols of gentrification (Citi Bike stations, Whole Foods and a Paris Baguette), “Thoughts” employs vignettes to check in with various characters, who are often grouped together. Though the show, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, only runs for about 100 minutes, it takes us to a bus stop, a basketball court, a barbershop, a hospital and other locations, in a series of 18 snappy scenes.The characters, ranging in age from late teens to mid-60s, have specific themes to illustrate: the elder Wisdom (Esau Pritchett) speaks about respect, history and ancestry; Anger (Tristan Mack Wilds) vents about the trappings of consumerism and the objectification of Black athletes; and Happiness (Bryan Terrell Clark) challenges notions about Black struggle and class.But the question remains: “Who is the Colored Man?”The framing of these characters as concepts seems to imply a larger metaphor about Blackness that never comes to fruition. Perhaps we’re meant to deduce that these men taken together make up an entire Black man, with all of his dimensions. Yet Scott’s script teeters between presenting fully drawn characters and firm personifications, ultimately failing at either.From left, Luke James (seated), Esau Pritchett, Da’Vinchi, Dyllón Burnside, Tristan Mack Wilds and Forrest McClendon in Keenan Scott II’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Thoughts” may be inspired by Ntozake Shange’s renowned choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” in which seven unnamed women alternate among songs, dances, monologues and choral poems. It has a narrative continuity that Shange’s doesn’t, though to what end is unclear. So Passion (Luke James) talks Lust (Da’Vinchi) down after a barbershop argument, and Happiness has an awkward confrontation with Depression (Forrest McClendon) in a grocery store. The minute insights are clear, about class and masculinity. More broadly, though, what does “Thoughts” ultimately contribute to this long conversation about Blackness in America?The play sits at the intersection of different avenues of Black life, from the bright retail worker who had to forgo a full scholarship to M.I.T. to the gay gentrifier who was raised in the upper middle class. Despite being set in the present, the play feels removed from time; Scott doesn’t touch the Black Lives Matter protests or the institutional systems that hold Black men back. There are barely any mentions of how whiteness shapes the Black experience in America.And Black women are almost entirely forgotten (except as victims, in one grossly sensationalized monologue by Lust, or objects of desire). The characters’ poems, which are awkwardly incorporated into scenes of regular dialogue about how to pick up women or which Jordans are the best, allow the men to describe and emote but not to advance any message. It all remains at surface level.How does one design a stage for a show that wants to claim representations of Blackness without knowing what to say about it? Robert Brill’s stage design, low black scaffolding and that “COLORED” billboard, recalls Glenn Ligon’s 1990 “Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background),” which was in turn inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s famous quote. It doesn’t help with the show’s overdone approach. Even Ryan O’Gara’s lighting, which at one point dresses the whole theater in a stunning constellation of speckled lights, cannot elevate the language.Dyllón Burnside has the toughest job. As Love, his spoken-word poetry is almost nonsensical. At one point, he says: “She was like the perfect use of assonance in just the right amount of lines. Her pupils looked lost, and I wanted to be the teacher that teaches them to love what they see.”Broadnax’s direction exacerbates these performances of the poems, which abruptly occur as other characters are frozen. They move with the stilted stage cadence of a slam poem, with awkward breaks, including some after verbs and prepositions, just to hammer home the wordplay and rhyme.Burnside as Love in the play, which has lighting design by Ryan O’Gara.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot everyone in the cast jives with this rhythm; Pritchett’s full-toned bass stumbles through the tempo. Though James’s Passion gets shortchanged with the character’s back story, he at least gets his own music; he shows off his stellar voice, even if for only a few bars scattered throughout the production.Clark is funny as Happiness, tossing side glances, raised eyebrows and witty asides to the audience, providing some much-needed representation of a queer Black character, despite dipping from the well of gay clichés. Da’Vinchi, likewise, has his comic moments as a believably blunt and horny young man. When addressing Black toxic masculinity, primarily through Da’Vinchi’s Lust, the play is mostly inoffensive, if unremarkable.I wish I could tell you that one character isn’t killed by the end. And yet, this is another way that “Thoughts” so obviously tries to convey the reality that so many of us already know to be true. In fact, some of us have lived it. We don’t need a random act of violence onstage to tell us that every day Black men are endangered in our society. We need nuanced characters, action and complex poetry and prose to tell our stories.Thoughts of a Colored ManThrough March 20 at the John Golden Theater, Manhattan; thoughtsofacoloredman.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Former ‘Hamilton’ Cast Member Files Discrimination Complaint Against Show

