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      Father and Son Return to the Stage, Together. Again. No Regrets.

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      Reed and Ephraim Birney are in the Berkshires, reprising their roles in “Chester Bailey.” They discuss what it’s like to play off — and fight — each other.In his Instagram profile, Ephraim Birney describes himself as “the black sheep out of work actor in a family of black sheep working actors.” Born and raised in New York, the 24-year-old actor is the elder child of Reed Birney (a Tony winner in 2016 for his performance in “The Humans”) and Constance Shulman (“Doug,” “Orange Is the New Black”). His little sister, Gus Birney, has appeared in the TV series “The Mist” and “Dickinson.” Ephraim Birney has booked jobs, too — “Gotham,” “The Americans” — but not quite as many.“The weird thing isn’t that I’m an actor,” he said during a recent video call. “The weird thing is that I’m not working as an actor.”But Ephraim Birney, who was seated next to his father in the kitchen of their summer home in the Catskills, is working now. On Friday, the father-son actors begin performances indoors (indoors!) of “Chester Bailey,” Joseph Dougherty’s heart-raking two-hander at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass. (The show, running through July 3, is being advertised as this summer’s first indoor theater event in the Berkshires approved by the Actors’ Equity Association.) Ephraim Birney stars as the title character, a Navy Yard worker who suffers a devastating injury in 1940s Brooklyn, and his father plays the doctor assigned to his care. The drama explores illusion, reality and the comfort imagination can provide.“As sad as this play is, and it is deeply sad,” Reed Birney, 66, said, “there’s something so beautiful about how these two men have affected each other.”The Birneys first took on these roles two years ago, for the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia. After a long pandemic-prompted break, spent mostly swimming and gardening at their upstate house, they have returned to them, with the same director, Ron Lagomarsino. During our hourlong call, the Birneys spoke about the vagaries of the business, learning to treat each other as colleagues and getting back to theater, together. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.For “Chester Bailey,” were you recruited as father and son?EPHRAIM BIRNEY No, it was a thing that I had auditioned for, on my own.REED BIRNEY I knew Ron Lagomarsino, the director, because I’d done “Hay Fever” with him in 1982 at the Kenyon Festival Theater. We’d stayed friends. So I wrote Ron, and I said, “My boy’s coming in for your show.” Suddenly I got an offer. I was not really interested in doing a play again for a while. But then I thought, if I say no to working with Ephraim, I will regret it for the rest of my life.EPHRAIM And you’ve regretted it ever since.When you started rehearsing the play in 2019, what was it like to encounter each other as co-stars?REED We were both nervous about that. But we both were really impressed at how very quickly we became colleagues.EPHRAIM It’s like your second home, a rehearsal room. It’s what you’ve always said. And it feels very, very cool that I get to play in that same room.REED One of the last days we were in West Virginia, we were driving back from the theater. And he said to me, “Thank you for treating me as an equal.” He’s so beautiful in the play. It’s really something to see. It’s a beautiful, beautiful performance, really simple and heartbreaking.Reed, when did you know you wanted to be an actor?REED I was about 5. I remember saying to a group of grown-ups that I wanted to be an actor. They all laughed nervously and exchanged looks like, oh dear, oh dear. There might have been a week where I wanted to be a fireman. But the rest of the time, it was an actor.EPHRAIM I’m still looking forward to being a fireman.When you knew that Ephraim wanted to be an actor, did you ever try to talk him out of it?REED Not ever. Because everybody had tried to do that to me. Anybody who wants to do it should try it. They’ll figure it out on their own. If there comes a point where they say, “Oh, this isn’t for me,” I don’t think there’s any shame in leaving. But I also know it’s one of the greatest professions in the world. Ephraim and Gus, they were always aware of the times when you don’t work or you lose a part or you get a bad review. Certainly, they saw that stuff. But I think they also saw how fantastic the community is.EPHRAIM When I started expressing interest in acting, you said, “Well, don’t you see how miserable I am?” And I said, “But I see that you’re still doing it, despite being so miserable.”The father-son duo first performed “Chester Bailey” in West Virginia in 2019. For their return engagement, they will perform at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., starting Friday.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesDid you try to give Ephraim any advice?REED Even now, I haven’t gotten that television series that suddenly takes me over the brink. So it’s an ongoing thing. If my career is an example, it’s a long ride. You have to keep your eye on the prize.EPHRAIM I remember getting [an audition] for that Hugh Jackman movie with the robots, “Real Steel.” I remember coming to you, and I was like, “I don’t think there’s a world where I get this. How do I even attempt to try?” And I remember you saying, “Because that’s the job, and one of those times, it’ll be your turn.Were there parts your dad played that really stood out for you?REED Most of the plays I did when they were little, they couldn’t come see. They never saw “Blasted” [a famously upsetting play by the English playwright Sarah Kane that involves nudity, rape and cannibalism]. Connie saw it and told them all about it. When I came home from the theater, our daughter said, “Do we see your heinie in that play?”EPHRAIM I was like, “I want to eat a baby in a play!”What is it like going back to “Chester Bailey”?REED Once we were finally back, I was like, “Oh, this feels incredibly familiar.” But I also am very aware that because the world has changed so much, the resonance of the play has changed, too, and the need for imagination and the need for the arts and the need for human contact, those things are much more profound in the production than they were before.“Chester Bailey” involves a physical altercation. What’s that like to perform?EPHRAIM That’s just a regular Tuesday for us!REED I don’t think Ephraim and I have ever had a fight. So it’s really interesting to suddenly be in the middle of one. That’s one of the things that acting does — it takes you places you don’t usually go. He’s pretty good at it, too. I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with him.What do Connie and Gus think of the play?EPHRAIM They love it. They really do. Mom is not someone who will pretend to like something.REED Yeah, Mom is a tough critic. And Gus couldn’t stop crying. There were a lot of tears.Is there a play the whole family could do together?REED People weirdly say, “You guys should do ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” That would be incredibly weird. That’s kind of gross.EPHRAIM People forget what that play’s about. We could do a fun version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But I don’t think anyone wants to see us to do that.REED I don’t think the play has been written, honestly. More

