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      Review: ‘Pass Over’ Comes to Broadway, in Horror and Hope

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      Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play about young Black men in peril inaugurates the new season with unexpected joy.On Wednesday night, when a preshow announcement informed the 1,200 or so people at the August Wilson Theater that they were “one of the first audiences back to see a real Broadway play,” the response was the kind of roar you’d expect for a beloved diva returning from rehab. And “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, does not disappoint in that regard. Having survived pandemic jitters (so far) and its own circuitous path to get there, it emerged like a star: in top shape, at full throttle and refreshed by some artful doctoring.If it seems strange to talk about a tragedy in such terms, keep in mind that though “Pass Over” is forthrightly centered on the plight of two young Black men in an urban police state, its ambition is so far-reaching that it embraces (and in Danya Taymor’s thriller of a production, succeeds as) comedy, melodrama and even vaudeville. In that, it emulates the vision and variety of its most direct sources: “Waiting for Godot,” the Samuel Beckett play about tramps biding their time in eternity, and the Book of Exodus, about an enslaved people seeking the Promised Land.In “Pass Over,” the tramps and the enslaved are combined in the characters of Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood). They are men of our current time who live on the streets of a city not unlike Chicago, yet also on a pre-Emancipation plantation and in Egypt more than three millenniums ago.The history of slavery everywhere is a heavy symbolic weight for individual characters to carry, but the suffering of men like Moses and Kitch in a racist society right now is not out of proportion to that of their forebears. When they try to make a list of everyone they know who has “been kilt” by the police, it takes a very long time to name them while also distinguishing their particulars. Among many others there are Ed with the dreadlocks (not light-skinned Ed), “dat tall dude got dat elbow rash,” Kev and “dat otha” Kev, Mike with “dat messed up knee.”They expect at any moment to be next.Yet as Moses and Kitch move through a day’s attempts at diversion from this horror, including their oft-rehearsed roughhousing routines and games of “Promised Land Top 10” — Kitch wants a pair of new (but “not thrift store new”) Air Jordans — Nwandu forces us to look beyond their struggle to their full humanity. Despite their encounters with a clueless white gentleman called Mister and an enraged police officer called Ossifer (both played by Gabriel Ebert) they remain witty and warmhearted, belligerent only to cover their need for each other, and filled with big dreams accompanied by the almost unbearable burden of hope.Their biggest dream is to “pass over” — an equivocal phrase that shifts its meaning as the 95-minute play moves through various theatrical genres. (There’s no intermission; in an introduction to the script, Nwandu writes that if Moses and Kitch can’t leave, “neither can you.”)At first, “pass over” means simply to get off the streets: to achieve, if not the fine foods and soft sheets on their Top 10 lists, then at least a decent meal and a bed that is not made of sidewalk. Later the phrase takes on larger meaning as their plight evokes and even merges with that of Black people escaping slavery and the biblical Israelites recalled on Passover. Yet later it becomes part of a suicide pact by which they hope to end their suffering together, and “pass over” into paradise.Many of these moments may be familiar to you if you know “Waiting for Godot,” in which Beckett’s tramps similarly rehearse old routines, contemplate hanging themselves from a spindly tree, deal with mystifying visitors and share their moldy turnips. (In “Pass Over,” the tree becomes a lamppost; the turnips, a pizza crust.) Yet even in earlier versions of the play — originally produced by Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2017, then filmed by Spike Lee and revised for Lincoln Center Theater in 2018 — Nwandu never bound herself to her templates, leaving Beckett’s absurdism behind as the needs of her particular story required. Those needs took her to strange places.From left, Smallwood, Hill and Gabriel Ebert, as Ossifer, who is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn rewriting for Broadway, she has gone even further. Not only has she decided to push the play past tragedy into something else, but she has also, in its last 10 minutes, let its innate surrealism fully flower in a daring and self-consciously theatrical way. (The transformation is gorgeously rendered in Wilson Chin’s scenic design, Marcus Doshi’s lighting, Justin Ellington’s sound and even, in their removal, Sarafina Bush’s costumes.) Somehow Nwandu gives us the recognition of horror that has informed drama since the Greeks while also providing the relief of joy — however irrational — that calls to mind the ecstasies of gospel, splatter flicks and classic musicals, all of which are sampled.Taymor’s production could hardly support that vision better. Though I was at first troubled by how strongly she stresses the comedy — given the almost ritualized clowning, it was no surprise to see Bill Irwin credited as a movement consultant — it soon became clear that allowing the humor full rein allows the same to terror. In pushing both extremes further forward, often letting them spill into the theater with winks and shocks, Taymor asks the audience