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      Revisiting a Post-Apocalyptic Play in the Pandemic

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      Anne Washburn’s phantasmagoric “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is getting a timely new run at Theater Wit in Chicago.CHICAGO — One of the most unbearable things about the pandemic is the uncertainty: about what we can and cannot do, and the way our understanding of what is going on gets tangled in conflicting stories or collapses altogether. And then there is the dread about what will happen next.Or at least that is what I was thinking as I watched this pandemic-era production of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” Anne Washburn’s 2012 apocalyptic phantasmagoria about hope, storytelling and “The Simpsons.” At Theater Wit in Chicago, Jeremy Wechsler, its longtime artistic director, is offering an expressive new staging that leans on the horror of the last 18 months to draw out the work’s fresh urgency. But he has also found new comfort in its meaning.I saw “Mr. Burns” twice in the Before Times — in 2013, at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and, in 2015, which was Wechsler’s previous Theater Wit production. Like many critics, I was won over by Washburn’s agile, boisterous storytelling and her tangled, semi-redemptive vision of how humans would respond to the end of the world as we know it.The plot is ingenious: In Act I, a group of people try to keep it together after a series of nuclear meltdowns by retelling the story of a single “Simpsons” episode: “Cape Feare,” a sendup of the movie “Cape Fear.” Seven years later, in Act II, those same characters, now an itinerant theater troupe, are recreating episodes of “The Simpsons,” commercials and hit songs. But they lose whatever unity they had and, in the closing scene, are gunned down by rivals. The sung-through third act begins 75 years later, with a ritual homage to the meltdown and a fantastical, grisly and surprisingly comedic version of “Cape Feare.”Washburn and the composer Michael Friedman, who died of complications from AIDS in 2017, were trying to examine how pop culture and storytelling might survive after a disaster. To take a line from the play: “What will endure when the cataclysm arrives — when the grid fails, society crumbles and we’re faced with the task of rebuilding?”Wechsler’s new production lands differently. And the pandemic isn’t the only threat it evokes. Take, for instance, climate change and all that comes with it: fire, heavy rain, droughts, people buying blocks of ice in a city with no electricity, gas stations running out of gas, power grid failure. “We have a larger sense of ourselves as being on precarious ground,” Washburn said in an interview.An emblematic moment arrives at the end of Act I, when one character, Maria, crouched around the fire, shares an anecdote about someone she met at Walmart who courageously tried to shut down the plant. But as she goes on telling the story, it begins to seem as if he never made it to the plant at all: “It’s not knowing,” Maria recounts the unnamed character saying. From the safety of a nearby gas station, he dreams himself fleeing the generator, nuked, and dying. But he actually walks in the other direction, away from the plant.Moments like this — as full of vivid, free-floating theories and fears as our current lives — make it fitting that “Mr. Burns,” which opened Sept. 8, was until recently the only Actors’ Equity Association production in Chicago.Theater Wit requires proof of vaccination and masks; the actors, who are unmasked, perform 10 feet away from the audience of the 99-seat house. But the attendees I saw didn’t seem fazed by the restrictions. And one of them, comparing Wechsler’s 2015 “Mr. Burns” with this one, said during a post-show discussion, “What was speculative became realistic.”In an interview, Wechsler agreed. “Back then,” he said, “the play had a funnier, sci-fi spin and a hallucinatory, giddy feeling.”He did not start the pandemic plotting to restage “Mr. Burns.” In March 2020, Theater Wit was presenting “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Wechsler took the show online, but then he sank into a depression. “What surprised me was how quickly the profession could vanish,” he said.Once the theater reopened to in-person audiences, Wechsler thought, it would need “something real, big, complicated and recklessly extravagant.” And he wanted that show to ask: What would theater need to provide in a post-lockdown landscape?Tina Muñoz Pandya and Ana Silva in the play, whose Act III costumes are made from materials including Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets.Charles OsgoodHe thought of Washburn’s layered storytelling and how it might hit more closely now. “I became obsessed with it,” he said.Although Wechsler has directed over 50 shows, restaging “Mr. Burns” felt different. He had never done a remounting in which the lives of artists, and culture at large, had changed so much, he said. This run is different from 2015 in many ways: It is the largest production in the theater’s history (with help from a $140,000 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant); and although a few actors reprised their roles, most of the cast was new, including Will Wilhelm, the first nonbinary actor to play Jenny.The design team is mostly intact from the 2015 production, though the set and costumes in Act III are more of, as Wechsler put it, a “fever dream” this time. The clothes worn by “Simpsons” characters are made of comparatively wackier found materials like Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets. Humorous frescoes of Marge Simpson as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” and Homer crossing the Potomac River have been moved closer to the audience.But the most marked changes are in the staging. In 2015, Wechsler set Act I in a forest; now, it opens on the characters huddled around a pile of burning chairs in a backyard. It is also set later in the year, with how people passed time during the pandemic in mind. “Act I is really, ‘How We Spent the Winter,’” he said.Earlier productions I saw dragged at times in Act II, but Wechsler’s new staging of it is ragged and brisk. “There is a shared sense of a new normal and managing dreams, the things the characters talk about, like the fires and the grid going down, have already happened,” he said. “I wanted that ‘Let’s put on a show’ spirit in desperate circumstances.” He was inspired in part, he said, by things that he had previously taken for granted, such as friendly visits and birthday parties, becoming difficult during the pandemic.Wechsler also updated the poignant and hilarious “Chart hits” medley, in which the actors perform (and flub) lines from pop songs. He added snippets from Billie Eilish, Lorde and Taylor Swift. Act III, too, has transformed: Its ceremonial theater piece seemed sharper, or maybe I understood better that we need the grandeur of a chanting masked chorus to communicate apocalyptic horror.In that scene, the actors also used details from their lives during the pandemic. Leslie Ann Sheppard, who plays Bart Simpson, said in an interview: “We incorporated a little bit more of the coughing and ‘Stay away from me. We need to cover our faces.’”During one striking moment of Act III, Jenny reads the names of people who have died. “When we first did the show in 2015, we would sing audience members’ names that were there that evening,” Wechsler said. “This was arresting in its way, but too anxiety-producing and flip after the last 18 months.”Now the names include those in the script, as well as theater luminaries who have died — not just from Covid-19 — including the Chicago actor Johnny Lee Davenport and the Organic Theater founder Stuart Gordon.Later in Act III, Mr. Burns brutally murders Homer, Marge and Lisa, and then Bart seems to kill the villain. But when the lights come on, Mr. Burns is not dead. The last moment reveals him pedaling more and more slowly on a stationary bike hooked up to a generator. It’s an image that “is uncertain,” Washburn said. “It can toggle more difficult or more heartening.”In his production, Wechsler wanted to emphasize the positive. “Life is hard, and none of us is going to emerge unscarred,” he said. “How do we heal? The answer is just keep living.”That moment, in 2015, ended with a blackout after a spotlight shone on Mr. Burns pedaling for a long time. Not now: Rather than close with that image, several colorful electric fixtures slowly descend from the ceiling as the house lights come on.“We wanted to bring the audience in,” Wechsler said, “to show them we are in this together.” More

