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      Review: In ‘Chicken & Biscuits,’ a Sweet but Dated Comedic Recipe

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      Squabbling siblings, familiar stereotypes and a chorus of amens: A new play aims for the pleasures of Broadway’s traditional family sitcoms.“Why we gotta wear black, huh? We already Black!”So grouses Beverly, the kind of woman who features aquamarine hair and a peek-a-boo push-up bra at a funeral.To be specific: her father’s funeral. “We should be honoring my Daddy in style, color!” she proclaims. Certainly the deceased — the late pastor of a church in New Haven, Conn. — has complied; he’s heading to the Pearly Gates in a canary yellow tie.“Canary yellow was his favorite,” Beverly explains. “And he wore it like a pimp!”As I sat alternately laughing and cringing in the audience of “Chicken & Biscuits,” a play by Douglas Lyons that opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square Theater, I couldn’t help thinking that Beverly was voicing more than a personal, sartorial truth. In her impatience with tragedy, her gaudy antics and her beeline for fun, she was also delivering what may be the play’s mission statement. This family comedy, with its cheek and secrets and eulogies and amens, wants to offer audiences living in bad times an old-fashioned good one.Whether it succeeds for you will depend largely on your taste for Broadway comedies of a type that otherwise went out of style a few decades ago. These were supposedly heartwarming domestic stories in which “ethnic” families like the Italian American Geminianis in “Gemini” and the Jewish Chamberses in “Norman, Is That You?” aired dirty laundry (typically involving a gay son) while reaffirming the notion that love conquers all, among kin no less than country.Sidestepping the traffic of somber, formally inventive new plays about Black life, “Chicken & Biscuits” eagerly boards that rickety old bus. To start, there are the requisite squabbling siblings: Beverly (Ebony Marshall-Oliver) and her sister, Baneatta (Cleo King), representing opposite ends of the bawdy-to-churchy continuum. Beverly resents Baneatta’s attitude of superiority; Baneatta, whose tenured professorship seems to be in Disapproval Studies, scorns Beverly’s down-market outfits and outlook.Lewis plays a pastor hoping to prove himself, while also trying to help his wife, played by King, navigate her family’s complicated dynamics at a funeral.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheirs is but one of the thin and mild conflicts that the production, directed by Zhailon Levingston, stirs mightily to bring to a boil. On the day of the funeral, Baneatta’s husband, Reginald, will be delivering the eulogy, hoping to prove himself a suitable successor to his father-in-law in the pulpit. (With Norm Lewis in the role, could there ever be any doubt?) Reginald is also hoping that family hysteria will not overtake family healing in the process.Apparently, he has not met his family, or even his own children: the tightly wound, high-achieving, 30-something Simone (Alana Raquel Bowers) and her younger brother, Kenny (Devere Rogers), a struggling actor and the de rigueur gay son. Each comes factory supplied with a pressing problem. Simone has recently been dumped by her fiancé, who took up with a white woman instead. Kenny’s problem is also white: Logan Leibowitz, the Jewish boyfriend (and fellow struggling actor) he has brought to the funeral unannounced.Though Simone repeatedly refers to the couple, with a smirk, as “thespians,” and Baneatta simply ignores the interloper, no one disapproves of Kenny’s gayness deeply enough to prevent a happy hug of an ending. All of the characters’ characteristics are red herrings, and usually stale ones at that. Beverly’s outrageousness recalls that of innumerable stock characters from Tyler Perry’s plays, Black sitcoms of the 1970s and Chitlin’ Circuit farces. Logan (Michael Urie) is a gay stereotype so flittery he cannot follow the service; as he flips madly through the Bible, he asks, “Where’s Corinthians? Is this in alphabetical order?”You will detect in Logan and Beverly — and in Beverly’s sarcastic Gen Z daughter, La’Trice (Aigner Mizzelle) — a kind of equal opportunity minstrelsy. In some ways, trotting out laughable stereotypes of a modern Black family and its white appendages seems almost daring on Broadway today. One of the highlights of Levingston’s production, which can otherwise feel bloated at two hours, comes when Simone, apologizing for her kneejerk hostility toward Logan, says, “Since the breakup, it’s been real hard for me not to see red when I see white people.” Levingston lets this moment sit a good long time, waiting for the (mostly white) audience to get the joke.In their performances, Marshall-Oliver, from left, Urie and Aigner Mizzelle evoke outrageous stock characters of the deep — and recent — past.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch insight and provocation is otherwise rare in “Chicken & Biscuits.” So is any real tension. Whether the family will accept Logan, whether the sisters will reconcile, whether the mystery guest at the funeral (NaTasha Yvette Williams) will be explained are barely even questions; they’re more like a packing list. In that sense, the play feels dramatically complacent and underdeveloped, suggesting that its trip to Broadway after a pandemic-foreshortened run at the Queens Theater in 2020 might have benefited from a stop along the way.Yet it’s at least a little unfair to look at a family comedy that way. Lyons, an actor himself before turning to playwriting — this is his Broadway debut as an author, and Levingston’s as a director — is operating here in a different tradition from most contemporary fare, which is built on ideas and argumentation.“Chicken & Biscuits” is built on sensation, more like a musical or even an opera. In the long scene of the funeral itself, the eulogies by several family members function as arias, delivered in the old-school park-and-bark style. They are not concerned with forwarding the action so much as bringing aural pleasure, and indeed Lewis’s satire of a preacherly stemwinder, with drawn out vowels and pounced-on syncopations, is more than halfway to song.In any case, Lyons is more interested in the family’s moment-by-moment byplay — its laugh track and tear track — than in drawing realistic character portraits or scoring sociological points. The cast, including five actors also making their Broadway debuts, for the most part fills in the characters’ outlines confidently. As for sociological points, you could hardly say more in a treatise than Dede Ayite does with the costumes and Nikiya Mathis with the wigs.So if “Chicken & Biscuits” isn’t a profound work, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Its gravy is just another name for schmaltz. Thinking back, as a Jew, on the Jewish families that Broadway audiences learned to love in not-very-sophisticated, high-cholesterol comedies, I have to admit that even as I alternately laughed and cringed at their caricatures, I felt relieved of the more pernicious problem of otherness.Representation matters. I see many great and necessary new works about the problem of Blackness in a racist society — or rather, the problem of whiteness. They are filled with anguish and unfunny funerals. What I rarely get to see are works about Black American life that are defiantly not problem plays. Their sunniness is just as necessary, however garish the aquamarine and pimped-out the corpse.Chicken & BiscuitsThrough Jan. 2 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, chickenandbiscuitsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Music