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      Challenges Aplenty Onstage in London, With Some Fun Along the Way

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      As London venues reopen, theatergoers can choose to reckon with works like “The Death of a Black Man” or enjoy frothier fare from George Bernard Shaw.LONDON — Intimations of mortality have weighed heavily on our minds during the pandemic, so what better work to reanimate the National Theater than “After Life,” a play set in a mysterious space between this world and the next?The director Jeremy Herrin’s often startling production, staged in conjunction with the theater company Headlong, is the first in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, for some 15 months, and has had its run extended to Aug. 7.The source material is an acclaimed 1998 film of the same name from the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, here adapted by the prolific Jack Thorne, of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” renown.The play is thematically challenging material to offer audiences recently well acquainted with the possibility of illness, or worse. And yet the abiding achievement of Herrin and his expert design team, headed by the Tony winners Bunny Christie (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting), is the delicacy they bring to what could be fairly heavy going. You’re aware throughout of the high stakes involved for the so-called “guided,” who are asked to select a single memory to take with them for eternity into the afterlife.The takeaway from an evening at “After Life,” though, is the visual wit and delight of a stage dominated by filing cabinets reaching to the ceiling that allows for a sudden cascade of falling petals and permits one conversation to occur with the characters perched halfway up the back wall.Anoushka Lucas in Jack Thorne’s “After Life,” adapted from the film by Hirokazu Kore-eda and directed by Jeremy Herrin at the National Theater’s smallest auditorium, the  Dorfman.Johan PerssonThe cast includes the veteran June Watson in robust form as an anxious woman ceaselessly fretting about her cat and the fast-rising Luke Thallon as a tremulous guide left to navigate a dreamscape that has a fablelike quality, even if the writing feels not quite fully developed and could deliver greater emotional force.The demands placed upon audiences are increased, and so are the rewards, across town at the Hampstead Theater. The north London playhouse has reopened after five months with “The Death of a Black Man,” a play that was originally scheduled last year as part of a 60th-anniversary series of revivals of titles first seen there.Premiered in 1975, the three-character drama offers a rare glimpse of the work of Alfred Fagon, a Jamaican-born writer and actor who died of a heart attack in London in 1986, age 49. Dawn Walton’s expert production, on view through July 10, leaves no doubt as to what was lost with Fagon’s premature death, even as it hints at the resonance for today of a play steeped in the specifics of the 1970s.Mention is made of the film “Last Tango in Paris” and of Princess Anne’s looming marriage to Captain Mark Phillips, and we hear pulsating snatches of “The Harder They Come,” the reggae classic from the 1972 film. But the core of the play, set in a Chelsea flat inhabited by 18-year-old Shakie (Nickcolia King-N’da), lies in what sort of future awaits this budding entrepreneur and the 30-year-old woman, Jackie (the astonishing Natalie Simpson), with whom he has a child and who has arrived back in his life after a two-year absence.From left, Alex Bhat, Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Hara Yannas in “Overruled,” part of the “Shaw Shorts” double bill directed by Paul Miller at the Orange Tree Theater.Richard Davenport/The Other RichardThe pair are joined before long by a political firebrand, Stumpie (a charismatic Toyin Omari-Kinch), who promises a better life for them all in “mother Africa” and doesn’t believe in right or wrong, only the need to “just grab what you can get.” Much of the unabashedly talky proceedings anticipate the Black Lives Matter movement, while the title reaches beyond an explicit reference to the death of Shakie’s father to connect with audiences today who, after the murder of George Floyd and others, understand the reality of such deaths all too well. (A namecheck is given to the divisive politician of the age, Enoch Powell, whose modern-day equivalents are easily found.)The plotting carries distinct echoes of Harold Pinter in its reversals of power and authority, and Simpson wears Jackie’s bravura like a shield, all the while falling to pieces internally. At one point, Walton has her actors stare down the audience directly as if daring them to acknowledge the play’s increasingly nihilistic landscape head-on as something we cannot help but understand and even share. It’s to this fierce production’s credit that you cannot look away.Weightiness, it would seem, is a London theatrical constant just now, even when it misfires, as in the case of Amy Berryman’s “Walden,” a worthy but synthetic sibling-relationship drama set against an ecowarrior backdrop that struggles to sound authentic. (That play finished its limited run at the Harold Pinter Theater on June 12.)Those in search of frothier fare will alight with pleasure on “Shaw Shorts,” two one-acts at the always-inviting Orange Tree Theater in Richmond, west London, that can be booked separately or together through June 26, depending how much time potentially Covid-skittish audiences want to spend in an auditorium.Olatunji Ayofe, center, in “After Life.” Johan PerssonThe pairing of “How He Lied to Her Husband” and “Overruled” reminds us of the subversive morality of a playwright eyeing the amorous goings-on among a sector of society who — guess what? — pass their time going to Shaw plays. In a cheeky nod toward himself, Shaw has the lovers in his 1904 “How He Lied to Her Husband” compare themselves to characters in his earlier and better-known “Candida,” which it seems these adulterers have seen.In the polygamy-minded “Overruled” (1912), the ever-breezy Mrs. Lunn (the able Dorothea Myer-Bennett) as good as offers her husband to another woman, leaving the male half of the other couple (played by Jordan Mifsúd) to expound on the boredom inherent in a happy marriage. The director, Paul Miller, runs the Orange Tree and has long included Shaw in an eclectic lineup of writers that extends to the contemporary as well.The result is a two-part bagatelle that serves for now as a starter in advance of heavier fare to come. These may be difficult times, but there’s room among the thematically fearsome for some fun, too.After Life. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. National Theater, through Aug. 7.The Death of a Black Man. Directed by Dawn Walton. Hampstead Theater, through July 10.Shaw Shorts. Directed by Paul Miller. Orange Tree Theater, through June 26. More