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      In the E.E.O.C. filing, the actor, who is nonbinary, describes being retaliated against after requesting a gender-neutral dressing room, among other claims. The show denies the allegations.A former “Hamilton” cast member filed a federal workplace complaint against the show on Wednesday, alleging that the show had retaliated and refused to renew a contract after the actor had requested a gender-neutral dressing room.In the complaint, filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for the former cast member, Suni Reid (who prefers the pronouns they/them), said they were sidelined and eventually let go in September after requesting a gender-neutral space at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles where “Hamilton” was playing.In the 28-page complaint, Reid, a Black, nonbinary performer who has performed with the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles productions of “Hamilton” since 2017, outlined several other instances of discrimination and harassment by cast members and management over the years, including episodes in which Reid said they were physically threatened or intentionally and repeatedly misgendered.The complaint said Reid eventually intends to pursue legal claims in federal court. Filing a charge of discrimination and retaliation with the E.E.O.C. is a precursor to filing such a lawsuit.“Publicly, ‘Hamilton’ is a beacon of diversity and appears committed to causes seeking social justice and harmony,” Reid’s lawyers, Lawrence M. Pearson and Lindsay M. Goldbrum, said in a statement. “Behind the curtain, however, the Company’s management will force out a Black, transgender cast member simply because they stood up for themselves and advocated for a more equitable workplace, and therefore called that public image into question.”“We look forward to upholding Reid’s rights and hope this is a wake-up call for the theater industry about the systemic inequities that persist even at its greatest heights,” the statement continued.In its own statement, “Hamilton” said Wednesday that Reid had been “a valued cast member” for years and said the show had “offered them a contract to return to ‘Hamilton’ with terms responsive to their requests.”“We deny the allegations in the Charge,” the show said. “We have not discriminated or retaliated against Suni.” During the shutdown, it added, “we have given Suni direct financial support, paid for their health insurance, and paid for their housing. We wish Suni well in their future endeavors.”Reid has performed in the ensemble as well as in roles such as Aaron Burr, George Washington, Hercules Mulligan/James Madison, and Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, according to the complaint.It comes as Broadway and touring shows are working to find their footing following a lengthy pandemic-related shutdown. Earlier this summer, as several shows like “Hamilton” were preparing to restart, some of the most powerful players on Broadway signed a pact pledging to strengthen the industry’s diversity practices.But Reid’s complaint paints a picture of a toxic workplace environment at “Hamilton” that stretched from coast to coast.Reid was cast in the Broadway production of the show in 2017 and met hostility from the start, according to the complaint. Reid eventually requested a transfer from the Broadway production and started with the Chicago company of “Hamilton” in March 2019, according to the complaint, and came out publicly as transgender and gender-nonconforming. They were constantly misgendered by co-workers, “at times in a pointedly hostile or callous manner,” according to the complaint.By 2020, Reid had begun rehearsals for the Los Angeles company, but never was able to to join the Los Angeles cast in performance because of the shutdown, the complaint said.In May, Reid was presented with a contract renewal for “Hamilton.” Around that time, they asked their agent, Michele Largé, to request a gender-neutral dressing room at Pantages that Reid and others could use. “Hamilton” officials then raised concerns about posts Reid had published on social media describing racial equity issues on the show, according to the complaint.The show would eventually agree to set up gender-neutral dressing spaces in every “Hamilton” theater. But in the fall, after Reid’s lawyers informed the show that they had legal claims of discrimination, the show told Reid’s lawyers that it was “no longer open” to having Reid perform in “Hamilton,” and that “renewal of their contract was no longer an option,” the complaint said. More