      Bolshoi Performer Is Killed in Onstage Accident

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      The man, in his late 30s, was crushed during a scene change as the opera “Sadko” was performed before an audience, the theater said.A performer was killed during an opera at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on Saturday when there was an accident during a scene change, the theater said.The man, in his late 30s, was working as an extra in a performance of the opera “Sadko,” by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.Russian news reports said that the man had been crushed by a piece of scenery, and videos of the event that circulated online showed it happening as a backdrop descended to the stage. As the chorus kept singing and the orchestra continued to play, there was a sudden commotion onstage. Performers waved their arms and shouted “Stop!” The music ground to a halt, and most of the performers walked offstage while a few went to the rear of the stage to help the man. The curtains closed.The show was stopped immediately, the Bolshoi said in a statement, and the audience was asked to leave.“A tragic accident happened during the ‘Sadko’ production tonight,” the Bolshoi, one of Russia’s most prestigious theaters, said in a statement. The theater said it was assisting investigators as they sought to determine the circumstances of the man’s death.The man was identified as Yevgeny Kulesh. He worked as part of a 50-person group of Bolshoi employees who serve as onstage extras, supplementing singers and dancers.Russian news reports said that audience members had not initially seemed aware of the death and appeared to think that the panic onstage was part of the performance.The Bolshoi has a history of strange deaths and injuries. In 2013, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was severely injured when a masked man threw acid in his face. That same year, a violinist died after falling into the orchestra pit. More

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      La MaMa Theater Reopens With Strange, Enchanting Puppetry