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      Positive Coronavirus Cases Halt ‘Aladdin’ a Day After It Reopened

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      The Broadway show had just returned to the stage on Tuesday with several understudies.On Tuesday, “Aladdin” held its first performance since Broadway closed for the pandemic. On Wednesday, the show was canceled because of several positive coronavirus tests.Disney Theatrical Productions announced the cancellation just a half-hour before curtain, saying “through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of ‘Aladdin’ at the New Amsterdam Theater.”Disney said it was refunding purchased tickets, and did not yet know whether or how future performances might be affected.“We will continue to provide support to the affected ‘Aladdin’ company members as they recover,” the company said in a statement.The cancellation is the first missed performance of a Broadway show for Covid-related reasons since theaters started reopening in late June.But there have been missed shows Off Broadway — Second Stage canceled several performances of Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh,” citing “an exposure of COVID-19,” and then postponed that play’s opening after resuming performances with an understudy. And in Atlanta, a touring production of “Hamilton” had to cancel a performance because of positive coronavirus tests.All Broadway companies — cast and crew — are required to be fully vaccinated, as are all Broadway audiences. When breakthrough cases occur, some productions have been able to keep going with a combination of backstage testing and understudies. For example, “Waitress” had a positive test in its cast before its first performance, but was able to use testing to determine that the rest of the cast was OK, and then to keep going with an understudy.“Aladdin” had been dealing with coronavirus complications in the run-up to its reopening performance. The raucous first night performance, with an audience that included Kristin Chenoweth and the show’s composer, Alan Menken, and librettist, Chad Beguelin, featured three understudies. The crowd didn’t seem to mind — “Friend Like Me,” the Genie’s big production number, brought the audience to its feet. Michael James Scott, the actor playing the Genie, stood to the side of the stage, breathless, before shouting to the audience, by way of explanation, “18 months, people! 18 months!” More

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      Young Women Set the Tone for a Paris Theater Season

