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      A Milestone for Broadway as ‘Pass Over’ Begins Performances

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      The play is the first staged on Broadway since the pandemic-prompted shutdown, and is one of seven by Black writers planned this season.Anne Grossman and Jennifer Rockwood hustled into Broadway’s August Wilson Theater shortly before 8 p.m. Wednesday and, beneath their face masks, smiled.They had shown their proof of vaccination, passed through metal detectors, and, as they stepped down into the lobby, marveled at being back inside a theater. “It’s thrilling” Grossman said, “and a little unsettling.”The two women, both 58-year-old New Yorkers, were among 1,055 people who braved concerns about the highly contagious Delta variant in order to, once again, see a play on Broadway. It was the first performance of “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, which is the first play staged on Broadway since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters in March of 2020.“I wanted to be part of the restart of live theater.” Rockwood said.The play, both comedic and challenging, is about two Black men trapped under a streetlight, afraid that if they dare to leave their corner, they could be killed by a police officer.The crowd, vaccinated and masked but not socially distanced, was rapturous, greeting Nwandu’s arrival with a standing ovation, and another when she and the play’s director, Danya Taymor, walked onstage after the play to hug the three actors.Those attending the play were required to show proof of vaccination to enter, and to wear masks while inside the theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe night was significant, not only as Broadway seeks to rebound from a shutdown of historic length, but also as it seeks to respond to renewed concerns about racial equity that have been raised over the last year. “Pass Over” is one of seven plays by Black writers slated to be staged on Broadway this season, and, like many of them, it grapples directly with issues of race and racism.“Thank you for celebrating Black joy!” the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, told celebrants at an afterparty on West 52nd Street, outside the theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe street in front of the August Wilson Theater was cordoned off for a block party after the show. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesPatrons expressed a mix of emotions. “I am a little nervous about being in a theater setting, because I haven’t been in that type of setting since the pandemic began, but a lot of precautions were taken, and that gives some comfort level,” said LaTasha Owens, 45, of New York. “But this is timely, and of interest, so I’m looking forward to being back.”After the play concluded, hundreds of people gathered for a block party on West 52nd Street, in front of the theater, chatting and dancing as a D.J. played music and exhorted “If you had a good time, I need to hear everybody say ‘Pass Over’ right now!”Playgoers danced at the block party after the show. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe party was held outside in part to reduce Covid risk.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNwandu addressed the crowd from a balcony above the theater marquee, saying she felt like “Black Evita!” “Do you know how crazy it is to write a play about a plague and then live through a plague?” she asked. Later, she added, “Thank you all so much for being vaccinated, and thank you for celebrating Black joy.”The play is not the first show on Broadway since the pandemic erupted: “Springsteen on Broadway,” a reprise run of a Bruce Springsteen concert show, began performances on June 26, and there have been a few special events and filmed performances in theaters since the shutdown. But the return of traditional theater is a milestone for the industry; the start of “Pass Over” will be followed on Sept. 2, if all goes as planned, by the resumption of two musicals, “Hadestown” and “Waitress,” and then on Sept. 14 five shows are slated to begin performances, including the tent pole musicals “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked.”The audience gave a standing ovation to the three actors, Jon Michael Hill, Namir Smallwood and Gabriel Ebert.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Pass Over” was previously staged at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 2017, and that production was filmed by Spike Lee and is streaming on Amazon. The play then had an Off Broadway production at Lincoln Center Theater in 2018. Nwandu has substantially revised the ending for Broadway. More

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      Ian McKellen Returns as Hamlet in U.K. Production