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      The daring Manhattan theater reopens this month with a gorgeous puppet festival, proving it has lost none of its nerve during the pandemic.Sonia enters naked, far upstage. Even from a distance, she is an imposing presence, taller than either of the men who are helping her walk.All right, making her walk. Sonia is a puppet, and she would be inert without them.Not for an instant does it feel that way, though, in “Lunch with Sonia,” an achingly beautiful entry in La MaMa’s annual puppet festival. These puppeteers are her caretakers, surely — because in this puppet-and-dance piece Sonia is ill, and her faltering body needs assistance as she puts on a gown and moves painstakingly downstage toward her grand, gilt-edged chair. Where, holding court, she proceeds to enchant us.The festival, now in its second week and continuing through Oct. 24, opens the venerable East Village theater’s post-shutdown season. I regret to inform you that “Lunch with Sonia” has finished its run. But of the four productions I have seen in this year’s lineup, it is one of two that made me feel intensely grateful that La MaMa is once again lending its stages to live performance that is strange, daring, gorgeous and far from the mainstream.More about “Sonia” in a moment, because there is still time to catch the other show that absolutely gripped me: Lone Wolf Tribe’s eerie, wistful “Body Concert,” running through Sunday upstairs in the cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater.Like “Sonia,” this is puppetry for adults — ideally the non-squeamish kind, given that a small herd of severed body parts is involved. They are made of foam rubber, but still.Kevin Augustine in “Body Concert.”Richard TermineKevin Augustine, who created this Butoh-inspired puppetry-and-movement piece, performs it clad in a dance belt, with his hands, feet and head colored greasepaint white. In mostly dim, hazy lighting, by Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa, Augustine animates an outsize skull; an enormous eye; and a giant, skin-stripped arm and leg, each a mass of muscles and veins. There’s a heart, too, and a jaw, and a semi-skeleton infant with an unclosed fontanel.I can’t tell you quite why it’s so fascinating to watch the leg use its knee and toes to inch across the floor, or just what makes it slightly poignant — though when Mark Bruckner’s music introduces piano, a note of longing enters. Comical as it is when the arm, with taloned fingers, tap-taps at the skull, there’s an element of yearning there, too. These disparate bits of body, little good on their own, want to be united. Want to be alive.Sonia, on the other hand, wants to be dead. That is the tension inside Loco7 Dance Puppet Theater Company’s celebratory “Lunch with Sonia,” whose matriarch heroine intends to end her life before debilitation takes that choice away. But first, we learn in voice-overs, she will have a month of goodbyes, some with family members who are still trying to talk her out of it.Created and directed by Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber — with choreography and puppet, lighting, video and set design by Restrepo — “Sonia” lifts a grief-tinged tale to a joyous realm, with Sonia at the center, eager to dance in hot pink Crocs. The piece is inspired by Restrepo’s experience with his own aunt Sonia, and it is understandably a bit longer than it needs to be: a result of the fond wish of the living to resurrect our lost beloveds and linger in their company.The other two festival shows I saw, both in the more intimate downstairs theater, were less successful. The first, Watoku Ueno’s shadow-puppet piece “The Tall Keyaki Tree” (whose run has ended), is visually and aurally alluring, with live music by Shu Odamura. But the story — inspired by the Koda Rohan novella “The Five-Storied Pagoda,” about a carpenter who builds a pagoda with wood from a tree he loved as a child — is soporific.Shoshana Bass in “When I Put On Your Glove,” which she created based on her father’s puppetry. Richard TermineSandglass Theater’s “When I Put On Your Glove,” which continues through Sunday, has an affecting premise. Created and performed by Shoshana Bass, it is a tribute to her puppeteer father, Eric Bass, and an exploration of artistic legacy. Using four of his puppets, she re-enacts some of his best known works, but she has not found a way to spark them with life.Directed by Gerard Stropnicky, with design and construction by Shoshana Bass’s mother, Ines Zeller Bass, the piece makes striking metaphoric use of falling sand. It also shows us clips of an Eric Bass performance, which are more magnetic than any live element of this show.Also notable is the festival’s exhibition of Richard Termine’s puppet photography, running through Sunday at La MaMa’s gallery space. It’s a lovely survey of the form as seen on New York stages; there is even a brief but robust section on puppetry during the pandemic.For people who experienced any performances on those walls, the images will be particularly vivid. As a line in “When I Put On Your Glove” says: “What animates the puppet is not the puppeteer, but the breath of memory with which we all fill it.” So it goes, too, with puppets caught on camera.La MaMa Puppet SeriesThrough Oct. 24 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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      Brooklyn Academy of Music Plans a New York-Focused Season

