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      Review: Unearthing the Late Curiosities of Tennessee Williams

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      “Hilton Als Presents,” from New York Theater Workshop, features three of the playwright’s overlooked and often disparaged works.Once mortals become immortal, it’s easy to forget how precariously they stumbled through life. That is certainly true of Tennessee Williams, who ensured his place in the pantheon of American playwriting with his early hits “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but spent his last two decades — after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961 — in what Hilton Als calls “a kind of critical purgatory.”But critics at their most vital aren’t a baying wolf pack chasing weakened prey. They’re champions of the overlooked, the underpraised, the misunderstood. In that spirit, Als, a writer for The New Yorker who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, is asking for a reconsideration of some late Williams works.In “Selections From Tennessee Williams,” the second episode of the two-part New York Theater Workshop podcast “Hilton Als Presents,” he plucks excerpts from three plays dismissed in their own time: “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” from 1969; “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” which succumbed in 1975 en route to Broadway; and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” Williams’s final Broadway premiere in his lifetime. It opened in 1980 on his 69th birthday and was met with such a pile-on of viciously mocking reviews that it closed after just two weeks.These plays are not exceptional in Williams’s oeuvre as considerations of masculinity, sexuality or the divided self — though, as Als notes, each includes a male artist character.Directed by Als, and with skillful audio production and editing by Alex Barron, the podcast does not always succeed in conveying, with voice and stage directions, what we need to envision.The scene from “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” starring Raúl Castillo as a band leader and Marin Ireland as a sexually rapacious belle, feels too untethered from context to add up to anything. But each of the other plays is memorable for a standout performance and for glimmers of beauty in the text.The longest excerpt, from “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” at first seems an airless exercise: an encounter between a brittle yet lascivious American woman (Nadine Malouf) and the Japanese barman (James Yaegashi) she is harassing. It comes to life only belatedly, with the entrance of Reed Birney as her husband, Mark, an exceedingly drunken painter struggling to maintain his dignity and harness his artistry. It is an utterly lived-in performance, edged with terror and mirth. (John Lahr, in his biography of Williams, calls this play “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche,” and he is correct.)“In the beginning,” Mark says, his hands shaky, paint all over his suit, “a new style of work can be stronger than you, but you learn to control it. It has to be controlled.”Williams, at that point, was not doing so well at controlling his art, his addictions or his emotional frailty.The other magnetic turn is by Michelle Williams in “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” which the playwright labeled “a ghost play,” about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Zelda — a role originated by Geraldine Page on Broadway — Williams evades the traps that lie in wait in Tennessee Williams’s women: the masks and artifices of gender and class that made him famous for writing diva roles, and that often expose those characters to ridicule. Against the odds, Michelle Williams locates a human being.“Are you certain, Scott, that I fit the classification of dreamy young Southern lady?” Zelda asks her husband (played by André Holland). “Damn it, Scott. Sorry, wrong size, it pinches! Can’t wear that shoe, too confining.”Tennessee Williams, too, felt pinched and confined by expectations. He was forever in competition with his younger self.Als’s production doesn’t persuasively argue for these late plays. But it does accomplish what a critic is meant to do when elevation is in order — to urge close examination of something that might otherwise escape our gaze.Perhaps, taking Als’s cue, some brilliant director will see a way.Hilton Als Presents: Selections From Tennessee WilliamsThrough July 31; nytw.org. At anchor.fm/nytw79 and major podcast platforms. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More

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      Theater to Stream: ‘The Wolves,’ and More Archival Treasures