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      As England’s theaters welcome capacity audiences again, Ian McKellen is back in a role he first played a half-century ago.LONDON — If you’re going to fully reopen a theater in these edgy times, it helps to have an actor whose presence feels like an event. That’s absolutely the case at the elegant Theater Royal in Windsor, England, where Ian McKellen, 82, is currently playing Hamlet, of all roles, and will stay on into the fall in a new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” (“Hamlet” runs through Sept. 25.)When the director Sean Mathias’s production started previews in June, coronavirus protocols in England required social distancing in playhouses, meaning numerous seats were left unsold. But those rules ended July 19, when the government rolled back restrictions on social contact. Theaters now have to choose for themselves whether to put their entire capacities on sale, and some smaller venues are still operating with caution by spacing seats out.At the “Hamlet” matinee I attended, this was not the case, and a full and expectant house had gathered to see McKellen return to a role he first played a half-century ago. The demographics of the Windsor playgoing public skew older, and during a post-show question-and-answer session with the cast, one man in the audience recalled seeing McKellen’s previous run as literature’s most famous Dane, in the early 1970s. (The actor tackled a more age-appropriate Shakespeare tragedy, “King Lear,” on the West End in 2018.)McKellen with Jenny Seagrove as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.Marc BrennerYou might wonder how an octogenarian might inhabit the angst of a perpetual student who can’t shed the memory of his father or an unusual attachment to his mother. McKellen’s achievement is to render age irrelevant, so that we seem to be peering into the soul of a character this actor understands from the inside out. And as mortality rattles Hamlet more and more, it’s doubly moving to hear those lines spoken by an actor now in his ninth decade.The production belongs to the here and now, and is presented on a multitiered, industrial-looking set with the actors in modern dress: Alis Wyn Davies’s Ophelia strums a guitar, and Jonathan Hyde’s excellent Claudius suggests a corporate apparatchik with his eye on the prize.But it’s McKellen everyone has come to see, and the Tony-winning actor who found global renown in the “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” movies doesn’t disappoint. As if taking a leaf from his character’s instruction to the players in Act III’s play within a play, he speaks Shakespeare’s verse “trippingly on the tongue,” so that the time-honored soliloquies become extensions of thought, rather than set pieces. I’ve rarely heard “To be, or not to be” communicated as easefully as here.Not all the cast is at McKellen’s level, and there doesn’t appear to be much of an overarching vision. But whether riding an exercise bike or scaling the skeletal set, McKellen is always the nimblest presence; the actor’s the thing, and the audience made its appreciation thunderously clear.I witnessed a comparable ovation at another full house recently, this time in the 2,300-seat London Coliseum, where the star attraction is the return of the English musical theater veteran Michael Ball, playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” through Sept. 29. Ball won the 2008 Olivier Award for his performance as this demure, soft-spoken laundress when the Broadway hit first came to London, and his affection for the generous-hearted show seems only to have deepened since. A heartthrob back in the day, Ball dons Edna’s apron and slippers without any sidelong winks.Lizzie Bea as Tracy Turnblad, Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad and Les Dennis as Wilbur Turnblad in “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum.Tristram KentonIt is a gift of a part. Edna is a wife and mother in 1960s Baltimore who long ago made peace with the life she never got to lead. (“I wanted to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” she says, meaning designing, not washing and folding, them.) Imagine her surprise, then, when her feisty daughter, Tracy (a spirited Lizzie Bea), turns out to be a consciousness-raising rabble-rouser, railing against racial segregation.Tracy’s transformation prompts her mother to unleash a previously unknown energy, and a dimpled Ball is a riot emerging, eyes gleaming, for the final number in a glittering pink party frock.Addressing the audience after the curtain call, Ball sounded moved to see a near-capacity crowd again. No wonder he looked ready to shake and shimmy all night, or at least until Edna’s sequins fell off.Social distancing was still the order of the day when I caught the Joseph Charlton two-hander “ANNA X,” which has just finished its run at the Harold Pinter Theater but will have five performances next week at the Lowry in Salford, near Manchester.The director Daniel Raggett’s high-octane production showcases a 25-year-old talent, Emma Corrin, who has been lauded as Princess Diana in “The Crown” and is clearly due for a major career. “ANNA X” casts Corrin in a fictionalized version of a real-life Russian, Anna Sorokin, who cut a swath through New York society before serving time in prison for fraud.Appearing alongside the engaging Nabhaan Rizwan as the ambitious techie, Ariel, whom Anna pulls into her alluring orbit, Corrin is both charismatic and inscrutable, as befits Anna’s shifting, twisted psyche. Let’s wish Corrin a return to the West End at a time when she, too, is allowed a full house.Nabhaan Rizwan and Emma Corrin in “ANNA X.”Helen MurrayHamlet. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, through Sept. 25.Hairspray. Directed by Jack O’Brien. London Coliseum, through Sept. 29.ANNA X. Directed by Daniel Raggett. The Lowry, Salford, Aug. 11-14. More

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      ‘The Threepenny Opera,’ Without the ‘Cabaret’ Clichés