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      In its first full season since the start of the pandemic, the organization will feature a mix of new and familiar works in dance and theater.There will be dances exploring Black love and relationships, theater works highlighting the impact of technology on daily life and an appearance by the filmmaker Spike Lee.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will focus its coming season on the artists of New York City, the organization announced on Friday, as it seeks to bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.“This is a season to celebrate artists who give New York City a sense of possibility, a sense of wonder, a sense of effervescence, a glow, a bit of magic,” the academy’s artistic director, David Binder, said in an interview. He said the academy wanted to create a season to mark New York’s recovery from the pandemic, which brought many of the city’s cultural institutions to a standstill for more than 18 months.The season, which runs November to March, is the academy’s first since the start of the pandemic. As the organization tries to lure audiences back to its stages and recover millions in ticket revenue lost during the pandemic, it will feature a mix of familiar hits and new works.Dance will be front and center, starting in November with the world premiere of “The Mood Room,” a Big Dance Theater production, conceived, directed and choreographed by Annie-B Parson. The show, which takes place in Los Angeles in 1980, mixes dance, theater and spoken opera to explore the effects of Reaganism.The dance lineup also includes Reggie Wilson’s “Power” in January, and the New York premiere of Kyle Abraham’s “An Untitled Love,” in February. The work, set to neo-soul music, is described as an “exaltation of Black love and unity.”Also in February comes Pam Tanowitz’s acclaimed “Four Quartets,” a staging of T.S. Eliot’s poems. When it had its premiere at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, in 2018, Alastair Macaulay, writing in The New York Times, called it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”In March, the Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Morris’s classic “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (1988), set to Handel’s oratorio.There will be theater and cabaret offerings as well. In March, SITI Company, the noted experimental New York theater company, will stage “The Medium,” a minimalist meditation on the role of technology in society.The cabaret performers Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman will star as their alter egos Kiki and Herb in a new holiday special, titled “SLEIGH,” which will premiere after Thanksgiving.In December, Lee will appear alongside his brother for a conversation about the filmmaker’s new book, “SPIKE,” a visual look at his career.With coronavirus cases still high, it remains to be seen whether audiences will turn out at prepandemic levels, but Binder said he believed many people were clamoring for live performances. The academy’s brief fall season, which opened in September, has attracted several sold-out crowds, he said.“It seems New Yorkers are really hungry to get back into the theater,” Binder said. “I feel very optimistic and excited.” More

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      Cynthia Harris, the Mother on ‘Mad About You,’ Dies at 87