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      Productions from the National Theater in Britain, a project from Billy Porter and a Yiddish musical celebration are among the highlights.Most Broadway productions disappear into that hazy province known as collective memory once they have closed. That’s the ephemeral beauty of theater, of course — yet wouldn’t it be great to be able to revisit some of your favorite stage moments, or share them with friends?Off Broadway shows are even more elusive, which is what makes Lincoln Center Theater’s initiative Private Reels so precious. For the past few months, newly edited archival recordings of productions have been made available to stream, and the latest is Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” which follows high school girls on a soccer team as they warm up before games. The play has been something of a success story: It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017; Lila Neugebauer’s production had three Off Broadway runs (including the one that will be online, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater); and it is done all over the United States and abroad. Thursday through Aug. 15; lct.orgNational Theater at HomeOn a much different scale is the National Theater in Britain, which pioneered live broadcasts of its shows in movie theaters before seamlessly moving into home streaming last year. Every time you think the well has run dry, the company pulls out more goodies from its vaults. If you are a fan of Michaela Coel’s acclaimed series “I May Destroy You,” you may want to check out her earlier, and often very funny, solo show “Chewing Gum Dreams” (adapted for TV as “Chewing Gum”). Also worth checking out are Chiwetel Ejiofor in Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the medieval morality play “Everyman,” and Ivo van Hove’s stunning revival of the Arthur Miller drama “A View From the Bridge,” which came to Broadway in 2015. ntathome.comChiwetel Ejiofor, center, in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Everyman.”Richard Hubert Smith‘Sanctuary’Billy Porter wears many hats, all of them fabulously. He may be famous for his performances in “Kinky Boots” on Broadway and “Pose” on television — not to mention elsewhere — but he is also a director and a writer. He has a memoir coming out this fall, and he was also the author of the autobiographical “Ghetto Superstar” and “While I Yet Live.” His latest project is the book for this new gospel musical, with a score by Kurt Carr. The show is getting a virtual outing as part of the New York Stage and Film season, with a cast featuring Deborah Cox, Bryan Terrell Clark, Ledisi, Virginia Woodruff and the choir Broadway Inspirational Voices. July 29-Aug. 2; newyorkstageandfilm.orgPTP/NYCIn normal times, PTP/NYC is a regular on New York’s summer stages, presenting some of the city’s beloved hot-weather entertainment: thorny, often experimental plays by the likes of Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker. As the company remains virtual this summer, its so-called Season 34 ½ continues with “Standing on the Edge of Time,” a collage of texts by such writers as Churchill, David Auburn, Tony Kushner and Mac Wellman (Saturday through July 27), followed by “A Small Handful,” an exploration of Anne Sexton’s poetry with music by Gilda Lyons. (Aug. 13-17). ptpnyc.org‘Judgment Day’In the Berkshires this summer, Barrington Stage Company is welcoming audiences both indoors and outdoors. But it also continues to offer online programming with the return of last year’s popular reading of this Rob Ulin comedy, boosted by an ace cast including Jason Alexander, as a lawyer who may or may not be dead, and Patti LuPone as an angel, along with Santino Fontana and Michael McKean. July 26-Aug. 1; barringtonstageco.org‘An Almost Holy Picture’Heather McDonald’s play explores faith and parenting via the character of Samuel Gentle. A former minister turned church groundskeeper, he ponders his life, most notably a terrible tragedy, and his relationship with his daughter. It’s an ambitious solo show — Kevin Bacon performed it on Broadway in 2002 — and Everyman Theater in Baltimore is presenting it with its company member Bruce Randolph Nelson. Through Aug. 22; everymantheatre.orgBruce Randolph Nelson in the solo show “An Almost Holy Picture.”DJ Corey‘A Yiddish Renaissance: A Virtual Concert Celebration’Once upon a time, Yiddish-language theater thrived in the East Village and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene keeps this history alive — often with surprising results, like when the company scored a hit with a Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof” that set off waterworks among many audience members. That show will be featured in this virtual concert from the company, along with nods to the likes of “Di Goldene Kale” (“The Golden Bride”), “On Second Avenue” and “Di Yam Gazlonim!” (that would be the Yiddish “Pirates of Penzance,” of course). If you tapped your foot at any of those shows, it’s largely thanks to the longtime arranger, conductor ​​and artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, whom the event is honoring. July 26-30; nytf.org‘We Live On’The journalist Studs Terkel’s interview collections were filled with “provocative insights and colorful, detailed personal histories from a broad mix of people,” as The New York Times put it in his obituary, in 2008. No wonder his vivid books are such rich sources for documentary theater. “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” from 1974, became the musical “Working.” And now, the Actors’ Gang Theater in Los Angeles is premiering a three-part show based on Terkel’s “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” — a 1970 anthology that also inspired Arthur Miller’s play “The American Clock.” Like “Working,” which keeps being updated, this project adds accounts by the cast, under Tim Robbins’s direction, to those collected by Terkel (some of which feature familiar names like Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez). Thursday through Sept. 4; theactorsgang.com More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber Delays ‘Cinderella’ Musical in West End