to accept its role in the story and perhaps also its complicity.She has also shaped the performances, which were already excellent three years ago, into something that seems to go deeper than acting. Like Laurel and Hardy, who were surely among Beckett’s models for his tramps, Hill and Smallwood have a kind of anti-chemistry that draws them closer the more they squabble.Hill, as befits a character named Moses, has the heavier burden of a vision to carry out; you can see his body resist the weight and then wonderfully, if only temporarily, lift it. Smallwood, as Kitch, the epitome of a pesky younger brother, knows just how to get under Moses’s skin because that’s where he needs to be for safety. For both of them, “You feel me?” is almost a password.Of course, when Mister hears it, he fails to understand. “I’d rather not,” he says.As Mister, Ebert manages the virtuoso trick of making obtuseness both weird and charming, at least for a while. But watch him try to sit down at one point, his lanky body becoming an expression of hypocrisy as he snakes one way then slumps the other. Later, when Ebert returns as Ossifer, hard and unbending, you barely know him, and certainly don’t want to.Ossifer is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Yet Nwandu’s larger view makes the choice to write him that way more than an expedience. Without ever forgetting its origin in American racism, “Pass Over” broadens to include every kind of -ism, including the ultimately unanswerable one of existentialism. She is asking not only why Black men must live in fear of having their bodily integrity stolen but also why all humans must, in any age and place.And if she waffles a bit near the end, never quite landing the final leap across the river, she lets us bathe in the hope of it anyway. After all, as the roar at the start of the show announced, we have already begun to pass over some things; the existence of “Pass Over” on Broadway is proof of that. Do we dare to hope that as a new season begins, new promised lands are possible too?Pass OverTickets Through Oct. 10 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; passoverbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Staging ‘The Glass Menagerie’ on the Fire Escapes That Inspired It

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      At Tennessee Williams’s childhood apartment in St. Louis, one of his most famous works has become an immersive event.ST. LOUIS — There’s a knowing twinkle in Tom Wingfield’s eye.He’s standing out on the second-floor fire escape, delivering the opening monologue of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” like a magician who knows his audience recognizes the trick. Wingfield, the play’s narrator and a thinly veiled self-portrait of Williams himself, played here by Bradley James Tejeda, sets the scene: “I take you back to an alley in St. Louis.”And there’s that twinkle, reminding us where we are.We’re not just in St. Louis, where Williams grew up and where his semi-autobiographical memory play unfolds. And not just in an alley, in the parking lot behind a fire-escape-covered apartment building much like the one where the Wingfield family might reside.Brenda Currin, left, and Bradley James Tejeda on a fire escape at 4633 Westminster Place in St. Louis.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesWe are on the corner of Westminster and Walton in the city’s Central West End neighborhood, outside the actual apartment building where Williams once lived. These are the fire escapes that likely helped inspire “The Glass Menagerie” in the first place.Williams’s family moved to 4633 Westminster Place — now called “The Tennessee” — from Mississippi in 1918, when Williams was 7, and lived there for four years before moving elsewhere in the city. He was long gone by the time he wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” his first hit, in 1944 — but this production, which opened Thursday from the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis, still feels unexpectedly immersive, with a set that stretches from a small stage in the parking lot to the existing maze of metal walkways that cover the side of the building.“We’re using fire escapes that he probably walked on,” the director, Brian Hohlfeld, said in an interview the week of opening night, adding, “It is very humbling and very daunting.”Hohlfeld and Carrie Houk, the festival’s executive artistic director, had initially targeted a local auditorium with ties to Williams’s early theater career for a 2020 “Menagerie” production. (That edition, last November, became a radio play.) As they weighed venue options for this year’s festival with health and safety considerations during the pandemic, the apartments seemed to be a serendipitous fit.The director, Brian Hohlfeld, left, and the executive artistic director, Carrie Houk, before a performance.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesHouk tracked down the owner of the building through Airbnb, where most of the nine units are available to rent — “The boyhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams” is listed as a main draw, with the going rate at the time of publication around $160 a night. The owner, Houk said in an interview, gave an immediate yes.Hohlfeld, a St. Louis native who now lives in California, and the cast — which also includes Brenda Currin, Elizabeth Teeter and Chauncy Thomas — are staying on location in the apartments during the run, which ends on Aug. 29. The housing decision was made, in part, to meet the Actors’ Equity Association’s ventilation guidelines — and frankly, Houk said, they needed the doorway. Many of the show’s entrances and exits are made through the back door of one of the units, to and from the second-floor fire escape.The festival has had the typical concerns that most open-air productions have — mainly, the unpredictability of St. Louis weather in August. But unlike other outdoor undertakings here — the Muny and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival have both dealt with their fair share of rainy Missouri summers — putting on a show in an active neighborhood, on a residential street, comes with its own challenges.