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      She was a familiar, sometimes meddling, presence on a hit ’90s sitcom about a pair of newlyweds. Earlier she won acclaim as Wallis Simpson, who inspired a king to abdicate.Cynthia Harris, a versatile actress who played Paul Reiser’s assertive mother in the hit 1990s sitcom “Mad About You” and won acclaim in the British TV mini-series “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.Her death was confirmed by her nephew Dan Harris.The Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning “Mad About You” aired on NBC from 1992 to 1999 and was revived in 2019 by Spectrum Originals, a streaming site. It starred Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as newlyweds (in the roles of Paul Buchman, a documentary filmmaker, and Jamie Stemple Buchman, a public relations specialist) who, living in Greenwich Village, must cope with both frivolous and eventful barriers to marital bliss, including Paul’s overbearing mother, Sylvia.Miss Harris’s Sylvia was a recurring character on “Mad About You” for four seasons and became a regular in 1997, often butting heads with Ms. Hunt’s Jamie but also sharing warmer moments. She reprised the role in the revival. All told, Miss Harris (who preferred that honorific) appeared in 73 episodes of the sitcom.In “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” a seven-part dramatization broadcast in Britain in 1978 and in the United States in 1979, Miss Harris played Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American for whom King Edward VIII, played by Edward Fox, abdicated the British throne. For her performance she was nominated for best actress by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.She made her Broadway debut in 1963, and appeared in dozens of television shows and movies. For 21 years she was also the artistic director and a founding member of the Actors Company Theater, an off-Broadway collaboration founded in 1992 that calls itself “a company of theater artists that reveals, reclaims, and reimagines great plays of literary merit.”Miss Harris in Hyde Park, London, in 1979. She was nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance in “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” a 1978 British TV mini-series in which she played the twice-divorced American for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne.Monti Spry/Central Press and Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesCynthia Lee Harris was born on Aug. 9, 1934, in Manhattan to Saul and Deborah Harris. Her father was a haberdasher, her mother a homemaker.After graduating from Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1951, she earned a degree in theater and literature from Smith College in Massachusetts. Afterward she worked as an assistant stage manager.Miss Harris made her New York City acting debut with an improvisational group called The Premise and then acted for eight years as a resident member of The Open Theater, an avant-garde ensemble. Her first film role was as Mary Desti in “Isadora” (1968), based on the life of Isadora Duncan and starring Vanessa Redgrave. She also had roles in the movies “Reuben, Reuben” (1983) and “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), among others.Playing Wallis Simpson may have been the closest Miss Harris came to stardom, but she had no shortage of roles on television, in theater and in film.She appeared on Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical “Company” in 1971 and in episodes of television shows including “Archie Bunker’s Place,” “All My Children,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “L.A. Law,” “Three’s Company” and “Sirota’s Court.”Miss Harris was familiar to radio listeners and TV viewers in the 1970s and ’80s as “Mrs. B” in commercials for the now defunct Bradlees discount department store chain.She married the theater manager and producer Eugene V. Wolsk in 1961; they divorced in 1972. She is survived by her brother, Dr. Matthew Harris; and her partner, Nathan Silverstein. More

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      The Flea Announces New Resident Company and a Focus on Black and Queer Artists

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      The Off Off Broadway theater, which ended programs for emerging artists in December, will return next year with a model that centers the work of underrepresented artists.The Flea, a notable Off Off Broadway company that discontinued its most prominent programs for emerging artists in December, effectively eliminating dozens of positions and provoking the ire of resident artists, announced a new model for its future and a new show. That model, unveiled on Thursday, focuses on supporting the work of underrepresented artists via self-contained, self-programming resident companies.“I’m really excited about it,” said Niegel Smith, the Flea’s artistic director since 2015 and one of the few Black artistic directors at a prominent New York theater. “The artists have total autonomy in making their work, and we’re making a long-term investment in a group of artists we care deeply about.”The first resident company will be the newly formed Fled Collective, composed of many of the members of the Flea’s former nonunion acting company, the Bats. It will have a three-year residency that comes with an unrestricted $10,000 cash grant and $50,000 in space rental credits each year, as well as production and marketing support and resources to develop new work. The company will have complete control over its artistic output and will focus on the work of artists of color and queer people.“Almost all the things we asked for, the Flea added into this partnership,” Dolores Pereira, a leader of the Fled Collective and a former member of the Bats, said in an interview. “It’s been a very collaborative process.”The theater will also begin a multiyear residency program for itinerant artistic companies. The first participant will be Emerge 125, a Black woman-led modern dance troupe that will receive creative, technical and producing support, discounted rental space, and access to office space for at least three years. The theater hopes to eventually support multiple companies in the program each year, Smith said.Pereira said the Fled Collective aims to be able to pay all its artists and plans to rely on the annual $10,000 cash grant and additional fund-raising to do so. The company has no cap on members and currently has at least 50, she said.The theater also restructured its board, with at least one seat now allotted to an artist from a resident company (board members remain volunteers, Smith said). He said the Flea, which has three paid staff members, aims to raise at least $850,000 to support programming and operations in the coming year.Since 2017, the Flea has operated out of a new, three-theater building in TriBeCa whose largest performing space holds about 100 seats. In the last few years, it has staged plays focusing on police brutality, gun violence and other timely issues: “The Fre,” a play by Taylor Mac that is partly a queer love story, was in previews when the pandemic forced it to close.The Flea also faced pushback for its reliance on unpaid artists, which boiled over in June 2020 when a number of the unpaid workers wrote a letter accusing the theater of “racism, sexism, gaslighting, disrespect and abuse.” The Flea then committed to begin paying all of its artists. But in December, it dissolved its programs for emerging artists, citing the financial effects of the pandemic.Through months of having meetings almost weekly, then holding a healing circle, and with the help of a Black woman-led consulting group, CJAM Consulting, the Flea and its artists set out repairing their relationships, Smith said. The theater’s staff also completed anti-oppression and antiracism training.“There definitely was a lot of hurt,” Pereira said. “But now it feels like a new relationship.”The first show of the new season (which is being produced by the Flea, not a resident company) will be “Arden: A Ritual for Love and Liberation,” slated for early 2022. That work was conceived by five artists including Carrie Mae Weems and Diana Oh and draws inspiration from the Forest of Arden from “As You Like It” — reimagined as a place where “queers, feminists and intellectuals dare to create the world that centers their desires.” It will be followed in June by four Juneteenth public art commissions that meld artists’ reflections on the holiday with work that honors Black culture. Additional productions will be announced at a later date, the theater said.Pereira hopes that organizations like the Fled Collective — which focus on empowering underrepresented artists — can serve as a blueprint for other companies, and help artists “reclaim their power.”“The harm done at the Flea is not unique to the Flea, but showcased throughout the theater community,” she said. More

