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      Review: Connection, Interrupted, in ‘Communion’

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      Christopher Chen’s new play is big on concept and cleverness, but withholds the intimacy that theater-lovers have craved during the pandemic.Last March, I booked tickets to see “The Headlands,” a new play by Christopher Chen. A few days later, live theater vanished like some awful magic act. I never made it to that show. But now Chen, a high-concept playwright with a vertiginous approach to dramatic structure, has created a new one, “Communion,” a clever and chilly digital wisp produced by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and experienced on Zoom. To see it, as in-person performances prepare to return elsewhere, provides a dizzy kind of symmetry.“Communion,” directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Stacy Ross, begins as so many recent shows have. A house manager greets the audience (about 40 people on the night I attended), offering a brief tutorial on cameras and mics and gallery view. Then Ross, a beloved Bay Area performer, appears, speaking from what looks like a basement. A nice basement. Ross, wearing a blazer, pigtails and a shrunken porkpie hat, has through-the-roof charisma, even in a Zoom window. This helped during the pro forma opening monologue, a friendly acknowledgment of the limits and possibilities of remote theater. “I always thought it would be interesting to do a Zoom show that somehow really took advantage of this strange intimacy this platform has,” Ross said excitedly.Like works by Will Eno and Lucas Hnath, Chen’s create a tension between the ideas at play — here, presence and absence, truth and lies, trust and manipulation — and the characters who inhabit them. There’s so much intelligence in “Communion,” enhanced by Ross’s mischievous performance and MacKinnon’s sleek direction. But the overall effect is somewhat stingy. It might have felt differently earlier in the pandemic. But at this point, most of us with working Wi-Fi have already thought plenty about presence and absence. I would trade the conceptualism for something more embracingly human.In fairness, “Communion” offers that, too. Late in the show, an unseen force sorts the audience into breakout rooms, asking us to introduce ourselves and perhaps discuss one of the prompts Chen had emailed before the show — chiefly, “In one or two sentences, can you describe a guiding principle you have?” Awkwardly and then with more ease, we introduced ourselves. One man shared a guiding principle, often attributed to Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”The rest of us had no principles. Still, we reveled in one another’s company and in the experience of sharing a work of art together, even though we sat some 4,000 miles apart. (In this, it resembles the recent efforts of groups like 600 Highwaymen.) It made me nostalgic for all those taken-for-granted lobby nods, that post-show race around the corner to discuss the play at a safe distance, that feeling of constituting an audience.“Communion” ends with a few conceptual switcheroos designed to make you question everything you have seen and heard. And I did. But these reveals dangle what people who love theater hunger for — connection, intimacy and yes, sure, communion — then snatch it back again, like Tantalus on a video call. Did you suspend your disbelief? Sucker.I like my disbelief suspended. And if a year of seeing shows from my bedroom has taught me anything, it is that I will take theater where I can find it. Here, I’d locate it less in Chen’s forceful smarts and more in those halting, unscripted breakout room moments, in a grid of people marking time with good will and small talk until we can really, actually be together again.CommunionThrough June 27; act-sf.org. More

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      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

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      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More

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      It’s Outside, but Shakespeare in the Park Still Plans Social Distancing

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      The free, beloved summer tradition will enjoy an extended run, but currently plans very limited capacity, with masks required.One of New York City’s hottest tickets is about to get even harder to get: When Shakespeare in the Park returns to the Delacorte Theater this summer after losing a year to the pandemic, it plans to sharply limit capacity in order to follow state guidelines, officials announced on Thursday.The 1,800-seat theater currently plans to allow only 428 attendees for each performance of “Merry Wives,” the intermission-free adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” being put on by the Public Theater; it says it must do so under the state’s current, but rapidly-shifting, rules. But there will be more performances: The show will run three weeks longer than originally scheduled, through Sept. 18 rather than Aug. 28.In a news release, officials said the capacity limit was put in place because of the need for social distancing. They said all theatergoers over age 2 would be required to wear a mask and either provide proof of full vaccination or a recent negative Covid test to attend.The decision to significantly limit the size of the audience stands in contrast to some other New York venues that have gotten permission to reopen to bigger crowds. Radio City Music Hall, for instance, plans to reopen this month to a full, indoor house of maskless, vaccinated ticket holders. Broadway shows have started ticket sales for what will be full-capacity performances, some of which will begin in mid-September. And on the other side of the country, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles has decided to start selling all 18,000 of its seats.It is possible that the limits could be eased before opening night. A spokeswoman for the Public said Thursday that New York health and safety protocols for small and medium-sized performing arts spaces still require six feet of social distance between patrons. She said the theater would await updated guidance from the state and would adapt its policies as needed. More