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      Don’t expect bowler hats and dirty negligees in a new production at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater Bertolt Brecht founded.BERLIN — This winter, after live performances had made a modest return in Germany, the coronavirus pandemic brought them to another halt.But at the Berliner Ensemble in January, preparations were underway for a highly anticipated new staging of “The Threepenny Opera.” That “play with music” by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had its 1928 premiere in the company’s house, and became the city’s most famous music theater export — and perhaps the most iconic cultural artifact of Weimar-era Berlin.“I am working behind Bertolt Brecht’s wooden production desk!” said Barrie Kosky, the production’s Australian director, with some astonishment.Although the cast had been rehearsing for eight weeks, no one could say when opening night would be. “The only good thing for me, personally, that’s come out of corona is that I’ve had more time onstage than I’ve ever had to put on a show,” Kosky said.Seven months later, this “Threepenny Opera” is finally set for an Aug. 13 premiere; it will then enter the repertoire of the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel, his wife. But don’t expect Weimar-era clichés like bowler hats, dirty negligees and tableaus out of Otto Dix or George Grosz.“This piece cannot be ‘Cabaret’ with a little bit of intellectualism,” Kosky said.“We are beyond ‘Babylon Berlin,’” chimed in Oliver Reese, the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, who was sitting across from Kosky during the interview.Kosky, 54, is best known for his energetic productions at the nearby Komische Oper, the opera company where he has been the artistic director since 2012. Among his biggest hits there have been deliriously overstuffed, razzle-dazzle stagings of operettas and musicals, including many forgotten works of the Weimar Republic.But now that he’s directing that era’s defining piece, he’s taking a different approach.During a dress rehearsal in January, the actors sang and danced on an industrial set whose welded metal ladders and platforms resembled a treacherous labyrinth or adult jungle gym; there were no references to the decadence of 1920s Berlin. Instead, the sardonic, acid-laced tone of the piece came through in a dark and psychologically probing production that appeared abstract and timeless.Christina Drechsler and Stefan Kurt in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Threepenny Opera,” which the Berliner Ensemble performed more than 300 times.Lieberenz/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesAlan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in “The Threepenny Opera” at Studio 54 in New York, in 2006.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which has been home to the Berliner Ensemble since 1949. Bertolt Brecht was the company’s first artistic director.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesThe Berliner Ensemble’s previous “Threepenny Opera” staging, by Robert Wilson, was a stylized tip of the hat to German Expressionism. It was one of the theater’s signature productions and ran for over a decade, with more than 300 performances. (It came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2011.) But it required many actors from outside the company, which made mounting it a challenge. Shortly after Reese arrived to lead the house in 2017, he approached Kosky about creating a new production cast exclusively with actors from the ensemble.It was an offer Kosky couldn’t turn down.“It was the same antenna that went out when Katharina Wagner rang me,’” Kosky said, referring Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter and the director of the Bayreuth Festival, who invited him to stage “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there in 2017.“If you’re going to do ‘Meistersinger,’ then where else do you do it but Bayreuth? And if you’re going to do ‘Dreigroschenoper,’ where else do you do it except the Berliner Ensemble?” Kosky said, using the German title of “Threepenny.”With its uneasy blend of genres and source materials — it is based on an 18th-century British popular opera, and Brecht also incorporated lyrics from other poets into the text — “Threepenny” is a tricky work to pull off convincingly. The most recent Broadway production, from 2006, was a coke-fueled 1980s bacchanal starring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper that was a critical flop.A rehearsal for “The Threepenny Opera” at the Berliner Ensemble with, from left: the actors Kathrin Wehlisch and Denis Riffel; Adam Benzwi, the production’s music director; and Barrie Kosky.Joerg Brueggemann/OstkreuzMuch of what makes “Threepenny” unique, and uniquely challenging for a director, can be traced back its origins. Brecht and Weill spent 10 days in the south of France hashing it out, working with a German translation of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” by Elisabeth Hauptmann — a collaborator and mistress of Brecht’s who, according to the Brecht scholar John Fuegi, was ultimately responsible for 80 percent of the “Threepenny” text.The creators, Kosky said, “didn’t even know exactly what they were writing, because it was written very quickly.” Although Weill later claimed that they had been trying all along to create a “new genre,” both Kosky and Reese felt that much of the show was the result of trial and error. The rushed nature of the collaboration, they said, resulted in something that doesn’t fit any one style.“It is a kind of bastard,” Reese said.“A schizophrenic bastard,” Kosky added. “But that’s the joy of it. It’s a tap dance through theatrical styles.”The rehearsal period for the premiere of “The Threepenny Opera” is the stuff of theatrical legend: calamities worthy of a screwball comedy. But after a month of cast illnesses and walkouts, and faulty sets and props — the barrel organ used for “Mack the Knife,” malfunctioned on opening night — the show opened, and was an immediate hit. All of Berlin was whistling Weill’s melodies, and lines for tickets wound around the block.But despite the fame the play has enjoyed in the 93 years since, Kosky called it a “problematic masterpiece” whose meaning is far from clear. Much of the ambiguity stems from the curious, even lopsided, interplay between the libretto and the score, he said.“Is it a farce with music, as Weill maintained?” Kosky asked. “Or is it a biting anticapitalist satire, as Brecht retrospectively claimed? And what is chief, the text or the music?”Every production of “Threepenny,” he added, “tries to do the impossible: to work out what the conundrum with this piece is, and the contradictions within the text, music and content.”Adam Benzwi, the American conductor who is the production’s music director, said he felt a definite tension between the critical distance that Brecht’s text invites and the emotional immediacy of Weill’s songs. The music, he said, must remain beautiful despite the harshness of the lyrics.“Weill’s music is unique because you immediately feel the pain, excitement and sexiness of urban life,” Benzwi said in a recent phone interview, pointing to the composer’s “melodies that want to be warm in a place that doesn’t allow that, rhythms that want to be happy when describing something terrible.”In January, Kosky said, “If Bertolt Brecht had asked another composer to do the music, we would probably have a much drier, easier piece to understand.”“But,” he added, “Weill opened up an emotional landscape where suddenly you are contradicting virtually everything that Brecht wants, or believes in, in theater.” (It’s a tension that would ultimately lead the dissolution of Brecht and Weill’s partnership in 1931, though they did reunite for “The Seven Deadly Sins” a couple of years later.)Cynthia Micas, as Polly Peacham, and Holonics.JR Berliner EnsembleUnder previous artistic directors, the Berliner Ensemble had developed a reputation for traditional, even worshipful, presentations of Brecht’s plays. Kosky is the latest in a series of innovative directors that Reese has invited to put their own spin on the works of the theater’s genius loci.“We’re trying to establish a new Brecht tradition at this house,” Reese said.“I think you don’t have to stick to the theory anymore,” he added, referring to Brecht’s stage philosophy, which despite its influence on 20th century theater is now approaching 100 years old. Brecht’s most famous technique, the alienation effect, is a push and pull between emotional involvement and critical reflection that is often achieved through ironic or metatheatrical means.Although Kosky is steering clear of Weimar-era imagery for his “Threepenny Opera,” he said he had been inspired by one of the period’s great comic filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch — but also, perhaps more surprisingly, the much-darker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of New German Cinema.Kosky said he was trying to bring together “the loneliness and melancholy of those isolated characters in Fassbinder’s films” with the “wonderful, naughty, Lubitsch quickness, irony and lightness.”“It’s a weird combination,” he admitted, adding he was aware that his artistic choices might not please everyone. But he doesn’t mind a bit of controversy.“I’m sure some people will say that I have ignored the savage social satire,” Kosky said, but insisted his production would be “political in a different way,” adding: “This is a piece about love in capitalism, and how love is for sale. It’s about the triumph of bourgeois hypocrisy.”For many, Weill’s score remains the soundtrack of its era, while Brecht’s portrait of a corrupt society captures the spirit of Berlin on the edge of an abyss. Even so, Kosky wants to roll back the show’s local associations in favor of something with broader resonance.“I think people will think my production smells like Berlin,” he said, “but the images that you see could be anywhere in the world.” More

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      A New Improv Theater Tries to Be the Anti-U.C.B. Is That a Trap, Too?