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      in Theater

      From a Contemporary Drama Festival, Tales of Art and Survival

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      At Berlin’s FIND festival of new international drama, some plays tackle big themes while others reject being useful.BERLIN — Theater, according to the Spanish director and performer Angélica Liddell, is a sacrificial act. In the opening minutes of her new show, “Liebestod: The Smell of Blood Does Not Leave My Eyes, Juan Belmonte — Histoire(s) du Théâtre III,” she takes a razor blade and slashes at her kneecaps and the back of her hands. It’s a “sacrifice in the name of the absurd,” she explains in an online teaser for the production. “It’s not a sacrifice in pursuit of the greater good.”“Liebestod” is the centerpiece of this year’s FIND festival of new international drama at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin, where many of the 2021 entries flirt with the redemptive power of art as a tool for both survival and transcendence.The theatrical persona Liddell assumes in “Liebestod,” a monologue-fueled play about art, religion, Wagner and bullfighting, is loud, angry, self-destructive and startlingly musical.When she’s not singing, cooing or screeching along to Bach, Handel and Spanish flamenco rumba, she lashes out at the audience for their mediocrity, hypocrisy and middlebrow tastes from a sparsely decorated stage whose yellow floor and red curtains suggest a bullring.In extended soliloquies, Liddell rails against the spiritual and aesthetic decadence of contemporary “culture.” Nor does she spare herself from scathing criticism. As a result, the production contains a running commentary on its own status as art.“Liebestod” refers, of course, to Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” The term is often used as a shorthand for the opera’s radiant coda, where Isolde sings herself to death in a moment of transfiguring ecstasy. We never hear the aria in the production, although Liddell, dressed as a matador, recites the lyrics to the stuffed effigy of a bull.While bullfighting is a main trope of the production, “Liebestod” is also awash in Catholic symbolism. Liddell renders the liturgical in ways both disturbing and absurd, including in a scene in which she mops her own blood with bread, which she then eats. There’s also a double amputee dressed as Jesus and a coffin-shaped glass reliquary filled with live cats. Some of these images seem worthy of Buñuel (an artist Liddell reveres), although the atheistic filmmaker would rise from the dead to protest when Liddell endorses theocracy as a corrective to a society built on secular values.Although she lacerates herself and her audience (some of whom left; others giggled nervously; most applauded heartily), it is clear that Liddell considers art a wellspring of holy beauty. And at the moments when her production approaches the high-water mark of the art she so venerates, Liddell makes us feel how dazzled she is.While Liddell performs as if her every minute onstage were a fight for survival, she’s not the only person with work at the festival for whom making art seems a matter of life and death. The Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov spent 18 months under house arrest in Moscow on charges of embezzlement that are widely considered to be trumped up. During his long confinement (and the coronavirus lockdowns that came after it), Serebrennikov has directed plays, operas, films and even a ballet remotely. Much of his confinement-era work has dealt with persecution, paranoia and even incarceration, suggesting a therapeutic working through of themes that loom large in the director’s new reality.In 2017, Serebrennikov contacted the Chinese photographer Ren Hang about developing a play inspired by his arrestingly provocative images. Shortly afterward, Hang leapt to his death and Serebrennikov’s freedom of movement was curtailed. From his living room, he devised “Outside,” a phantasmagorical double exposure of himself and Hang that premiered at the 2019 Avignon Festival.In “Outside,” by Kirill Serebrennikov, erotic choreographies bring Ren Hang’s photos to life.Ira PolarAt the start of the performance, the American