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      Atlantic Theater Company Announces a Premiere-Packed Season

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      Five works will debut from August to April, including Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter” and an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo.”Atlantic Theater Company will spring back to life this summer with an ambitious five-premiere season. The theater’s Off Broadway productions, announced Tuesday, include Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter,” an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo” and a new play by Ngozi Anyanwu.Anyanwu, a playwright-actor whose work “The Homecoming Queen” was staged there in 2018, returns in August with “The Last of the Love Letters.” Patricia McGregor will direct. The play is about two people wrestling with “the thing they love most” and questioning “whether to stick it out or to leave it behind,” according to the theater.The musical adaptation of “Kimberly Akimbo,” with music by Jeanine Tesori, will debut 20 years after Lindsay-Abaire’s play was first produced at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. It tells the story of a teenage girl with a condition that has left her with the health and appearance of a 72-year-old. In his 2003 review of the Manhattan Theater Club production of the dark comedy, Ben Brantley called it “haunting and hilarious.”Silverman’s show, based on her 2010 memoir, will arrive in 2022, nearly two years after it had originally been scheduled to receive its world premiere. The company noted that Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the music and collaborated with Silverman on the lyrics, will not be present when the cast takes its first bows next April. He died in 2020 of Covid-19 complications.The second half of the season will also feature “SHHHHH,” a new play by Clare Barron, which she will direct and perform in, and Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” about four adult students in Iran preparing for a language test.More information about the season is available at atlantictheater.org. More

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      Making Every Second Count in Plays Too Short to Miss