“Yesterday during rehearsal, this guy comes out to empty his trash. He walked down three stories with his trash bag, and we had to direct him toward the trash bin,” Hohlfeld said. “He was polite enough to go around front when he came back.”Opening night conditions were slightly better. Actors only had to compete with a car alarm, a distant siren or two and a passing car’s thumping bass in the alley.Watching a play on a residential street comes with challenges.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesBut, Hohlfeld conceded, the ambience can also add something neat: “Occasionally lights will be turned on in the units, turned off, and it just gives it real life.”At least from the outside, nearby residents don’t seem to mind the noise — most passers-by on Thursday night stopped to take in a scene or two from the sidewalk, and a neighbor gave a standing ovation from the porch next door.“One of the things we were worried about is the neighbors complaining,” Houk said, “but I think they’re fascinated by it.”St. Louis is admittedly an odd location for a festival celebrating Williams, considering that it’s a place he notoriously despised. “When the Williams family moved to St. Louis from the South, it was a different St. Louis than it is now,” Houk said.Houk, who added that getting the festival started several years ago was a “battle” for that reason, thinks Williams didn’t hate the city so much as his family’s circumstances, many of which are on display in “The Glass Menagerie.”“It’s really about how he was trying desperately to get out of St. Louis, but at the same time, it captures the city and why he wanted to get out,” Hohlfeld said. “I think if he had moved here at a different time, he might have had a different attitude.”Still, the script is riddled with plenty of St. Louis references, all of which serve as additional winks to the audience: mentions of Washington University, where Williams attended for a time, and of several institutions in Forest Park (a bucolic spot that easily rivals Central Park, to anyone you ask here) — the art museum, the zoo’s massive 1904 World’s Fair bird cage and the Jewel Box greenhouse.And on Thursday night, in case any further reminder was needed of exactly where we were, one man stretching his legs during intermission posed the most familiar and inconsequential St. Louis greeting there is: Where, he wondered, did Williams go to high school? 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      Dudes on Ice: A Play About Hockey Tackles Masculinity, Too

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      “Islander,” a skewed look at a New York Islanders season, examines extreme fandom, violence and the thrill of sports.Hockey is a brutal game: In what other sport are missing teeth a badge of honor? Not that Liza Birkenmeier and Katie Brook were in any danger of losing Chiclets as they stared down a puck: Not only were they playing air hockey instead of the ice-rink version, but they also seemed to prefer huddling on the same side of the table rather than face each other.Clearly Birkenmeier, a playwright, and Brook, a director, like being on the same team. They started working together almost 10 years ago and their fruitful collaboration includes the well-received “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” and the new “Islander,” a skewed look at the New York Islanders’ fateful 2017-18 season, when the team failed to make the playoffs and its star, John Tavares, was about to become a free agent. (The show was originally slated for March 2020 and opened Saturday at HERE Arts Center.)There have been quite a few sports-themed plays by women in recent years, most notably Sarah DeLappe’s soccer-centric hit “The Wolves” and Lydia R. Diamond’s portrait of a barrier-shattering baseball player, “Toni Stone,” but they have focused on the female athletic experience.“Islander,” on the other hand, zeros in on “dudes doing dude stuff,” as Birkenmeier put it. An extreme version of dude stuff: Professional hockey is “unhinged and violent and white,” she said. In other words, it provides a fine lens through which to look at modern masculinity and its discontents.John Tavares playing for the New York Islanders in 2017. He was the team’s star and was about to become a free agent.Nick Wass/Associated PressTo do so, Birkenmeier, 35, and Brook, 39, pulled lines from game commentary and analysis, and podcasts like “Islanders Anxiety.” Then those sources were edited into a quasi-monologue for a composite character referred to simply as Man (David Gould) — so “Islander” is also a sly reflection on solo shows by the likes of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray.There is a certain affection, too, as Birkenmeier and Brook enjoy watching hockey, not just using it as a decoder ring for male behavior. A few days before previews started, the two women turned up at a Brooklyn games emporium for a chat about pucks and violence. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The show’s narrator is obsessive, whiny, triumphant, analytical, bellicose, despondent — all the stages of fandom. What impression are you trying to create?LIZA BIRKENMEIER We’re highlighting the ridiculousness of his struggle as opposed to empathizing with it.KATIE BROOK We’re leaning into the haplessness of it: It’s not a hero’s journey, although he thinks it is. The dance we do is to engage the audience enough that you think you’re going along with him and then you kind of back off.Do you think professional sports foster a kind of stereotypical masculinity, or do they help channel it so the rest of us are a little bit safer?BROOK [Laughs] It’s a good outlet but it also reinforces things that I think are bad. Amateur sports are actually wonderful and must be kept separate in some ways, but professional sports, in part just because of the basics of capitalism, have to be violent and extreme. Basketball is not that way.BIRKENMEIER Or baseball. Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy. It’s part of the sensationalism. I do think it’s very poisonous. The ideas of legacy and dignity and loyalty come up so violently.According to Birkenmeier, right, “Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesWhy do you think theater hasn’t really tackled hard-core fandoms, either in sports or pop culture, considering the huge part they play in modern life?BROOK I don’t think there’s a lot of satire in theater these days. That may be part of it. Also a well-made play is based on things that we should all be able to relate to, like real estate. A lot of them hinge on the loss of the family home or whatever — some big events that everyone can agree is a big deal. But people can’t really relate to most obsessions. Those people are all on the same page about how important it is — it’s for them, not for us.BIRKENMEIER Sometimes we underestimate that sports is better theater: It’s so much like a play except you literally don’t know what’s going to happen and somebody has to win. A hockey game as a community event is potentially more exciting than a play.BROOK Well, most people think that.What was it like researching the show?BIRKENMEIER Watching the games at bars, I would sit and take notes and men would quiz me. They wouldn’t believe that I was into it. They would ask, “Who’s your favorite player?”BROOK That’s a softball question.BIRKENMEIER It is, and often they’d be like, “Is your favorite player John Tavares?” Or ask me what I thought of the last game. Or ask me what I thought of the new or old management, or whose contract was going to be up.BROOK Insulting flirting: They want to show that they’re smarter than you, but it’s supposed to be a flirtation.BIRKENMEIER Oh my God, I never took it as flirtation! I would have been more flattered. One guy was really excited about the play.Did you go to many games as well?BROOK We went to a bunch of games in Brooklyn and no one was there. After John Tavares left the [Islanders] and joined the [Toronto] Maple Leafs, I went to Nassau Coliseum at the first game against the Leafs and it was horrific. The fans were so angry, they kept yelling “We don’t need you!” every time John came on the ice. It was scary, actually. It’s not a show about violence but there is a sort of underlying fear that this guy [the narrator] is threatening, somehow.BIRKENMEIER I generally think it’s important to be funny. It’s very easy to take this and to take a serious skewering look at it.BROOK No one needs to suffer right now.BIRKENMEIER Let’s have fun, you know? More

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      La MaMa’s Season Includes an Indigenous Take on Shakespeare

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      A version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is planned, along with the company’s puppet series, an examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and more.In a season that is expected to include the reopening of its flagship theater after a three-year, $24 million renovation, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present an Indigenous take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a vaudeville concert that explores the history of cannabis.“We’re in a revolutionary time right now,” Mia Yoo, the artistic director of the theater, on the Lower East Side, said in an interview, “and we need to think about who the voices are that we need to look to to guide us.”The original home of La MaMa, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is at 74A East Fourth Street. It is slated to reopen in January with two flexible, acoustically separated theaters; green rooms; a cafe; and an open-air roof terrace. All of the shows this season will take place at two of the company’s other spaces — the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs, both at 66 East Fourth Street. When 74A is reopened there will be an additional slate of productions announced.The season will kick off with the La MaMa Puppet Series (Sept. 27-Oct. 24), a biannual festival of new contemporary puppet theater. It will be followed by in-person and online performances of “A Few Deep Breaths” (Oct. 27-30), a collaboration among seven writers, including Adrienne Kennedy, Chuck Mee and Robert Patrick, that premiered online at La MaMa in June and is a co-presentation with CultureHub, La MaMa’s digital arts division.The world premiere of James E. Reynolds’s “History/Our Story: The Trail to Tulsa” will run Dec. 9 through Dec. 12. Dance, music and spoken word performances will examine the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of America’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence. There will be a post-performance audience discussion following the show.In January, La MaMa, HERE Arts Center and the Prototype Festival will present the world premiere of Talvin Wilks and