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      ‘Is This a Room’ Review: A Transcript Becomes a Thrilling Thriller

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      Beneath the dry words of an F.B.I. interview, a new play unearths a world of interior terror.Short of grocery lists, raw transcripts may be the most boring things ever written. With their halts and hesitations and dust bunnies of fuzzy logic, they beg to be thoroughly tidied before use, and disposed of quickly after.Nevertheless, a 65-minute verbatim transcript has now become the basis for one of the thrillingest thrillers ever to hit Broadway. “Is This a Room,” which opened on Monday at the Lyceum Theater, turns the ums and stutters and bizarre non sequiturs of recorded speech into astonishing — and astonishingly emotional — theater.How does mind-numbing banality become heart-racing excitement? In “Is This a Room,” the transcript is only the starting point. More salient is the way the production, conceived and directed by Tina Satter, views the document through an expressionistic lens, allowing Emily Davis, in a heartbreaking performance, to make words into windows on a world of interior terror.Davis plays the ironically named (yet quite real) Reality Winner, who on June 3, 2017, returning from some Saturday chores, finds F.B.I. men waiting outside the barely furnished house she rents in Augusta, Ga. They have come, one of them tells her, “about, uh, possible mishandling of classified information.”“Oh my goodness,” she replies. “Okay.”At first you believe her when she insists she has “no idea” what the agents are referring to. In cutoff denim shorts, a white button-down shirt and yellow high-tops that perfectly replicate what Winner wore that day — the costumes are by Enver Chakartash — she seems like a teenager. She often sounds like one too, with a hiccuppy delivery and an excuse-my-existence upspeak.But she is 25, keeps three guns and, as she later confirms, has top-secret clearance with a local military contractor, where she works as a linguist specializing in Farsi, Dari and Pashto.If those languages of South and Central Asia make you think Winner has mishandled documents about the war in Afghanistan, that’s a red herring — or rather, a pink one; wherever the F.B.I. transcript redacts information as sensitive, as it does when the specific subject of the leak is discussed, the stage lights blink pink for a moment. A scary “Law & Order”-style thunk may also jolt you from your seat.Pink lighting punctuates moments when pieces of the actual F.B.I. transcript have been redacted. Becca Blackwell, left, portrays the third agent alongside Cobbs and Simpson. Davis is at right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe superb lighting (by Thomas Dunn) and sound (by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada) are just two weapons in Satter’s arsenal of disorienting effects. Aiming, as she recently told The New York Times, to imagine what “Reality is feeling second by second,” she avoids naturalism, which would hide those feelings — there’s barely a set — in favor of an almost sculptural abstraction, increasing and abating tension by the shaping and massing of bodies in space.So as the interview zips along, and Winner, a CrossFit aficionado, realizes she has been caught in an action she can barely justify even to herself, we watch as she seems to decompose muscle by muscle. Her hands wring and flop, her hips give way and finally her torso drops perpendicular to the floor so her tears drip down as if from a leaky showerhead.It’s hard not to cry with her, especially when “Is This a Room,” named for a strange question asked by one of the agents, gets you there without gimmicks. It does not present Winner as a lefty firebrand or a noble whistle-blower but as a maddeningly squirmy, fed-up desk jockey.Nor are the agents demonized. Pete Simpson as the smiley one, Will Cobbs as the wary one and Becca Blackwell as a hilariously oblivious “unknown male” all excel at mitigating their implicit menace with varieties of insouciance. Still, their glad-handing and good ol’ boy chivalry barely disguise their own nervousness; they are just as lost in their absurd script as Winner is in hers, whether huddling in a pack as if to man up or getting right in her face with small talk.Yet has small talk ever seemed so big? Though at least half of the transcript finds the men aimlessly — almost flirtatiously — gabbing with Winner about their own CrossFit experiences and pets they have known, eventually they can’t help revealing a subtext too deep and cold for words. That subtext concerns gender, and part of the fear you feel for Winner comes from the unequal distribution of the sexes. She feels it too: When she offers the information that her dog and cat, both female, “don’t like men,” she adds, in a joke that curdles instantly, “Starting to see a trend here.”Davis (with Simpson) delivers a heartbreaking performance as a linguist who received a five-year prison sentence for leaking documents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed. Winner, who