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      The composer and producer blamed Britain’s coronavirus restrictions for the delay.One day before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-anticipated “Cinderella” musical was slated to open in London’s West End, and two days after a cast member tested positive for the coronavirus, the prolific composer and producer announced on Monday that opening night would yet again be delayed.“I have been forced to take the heartbreaking decision not to open my Cinderella,” he said in a Twitter statement. “The impossible conditions created by the blunt instrument that is the Government’s isolation guidance mean that we cannot continue.”Lloyd Webber’s announcement initially did not specify whether the production was closing for good or just being postponed, though a spokeswoman for him later clarified that the show’s opening was delayed, not canceled, and that they hoped to open the show “soon, but it’s very difficult under the current conditions.”The composer’s statement was likely an attempt to try and force the British government to change its rules on quarantine for actors and crew. Last month, he made newspaper front pages with comments promising to open “Cinderella” at full capacity “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines for breaching British coronavirus rules.With its story and book by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), the $8.2 million musical had been set to star Carrie Hope Fletcher in the title role, and had been in previews at half capacity at the Gillian Lynne Theater for about a month.Lloyd Webber, 73, has been pressuring the government for more than a year to allow theaters to open at full capacity. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, he said protocols that required a show to cancel performances because one member of the cast came into contact with someone who tested positive could be the death knell for a musical like “Cinderella.”“The trouble is, we wouldn’t be able to carry on,” he said. “We can’t carry on hemorrhaging money each week, because at 50 percent we do. It’s almost unthinkable, but there comes a time when you just have to hand in the towel.”A surge of coronavirus cases in Britain, driven by the Delta variant, has also been shuttering London’s other West End theaters after members of productions like “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum and “Romeo and Juliet” at Shakespeare’s Globe tested positive earlier this month. And London’s Riverside Studios announced that “The Browning Version,” which had been set to open next month starring Kenneth Branagh, has been canceled.Despite a rise in cases that has driven England’s daily average to 39,950 — approximately double the level just two weeks ago — virtually all social distancing and mask requirements were removed on Monday, prompting widespread “Freedom Day” celebrations.But for those involved with “Cinderella,” the news was grim.“Cinderella was ready to go,” Lloyd Webber said in the statement. “My sadness for our cast and crew, our loyal audience and the industry I have been fighting for is impossible to put into words.” More

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      Head of Classic Stage Company to Depart in 2022

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      The Tony Award-winning director John Doyle will leave after six years at the theater — but not before directing two musicals.John Doyle, the artistic director of Classic Stage Company since 2016, announced on Monday that he would step down from the Off Broadway theater next summer.“I feel like it’s somebody else’s turn,” Doyle, 68, said in a video interview from Britain. “It’s as simple as that. I think art is better with a kind of turnover.”Classic Stage Company on Monday also revealed its 2021-22 season, Doyle’s last with the company. The productions include: Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Assassins”; Marcus Gardley’s “black odyssey”; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “Snow in Midsummer”; and Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally’s “A Man of No Importance.”Doyle, a Tony Award-winner in 2006 for his revival of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” will direct the musicals “Assassins” and “A Man of No Importance.”“Assassins,” which will be Classic Stage Company’s first in-person production since the start of the pandemic, was in rehearsals last year when New York theaters were closed to slow the coronavirus’s spread.Given the events of the past year and a half, Doyle said, storytellers “must be addressing the stories they tell.”“How they tell those stories, why they tell those stories, who are they for?” he said. “We have to pick up that responsibility very strongly.”Doyle has also asked of Classic Stage Company: What does it mean for a piece of theater to be a “classic” today?“It need no longer mean plays by dead, white, European men,” Doyle said. “Which is inevitably what most classical theater has been.”Two of the coming season’s works — “black odyssey,” directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, and “Snow in Midsummer,” directed by Zi Alikhan, both planned for the first half of 2022 — are by living artists of color. Both reimagine classic stories: Homer’s “The Odyssey” and Guan Hanqing’s “The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth.”Those plays, Doyle said, are “trying to take the worldwide stories and make those available to the modern audience, in the hope and intention of bringing in new audiences into the theater.”“A Man of No Importance” resonates with Doyle. It’s a musical about a Celtic man (Doyle is Scottish) making theater for his local community (which Doyle once did).“It celebrates what theater can do, and it celebrates how theater can make change,” Doyle said. “And I’m hoping that my leaving will help to make more change. And I’m hoping that my doing a piece about how spiritual, in a way, the theater can be, in terms of how it touches our souls, is a nice way to leave.”Reflecting on his tenure, Doyle said he was especially proud of reconfiguring the physical space of the theater itself. “It really feels like a New York space to me now, not just a black box,” he said. “Plays come and go, but the space stays. And it is a truly remarkable space.”His departure is not a retirement. Doyle said that the pandemic made him realize the importance of family, self and quiet time, but that theater remains as important to him as ever. And although he would like to spend more time in the Scottish Highlands with his husband, he has no plans to leave New York any time soon.“I’m really hopeful that I could do another Broadway show or two, before I pop my clogs, as we say in Britain,” Doyle said. “I would love that.” More