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      Theater shrank to tiny proportions during the pandemic. Sometimes that’s a big plus.Forever ago, in March 2020, a press agent handed me tickets before a show and said, “Ninety minutes, no intermission, thank God.”But those days of durational drama are gone. The pandemic has been whittling down running times as if attention spans, like paper towels, were running short. Even “Angels in America” caught the disease, showing up online in October at 50 minutes instead of the customary seven hours.So when I heard that the British playwright Caryl Churchill, already a master of concision, had upped (or lowered) the ante with a 14-minute play — not a doodle or a one-act meant for pairing with others, but a stand-alone event — I began to wonder what advantages might be found in the shorter forms that online theater made feasible. Or was the pandemic just an excuse for clearing out the small ideas that clutter every writer’s notepad and napping dreams?That Churchill play — “What If If Only,” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company — is the briefest of three I saw in the last week alone. “The Floor Wipers,” from the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, runs 15 minutes; “Ali Summit,” from the Actors Theater of Louisville, weighs in at 23.Paradoxically, their similar lengths — just a gulp, and they’re over — help to differentiate them, as the various ways in which they pack their brief time are highlighted instead of papered over.Churchill is not, in any event, a paper-overer. “What If If Only” is harrowing from nearly the first instant, as a woman begs her late husband, who may have committed suicide, to make contact from beyond.“Are you not trying?” she cries. “If you’d wanted to talk to me you could have stayed alive.”Soon the husband does appear, as the wisp of a ghost that could become real, he says, if only his wife would make him “possible.”Merging Churchill’s frequent themes of dread (“Escaped Alone,” “Far Away”) and duplication (“A Number,” “Love and Information”), “What If If Only” dismisses its speculative worlds as quickly as it creates them. The wife’s despair, tearing a hole in space-time, soon releases a multiplicity of possible versions of her husband, had he lived, crowding out the “real” one. Even when she shoos them away in terror, one remains stuck in her hair.“Just brush with your fingers,” her husband says gently. “All gone.”I call the main characters “she” and “her husband” because the livestreamed production, perfectly and creepily “realized” by the stage director Les Waters and the theater tech guru Jared Mezzocchi, casts the roles to suggest that the mourner is a woman (Mia Katigbak, superb as always) and the ghost is a man (Bernard White).But the play’s horror, which in Churchill is never just cosmological but also spiritual, comes from the combination of its radical relevance to any human and its freakish compression, in which 14 minutes becomes a literal deadline. The extreme brevity — typical one-acts more often last an hour or longer — serves as a tool, like a socket wrench, to make clear that grief is unbearable, even in small doses.One of Andy Perez’s collages from “Ali Summit.”via Actors Theater of Louisville“Ali Summit,” by Idris Goodwin, also feels usefully short, in the manner of a teaser designed to encourage deeper research and reflection. The subject is the June 1967 meeting at which major Black athletes — including Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (not yet known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) — questioned Muhammad Ali about his conscientious objection to military service.Though Ali’s justification now seems incontrovertible — “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” — he was nevertheless convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his