Baba Israel’s “Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville,” exploring the history of the plant through music, dance and spoken word. Also in January, the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s “God’s Fool,” an interpretation of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, will have its world premiere.The world premiere of “Misdemeanor Dream,” a Native American adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will open in March. The production, which has a cast of 20 Indigenous actors, will be performed by Spiderwoman Theater, an all-women Native American company, and directed by Muriel Miguel, the company’s founder and artistic director.Later in the spring, Qendra Multimedia, a Kosovo-based cultural organization that focuses on contemporary theater and literature, and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company will present the U.S. premiere of “Balkan Bordello,” a play aiming to expose the fragility of democracy within the framework of Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia. And concluding the season, in May, will be the New York premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s reimagined musical composition “The Beautiful Lady,” which adapts the words of Russian poets who lived and performed in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It will be directed by Anne Bogart, one of the founders of SITI Company, which will take its final bow in 2022.Audience members must show proof of vaccination to attend performances, and masks are required at all times. Children under the age of 12 are welcome, but must be masked. For more information, visit lamama.org. More

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      ‘The Opposite of Airlines’: When Larger Audiences Require Fewer Seats

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      Yes, the comfy chair. The War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco put in roomier seats just in time to try to lure audiences back from the couches they got used to during the shutdown.SAN FRANCISCO — Wagner was the worst. Five hours — sometimes more — of squirming in 1932-era seats at the War Memorial Opera House here, sinking into lumpy, dusty cushions, suffering the bulge of the springs and the pinch of the wide armrests, craning for a glimpse of the stage around the head of the tall person one row ahead.“Particularly on a long opera — oh my God,” said Tapan Bhat, a tech executive and a season-ticket holder at the San Francisco Opera since 1996.When the San Francisco Opera opens Saturday, starting its scaled-back 99th season with Puccini’s “Tosca” after a shutdown of more than a year, those punishing seats will be gone. The opera has used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace all 3,128 seats with more comfortable, roomier ones. The opera used its forced sabbatical to complete a long-planned $3.53 million project to replace its 3,128 seats. Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesAnd San Francisco is not alone. Theaters, concert halls and sports arenas around the country have been increasingly investing in comfort in recent years — with wider and plusher seats — to try to accommodate audiences that have grown in breadth, if not in numbers. In the early 1960s, when the War Memorial Opera House was only a few decades old, the average weight of adult men in the United States was 168 pounds, according to federal data; it is now 199.8 pounds.Since the pandemic struck, the owners of theaters and live venues have come to see such investments as more urgent than ever. As coronavirus restrictions are dropped, presenters face the challenge of luring back patrons who, during more than a year without theaters, have grown accustomed to consuming home entertainment from the sprawling comfort of their own couches and recliners.“The entire patron experience has really been under a lot of scrutiny,” said Gary F. Martinez, a partner with OTJ Architects, a Washington-based firm. “Venues are working diligently to improve that experience. We’ve never spent so much time on seats.”The Lyric Opera of Chicago put in wider seats in the summer of 2020, following the example of the Music Hall in Cincinnati and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. On Broadway, where older theaters have been notorious for cramped quarters, the Hudson Theater added wider seats during a recent renovation. The seats in the new Yankee Stadium are wider than those in the old one, and venues including the Daytona Speedway and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore added wider seats during recent renovations.The old seats were thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, and had wide armrests that made them feel narrower.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesEven before the shutdown, audience members of all sizes were growing accustomed to ever-larger, ever-sharper television screens with an ever-broader array of streaming options. And when people did go out, many had seen the what-could-be potential in movie theaters that had installed wide, comfortable stadium-style seats, which recline and have slots for drinks and, sometimes, trays for snacks. Why pay as much as 20 times the cost of a movie — tickets at the San Francisco Opera go for up to $398 a seat — to be scrunched up in a cramped holdover from the last century?“I think anything we can do to break down barriers and improve the experience we should be doing,” said Matthew Shilvock, the general director of the San Francisco Opera. “If someone is having an uncomfortable evening at the opera that is an experience they should not be having.”