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      Historic Cherry Lane Theater Sold for $11 Million

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      The Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation, which has managed the 97-year-old theater for the past decade, will take over the building in Greenwich Village.The Cherry Lane Theater, the oldest continuously running Off Broadway theater in New York City, has been sold to the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation for $11 million, the theater announced on Monday.“It has been a great run,” Angelina Fiordellisi, the executive director of the theater, said in a statement. “To stand on the stage where so many of our greatest artists, crews and theater providers have stood is to know what theater history feels like.”The new owner will be the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation, which is a few blocks from the Cherry Lane Theater on Christopher Street and has managed the building for the past decade. The sale includes the 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio theater.Fiordellisi, who has led the 97-year-old nonprofit theater since acquiring the building in 1996, will continue to lead the nonprofit producing group Cherry Lane Alternative, which will have readings — and possibly productions — in the theater’s studio space.She had previously announced plans to sell the building, at 38 Commerce Street, in 2010, citing financial struggles. At the time, she told The New York Times that the theater was operating at a deficit of $250,000, which she attributed to a steep drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales and rental fees.“It’s frightening to me, what’s happened to Off Broadway theater,” Fiordellisi told The Times in 2010. “We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it’s so financially prohibitive. I don’t want to do theater like that.”But eight months later, she reversed her decision because of a significantly reduced deficit, a new managing agent and the support of the theater’s neighbors. Cherry Lane Alternative, the resident theater company Fiordellisi established in 1997, currently has a deficit of $100,000, a spokesman for the theater, Sam Rudy, said.The theater, a Greenwich Village institution that has long been a testing ground for new work by emerging artists, reopened at full capacity last month with Jacqueline Novak’s “Get on Your Knees,” a comedy that offers a personal and intellectual history of oral sex. It is scheduled to run through July 31.Under Fiordellisi, Cherry Lane has mentored writers including Katori Hall, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “The Hot Wing King”; Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, whose play “Pass Over” will begin previews on Broadway in August after being produced at the theater in 2016; and Jocelyn Bioh, whose “Merry Wives,” a contemporary take on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” is running at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Cherry Lane was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has showcased work by Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. But despite its storied history, the theater had not staged a play in two years when Fiordellisi bought it for $1.7 million in 1996 and renovated it for $3 million.Cherry Lane Alternative, the nonprofit producing group, said it expects to resume a scaled-back version of its acclaimed Mentor Project, which pairs emerging writers with established playwrights like Lynn Nottage, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Taylor Mac to develop and stage their work in the studio theater space. It will likely include one production per season instead of the typical three.George Forbes, the Lucille Lortel Theater Foundation’s executive director, said the foundation plans to announce new programming shortly. More

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      Review: Endorphins Fuel an Awakening in ‘Endure’