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      The directors staging the most ambitious premieres are all female millennials.PARIS — In March last year, Pauline Bayle’s “Lost Illusions” closed after just two performances, the day before France’s first coronavirus lockdown came into force. Eighteen months later, the Théâtre de la Bastille was chock-full once more for the production’s return to the stage — and the mood in Paris appeared to have finally lifted.Sure, proof of full vaccination or a recent negative test is required at the door, and masks remain mandatory in theaters. But the fear of shutdowns has receded along with the infection rate in the country, now that 75 percent of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine. Nearly all the country’s playhouses have reopened, with hopes now high for a “normal” season.And the directors setting the tone with ambitious premieres this September have all been millennial women. Like Bayle, Pauline Bureau, currently at the Théâtre de la Colline with “Surrogate” (“Pour Autrui”), and Maëlle Poésy, who just made her debut at the Comédie-Française, were on the cusp of national prominence when the pandemic hit.It is a relief to see them back. For emerging artists, the risk of running down funding or losing key opportunities has been especially acute over the past 18 months. The odds for women are arguably even tougher: Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum report suggested that the pandemic would delay gender equality by a generation. In France, an open letter published in the newspaper Libération last March pointed out the continued dearth of female leaders in the country’s arts world.The talent is there to change the narrative, and these millennial directors are maturing. While Bayle, Bureau and Poésy are far from alike, they all shun the highly conceptual approach that is often confused in France for a strong directorial voice. Instead, “Lost Illusions,” “Surrogate” and Poésy’s “7 Minutes” are all examples of confident, clear storytelling, complete with a few twists.“Lost Illusions” is in many ways a follow-up to Bayle’s Homer-inspired “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” two shows that toured widely in France from 2017 to 2020. Once again, Bayle has adapted an epic, character-heavy tale — Honoré de Balzac’s novel of the same name, published in installments between 1837 and 1843 — with just five actors on a bare stage. Four of them play multiple characters, men and women; the fifth, Jenna Thiam, takes the gender-swapped role of Lucien, an ambitious young writer from Angoulême who strives to make it in Parisian society.Significant cuts have been required to keep “Lost Illusions” under the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Still, Bayle and her cast manage to clearly delineate no fewer than 17 characters, sometimes with seconds to change costumes and transition from one to the next.Marie Nicolle and Nicolas Chupin in Pauline Bureau’s “Surrogate” at the Théâtre de la Colline.Christophe Raynaud de LageWhile Bayle relies on the audience’s imagination to fill in some gaps, Bureau’s instincts are closer to documentary theater. In 2019, she tackled the legalization of abortion in France in the 1970s for the Comédie-Française, in a play that drew on real-life events; “Surrogate,” at La Colline, returns to the theme of women’s reproductive rights through fiction.While legal in many countries and in some U.S. states, surrogacy remains forbidden by French law, regardless of the parents’ circumstances. “Surrogate,” which Bureau wrote and directed, openly acts as an advocate for change by telling the story of a heterosexual couple who can’t conceive after the prospective mother was treated for cancer.It’s a tricky proposition for a play, because creating characters in service of a clear cause can leave them feeling one-dimensional. When we meet Liz (Marie Nicolle), a construction manager, and Alexandre (Nicolas Chupin), a puppeteer, it soon becomes obvious — if only because of the play’s title — that they will fall in love and struggle to have a child. Yet in a neat, fast-paced series of vignettes, Bureau manages to introduce them both and stage a believable meet-cute at an airport. Their budding love story is told through intimate text messages flashed over the elaborate two-tier set.Some shortcuts are more frustrating. After Liz undergoes a hysterectomy, the play nudges them quickly toward surrogacy. Liz’s sister just happens to work at an American maternity hospital, and to have a colleague who dreams of becoming a surrogate. The staggering cost — over $100,000 — is mentioned only in passing, along with the vague prospect of a loan.Yet Bureau is brilliantly imaginative when it comes to revealing character in small, concise touches. As the American surrogate Rose, who seems too perfect on paper, she cast Maria Mc Clurg, a trained dancer who luxuriates in languid, expansive steps while heavily pregnant, as Liz watches, still — an eloquent metaphor for the relish Rose says she experiences when carrying a child, as well as Liz’s frustration with her own body.As Liz’s mother, Martine Chevallier is another highlight, insensitively deadpan, even as her daughter struggles. The only major mishap in “Surrogate” is the final scene, which sees Liz and Alexandre’s daughter appear as a teenager. Her studied weirdness, as well as repeated allusions to her high intellectual potential, undermine the rest of the play: Wouldn’t an average child be a gift, too, after infertility?The cast of “7 Minutes,” directed by Maëlle Poésy.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseNotably, both Bayle and Bureau benefited from commissions from the venerable Comédie-Française in 2019. Under its current director, Éric Ruf, the storied company has implemented a roughly equal split between female and male directors every season. This year, the two productions that opened the season were staged by women.After directing a Chekhov double bill for the troupe in 2016, Poésy returned with “7 Minutes,” a play by the Italian author Stefano Massini. It is set in a French textile factory, whose workers fear for their jobs after a change of ownership. Instead, the new management makes them a surprising offer: Eleven women elected to represent their peers are asked to voluntarily give up seven minutes out of the workforce’s daily 15-minute breaks.“7 Minutes” works like a courtroom drama. The characters have 80 minutes to decide whether or not to accept the proposal, and never leave the stage. While it initially seems like a no-brainer — seven minutes, they reason, is nothing compared with layoffs in a declining sector — one dissenting voice, that of Véronique Vella, raises the possibility that it is the first step in a rollback of hard-earned rights. As blue-collar jobs disappear, she asks with understated defiance, should those who remain accept worse working conditions just to remain employed?The play makes a superb addition to the Comédie-Française repertoire, which isn’t exactly replete with working-class stories, and brings every generation of the company together, from the company’s doyenne, Claude Mathieu, to Ruf’s latest hire, Séphora Pondi, 29.From left, Gaël Kamilindi, Sylvia Bergé, Gilles David, Claïna Clavaron and Birane Ba in Rose Martine’s “Hansel and Gretel” at the Comédie-Française.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseAnd there are already new names in the wings. “Hansel and Gretel,” a family-friendly production on the Comédie-Française’s smallest stage, the Studio-Théâtre, introduces Rose Martine, a 27-year-old director born in Haiti and raised in the overseas department of French Guiana.“Hansel and Gretel” lacks a little finesse in the acting choices, yet it’s a joy to see Martine bring elements of Black culture to the Comédie-Française stage, including call-and-response interactions with the audience borrowed from Haitian folk tales. Hansel, Gretel and the narrator are all played by young Black members of the company, with Birane Ba especially convincing as Hansel. Postpandemic, the future looks bright.Lost Illusions. Directed by Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 16.Surrogate. Directed by Pauline Bureau. Théâtre de la Colline, through Oct. 17.7 Minutes. Directed by Maëlle Poésy. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 17.Hansel & Gretel. Directed by Rose Martine. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 24. More

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      Review: Tracy Letts Brings Out the Long Knives in Short Plays