later admitted guilt in a plea bargain, was the first person sentenced under the Espionage Act after President Trump cracked down on leaks upon entering office. According to a Times report, hers was the longest sentence — more than five years — “ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.” And even though she was granted an early release this June for “exemplary behavior,” she is still prohibited from making public statements or appearances.Plays based on transcripts would seem to face a similar prohibition, their verbatim nature acting as a hard brake on editorial indulgence. (Another transcript-based play, “Dana H.,” by Lucas Hnath, opens next week at the Lyceum, where it will run on an alternating schedule with “Is This a Room.”) Yet in practice, such works are sometimes richer than fiction, if not in words then in implication.For me, the implications of “Is This a Room” are clear. The documents Winner leaked to a publication called The Intercept contained proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election, interference President Trump was at pains to deny. However wrong her actions, I find it difficult not to connect the dots between her excessive punishment and Mr. Trump’s many other attempts to shame and silence women, whether Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford.Far from mitigating the play’s power, such hindsight deepens it; it’s a story that can’t be spoiled. Even if you saw “Is This a Room” when Satter’s company, Half Straddle, premiered it Off Off Broadway at the Kitchen in January 2019, or at the Vineyard Theater later that year, its drama would not be diminished now.That’s because, to the extent it is a mystery, the question is not what Winner did but what doing it did to her. “Is This a Room” asks whether it’s possible to live in a lawless world without becoming lawless ourselves. Is there a room for that? The answer, I’m afraid, is not in the transcript.Is This a RoomThrough Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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      Maryann Plunkett Says Goodbye to Her Lives in Rhinebeck

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      She has portrayed three characters over the course of the 12 plays in Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama.” A decade later, it’s time to move on.Talking with the actress Maryann Plunkett recently, it was hard to know, at times, whether she was speaking as herself or Barbara, Mary or Kate — the three characters she has played over the course of Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama” cycle.Plunkett, 68, has, after all, spent a lot of time immersed in Nelson’s created world: She and her husband, Jay O. Sanders, have appeared in each of the Rhinebeck cycle’s 12 plays. And when the final installment, “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” closed on Sunday, she ended an 11-year journey that documented the lives of three families in upstate New York.There were the Apples, who lived through and reminisced about epochal moments in American history, such as Sept. 11, and came together on Zoom during the pandemic lockdown. Then came the Gabriels, whom Nelson visited three times during the 2016 presidential election year. And after that, the Michaels, an artistic family facing the death of its matriarch, a luminary of modern dance.Along with her husband, Jay O. Sanders, Plunkett has performed in each of the 12 Rhinebeck plays.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett, right, hugging her fellow cast member Rita Wolf before “What Happened?”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett made her Broadway debut in 1983, replacing Carrie Fisher (herself replacing Amanda Plummer) in “Agnes of God,” and opened the musical “Me and My Girl” as the lead three years later. But while she had established herself as a New York treasure, seeing Plunkett in Nelson’s plays, with their profoundly humane intertwining of politics and family relationships, felt revelatory. Over the years, you could see the most subtle emotions float on her face; she would draw the audience in without appearing to be acting at all.Barbara, Nelson said, is “sort of the heart” of the Apple family. “And that’s very much something that comes out of Maryann just naturally,” he added. “She’s an extraordinarily truthful actor, and because of that each time it’s alive, it’s fresh, it’s real. And it’s present, it’s immediate.”With the conclusion of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett is taking on other projects, including a new musical in development and the Kelly Reichardt film “Showing Up,” in which she plays Michelle Williams’s mother.None of that, though, makes leaving her Rhinebeck characters any easier. In a video interview from her home in Manhattan ahead of the last performance, Plunkett talked Apples and pimentos, a certain election night and moving on. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.The “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett said, “has been the experience of my lifetime.