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      A diverse board of comics is trying to build an inclusive, accessible institution. But knowing what they don’t want to be may not be enough.When the Upright Citizens Brigade permanently closed its New York operations last year, the news hit Corin Wells like a death in the family. She moved to the city because of U.C.B., invested time and money, evolving from a student to a teacher and in the uncertain early months of the pandemic, the theater represented an anchor to the past and hope for the future. “When I got the email, I cried,” she said in a video call. “I didn’t have anything to go back to.”Then a sense of betrayal sank in, one shared by many improvisers, particularly since U.C.B. had held onto its theater in Los Angeles, where its founders are mostly based. “We were the bastard child,” Wells said. “Decisions were being made for us that did not serve us, almost like taxation without representation.”In recent years, U.C.B. had moved its popular Del Close Festival from New York to the West Coast, closed its East Village theater and exited its longtime space in Chelsea. But for Michael Hartney, the last artistic director of U.C.B. New York, the final straw came when the institution took out a Paycheck Protection Program loan worth hundreds of thousands of dollars before closing his theater. He felt “very gamed,” sparking an epiphany and a call to Wells to propose starting their own improv theater. She immediately agreed. They brought other U.C.B. veterans to form a board that met remotely every week last summer.“We wanted to reinvent what the improv theater looked like,” Wells said.The challenge: How do you hold onto the good parts of the Upright Citizens Brigade but avoid the flaws that made it so susceptible to collapse?Squirrel Comedy Theater is trying to reinvent how an improv institution is run.Gus Powell for The New York TimesOf all the art forms hurt during the pandemic, none was disrupted as much as improv comedy. Legacy institutions like Second City and iO in Chicago were sold after economic turmoil and a racial reckoning. In New York, the vanishing of U.C.B., a longtime juggernaut, left a vacuum that many are now competing to fill. It’s a moment of remarkable flux, turmoil and opportunity. Relative newcomers to New York like Asylum NYC (currently in U.C.B.’s old 26th Street home) and the Brooklyn Comedy Collective (which recently moved into a new space in Williamsburg), are both offering classes and putting on shows. And staples like the Pit and Magnet (which both scaled down in the pandemic) have started to reopen, producing shows and offering classes, virtually and in person.And what began with Hartney’s phone call is now the Squirrel Comedy Theater, the name a wry reference to the term for people who practice Scientology outside of the official organization. Even though the Squirrel was born in part from disenchantment, it still distinguishes itself by its faith in the aesthetic of the Upright Citizens Brigade. “The U.C.B. taught us a method of creating comedy that works,” Hartney said. “Those other theaters are amazing and valuable, but they don’t teach that. We feel like it has to keep going.”The Squirrel started as a residency in June at the Caveat, a theater on the Lower East Side. Hartney and his board, which includes the improvisers Lou Gonzalez, Patrick Keene, Maritza Montañez and Alex Song-Xia, are looking at real-estate options.The Squirrel has started a residency at the Caveat theater on the Lower East Side.Gus Powell for The New York TimesThe board members quickly came to a consensus on principles that would put them in contrast with their former home. Squirrel would be nonprofit (which until recently was very unusual for improv theaters), pay onstage talent (U.C.B. did not), and in an effort to remove barriers of entry, open classes to any student, regardless of level. Because it’s nonprofit, the Squirrel’s long-term sustainability may depend not just on ticket sales and class fees, but on its ability to raise money, too.Its mission statement emphasizes a commitment to diversity, inclusion and representation. U.C.B. also claimed to value inclusion, instituting a diversity scholarship, but that often didn’t translate to the stage. In June 2020, it came under considerable criticism for its diversity efforts, leading its founders to announce they were giving power to a “board of diverse individuals.”So how will Squirrel be different?Hartney and Wells say it starts with leadership. In contrast to the U.C.B.’s founders — Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh — this board includes no straight white men or women and are majority Black, Indigenous or people of color. Hartney described himself as “a de facto artistic director,” which he said he was very hesitant about because of the appearance of continuity, but added that because of his experience, others insisted. Whereas programming decisions at U.C.B. were made by himself alone, now the group decides.When asked if they would program a troupe like the Stepfathers, a popular, talent-rich company that ran at U.C.B. for many years with performers like Zach Woods and Chris Gethard, he shakes his head: “I’m not excited about an all-white weekend team.”Michael Hartney, in red, is the de facto artistic director, a job he held at U.C.B.Gus Powell for The New York TimesOn Sunday, the Squirrel did premiere a weekly show with a diverse cast, Raaaatscraps, that was hosted by two former members of the Stepfathers, Connor Ratliff and Shannon O’Neill, also veterans of the most famous U.C.B. show, Asssscat. Without mentioning the old theater, O’Neill went onstage and described the show as a “renamed, rebranded” version of Asssscat, and it relied on the same format: A monologue by a surprise guest (Janeane Garofalo this time) inspires a long-form improv.How the Squirrel navigates its relationship to the U.C.B. is going to be an evolving process that Wells said will depend to some degree on trial and error: “What’s going to sell tickets: An old U.C.B. team with a recognizable name or a new group of artists who will bring their friends? “It’s a hard balance,” she said, adding that they need to do both. “Always be testing.”But one guiding principal is a skepticism of permanence, of shows that run indefinitely, even of founders who stay too long. “We designed this to be taken over,” said Hartney, who doesn’t see himself at this job in 10 years. “We want the next people to address the changing needs of this community.”U.C.B. built its reputation in part as an incubator of stars like Kate McKinnon, Ilana Glazer and Donald Glover, and the Squirrel wants to be a competitive environment for ambitious comics as well as a warm, welcoming community. Hartney recognizes that there can be a tension. Of the board members, “I am probably the one most interested in hosting an ‘S.N.L.’ showcase,” he said.Wells is, too. It will surely help the Squirrel get attention from people in comedy that last week, Wells was named one of the new faces at Just For Laughs, the industry festival. It’s an irony not lost on her that building a theater in opposition to U.C.B. can tie you to it. “In a perfect world, we could separate ourselves,” she said, but in every conversation they’ve had, U.C.B. “has always been a part. I think to be able to fix a system that U.C.B. set in place, you kind of had to live in it.” More