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      A solo show about a marathoner rebuilding her life takes its audience on a 5K through Central Park. Running is optional, our critic insists.We stood on the grass in Central Park, just inside the Columbus Circle entrance, and put in our earbuds. Our race numbers were already pinned to our clothes, and as we waited for the whole group to assemble, we watched people walk and bike, ride and run, along the crisscross paths on a sun-dappled New York summer afternoon.It was an ideal day for a play in the park, and we were an audience. Melanie Jones’s bracing and beautiful “Endure,” a solo show about a marathoner running a race and rebuilding her life, was about to take us on a 5K past the Pond, over and under bridges and across sloping stretches of lawn. This is not a performance you can observe from a fixed point. But the publicity materials state flat out, “Audiences are not required to run.” I, in my long sundress and sandals, decided to trust that.Casey Howes displays her nimble athleticism during the show, doing a headstand at one point.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt another point, she wraps her legs around a lamppost.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd the first time our marathoner — played by Casey Howes, a dancer who alternates the role with Mary Cavett — sprinted off down a path, I was the only one who didn’t break into a run behind her. Some were eager, having come dressed in sports gear; others were apparently in a panic that they would be left behind. Walk at a decent clip, keep an eye on the pack (each audience is capped at just 15) and, truly, you will keep up.Directed by Suchan Vodoor, the expertly paced action is stop-and-start, pausing frequently for interludes that are choreographed or, as with one emotionally intimate scene meant to be watched up close, delicately staged. (The choreography is by Lauren Yalango-Grant, Chris Grant, Howes and Cavett.)Whether you walk, run or jog, the text of this 75-minute play comes to you through your earbuds, which the show provides. The inner monologue is spoken by Jones, a Canadian marathoner, who has structured it in 26.2 sections to match the number of miles in a marathon.“You see so clearly that the finish line might be hard to get to,” the voice says as the race begins, “but the start line was the thing, the start line was where you were headed that whole time.”Casey Howes, a dancer, alternates the role with another actress. Walk at a decent clip, and you will keep up, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLayering the narration with instrumental music by Christine Owman, the recording is rhythmic, incantatory, relentless. It focuses the attention and soothes the mind even as its tale of amped-up competitiveness detours into memories of a painfully broken marriage and the depths of immobilizing depression. In running, our marathoner has found a healing passion, and the kind of defining obsession that makes other people view her as an oddity.Trailing her through the park, we become fully invested in the perseverance and triumph of this wounded, funny, tenacious woman, played by Howes with nimble athleticism and charismatic grace. There she is, doing a headstand on a hillside while she pedals her feet in the air; wrapping her legs around a lamppost as if it were a tall man’s waist; running and running in a widening arc while we stand mesmerized.“Endure” is a play about survival and aspiration and excellence, about having yourself for company over the long slog, about building strength in pursuit of a happier life.It won’t give you a runner’s high, but it is absolutely intoxicating.EndureThrough Aug. 8 in Central Park, Manhattan; runwomanshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Rattlestick Theater Focuses on Social Change in New Season

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      The theater will produce three plays in an ambitious 2021-22 season, but it has also committed to a five-day workweek and reforms that prioritize artists.When Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the West Village testing ground for new playwrights, reopens Aug. 14, it will be the same 99-seat, proscenium-arch venue where Heidi Schreck (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) and Jesse Eisenberg (“The Spoils”) have premiered plays. But some things are changing behind the scenes. Despite a heavier load this season, which will feature three, not just two, main-stage shows (to honor commitments to productions planned before the pandemic), rehearsals will take place exclusively during the five-day workweek, and no rehearsal or tech call will last longer than eight hours.“It feels essential to have a healthy dynamic for everyone to do their best work and also take care of themselves,” said Daniella Topol, the theater’s artistic director. (Previously, some team members would spend as many as 18 hours at the theater.) She added that rehearsal periods would be extended by an additional week to allow for ample time to prepare for the shows.“It’s not an inexpensive change,” she said. “But it’s an essential one we’re all so grateful for.”When the season kicks off, with Arturo Luís Soria’s solo show “Ni Mi Madre,” social change will be at the heart of the new season. Soria’s show, which will be the actor’s first venture as a playwright, is one of two this season that will be presented both in person and livestreamed.“I hope this is our new normal,” Topol said of the in-person and virtual options. “It’s been great to give people who don’t just live in our borough or our neighborhood the opportunity to experience the work, as well as to open it up to people who have physical restrictions and can’t access the work live.”The one-man play, which features the music of Gloria Estefan, Cher and Maria Bethânia, explores the intersection of queerness and Latino identity in the tumultuous relationship between a larger-than-life Brazilian mother and her son. “It’s deeply personal, alive and funny,” Topol said of the show that lays bare the secrets, memories, fears and celebrations of being an immigrant and first-generation American. Rattlestick’s directing fellow, Danilo Gambini, will oversee the world premiere, which will be his first professional production in the United States after having previously worked as an opera and musical theater director in his home country, Brazil.“It will make anyone and everyone think about their relationship with their mother,” Topol said.The show will be followed in November by the Atlanta-based playwright Mansa Ra’s “In the Southern Breeze,” an absurdist drama that centers the Black male experience across centuries of American history as it follows five Black men who meet in the afterlife following their murders. Christopher Betts will direct.Topol, who first got a glimpse of the play when Rattlestick produced a reading of it in 2018, said, “I couldn’t get it out of my head, particularly when everything was happening with George Floyd and the protests. It really speaks to this moment.”In the season’s final show, and the only one to be presented exclusively online, audience members will be invited to chart their own theatrical experience in the interactive virtual game “Addressless,” which asks viewers to work together in small groups on Zoom to make choices that illustrate the challenges of homelessness. The work, written by the Hungarian artist Martin Boross and adapted by Jonathan Payne, whose day job is working in social services, will be presented virtually in January and February.“The irony is that every choice you make as the character either costs money or years of your life,” Topol said, noting that they include whether a character will sleep on the street or in a hostel, if they will ask people for money or try to find work. “Hopefully people can move toward greater empathy and change after seeing this piece.”Topol said the theater has also hired a venue and production manager to oversee Covid-19 health and safety protocols during the 2021-22 season, which include installing MERV-13 air filters. In line with the demands articulated by the advocacy group “We See You, White American Theater” last fall, Rattlestick has brought on a mental health professional to support artists in rehearsals for projects that involve trauma.“These are personal pieces that dig deep into the roots and deal with inherited and generational trauma,” Topol said, “and we want to do all we can to help artists investigate that with courage, passion, care and empathy.” More