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      It takes 15 minutes or less in each segment of “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts” for the bard of male moral decrepitude to skewer his subjects.Tracy Letts, though always funny, has never been jolly.You wouldn’t, after all, expect bonhomie from a writer whose earliest plays were called “Killer Joe” and “Bug.” Even now, in dark memory, those Off Broadway hits feel somehow infested, buzzing with sociopathy.Nor did “August: Osage County,” his 2007 Broadway breakthrough, do much to advertise the charms of humanity, featuring as it did a hellish family that by the final curtain made the opening suicide seem inevitable.Since then, despite the increased restraint of middle age, he has periodically released his swarms of psychic cicadas; “Linda Vista,” his 2019 Broadway outing, basically pinned American maleness to a museum wall, letting it writhe there, and us with it.Now welcome to Letts 2021, the streaming edition, as Steppenwolf Theater Company, his longtime Chicago home, unveils a virtual Letts sampler. In three heartbreaking, brutally short plays — an anthology if not of horror then of angst — the fury may be fully internalized, but it is nevertheless poisonous, and seeps.I at first thought the pandemic might be a factor in the tone of the triptych, which carries the omnibus title “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts,” but as it happens all three were written in the Before Times. They first appeared, live, at the Gift Theater, another Chicago institution, during annual evenings of original short works by various writers. I can only imagine that on those occasions, they came off like the creepy guy at the corner of a party.That’s a compliment, by the way, or at least a job description for Rainn Wilson. In “Night Safari,” first performed in January 2018, Wilson plays Gary, the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever. Certainly it’s the most unusual, containing only animals whose characteristics mirror those of their guide. Take, for instance, the Panamanian night monkey, monogamous in captivity but not, Gary emphasizes, in the wild.Rainn Wilson, as the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever, in “Night Safari.”Liberace Cruzuee“There’s a lesson there somewhere,” he says, “but you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”Between stops at the aardwolf (“physically unattractive, and what is with this attitude?”); the boreal owl (“unsociable”); and the reverse-growing paradoxical frog (“Imagine that, if you can … dwindling as you mature”), Gary can’t help but display his own problems, too. These mostly involve Rhonda, who works in the gift shop and has so far responded unfavorably to his khaki plumage.Wilson is terrific in the 12-minute monologue, managing (much as he did as Dwight Schrute on “The Office”) to make boorishness and hostility human if not sympathetic. In the director Patrick Zakem’s merciless close-ups, he looks as if he’s actively curdling. Even so, “Night Safari,” with its slightly over-clever conceit, is not much more than a lark — perhaps a foxy lark, characterized (I read) by its quick, high-pitched song.“The Old Country,” written in 2015, is no less foxy; what seems at first like a simple lunchtime conversation between two codgers embodied by papier-mâché puppets moves quickly but without comment into another realm as you realize the men are talking at cross-purposes. Ted (voiced by William Petersen) is the spryer of the pair, and basically compos mentis; he praises the diner’s sandwiches, recalls the Russian waitresses who used to work there and waxes sexist on the topic of past conquests.But Landy (the great Mike Nussbaum, who is 97) seems to have let go of his moorings, drifting on a sea of random and often inappropriate thoughts. When Ted says of a previous visit, “We sat in a booth right there,” Landy responds: “You sawed a lady in half.”As his non sequiturs (or at least I hope they’re non sequiturs) get ever more so, you realize that he is not in fact responding; rather, he is making pronouncements, as perhaps we all do, from a locked-down world of his own.That impression is deepened by the choice (the director, again, is Zakem) to stage the piece, written for humans, with the puppets, which as rendered by Grace Needlman seem to generalize human experience instead of specifying it the way live actors do. Their sad gorgeousness and apt materiality — Ted’s stringy white hair looks like Scotch tape, as if it alone were holding him together — give “The Old Country” the weight of universal tragedy, in just eight minutes.Or perhaps I mean the lightness of universal tragedy. There’s no shrieking or bellowing in these plays; the theatrical format does all the dramatic work, and only by implication. The gap between what’s being said and what’s being shown is where the pain lies.Letts in “The Stretch,” which at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers.Anna D. ShapiroIn that sense “Night Safari” and “The Old Country” are warm-ups for “The Stretch,” a 15-minute monologue, performed by Letts himself, that at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers. You barely have time to laugh as the names of the horses flying by get weirder: Architect, Daddys Lil Dumplin, My Enormous Ego, Scrod.Perhaps the most telling name is A Horse Called Man, which gives away the game. In the guise of “calling” the 108th running of the (fictional) El Dorado Stakes, “The Stretch” is actually calling the uncountable zillionth — and yet always roughly the same — running of a man’s life. I say “man” because it is from a man’s perspective that the story unfolds, at least as written; in the script, from 2015, the announcer’s monologue is “illustrated” onstage by human dioramas of a boy’s birth, then maturation, marriage, fatherhood, infidelity and decline.But the version now streaming — directed by Anna D. Shapiro, who stepped down as Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August — does away with the illustrations, which strike me in any case as banal. Instead, Shapiro trusts the words (abetted by Allen Cordell’s thundering hooves soundscape) to score the play’s points in passing, and in Letts’s imperturbably dense performance they do. You don’t need to see a man getting married stage right to feel the punch of a line like “My Enormous Ego has stumbled badly and taken a terrific fall!”Nor do you have to be a man, though Letts now seems to be our leading contender for bard of male moral decrepitude. He was always in the running, of course; check out the revival of “Bug” at Steppenwolf in November. For new Letts, there’s also “The Minutes,” scheduled to open on Broadway in April, two years after the pandemic shut it down in previews.But now, taking on smaller slices of humankind, and leaving the big bad themes to speak for themselves, his vision seems funnier, deeper, bigger. Call him the paradoxical frog of playwriting: He’s growing as he shrinks.Three Short Plays by Tracy LettsThrough Oct. 24; steppenwolf.org. More

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      Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga Will Star in 'Macbeth' on Broadway