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      Where Do Theater Artists Go to Ask Questions? Poughkeepsie.

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      New York Stage and Film provides an unlikely haven for inquiring writers of new plays and musicals.POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — For Michael R. Jackson, the question was quite specific. What kind of underscoring do you write for a melodramatic yet serious musical inspired by soap operas, Lifetime movies and “Law and Order: SVU”?Jackson has been developing his musical, “White Girl in Danger,” since 2017, through so many workshops and readings that he can barely list them all. He had already nailed down the plot, about a Black performer on a surreal soap who schemes, from the “blackground,” to outshine the white stars and get a story of her own.Now he needed to figure out something smaller but crucial: how to apply the organ stings, ominous monotones and other instrumental plot thickeners that would underline the satire and keep the audience on track.That was the reason he spent two weeks recently on the stately campus of Marist College here, working in free rehearsal halls and sleeping in an undergraduate dorm bed. He was a guest of New York Stage and Film, the quietly influential incubator of new plays and musicals (and screenplays and television scripts) offering year-round workshops and residencies. And though its theater season each summer is a must-see in the industry, even that is more inward facing than outward, with only a few performances of each show and no reviews allowed.Call it a concierge service for works in progress.“These days have been nothing short of stupendous and invaluable,” Jackson told me last week as “White Girl” was preparing for its debut under an open-sided tent along the Hudson River. He was not referring to the festival’s coffers; the Marist season was pay-what-you-can. Rather, like all the artists I spoke to, he was excited by what he’d learned in rehearsal, and by what he expected to learn from the audience that weekend as it laughed, gasped, cheered or fell silent.“What question are you asking that you can’t ask anywhere else?” said Chris Burney, Stage and Film’s artistic director, discussing what he sees as the organization’s mission. “What’s your big dream project? That’s why we are here, outside the bounds of the commercial theater.”This year, most of New York Stage and Film’s productions took place in a tent on the banks of the Hudson.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesOutside its bounds, perhaps, but not a stranger to it. Many shows developed at Stage and Film in its 37 seasons have had long and profitable afterlives. The best known is “Hamilton,” which appeared as “The Hamilton Mixtape” in 2013, but Poughkeepsie has also been a stop in the journey of “The Wolves,” by Sarah DeLappe, “The Humans,” by Stephen Karam and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” by Taylor Mac.Those were big works, and so is “White Girl”: Stage and Film hosted Jackson and a company of 22, while providing advice, support, space and two paid apprentices. Jackson, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for his musical “A Strange Loop,” now wending its way toward Broadway, is a big name, too, and “White Girl” is already on track for a New York production, after several workshops over the last two years at the Vineyard Theater.But the season’s smaller shows, by artists not yet as well known, got much the same treatment as they set out to answer their own idiosyncratic questions. Though I didn’t get to see “South,” by Florencia Iriondo, who was turning her five-character musical into a solo show so it could be performed more easily in a pandemic environment, I saw the other four productions on offer, three in the tent and one online, with a huge star, Billy Porter, attached.At whatever stage in their evolution, from nowhere near finished to almost complete, the shows received the same careful, sheltered airing. Audiences included some theater professionals but they did not bring with them the hothouse feeling that so often and unhelpfully hangs over developmental work in New York City.Well, the tent was hot, especially at matinees. (Admission included a precautionary temperature check as well as a jaunty paper fan.) And the atmosphere was more informal than in previous seasons, which were held at theaters on the campus of Vassar College nearby.The switch was not an aesthetic choice, though. Two weeks before Burney was to announce his first season as artistic director, in March 2020, the pandemic hit. Vassar shut down in the middle of spring break, meaning that Stage and Film, even if it were functioning by summer, could not do so there; the dorms that usually housed artists were filled with the students’ abandoned belongings.Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada in “Mexodus.”Buck LewisThe Vassar programs were canceled, but some of this season’s most promising productions emerged from the disaster. One was “Mexodus,” by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, which began when Quijada was “scrolling good old Facebook many years ago,” he told me, and came upon a bit of history he’d never learned, about thousands of Black people who had escaped slavery not by the familiar northern route but by a southern one, leading to Mexico.“My parents” — who are from El Salvador — “both crossed in the ’70s,” Quijada said, meaning from Mexico to the United States. “I wanted to explore this reverse border story but didn’t know how I would do it alone.”He didn’t have to; Robinson, whom he met at a conference, was on board the minute Quijada shared the idea; they began riffing on ideas the next day, including one that became the first song.“It could have just been a little passion project,” Robinson says, “if Stage and Film hadn’t put some fire under it.”The fire came in the form of an offer, said Quijada, who had worked with the institution before: “They said, ‘Is there anything you want to do? We have funds.’”This is not the kind of question artists, no matter how seasoned, usually hear from producers. When Quijada and Robinson picked their jaws up off the floor, they shared their idea, which as yet had no plot or structure.Stage and Film loved it anyway, suggesting that the two write a song each month from their quarantines in different cities as they built the story into a virtual concept album. Then, when live theater returned, Burney promised to bring them to Poughkeepsie to work on it in person. “They even sent me a new bow for my bass,” Robinson said.By the time the two men arrived here in July, the score was in good shape to tell the story they’d settled on, about an enslaved Black man (played by Robinson) who crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico after murdering a white man who has raped his sister. He nearly dies en route but is nursed back to health by a Mexican farmer (Quijada) with a troubled past of his own.The specific question the authors needed to answer was technical: How could they perform the music they had created electronically during the pandemic, including frequent looping, in a live environment?When I saw “Mexodus,” they were still sorting out that complicated choreography, but it never got in the way of the story, or of the feedback the artists were receiving from the audience.“Interstate,” a pop-rock musical, took nine years of work.Buck LewisThe creators of “Interstate,” a more traditional pop-rock musical — if one about nontraditional characters — wanted to address a problem that was itself more traditional: How could their second act best develop the themes of the first? After nine years of work, the setup, about a lesbian and a transgender man who tour as a duo called Queer Malady, was working just fine. But when a developmental production in Minneapolis was shut down by the pandemic, Melissa Li and Kit Yan felt that the rest of their show, focusing on the duo’s conflicts and a desperate fan, still needed work. Stage and Film stepped in.The presentation I saw thus skipped the first hour, starting just two songs shy of what would normally be the intermission. If that foreshortening meant meeting the characters in mid-arc, it allowed the audience to feel it was meeting the show in mid-arc, too; like the other productions at Stage and Film, it was revealing itself before being set in stone.That’s a thrill pretty much unique to this model of development. Still, a static production of new work can be thrilling too. That was the case with Porter’s show, “Sanctuary,” for which he is writing the book, about a pop diva with big issues, and Kurt Carr is writing the gospel score.The video that streamed for five days recently didn’t include any dialogue; Porter says that his work with Stage and Film is aimed at figuring out the tone of the book scenes in the context of such overwhelming music. (The soloists included Deborah Cox and Ledisi; Broadway Inspirational Voices was the luxury chorus.) If it was not quite stage and not quite film, “Sanctuary” is nevertheless the kind of thing Stage and Film does best: letting you experience new work before all its questions are answered. More