“The seats have historically been patrons’ No. 1 concern for the building,” he said. “Letters to me. Letters to the box office. Letters to the city. And with some justification. We had springs coming through some of the seats.”San Francisco put in its new seats just in time for the reopening of the opera and the San Francisco Ballet, which share the stage of the War Memorial. The new seats have wooden backs, which could improve the acoustics, and cup holders. (No clinky ice cubes will be allowed, though.)Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesThe new, ergonomically tuned chairs are slightly higher, roomier and firmer than the old ones. There is 2.5 inches more leg room, and the chairs have been staggered to improve sightlines, giving even the shortest operagoers and balletomanes a better shot at seeing what is taking place onstage. The seat widths are about the same as before, ranging from 19 inches to 23 inches, but the new armrests are narrower, making seats feel roomier. And there are cup holders for those who want to bring a drink to their seat. (Ice, though, with all its clinking distractions, is not permitted).Comfort comes at a cost: This will mean a loss of 114 seats, and the revenue they bring.The situation in Chicago was not quite as dire as in San Francisco — its seats were at least renovated in 1993 — but they were decidedly in need of replacement. The widths of Lyric seats ranged from 18 to 22 inches before the renovation; now they range from 19 to 23 inches. The number of seats there was reduced from 2,564 to 2,274.“We are doing the opposite of airlines,” said Michael Smallwood, the technical director at the Lyric Opera, referring to the practice of cramming more narrow seats onto planes. “Now you can sit at home and watch Netflix. People want to be comfortable. Operas want to be long. People expect different things.”“To put it bluntly, it takes a lot more effort to sell a ticket these days,” Smallwood said. “You want it to be comfortable so they’ll be here again.”Many of the seats in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center home, David Geffen Hall, will be a bit wider as well when its current renovation is complete. While most of the seats in its old hall were 20 inches wide or less, more than three-quarters of the new seats will be 21 inches wide or wider.The San Francisco Opera will return to the opera house on Saturday with “Tosca.” Alfred Walker, left, and Michael Fabiano sang at a recent rehearsal.Cory WeaverThe seat backs in San Francisco were once covered with cushioning. The back of each seat is now wood; doing away with that cushioning means more leg room for those sitting behind. “I am 6-foot-1 without shoes,” said Danielle St. Germain-Gordon, the interim executive director of the San Francisco Ballet. “And I have very long legs. They were the type of seats that when I sat in them, my knees came up to my belly button.”The old seats at the War Memorial had become vintage relics, thick with faded cushioning and challenging to climb out of, a particular concern to the opera crowd, which tends to skew older.“Like those seats you saw when you went to your grandma’s,” said Jennifer E. Norris, the assistant managing director of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, who oversaw the project. “You know, when your grandma had her favorite chair and it sits a little too low, and was a little too worn.”With uncushioned seat backs, the sound in the hall should be crisper. “Applause won’t die in the room, so you’ll have a great sense of enthusiasm around you,” Norris said. “It’s also possible the lady with the candy wrapper will annoy us more. I am hoping that peer pressure will remind her to unwrap her candy before the performance begins.”The renovation began in 2013 with replacement of seats on the box level, and it includes 12 bariatric seats, designed to hold weights of up to 300 pounds, that will be 28 inches wide, as well as 38 spaces for wheelchairs, an increase of six from before the renovation. The project was funded by a ticket fee ranging from $1 to $3.The new seats were designed by Ducharme Seating of Montreal, which also installed seats at the renovated David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, as well as halls in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Toronto. The historical nature of the Beaux-Arts building near San Francisco City Hall — it opened in 1932 — and the exacting demands of its high-end opera house and ballet made this project particularly complicated.“This is the most extensive design we have ever done on a seat,” said Eric Rocheleau, the president of Ducharme Seating. “The opera houses are always the most stringent customers.”Germain-Gordon said that theaters probably have little choice but to invest this kind of money as the world slowly returns to normal after the pandemic. “People can have in their home a beautiful media room,” she said. “Back in the olden days, if you wanted to see something you had to go see it. Nobody had TVs the size of movie screens, or La-Z-Boys. But people are investing in their comfort and they want to see it when they go out.”Bhat, the tech executive, said anything would be better than the seats he had suffered over 25 years of long nights at the opera.“They were creaky,” he said. “The upholstery would be fraying. So if you’re sitting in an opera in less than comfortable seats, something that’s going on for four and a half hours, or the first act of ‘Götterdämmerung,’ which is like 90 minutes long — it’s torture.” More

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      in Television

      Is Jeremy O. Harris’s Play for ‘Gossip Girl’ Real? Now It Is.