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      Ruth Negga will co-star as Lady Macbeth in a production directed by Sam Gold and scheduled to open next April.Daniel Craig is veering from James Bond to Shakespeare.The 53-year-old actor, who has said that his tenure as Bond will come to an end with the release of “No Time to Die,” on Oct. 8, plans to return to Broadway next spring to star in the title role of “Macbeth.”Famous for his film career, especially as the rakish spy, Craig is also an accomplished stage actor.He has starred in two previous Broadway plays, the 2009 production of “A Steady Rain” and a 2013 revival of “Betrayal.” And he played the villainous Iago in a 2016 Off Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, opposite David Oyelowo in the title role. (“Gritty brilliance,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote of Craig’s performance.)In the “Macbeth” production, Ruth Negga will play his wife, Lady Macbeth. Negga, known for the TV show “Preacher” and the film “Loving,” last year played the title role in “Hamlet” (yes, a woman played Hamlet; Negga had also previously played Ophelia) in an Off Broadway production at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Ruth Negga will play Lady Macbeth.Nina Prommer/EPA, via ShutterstockThe lead producer for the Broadway production will be Barbara Broccoli, who has a long collaboration with Craig: She and her brother produce the Bond films, and they also co-produced “A Steady Rain” and supported the nonprofit “Othello” production.Broccoli said she had been talking with Craig about Macbeth for several years, ever since he expressed an interest in playing the role.“I’m thrilled that it’s coming after Bond, because, obviously, after 16 years of working with this man, the thought of it all coming to an end has been really difficult to take,” she said. “And so it’s really heartwarming for me that we’re going to be working on something else so soon after the wrapping up of his James Bond cycle.”Broccoli said that she and Craig also thought it was important to stage the play this season, as Broadway seeks to recover after a long shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.“It’s been a horrendous 18 months for everyone, and live theater has been damaged tremendously,” she said. “He really wants to come back and be on the stage and encourage people to come back to Broadway — it’s important to all of us from a cultural point of view and from a social point of view.”“Macbeth” is scheduled to run for 15 weeks, beginning previews March 29 and opening April 28 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater. The production is to be directed by Sam Gold, who also directed the Off Broadway “Othello” in which Craig appeared, and who in 2019 directed a Broadway revival of “King Lear.” The production will feature original music by Gaelynn Lea.There have been 47 previous Broadway productions of “Macbeth,” according to the Internet Broadway Database; the most recent was in 2013, starring Ethan Hawke and Anne-Marie Duff.Broccoli is also the lead producer of “Sing Street,” a musical that was scheduled to begin performances on Broadway in March 2020, but never did because of the pandemic. She said she still plans to bring the show to Broadway, but was not ready to say when. “We love the show,” she said, “and we’re trying to figure out the best way to bring it back.” More