heavyweight title, sentenced to five-years in a federal penitentiary and fined $10,000. Five years later, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction.None of that falls within the scope of “Ali Summit,” which limits itself to the disruptive and galvanizing effect Ali had on his colleagues that summer. In fact, Ali, though he is represented, like all the characters, in a series of beautiful collages by Andy Perez, does not speak in the play. Only the others do, voiced by actors who give full force to the confusion and anguish of men who are already questioning what it means, as Black athletes working for white “owners,” to fight.“We are soldiers, all of us really, enlisted since birth,” says the Griot, or narrator figure, portrayed by the playwright and rendered as a wide-eyed witness.The language, mixing earthy jargon with breakbeat poetics, is as much a collage as the visuals and does a good job of setting the tone of urgent reflection. But also like the visuals, which are filmed in the familiar documentary pan-and-scan style, it tends to flatten conflict that wants to be more argumentative and three-dimensional. (An immersive virtual reality element is scheduled to be added later this summer.) As if to make up for that, “Ali Summit,” directed by Robert Barry Fleming, mines emotion from the pressurized implications of its transitional moment, a moment we are somehow still living through.“I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali,” Russell says. “I’m worried about the rest of us.”Jaylene Clark Owens, left, and Taysha Marie Canales in “The Floor Wipers.”via the Wilma TheaterAthletes figure in “The Floor Wipers,” too — indirectly. Its two characters, Racine and Tiana, are members of an “elite squad” given the responsibility, during the N.B.A.’s coronavirus-bubble playoffs last year, of keeping basketball courts dry and sweat-free. (This is a real job.) An exaggerated, “Law & Order”-style introduction immediately identifies “The Floor Wipers” as quick-take comedy; in a handful of episodes of just a few minutes each, the women gossip and sass on the sidelines while waiting for their big moments.For Tiana (Jaylene Clark Owens), those moments are about furthering God’s plan that she marry one of the players; she’d prefer Jayson Tatum but would settle for Nikola Jokic. Racine (Taysha Marie Canales) has more modest goals: to work off her pandemic 15 and save money for her first trip “abroad” — to Texas.Conceived by Canales, directed by Akeem Davis and written by both along with Owens, “The Floor Wipers” is really just a sketch, but it does not ignore the way the outside world penetrates even a bubble. Tiana and Racine wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts, take note of the kneeling players and lose work when games are canceled in protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake. The sure touch of the writing and especially of the performing mean that the comedy isn’t canceled by the intimations of tragedy. Instead, you laugh with a catch in your throat, and the whole thing evaporates before you can ask too much of it.That’s smart, and something I wish other sketch shows, some of which are televised on Saturday nights, would learn from.For dread, though, a heavy boil may be best. That’s what Churchill gives us in “What If If Only,” and why it will likely stand on its own even when mounted live in a theater, as the Royal Court in London plans to do this fall. But be warned that Churchill, even at 14 minutes, doesn’t evaporate. When she leaves a kettle on the fire that long, it often bursts into flames.What If If OnlyThrough June 20; naatco.orgThe Floor WipersAt wilmatheater.orgAli SummitAt actorstheatre.org More

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      Lisa Banes, 'Gone Girl' Actress, Dies at 65 After Hit-and-Run