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      in Music

      Abrons Arts Center’s Fall Season Celebrates Trailblazers

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      Highlights include a photography exhibition on female leaders in public housing and a contemporary play about the life of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.”Abrons Arts Center’s lineup for the fall season is a salute to groundbreakers and innovators in the arts, public housing and emerging technology.“As we emerge from isolation, we wanted to focus on work that’s still been happening and developing in different ways during the pandemic,” Craig Peterson, the center’s executive artistic director, said in an interview. “Because it deserves an audience.”Several of the productions scheduled at the 300-seat playhouse for the coming season were booked before the pandemic and postponed because of it, said Peterson, who curated the season in collaboration with Ali Rosa-Salas, the recently appointed artistic director of the center.“Lots of them got displaced when we stopped live performance,” he said. “But we never stopped supporting artists and always intended to present them.”The center has scheduled a concert, “Holy Ground: Land of Two Towers,” by the jazz ensemble Onyx Collective on Sept. 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.“It felt like an appropriate way to think about the long-term impacts of historical moments like the ones we’re in now,” Rosa-Salas said.A week later, the center will open a free outdoor photography exhibition, “Community Matriarchs of NYCHA” (for the New York City Housing Authority), celebrating five women who have transformed their neighborhood on the Lower East Side, where they organized food distribution, especially during the pandemic, to other residents of public housing. The exhibition, presented as part of the Photoville Festival 2021 in partnership with the digital storytelling platform My Projects Runway, will include portraits by Courtney Garvin and video interviews by Christopher Currence and remain on view through Dec. 1.“I’m really excited to uplift women activists in our community and reflect on the role of public housing in our neighborhood and city,” Rosa-Salas said.From there it’s on to Frankenstein, Bigfoot and Sasquatch as Abrons presents a streaming video adaptation of Sibyl Kempson’s “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,” beginning Oct. 29. First performed as an experimental, four-part radio play in January, the production, presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co., is described as a visual journey through the layered universe of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.” The new virtual video work will feature hand-cut collages, digital and analog animation and illustration and collaborations with more than a dozen artists. An in-person screening is also set for Halloween at the new Chocolate Factory Theater.Closing the season from Dec. 10-12 is a live motion-capture piece, “Antidote,” created in collaboration with Pioneer Works. Directed by the Jamaican-born choreographer Marguerite Hemmings and the new-media artist LaJuné McMillian, it explores the relationship between physical movement and motion-capture technology and how the latter can be used as a tool of personal power and liberation. The project is a collaboration with six young artists from high schools on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood.“It’s an intergenerational experiment and a great way to end the season,” Rosa-Salas said.The full season lineup is available at abronsartscenter.org. More

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      in Movies

      Marsha Mason’s ‘New York Loft in a Hayfield’