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      in Television

      Onstage, ‘Designing Women’ Sheds the Shoulder Pads, Not Its Politics

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      The hit sitcom, which ended in 1993, is back as play, premiering in Arkansas. But how do its laughs land in our more pointed political landscape?FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the Emmy-nominated writer and producer, started hearing voices earlier this year, voices she hadn’t heard in nearly 30 years. Those voices wouldn’t shut up.“I told my husband, I’m going to have to get a gun and shoot them,” Bloodworth-Thomason said during a recent phone conversation.She didn’t know how else to make them stop.The voices were those of Julia Sugarbaker, Suzanne Sugarbaker, Mary Jo Shively and Charlene Frazier, the characters from “Designing Women,” the half-hour sitcom that premiered on CBS in 1986. Nominated for a slew of Emmys, it won only one, for outstanding achievement in hairstyling. Set in Atlanta, and centered on a quartet of mouthy women who orbit an interior design firm, it combined feminist politics with click-clack comedy rhythms, celebrating the New South with wit and pluck and shoulder pads.The show earned her, Bloodworth-Thomason said, citations from both Mitch McConnell, who had praised an antipornography episode, and the A.C.L.U. The A.C.L.U. one she framed.The show wrapped in 1993. Prime time and popular culture moved on. But friends and fans would often ask Bloodworth-Thomason what Julia, the outspoken founder of the design firm, played by Dixie Carter, might say about same-sex marriage or the #MeToo movement or the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency.More recently, Bloodworth-Thomason began to think about answers.Those answers coalesced into a two-act comedy, “Designing Women.” Directed by Bloodworth-Thomason’s husband, Harry Thomason, the play had its premiere recently at TheaterSquared, in Fayetteville, Ark. (Thomason grew up in Hampton, Ark.; Bloodworth-Thomason in Poplar Bluff, Mo., just over the border.) The play runs through the end of October. It will also be available to stream, starting Oct. 15.The cast of the original “Designing Women” included, clockwise from bottom left: Jean Smart, Alice Ghostley, Delta Burke, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts and Meshach Taylor.Fotos International, via Getty ImagesA sleek, glass-walled building, a paper airplane’s flight from the University of Arkansas campus, TheaterSquared occupies a busy-ish corner. It has two theaters: the West, where “Designing Women” plays, which seats 275, and the Spring, which seats 120. The building hosts rehearsal spaces, administrative offices, scene and wardrobe shops, a flexible lobby performance space and a welcoming cafe where pastry always seems to be baking.Its programming favors lively dramas and musicals from contemporary playwrights of diverse backgrounds. This season includes Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” Mike Lew’s “Tiger Style!” and Kristoffer Diaz’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.” Fayetteville, where more than 77 percent of residents identify as white, is not itself especially diverse.“If you’re a theater company that sets as its mission creating a more equitable community, then you want to bring people along,” Martin Miller, the theater’s executive told me. He had found me on the cafe’s patio, in early September, demolishing some local goat cheese. I’d come to northwest Arkansas for a few days of table work and rehearsal because I had wanted to see if an ’80s sensation, a sensation I had loved as a kid, still had anything to say to a 2020s audience. And, if I’m honest, I wanted to know just what this sensation was doing in Fayetteville.In “Designing Women” — the theatrical version — the diversity centers on the class backgrounds of its characters, their religious beliefs, their voting patterns, as the TV one had. Set in the very recent past, the script eavesdrops on the women and a few new characters as they contend with the pandemic, the possible financial collapse of their firm and the 2020 presidential election. It is no spoiler to say that the women ultimately triumph, bridging their differences stylishly. The creators and producers hope that it will encourage audiences across the political spectrum to build some bridges, too.“We just need to look at each other with more grace and more love, that’s what I’m gathering from this play,” Carmen Cusack, the Tony-nominated actress who plays Julia in the theatrical version, said. “At the end of the day, what’s most important is just appreciating that we’re all in this together.”The original “Designing Women” wore the skirt suits and heels of a workplace comedy. But the workplace occupied Julia’s living room, so it was a domestic comedy, too. Part of a late ’80s boom in women-centered shows that included “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown,” it wrestled — sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely, often in heels — with the feminist discourse of the day.Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, described the series as a helpful fiction suggesting that women could have both careers and families without apparent conflict. “It opened a fantasy, a conceptual space, an idealized image that it was going to be possible for women to be very successful professionals and very successful mothers,” Williams said.The fantasy largely favored an empowerment agenda, implying that if a woman just tugged on her big-girl panties and stood up tall in them, she could bend the world to her will. But episodes also exposed systemic problems — sexual harassment, violent pornography — without offering easy answers.“‘Designing Women’ really did try to speak to the particular political moment, even as it attempted to negotiate it within the politics of television,” said Alfred Martin, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Iowa.The show’s director, Harry Thomason, far left, with Jason Lynch, the production lighting designer, and Austin Bomkamp, the programmer, at a tech run.Rana Young for The New York TimesThe show wasn’t entirely progressive. Its sole character of color, Anthony Bouvier (Meshach Taylor), had a subordinate role in the firm, and queer characters were rare. But it gave its characters divergent attitudes, insisting that the experience of women wasn’t uniform. In a logline, the characters might have come across as stereotypes — hardass, bimbo, pragmatist, naïf — yet as played by Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Jean Smart, they had smart minds and big hearts. Even as they fought, they supported one another.That’s what makes this theatrical version of “Designing Women” more than an attempt to capitalize on familiar intellectual property. As a television show, it straddled the political divide, allowing both progressive and conservative women to see themselves represented, glamorously. Those divides are wider now. But if these characters can still talk to one another onstage, maybe audience members can continue those conversations offstage, with or without repartee.Though TheaterSquared announced the show in early 2020, Bloodworth-Thomason didn’t start writing it until this year, ultimately amassing some 7,000 pages. (Those voices really wouldn’t shut up.) The September draft flaunted her practiced style, a rapier wit with a bedazzled handle, and included a few callbacks for dedicated fans, like a riff on Julia’s “the lights went out in Georgia” speech.The feminism still isn’t especially intersectional, even as the firm now includes a co-owner who is Black and queer, Anthony’s cousin Cleo (Carla Renata). But the script has updated its politics. The first line has Julia instructing Hayley (Kim Matula), the new receptionist, in temperature checks for clients. “If they refuse, kick ’em out,” Julia says. “If they’re wearing a MAGA hat, don’t let ’em in.” In the background a voice mail message plays, calling Julia a “lying socialist slut.”Bloodworth-Thomason dreams of a tour of the South for the play and an eventual berth on Broadway. But it’s dialogue like this that explains why she and Thomason chose TheaterSquared for the tryout. Washington County, which encompasses Fayetteville, went for Trump in 2020, though by a somewhat narrow margin — 50.39 percent to Trump, and 46.49 percent to Joseph R. Biden’s ticket — and the theater attracts spectators who don’t all vote the same way.“I know that not everybody who walks in the door would automatically agree with me in a conversation over a beer,” Miller told me. But the theater deliberately programs plays that prompt those conversations. And the cafe has 16 local beers on tap.On a Tuesday, about two weeks before previews began, the theater thrummed with activity — set painting, costume stitching, wig combing. The scenery was half assembled, and a variety of faux topiary dotted the back of the auditorium. The theater had recently announced new Covid protocols, which require that audience members offer proof of vaccination or a recent negative test, and Miller had to devote several hours to handling angry responses, like an email describing the protocols as “an imperialist act against our democracy” — only a step or two removed from “lying socialist slut.”A rehearsal in early September. Thomason said he wanted the play’s cast members to capture some of the aura of the original actresses, without quite impersonating them.Rana Young for The New York TimesUpstairs, in the rehearsal space, the masked actors arrayed themselves around several folding tables, with cookies and water bottles in reach. Bloodworth-Thomason had hoped to join them, but an illness had kept her at home in Los Angeles. (A glitchy Zoom connection made table work possible.) Though the characters ought to be in their 70s by now, the actresses, and a few male love interests, were mostly in their 50s, suggesting either a suspension of disbelief or some superb plastic surgeons. The mood was friendly, while also faintly tense, a reflection of the work ahead.Playing beloved characters — characters associated with even more beloved actresses — applies deep-tissue pressure. Most of the actors had seen the show during its original run. (Cusack, who grew up in an evangelical Christian household, is an exception.) They spoke, feelingly, about what it had meant to see smart women, funny women, Southern women, beamed into their living rooms. Several of them voiced an obligation to honor those performances.“I do feel a responsibility, particularly to the fans,” Elaine Hendrix, who plays Charlene, said.In an interview the next day, just before rehearsal, Thomason said he hoped that this cast would capture some of the aura of the original actresses, without quite impersonating them. “That’s all one can hope for,” he added. “Because if you try to just duplicate them, then the audience will not forgive you.”During the rehearsal, as coffee bubbled in a percolator, everyone tried to inhabit the characters, old and new, even when the characters voiced opinions that diverged from the actors’ own.“It’s the challenge, right?” said Matthew Floyd Miller, who plays Suzanne’s latest ex-husband, a Trump supporter. “How do you sympathize and humanize somebody who has diametrically opposed views than you do?”But what will audiences forgive? What will get them in the door? There’s already a glut of reboots, reimaginings and screen-to-stage variations. And not everyone wants to see “Designing Women,” which was overtly political to begin with, revived for our era. Thomason had heard from friends about some people’s plans to protest the show, even before they knew a lick of its plot or a line of the script.That didn’t faze his wife. “I would love to see a big crowd outside with a lot of signs,” she said.It did, however, give some of the actors pause. “I’m a little nervous because I say some stuff that is blunt and is hard-core and is extremely politicized, and I’m a Black person in Arkansas,” Renata said.When Cusack told her mother about the show, her mother told her she planned to be among the protesters. Cusack didn’t try to dissuade her. “I said, ‘Mom, I’ll buy your plane ticket,’” Cusack recalled. “‘Come. Bring it. Let’s have the discussion.’” More