actor Odin Lund Biron plays a character who is similar to his director. He converses with his shadow about life in confinement and under surveillance. These early scenes, which depict a version of the director’s Kafkaesque ordeal from the inside, are the most dramatically absorbing in the play. Soon, however, Biron is all but supplanted by the suave Russian actor Evgeny Sangadzhiev, who plays the Chinese photographer. The stage fills with beautiful bodies, many naked or in various stages of undress.Much of the following 90 minutes is a series of erotic choreographies that bring Hang’s photos to life. While frequently arresting, the lengthy succession of tableaux vivants often feels arbitrary in its order and selection.“Outside,” though less hermetic than “Liebestod,” is similarly committed to art that is upfront about mining personal pain for the sort of rare beauty that can produce epiphany. For all of their differences, these two shows reflect the sensibilities of artists who are not afraid to practice their art as an end in itself.“I think that making theater into a tool is death to theater and death to art,” Liddell says in the “Liebestod” teaser. In the context of this year’s festival, that credo almost sounds like a warning to some of the other artists featured in the program.In “Not the End of the World,” the writer Chris Bush and the director Katie Mitchell run the risk of using theater to lecture the audience about the dangers of climate change. Bush is a young, acclaimed British playwright; Mitchell is arguably the most influential English theater maker working regularly on the continent. Sadly, their encounter is ill-fated.From left, Alina Vimbai Strähler, Veronika Bachfischer and Jule Böwe in Chris Bush’s “Not the End of the World.” Gianmarco BresadolaThe play toggles between time periods and plot lines at breakneck speed: a young climate scientist interviewing for a postdoctoral position; a researcher who dies during a research expedition; a woman delivering a eulogy for her mother.To their credit, Bush and Mitchell have consciously avoided making a militant play, but what they’ve given us is so slippery that it’s very difficult to get a handle on.The wealth of obscure or cosmically weird anecdotes that are stuffed into this collagelike text often make the play sound like “Findings,” the back-page feature of Harper’s Magazine that compiles wild facts from science journals.In keeping with the play’s theme, the entire production has been crafted with an eye to sustainability. The British team didn’t travel to Berlin for rehearsals; the sets and costumes have been recycled or repurposed; and the show’s sound and lighting is powered by two cyclists who pedal from the sides of the stage. Yet these facts don’t add much to the production.Another British production at FIND, Alexander Zeldin’s “Love,” also runs the risk of “making theater into a tool.” First seen at the National Theater in London in 2016, it centers on a family who have been suddenly evicted from their apartment and find themselves in a crowded shelter, struggling to maintain their dignity.Janet Etuk in “Love,” by Alexander Zeldin.Nurith Wagner-StraussThere are so many ways that a play like this could go wrong, but “Love” is neither earnest nor preachy. The themes are so elegantly dramatized, and the characters so beautiful rendered, that it winds up being politically urgent almost by stealth; the production’s emotional impact is surprising considered how economically it is put together.The immense set depicting the dreary residence plays a focusing role — for the actors, I imagine, as much as for the audience. This is naturalistic theater at its best, evoking the work of the filmmakers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.“Love” had me thinking that perhaps Liddell is too absolutist in her thinking. I’m not saying it’s easy, but in the right artist’s hands, theater that is alive to social and political issues can be an occasion for beauty and transcendence.FIND 2021 continues at the Schaubühne through Oct. 10 More

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      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

      by

      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More