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      Following Theater Graduates Who Were Left Without a Stage

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      The Times’s theater reporter tracked drama students who emerged from a well-regarded North Carolina conservatory into a world with performance on pause.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times. But for more than a year, there was very little theater.So what have I been doing? Well, at least in part, I’ve been writing about the people whose lives, and livelihoods, have been upended by the pandemic-prompted shutdown.That means actors, of course, and fans, too. But I’ve also been intrigued, almost since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, by what the widespread layoffs and absence of productions would mean for aspiring theater artists,. That’s what led me to report the article that appeared in Sunday’s paper about a group of drama students who graduated last year from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.Over time, I was able to talk to 22 of the 23 drama students in the class of 2020, and they reminded me of so much that I love about journalism, and about artists — they were open and generous and self-aware, and sometimes uncertain about how to think about what this strange and unexpected time would mean for them. And it seems like the article has resonated with readers, for which I am grateful.I started pitching the story to The Times’s culture editors last summer. Then, in January, prompted by the annual what-do-we-want-to-do-this-year meetings, I moved it to the top of my wish list.But how to proceed? I started by reaching out to a number of leading drama programs in New York and around the country, and by talking with educators and students about what was happening with the class of 2020. I was just trying to get my head around what a story might look like.As I gathered reporting, my editors and I resumed a debate we have over and over: breadth versus depth. Was the best way to proceed to write in a sweeping fashion about the most interesting graduates from a variety of programs, or to go deep on a single program that could stand in for the larger universe?Once we decided to focus on one class, it was time to select a school. This is the kind of multiple-choice question for which there is no single right answer. We wanted a well-regarded program, but maybe not one of the schools right in our backyard, and we wanted a group of students with a variety of back stories and a range of pandemic experiences.The University of North Carolina School of the Arts appealed because it met those criteria, and I just had a gut feeling, after talking with the program’s dean, its communications director and a few of the students, that I would find the level of candor that might make a story succeed.As has been true for much of my work over the last year, the reporting was largely by phone — the students have scattered, with one in England, one in Australia and the others all over the United States and often on the move. But I did get to meet some of them.In May, I took my first reporting flight since the pandemic began, to Winston-Salem, to tour the campus and attend the 2021 commencement, which members of the class of 2020 were invited to attend, and two did. (One bonus: I got to see what a Fighting Pickle, the school’s mascot, looks like.)I visited with three members of the class. David Ospina, who is now working as a real estate photographer, met me for cold brew coffee on a very hot North Carolina morning; Lance Smith showed me around his mom’s apartment, where he’s been making music and self-taping auditions during the pandemic; and Sam Sherman joined Mr. Smith and me at a picnic table on campus to debrief the morning after commencement. And over dinner with the dean and several faculty members, I learned more about the school’s programs and how it had weathered the pandemic.It’s been great to start reporting in person again. It just leads to better conversations and richer material, and I’m so grateful to all the students for their thoughtfulness. As I sat with Mr. Smith and Mr. Sherman, one memory prompted another — the student production of “Pass Over” they worked on, the alumni panels they attended, the books they’re reading and the survival jobs they’re taking and the dreams they’re trying to hold on to. “I’m starving to be in a room with people, playing with each other, having fun and goofing off and seeing what works and maybe having a breakthrough one day,” Mr. Sherman said. Mr. Smith agreed. “I miss being in it,” he added. “I miss doing it.” More