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      A mainstay of the New York stage, she also acted in films, including “Gone Girl.” She died 10 days after she was struck by a scooter as she was crossing a street in Manhattan.Lisa Banes, a versatile actress who came to prominence on the New York stage in the 1980s and went on to a busy career that also included roles on television and in the films “Cocktail” and “Gone Girl,” died on Monday of head injuries she sustained 10 days earlier when she was struck by a scooter in Manhattan. She was 65.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, was confirmed by the New York Police Department, which said she had been struck by the scooter on June 4 as she was crossing Amsterdam Avenue near West 64th Street in Manhattan.The operator of the scooter had driven through a red light before crashing into Ms. Banes and then fled, said Sgt. Edward Riley, a police spokesman. Sgt. Riley said on Tuesday that no arrests had been made.Ms. Banes lived in Los Angeles and had been in New York visiting friends, her wife, Kathryn Kranhold, said.Known for her wry humor and confident, elegant presence, Ms. Banes appeared in more than 80 television and film roles, as well as in countless stage productions, including on Broadway.Ms. Banes, as the mother of a missing woman, with Ben Affleck in the 2014 movie “Gone Girl.” Alamy Stock PhotoShe found quick success in the theater after coming east from Colorado Springs in the mid-1970s and studying at the Juilliard School in New York.In 1980, when the Roundabout Theater revived John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” with Malcolm McDowell in the lead role as the angry Jimmy Porter, she played his overstressed wife.“Lisa Banes has a remarkably effective final scene,” Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times, “on her knees in anguish, face stained with failure, arms awkwardly searching for shape and for rest.”The next year, at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., she was in a production of the James M. Barrie comedy “The Admirable Crichton,” playing a daughter in an upper-crust British family that becomes shipwrecked on a deserted island.“As Lady Mary,” Mel Gussow of The Times wrote in his review, “Lisa Banes has a regal disdain. Gracefully, she plays the grande dame, and with matching agility she becomes a kind of Jane of the jungle, swimming rivers and swinging on vines — a rather far-fetched transformation, brought off with panache by this striking young actress.”Off Broadway roles kept coming. Later in 1981 she and Elizabeth McGovern had the lead roles in Wendy Kesselman’s “My Sister in This House” at Second Stage Theater. In 1982, at Manhattan Theater Club, she was the sister Olga in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” part of a starry cast that included Dianne Wiest, Mia Dillon, Jeff Daniels, Christine Ebersole and Sam Waterston.In 1984, when Ms. Banes was in the midst of a run in Wendy Wasserstein’s comedy “Isn’t It Romantic” at Playwrights Horizons, The Times named her one of 15 stage actresses to watch. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in that play. More

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      ‘Revolution Rent’ Review: Taking the Show South

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      This HBO documentary follows Andy Señor Jr. as he directs a production of “Rent” in Cuba.In the ballad “La Vie Boheme,” a colorful cadre of artists raise a toast to “emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion.” After all, Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking musical “Rent” embodies revolution. In the earnest though narratively clumsy HBO documentary “Revolution Rent,” a director unpacks the relevance of this joyously defiant show when it’s translated to a different language, culture and political landscape.“Revolution Rent,” directed by Andy Señor Jr. and Victor Patrick Alvarez, depicts Señor’s rocky road to developing Cuba’s first Broadway musical produced by an American company in decades. The film begins with Señor’s background with “Rent” as a performer and his decision, regardless of his family’s protests, to direct a Cuban adaptation. In addition to confronting technical issues, translation adjustments and disagreements among the cast members, Señor is also forced to consider his own heritage and history. Despite the intriguing premise of the film, its cursory and lopsided narrative approach dilutes its salient themes and messages.The film feels scattered, with the first quarter too heavily reliant on abruptly intercut footage of the original Broadway cast performances, and the rest too shallowly dipping into details of the production’s story before skipping along to the next thing.And so Señor’s personal narrative shifts in and out of focus — his relationship to the musical and to his Cuban heritage are detailed just enough to leave us wanting more history, more background, more reflection and more depth. Similarly, the brief glimpses into the lives of its cast members, some queer and many impoverished, are compelling, but inconsistent and over too soon.For a documentary about a substantial staging of a beloved musical, “Revolution Rent” also skimps on the scenes of the final product itself. The production’s Roger singing an impassioned Spanish translation of “One Song Glory”; Señor pushing a cast member into an emotional reckoning with the meaning of the word freedom; the conversations about performing a queer musical in a country that hasn’t had a great track record for its treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people: These are the kinds of moments that most resonate but are overshadowed by the film’s sporadic approach.The show “Rent” gave us an onstage revolution, while “Revolution Rent” often gives us an underwhelming translation.Revolution RentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on HBO. More