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      Theater’s New Glass Menageries

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      Some of the most innovative set designers and directors are placing actors within transparent boxes, posing novel aesthetic questions in the process.IN A WORLD filtered through screens, a condition made even more acute during pandemic lockdown, the theater’s most anachronistic thrill would seem to be watching lives unfold before us. The actors may not literally be within our grasp, but the lack of a barrier between them and us, the illusion that we are, for once, actually in the room — the sound of the human voice in anguish or joy, a carafe of water crashing to the floor — has never seemed more stirring and essential.Or perhaps not. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place not in the three-sided black boxes that defined the experimental zest and emerging punk of the late 1970s, or the crowd-pleasing theater-in-the-round pioneered in ancient Greece and Rome and revitalized in the mid-20th century, but in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke the International Style’s high Modernism and the minimalist penthouses of the contemporary metropolis. There would not seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeAnd yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous. After a long Broadway hiatus, “The Lehman Trilogy,” directed by Sam Mendes, opens next month at the Nederlander Theater; during its nearly three-and-a-half-hour duration, three actors play a cavalcade of characters from the more than 160-year history of Lehman Brothers, the infamous investment house, encased in a revolving transparent box conceived by the British designer Es Devlin. The 2016 Young Vic production of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma” (1934), directed by the then-31-year-old Australian Simon Stone, was restaged in 2018 at New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory in what was essentially a giant terrarium. That same year, the German designer Miriam Buether built a glassed-in room with a huge tilting mirror as the back wall for a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” (1991), directed by Joe Mantello on Broadway. And for his 2017 National Theater adaptation of the film “Network” (1976), which came to Broadway the following year, the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove put his stage manager in a large glass box, casting him as a character who ran both the actual play and the mythical television broadcast at the center of the plot.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeA thoroughly contemporary material, glass creates what Buether calls “an ultimate filmic quality, like looking through a lens.” Even before fear of infection drove us behind protective plexiglass shields and reduced most human interaction to Zoom, theater audiences had come to appreciate the trippy perceptual effects of multimedia innovations — video projections have become commonplace onstage, particularly as pioneered by van Hove and others. Such effects are now part of the theatrical experience, a way to warp audience expectations. Once, updating a classic with, say, modern dress or gender-blind casting was provocative and transformational, allowing us to see the text anew; now, the stage itself has become the terra nova that jolts us, a glass cage making literal these works’ themes of isolation and vulnerability.FOR THE VIEWER looking at something through it, glass offers both a subtle shift and a seismic one; it alters everything while visually changing very little. “You know that what you’re watching is different, but you can’t quite tell why,” says Buether, 52, who, for the second act of “Three Tall Women,” created two rooms — mirror images of each other — separated by a wall of plexiglass, and then placed a mirrored wall behind them, creating multiple images of the characters and echoing the play’s notions of identity and time. “It’s like making the fourth wall tangible, as though peering into a display case. You adjust to it quickly — I mean, it’s transparent — but it never really disappears.”For Stone, who has set shows behind glass a half dozen times, beginning with his 2011 production of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” (1885) at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, the conceit works best with a particular part of the canon: intimate plays “that plumb the dark night of the soul,” he says. A specialist in reviving the works of domestic naturalism that distinguished European theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he believes that using glass, often in near-bare environments, has enabled him to reinvent these plays for a new generation. Back when Ibsen was writing, Stone notes, it was radical to set works in bourgeois living rooms instead of castles and fields, but such environments now seem banal. “I thought to myself: ‘What would happen if you actually put the glass between the action and audience?’” he says. “‘What if you make it an obstacle that has to be overcome, that the audience has to lean into?’” A production of “The Wild Duck” from Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, at the Barbican Theater’s International Ibsen Festival, 2014.Theatrepix/Alamy For “Yerma,” he wanted the title character’s descent into madness after she’s unable to bear a child to seem inescapable; for “The Wild Duck,” he was seeking to add a clinical aspect to a plot that culminates in a young girl unexpectedly shooting herself in the chest: “I was very conscious of not turning it into suicide porn,” he says. He used a series of revolving stacked glass boxes — roughly evocative of a Modernist chalet — for his 2017 Theater Basel production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” published in 1901, “because it made the realities of their lives even more brutal and confined.” Paradoxically, actors thrive in the glass box, he adds: “Sometimes being fully exposed can inhibit them. You have too close a connection to the audience; you are too aware. The illusion that they are in a private room makes them feel safe.”The Young Vic’s production of “Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2018.Stephanie BergerStill, working behind glass is not without its unique technical challenges. If you put your cast in a box, especially one with a lid, you cut off all possibility of acoustical naturalism. Many plays these days are miked, but the amplification is designed to be undetectable, creating the illusion of proximity; once there is a closed cube, verisimilitude becomes more complex. “Yes, you lose the sound of the natural voice,” says Stone, “but you gain extreme aural intimacy.”Devlin, 50, who has designed tour sets for Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, as well as for operas, is also accustomed to the trade-offs of a glass box. For her and Mendes, who began as a theater director before moving to film, this kind of spare set provides a juxtaposition to an epic historical work like “Lehman.” The boardroom, as well as the other office spaces in which the play unspools, “conveys both claustrophobia and expanse, intruding on the audience’s domain,” she says, and winks at the glassed-in conference spaces that have become corporate America’s heavy-handed attempt at conveying “transparency.” Inside, the box is divided into three chambers with internal glass partitions on which the actors scrawl the names of the Civil War dead and the price of commodities. The rectangle’s perimeter is formed by glass panels between which are open gaps, which improve the acoustics and act like apertures, allowing the action to move from wide screen to close up. That the box also revolves creates the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot: “Sam loves that, of course,” Devlin says.A revolving glass box returns to Broadway in “The Lehman Trilogy.”By Nicholas CalcottBut cramming the action into a single room also has a deeper significance. When Devlin worked with the director Trevor Nunn on the 1998 London revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” (1978), which took place in a deconstructed facsimile of a domicile in which the windows were mere outlines on the walls, she referenced the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a ghostly, solid cast-concrete replica of a rowhouse, which stood on an East London street for three months. Together, the sculpture and the production reminded viewers how the confines of home can be both solid and ephemeral. For “Lehman,” Devlin was also inspired by “Tango,” a semi-animated eight-minute 1981 short by the Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski, in which dozens of people seem to simultaneously inhabit a small front parlor, their elaborate dance compacting time and space. “There’s a message embedded in a single room,” says Devlin, “that architecture itself is the vessel through which history — whether intimate or monumental — is enacted. Glass helps you make that message explicit: A room is more than just a passive container. It remembers life.”Set design: Todd Knopke More