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      Joshua Safran’s “Gossip Girl” reboot filmed a scene from an imaginary work by the “Slave Play” playwright. Then the Public Theater commissioned it.We hear him before we see him come across the screen: Aaron howls and barks then gallops, on all fours, onto a white, wooden thrust stage, ringed on three sides by the audience. This enraged man — the son of Aaron the Moor from “Titus Andronicus” — is stark naked and covered in blood.“What? What? Have I not arrived as you assumed I would? Like a black dog, as the saying is,” he demands, panting and sniffing, shouting into the faces of the seated theatergoers.He backs away slowly. “You do know who I am, riiight?” Aaron drawls. “The inhuman dog. Unhallowed slave.”This intense scene from a play-within-a-TV-show commands viewers’ attention in Episode 3 of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot. And it’s all courtesy of Jeremy O. Harris, the Tony-nominated playwright of “Slave Play.” Shortly after the episode dropped, though, people began to speculate on social media if the play was real or not.With a tweet, Harris recently confirmed that “The Bloody and Lamentable Tale of Aaron” is, in fact, a real play. He began writing his dream Public Theater play for “Gossip Girl” after chatting with the show’s creator, Joshua Safran (“Smash,” “Soundtrack”).The series’ showrunner, Joshua Safran, left, and Jeremy O. Harris during the taping.Karolina Wojtasik, via HBO MaxUpon seeing the play’s opening scene during the taping, Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater — who makes a cameo as an audience member in the episode — turned to Harris and asked, “Can we commission this?” Harris said he had a contract the next day.“I was dreaming this play into existence,” Harris said in an interview. It’s a play he’s been thinking about for seven years, since he started studying “Titus Andronicus” — his favorite Shakespeare play.“Titus Andronicus,” thought to be Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, tells the bloody tale of the downfall of Titus, a Roman general. Titus returns home from war with Tamora, Queen of the Goths, as a prisoner to the Roman emperor; her lover, Aaron the Moor, is in tow.Tamora gives birth to a child, fathered by Aaron, who then kills the nurse to keep the child’s race a secret and flees with the baby to save it from the emperor. But Lucius, Titus’s son, captures Aaron and threatens to kill the child. To save his son, Aaron confesses to a plot for revenge. Lucius, who is later proclaimed emperor, orders Aaron be buried up to his chest and left to die. The baby, however, survives.Harris’s play, then, picks up where Shakespeare left off. We meet Aaron (portrayed by Paul James in the “Gossip Girl” episode), named after his father, in his 20s. He has been raised, ironically, by Lucius Andronicus, now in his 60s. And he’s thirsty for revenge.“The thing that I think makes Aaron a complex character in literature is because he’s like, ‘I’m evil because I’m Black,’” Harris said of Shakespeare’s play. “And this time, he’s like, ‘No, I’m evil because you guys have socialized me. You have socialized rules around what Black means and what maleness means.’”When the opportunity to shoot at the Public arose, Harris knew two things: He wanted to do “Aaron.” And he wanted the director to be Machel Ross, who also directed his play “Black Exhibition” at Bushwick Starr in 2019. Lila Feinberg wrote and Jennifer Lynch directed the “Gossip Girl” episode, in which several characters grapple with what to make of the challenging work.“I loved it. But it’d be committing theatrical seppuku to transfer it,” a theater critic mutters to another at the show’s after party.The other responds: “It would close in a week, especially without a star. I just wish it wasn’t so confrontational.”In an interview, Ross said she “knew that the text was evoking a very specific sort of confrontation between audience and performer.”How could they thrust the “Gossip Girl” cast and universe into this play from the moment it begins, she wondered? Enter: a naked Paul James.“I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to have to be comfortable. I’m going to have to make other people uncomfortable, and own the stage, and be very physical,’” James said in an interview.Harris described the play to Safran, the show’s creator and showrunner, as the audience’s worst nightmare: A naked Black man covered in blood, coming up to them and asking them to touch him. It’s a confrontational idea, and one that the “Gossip Girl” character Zoya Lott — a newcomer to the world of glitz and glamour depicted in the series — can identify with.“Are you kidding me? A provocative play like ‘Aaron’ is exactly what Broadway needs after a year on pause,” Zoya (played by Whitney Peak) fires back at the naysayers. “What it doesn’t is another ‘revisal’ of — of anything. Especially one devised by white people, about white people, starring white people.