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      After more than two decades in New Mexico, the actress and director is back on the East Coast, with new digs and a renewed focus on the theater.From the front, Marsha Mason’s house in Washington, Conn., is modest as can be — low slung, with small windows — no reason to stop and covetously gawk.“It looks very unassuming,” said the similarly unassuming Ms. Mason, 79, a four-time Oscar nominee (including for 1973’s “Cinderella Liberty” and 1977’s “The Goodbye Girl”), who plays Arlene on the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie,” now in production for its final season.But stroll around to the back, and it’s a different story altogether: an expanse of floor-to-ceiling glass framed in gray cedar, and a terrace with a seating and dining area that runs the width of the rectilinear structure, making the great outdoors feel part and parcel of the great indoors (and vice versa).Think of the house and the eight-acre setting as Ms. Mason’s Act Three.After more than two decades in Abiquiu, N.M., where she built a 7,000-square-foot house and an art barn, and started a business that specialized in organic medicinal herbs, Ms. Mason was eager to downsize and refocus her attention on theater work — in particular, directing.Marsha Mason, a four-time Oscar nominee and two-time Golden Globe winner, lives in a custom-built contemporary house in Washington, Conn. Much of the furniture in the house comes from her previous residences. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMarsha Mason, 79Occupation: Actor and directorSense of direction: “I feel that getting more serious as a theater director came out of building houses. It’s all about preproduction.”To be sure, she has lovely memories and no regrets.“When I moved to New Mexico, the movie business was changing. It was getting very youth-oriented, and roles weren’t coming as much as before,” she said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. In some ways, I was having a little bit of an identity crisis. What Abiquiu was about was me maturing and becoming a full-blown human being, in that I had my show-business work and a lot of other, different work.“It was an interesting place during all those years,” she added. “Gene Hackman lived there while I was there. Jane Fonda lived there. And my friend Shirley MacLaine lived up a mountain across the road. She’d come down to my house for Christmas dinner on a golf cart dressed as Santa.”“I knew I wanted this house to have a great room,” she said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn 2014, Ms. Mason sold the 247-acre property and returned to the New York area, where she had typically owned or rented an apartment even after moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s with her second husband, the playwright Neil Simon. (The marriage ended in 1983.)This time, she decided to hang her hat in western Connecticut, where she had friends in the area. Briefly under consideration was a large house with many bedrooms, many nooks and many crannies. “Then I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to have something of that size again,’” Ms. Mason recalled. “But I asked the owners if they would sell the hayfield that was attached to the house, and they agreed.”It took a while to conceptualize this, the fourth home she would be building from scratch. (The others were in New Mexico and Los Angeles.) But Ms. Mason was clear on certain points long before the heavy machinery rolled in: She wanted it to be all on one floor and of manageable dimensions. She wanted solar panels (but didn’t want to see them), radiant heat, a great room, a “really nice bathroom” and a guest room on the opposite side of the house from her own quarters.“The design grew out of all that,” Ms. Mason said of the resulting 2,600-square-foot contemporary, which she is fond of characterizing as a “New York loft in a hayfield.”A photo of Ms. Mason and her friend Paul Newman hangs in the laundry room. The two bonded over their love of car-racing.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“I find that, in general, it’s the details that set things apart — what kind of door you choose or what kind of sconce,” she said, offering the example of the bright red bookcase that on one side houses a television screen and, on the other, serves as gallery space for several paintings. “I knew I wanted to do certain things like that.”The house is a study in contrasts: plain exterior and — thanks to a trove of furniture and art from around the world and from various stages of her life and career — vibrant, eclectic interior. Here, a 19th-century Spanish chair; there, a sofa from Design Within Reach. Over there, a country French bureau.Twenty-five years ago, when Ms. Mason was being honored at a film festival in Egypt, she did some shopping and brought back a game table with parquetry inlay and mosaic chairs. Those made their way from New Mexico to Connecticut. A pair of spindle chairs with rush seats and leather cushions were bought for the Bel-Air house that she shared with Mr. Simon. After the couple split, she kept the chairs, which have since been outfitted with crushed-velvet pillows.The Tulip dining table and chairs were bought post-divorce when she moved into a co-op on Central Park West. They’re now in a corner keeping company with a vivid abstract and a painted wood sculpture of a mother and child that was part of the décor during her years with Mr. Simon.Three wood female figures from Thailand and a wooden head of a merry-faced king from one of Ms. Mason’s trips to India are displayed atop the Stûv fireplace that dominates the great room. A Ganesh statue sits sentry in the hall outside her bedroom.Ms. Mason bought the game table and chairs in Egypt 25 years ago, when she was being honored at a film festival.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesBehind the antique rosewood desk in the office are shelves with assorted trophies, among them two Golden Globes. And perhaps because distraction is always welcome when you’re folding towels and sheets, a wall in the laundry room is given over to framed award citations and photographs of Ms. Mason’s stepdaughters, of her with her father, and of her with Paul Newman. The two became fast friends through their shared passion for auto racing. “He eventually invited me to Lime Rock, here in Connecticut, his home track, and I drove one of his GTs,” she recalled.“The sink where I wash up after I do my gardening is here in the laundry room,” Ms. Mason said. “So I see these pictures every day.”Moving into the house necessitated winnowing, she said. Many things were jettisoned or left behind for the new owner in Abiquiu.“This place,” she added, “reflects my sense of aging and ‘what do you need?’ not ‘what do you want?’ It’s about a few nice pieces as opposed to a lot of nice pieces — the whole psyche of simplifying.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      in Theater