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThere are similarities among the three women you have played in the cycle, yet they are not the same people at all. How did you work it out with Richard Nelson?His writing is so specific, without giving you directions on how to do it, that you would just go: “Oh, only Barbara would say this,” or “Kate would never say this.” So it’s very clear without being obvious that, yeah, this is Barbara’s soul, this is Mary’s soul, this is Kate’s soul. I mean, who gets a chance to do a project like this in their lives? Not a lot of people. And to do it with your husband? What a gift that we have been given.And you never played a couple in the cycle.[laughs] No! We were brothers and sisters, then he was my brother-in-law, and in this one I’m the widow of his ex-wife. It was very easy to play brother and sister because we really like each other, and we’re playful with each other. I suppose in a strange way maybe you don’t want to play lovers or something because people might go “Oh, they have no chemistry together.” That would be really embarrassing.The characters all feel real, and lived in. Did anything particularly resonate with you?My mom died three weeks before our first read-through of the first Apple play. She had dementia, and I spent a lot of time with her. Uncle Benjamin, in the Apple plays, had a stroke. It wasn’t dementia, but it manifested itself in things that are similar to dementia, and I felt a great closeness. The yearning maybe was for my own mother, with the protectiveness and responsibility toward him. So much so that after the final performance of the fourth play I said to John DeVries, who played Benjamin, “I feel like I’m having to say goodbye to my mother again.”“Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know,” Plunkett said. “They will move forward.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe conclusion of the Gabriels trilogy, “Women of a Certain Age,” takes place on election night 2016. What was it like to do the show, at the Public Theater, that specific evening?After the play they had a reception downstairs, and they had monitors all around the lobby. I was looking at Richard, and I said, “Oh come on, how bad can it be?” And he said, “Don’t look” [laughs]. And this pall fell over the crowd. My son and his girlfriend were there, it was only the second election they had ever voted in. The next night we were, mercifully, off. When we came back on Thursday, the audience was so somber. Things that used to be a laugh line — it was just these sounds of grief.Food has played a central part in the shows. In the Gabriels plays, you even had to cook in real time. Was it hard to focus on your lines?There was a lot to prepare: Slicing a sausage or an onion, and some things had to be in the oven by a certain time. Of course I’m not looking at a timer, it had to be in by a certain line. It’s almost like music: There is a rhythm. This one [“What Happened?”] is the first play where I have nothing to do, preparing or serving the dinner, and during rehearsal it was weird for me. “Can I do this?” “No, you can’t come in and start cooking; this isn’t your home.”Sanders, left, with Plunkett and Nelson. The trio have worked together on the Rhinebeck plays for over a decade.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesWhat has it been like to spend 11 years on this project?It has been the experience of my lifetime. Our son was in high school, and now he’s 27 years old. My mom had just died, my dad had died three and a half years before the first play. It’s crazy. When we did the 9/11 one, “Sweet and Sad,” you could tell when there were people in the audience who had perhaps lost someone because you would feel the grief. And some nights in this one, when I’m talking about Rose’s death and say it was the virus, sometimes you will hear reactions [makes a gasping sound]. And it’s very hard to just stay focused.What is it like to face down the last performance?I have to say to myself, “We’re going to do a tour” [laughs]. I can’t be self-indulgent and go “Oh my God, it’s over, poor me!” The other day during the show, I got emotional so I picked up the jar of pimentos on the table, and that grounded me. I held on to them until I finished that section. Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know. They will move forward.It looked like he was done with the Apples after four plays, but then he wrote three more for Zoom. Is the “Rhinebeck Panorama” really finished?Sad as I am to say that, yes, I believe it is. It’s this decade, in this country, and in the lives of these three families. And the decade is over, plus one. More

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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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      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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      in Television

      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