“That’s why the theater was invented, right? To challenge audience members to — to think beyond their own narratives. I mean, come on, have you never read Shange? Albee? Fornés?”About that exchange, Safran said in an interview: “That’s what Zoya is wrestling with in this world with these people. Can I actually speak my mind, or do I have to fit myself into a box and just observe?”In the show, Harris sweeps into the room, playing himself. “Hey. Who are you?” he asks Zoya. “You seem very much like someone to me. Let’s find a less confrontational space and have a little talk,” he says.“Zoya is one of the only people that can look at their world and process it and call out things as they are,” Harris said. “And make a little mess along the way as she does that.”In fact, Harris will be returning as himself to the show in the second half of its first season, in Episode 10, as a fairy godfather of sorts to Zoya. As for the status of the play itself? “I think it’ll be done when it’s done,” Harris said. More

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      When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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      These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Review: When a Stranger Knocks at the Airlock

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      Edward Einhorn’s “Alma Baya” is the bleak, humor-flecked tale of two clones on a distant planet who let a third inside their walls.Inside their white-walled home on the surface of a hostile planet, Alma and Baya have only each other for company.They are grown women in a worsening crisis, rationing their food and unable to go outdoors, yet their utilitarian pod has the coziness of a permanent slumber party. Alma is bossy, Baya is ebullient, and somehow they are comfy together.Then a shadow appears outside: a stranger, who will die without their help.“Should we let it in?” Baya asks, softhearted and curious.“Are you insane?” Alma says.“But it’s human,” Baya argues.“All the more reason why not,” Alma says.Edward Einhorn’s prismatic new sci-fi play “Alma Baya,” at A.R.T./New York, can be viewed as a metaphor for any number of current catastrophes, the pandemic and climate change among them. But when I saw it the other night, hours after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, as the news filled with images of desperate people thronging the Kabul airport in hope of escape, that was the disaster foremost in my mind.“It could be you,” Baya tells Alma, as the stranger knocks. “In another circumstance.”“But it’s not,” Alma says, dismissively.Beyond each other, Alma and Baya have never known another human being. They are variants — more in the “Loki” sense than the coronavirus sense, but feel free to choose your metaphor — whose lives on their airless planet are an experiment in survival for the benefit of the faraway society that placed them there, in their pod, with instruction manuals that tell them how to live.Directed by Einhorn for his Untitled Theater Company #61, and performed with two alternating casts as a pandemic precaution (I saw the occasionally underpolished Cast A), “Alma Baya” is the bleak, humor-flecked tale of what happens when Baya lets the stranger in.It’s a furtive, middle-of-the-night move, but it’s hopeful, too — because what if this wild-haired woman, rasping for a drink of water, can help them survive?She is, after all, wearing exactly the kind of oxygenated suit that Alma (Ann Marie Yoo) and Baya (Sheleah Harris, the cast’s winsome standout) will need if they are ever to go outside again and tend their crops, which they abandoned months ago when their own suits broke. And the stranger (Rivera Reese) claims to have a green thumb.There is a sense of playfulness to that bubbleheaded suit (costumes are by Ramona Ponce), but Mike Mroch’s set looks considerably cheaper in person than it does in photos, even under flattering lighting by Federico Restrepo. This production is also available on demand, though, and I wonder if the scenic design is tailored more to the cameras than to the eyes in the room.Alma and Baya, in their little pod, live according to the dictates of their sacred books, the instruction manuals — though they have confidently, comically misinterpreted a significant piece of advice contained therein. Grimmer is their assumption, challenged by the stranger, that everyone gets the same operating instructions, and that cruelty is OK if you can find a line of text that tells you so.“Alma Baya,” then, is a sci-fi meditation, set in a world plagued by human problems that eternally replicate — because survival is a brutal business, and selfishness is one of our dominant traits.Alma BayaThrough Aug. 28 at A.R.T./New York’s Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theater, Manhattan; on-demand through Sept. 19; untitledtheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More