      After 40 Years, a Luminary of Theater’s Avant-Garde Departs

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      “I have the energy, I have the interest,” says Blanka Zizka of the Wilma Theater. “But I need to go a different way.”When Blanka Zizka retired from her post as artistic director of the Wilma Theater at the end of July, it was truly the end of an era.“I have been at it for 40 years,” Zizka said in a video interview from Philadelphia, where the company is based. “That’s a long time.”Zizka and her husband, Jiri, were born in Czechoslovakia, where they immersed themselves in the underground scene of late 1960s and early ’70s, notably the work of innovative titans like Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. The couple eventually emigrated to the United States and then landed at the Wilma Project in 1979, becoming artistic directors in 1981. They divorced in 1995, and she became the sole artistic director of the renamed Wilma Theater in 2010.And now, at 66, she will be its artistic director emeritus.Throughout the Wilma’s history, the Zizkas championed demanding work by directors and playwrights. The theater has had a fruitful association with Tom Stoppard, for example, who described Blanka in an email as “an intellectual steeped in theater language; a ‘writers’ director’ but freethinking in what she wants the audience to see.”The Wilma also often put on visually daring productions that stood out from the comparatively naturalistic fare by many regional companies. In recent years, Blanka also encouraged the resident acting company, the HotHouse, to explore experimental techniques and pushed artists to supersize their ambitions. (She will continue to work 20 hours a month over the next two years, some of which she said she is likely to spend with the HotHouse).“She taught me, as a young, queer, Black artist in the theater, that I could write Black queer stories at the scale that she was directing,” said James Ijames, who is now one of the Wilma’s artistic directors, with Yury Urnov and Morgan Green. “She just really blew open what I thought was possible.”In the video interview, Zizka shared the joys and frustrations of her years running a regional American theater company. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Keith J. Conallen, a HotHouse company member, in “Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq,” a 2014 production by Paula Vogel.Alexander IziliaevWhy leave the Wilma now?I started to think about it very strongly last August. Suddenly, I was spending some time with my son, who is now 44 and lives in Bellport, N.Y. I was always feeling so guilty about him because I felt I’ve never been a great mom; theater was always my first priority. It’s hard to say, but that was the reality. So it was kind of a reunion, in a beautiful way. I also spent two or three hours a day biking in wetlands and I realized: Oh my God, I’ve been living all my life in a space without windows. I started to feel something that I have not felt since I was about 15 or 16, this sense of freedom and of loving beauty and colors in nature. And I felt I need to experience it more before I kick the bucket [laughs].And yet in a 2015 interview, you said: “I feel that, professionally, if I’m lucky, I have, like, 10 years. There is not a history of old women running theaters.” Did you defiantly plan to stay on for another decade at the time?I said that exactly out of those feelings, but I don’t feel it anymore. I feel like that if I had wanted to stay at the Wilma, I could have. I have the energy, I have the interest. I didn’t lose the love for theater, for sure. But I need to go a different way. And there is also the danger of becoming your own prison for anybody who works in an institution for a long time.What were your earliest memories of American theater, having grown up behind the Iron Curtain?I never studied at university. I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening. We used to go to Poland for a weekend to just see shows and I was able to see the Living Theater and Bread and Puppet Theater, the experimental-happening scene, Joseph Chaikin — those are my heroes. But that period was over by the time I got here.What were your early years in Philadelphia like?We were taking it step by step. We spoke very bad English — I could not ask for a cup of coffee, basically. For us it was about how do we survive? How do we support ourselves and our child? How do we learn English? I met people and I offered to teach them what I knew from Grotowski. When you are young, you’re audacious about teaching and you know nothing [laughs].Stoppard has played a big role at the Wilma, but what are other artists who have been meaningful to you?Athol Fugard was very important for me in the early days. In 1988, I produced “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act,” which is about a white librarian and a Black schoolteacher falling in love. And the play is done in the nude, 90 percent of it. That was very daring at the time.Do you think it could be done now?I don’t know. That’s a question. I do want to mention Paula Vogel. She’s an amazing, generous artist who takes care of her colleagues. “I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening,” Zizka said about her past.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesHow so?I had commissioned her to do a play, and she was doing a workshop, and I had to participate. I was terrified because my English is so bad. She said, “You can just write characters the way you speak.” Easy, right? [Laughs] She was constantly on me and said, “You have to keep writing.” So I did. Another person who was very helpful was Stew [of the musical “Passing Strange”]. He was my boyfriend for a moment, about six years ago. Like Paula, he encourages people to try things out and not to be afraid.What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing American theater?In American theater, the people who are actually creating the work are the only people who are freelancers. How do you run theaters when you are surrounded by administrative staff only? Once foundations are away from the scene, you start pushing toward rich individuals. They can be great people, they can really love you — but something can happen in their life, and they move on. Because of this need to get money from so many different sources, you have to make people feel good; you have to do great parties. So your administrative staff is growing, and you are putting money there instead of into the art.You came of age with avant-garde theater, and at the Wilma you never stopped pushing the intellectual and aesthetic envelope. That’s not the easiest sell.The Wilma has been quite progressive in terms of programming, but it was very difficult for us to retain audiences. In America we are now in the grip of consumerism, where an audience wants theater to be exactly “the way I feel it, the way I want it, and if it’s not that I don’t like it and I will never come back again.” That is a very difficult situation to be in. The only reason I want to do theater is an exploration of life. Entertainment is part of life, but I don’t want the theater to be any escape from reality. Reality is beautiful, and there are multitudes of possibilities. But this consumerism and narcissism I find in American audiences at this time is really detrimental to the theater culture. More