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      Review: ‘A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet’ Is Missing a Few Notes

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      In this new musical, a singer’s future hangs on one song, but entrusting it to an inexperienced songwriting team is not, perhaps, the shrewdest choice.Once upon a time, Regina Comet was a pop star who filled arenas. Now that her career desperately needs a reboot, she and her team have a brilliant idea: They will come out with a perfume — sorry, a fragrance, called Relevance — and peg her comeback to it. Because of course listeners will just follow that scent all the way to Regina’s big concert.Adding a thick frosting of improbability to this far-fetched cake, Regina hires a pair of young songwriters so unhip that they idolize Barry Manilow — in 2021 — to pen the song her future depends on, the jingle for the fragrance.The focus of the story is not, as you might expect, Regina Comet, but rather the untried tunesmiths who simply, coyly, are called Man 2 and Other Man, and are portrayed by the show’s creators, Ben Fankhauser and Alex Wyse. Starring roles notwithstanding, Bryonha Marie Parham plays the title character in “A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet” with tireless zest and good humor.“Jingle” is mostly set in the office of the writers, where the walls are lined with so many notes, papers and photos that you might think they are TV detectives tracking a criminal. (Wilson Chin did the scenic design, which appears to have been labor-intensive.) But the object of their obsessive hunt is even more elusive than the Zodiac Killer: They desperately want to write “One Hit Song.” This would be a realistic goal only in a universe in which the Billboard cast-album chart decisively influenced mainstream pop culture.Man 2 and Other Man invite Regina (who always wears a shapeless ’80s-style tracksuit) to brainstorm. She’s open to a samba, or maybe some bossa nova, but the resulting song, “Say Hello,” sounds like a show-tune-ized single from Backstreet Boys or ’NSync. It is the most enjoyable number of the evening, yet it also reflects the production’s uncertain tone: Are we meant to laugh with the ingenuity of the Men or at their ineptness?The most frustrating element of the show is that despite a last-minute sort-of plot twist, Regina mostly serves as an unwitting wedge between the rookies. Their relationship gets so tense that in one particularly brutal dispute they chuck their notebooks to the floor in disgust.The production, directed by Marshall Pailet, moves at a steady clip, and Fankhauser and Wyse throw so much at the wall that once in a while, a joke acquires a bizarre kind of sheen through sheer surrealism.“I read she has an honorary degree in astrophysics,” Man 2 says of Regina. “That makes sense,” Other Man replies, “because her voice is so … good.”In the role of Other Man, Wyse, looking like an overgrown summer camper in his neat shirt and shorts — another costume decision that’s hard to parse — excels at this kind of exchange. Add his character’s penchant for borscht belt humor (“Take my Grandma, for instance,” one line starts, “no really, take her —”) and you’re halfway to an actual comic role.“A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet,” an Off Broadway production, is the first new in-person musical to open since Covid-19 shut down theaters last year, and it feels like the first pancake to come out of the pan: It’s a little undercooked, a little misshapen, but we’ll eat it anyway because hey, it’s still a pancake.A Commercial Jingle for Regina CometThrough Nov. 14 at DR2 Theater, Manhattan; 800-447-7400, reginacomet.com. Running time: 80 minutes. More