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      They Fought to Make ‘In the Heights’ Both Dreamlike and Authentic

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      The creative team of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Jon M. Chu explain what it took to create a euphoric spectacle that stayed true to its cultural roots.Lin-Manuel Miranda still believes it was a miracle that “In the Heights,” the musical homage to Latino culture through the lens of the Washington Heights neighborhood, made it to Broadway. Back in 2008, before striving for inclusion became the entertainment industry standard, he and the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes were unknowns peddling a joyful narrative about unseen people.Their exuberant show inspired by their families and neighbors finally reaches the big screen (and HBO Max) this week after stumbling through multiple studios. Warner Bros. and the director Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) were ultimately entrusted with the project.In retrospect, Miranda said, it was naïve to think that getting the show from the stage to the multiplex would be easy. It took more than a decade.“Some of the hurdles were about Hollywood’s unwillingness to take chances on new talent and invest in that,” Miranda said. “When you watch this movie that Jon has so beautifully directed, you see a screen full of movie stars, but some of them you may not have heard of before. They were movie stars without the roles they needed to become movie stars.” More

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      Harvey Fierstein Donates $2.5 Million for Public Library Theater Lab

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      The gift from the writer and performer will help create an educational hub at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.Harvey Fierstein may be a multiple Tony-winning performer and writer. But he is also the son of a librarian, who still sometimes heads to the reading room when he needs to do homework.In 2005, when he was preparing to play Tevye in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” he visited the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch a recording of an earlier Broadway revival featuring Zero Mostel, which is included in its famed Theater on Film and Tape Archive.“And don’t tell anyone, but I’ve also used the library,” he said in an interview, dropping his famous Brooklyn molasses-spiked-with-gravel voice, “for pleasure.”Now, Fierstein has donated $2.5 million to create a new “theater lab” at the library’s Lincoln Center campus, a dedicated educational space where students and the general public will be able to attend programs drawing on its vast holdings of photographs, scripts, recordings, set models, costumes and other materials.“Live theater is live theater — you do it and that’s it,” said Fierstein, 67. “Without a library collecting this stuff, our whole history disappears.”The lab, which will be named for Fierstein, is to be built in what is currently a 770-square-foot office space. In a statement, Jennifer Schantz, the library’s director, said it would be “an incubator of creativity” that embodies “the library’s mission to inspire lifelong learning using the theater division’s unparalleled collections.”The performing arts library holds material from shows Fierstein wrote or performed in, including “Torch Song Trilogy,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “Kinky Boots” and “Hairspray.” But as it happens, his personal papers are elsewhere.In 2005, before a home renovation, Fierstein placed his personal archive at Yale University. “So I needed to also do something for the performing arts library,” he said.In addition to the $2.5 million donation, the library has been named a beneficiary of the Harvey Fierstein Trust, which will allow it to receive additional support in the future.Fierstein said he hoped the lab would help people reimagine what theater can be after the pandemic, which shuttered the entire industry. He recalled how over the years, every time he did a revival of “Torch Song Trilogy,” for which he won his first two Tonys in 1983, he would call the downtown experimental theater La MaMa to ask if he could use their rehearsal space, which he described as a kind of spiritual home.“I would ask, ‘Can I borrow your basement?’” he said. “I thought of it as a kind of womb. That’s what I think of this space as — a womb for something wonderful. You just don’t know what’s going to be born out of it.” More