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      Some Venue Owners Get a Federal Lifeline. Others Are Told They’re Dead.

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      The first applications for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, offering $16 billion in federal aid, were approved.As the emails finally started arriving late last week, some business owners got the good news they had been long awaiting: They would be awarded a piece of a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic.But other applicants ran into fresh obstacles — including the discovery that the government thinks they’re dead. It was the latest bureaucratic mishap for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, an aid program created by Congress late last year that has struggled at nearly every turn to disburse badly needed relief funds.Derek Sitter, the owner of the Volcanic Theater Pub, a 250-capacity music and performance venue in Bend, Ore., was at home on Saturday watching a British soccer game when an alert popped up on his phone: “Congratulations,” ran the subject line of an email from the Small Business Administration, which manages the grant program.Mr. Sitter ran outside to tell his wife and daughter the news, with tears swelling in his eyes. “My heart rate increased,” he recalled in an interview. “But it was a good increase.”The Volcanic was awarded about $140,000, Mr. Sitter said, though the funds have not yet arrived. (The size of the grant is pegged at 45 percent of a venue’s gross revenue from 2019.) Just how many venues have learned that their applications have been approved is unclear, but members of the network of small venues — which became a tightly connected hive during the pandemic — say they have heard of only a few so far. The Small Business Administration has not released details on how many claims it has approved.Bobby McKey’s, a piano bar near Washington, is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Bob Hansan, the venue’s managing partner, said that his application was stalled because the government thinks he is dead. Charles King/C King MediaOther applicants got grimmer news. Bob Hansan, the managing partner of Bobby McKey’s, a piano bar near Washington, received a cryptic email Tuesday afternoon that began: “Your name appears on the Do Not Pay list with the Match Source DMF.”A few minutes of frantic Googling revealed that was a reference to the government’s Death Master File, a record of more than 83 million people whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration.Mr. Hansan immediately called Social Security’s headquarters, which referred him to his local office, which told Mr. Hansan that they could find no record of his name anywhere on the death list. The office agreed to send him a form affirming that he’s alive, but the document can only be sent by mail, he was told — a process he worries will be slow.“It’s this continual drip-drop of delays,” he said.Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York — and a prominent figure in the independent music world — also received notification early Wednesday that he was considered dead, and said that he was beside himself trying to understand how to correct the error.“What do I do? What kind of proof do they need?” Mr. Swier said. “Can I say over the phone, ‘It’s me’?”Representatives of the Small Business Administration did not answer questions about the erroneous death data.Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York, was told he was considered dead. (He is alive.) “What do I do?” he asked. “What kind of proof do they need?”Michal Czerwonka for The New York TimesThe glitches were the latest to bedevil the program, which has suffered many delays, including a complete failure of its online system on the day it tried to start taking applications. (The application system finally opened in late April.)Some 13,000 people applied, seeking a total of $11 billion. The Small Business Administration has not yet released details on how many it has approved.In Facebook groups and on Twitter, frantic business owners have been swapping tips and trying to glean where in the application process their own claim might be.Some venues are beginning to get good news.Hugh Hallinan, the executive producer of Downtown Cabaret Theater, a nonprofit venue in Bridgeport, Conn., spent weeks checking the S.B.A.’s grant portal each day, and last Thursday learned that his theater had been approved for a $541,000 grant.On Tuesday the theater held a news conference with Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.“We’ve been in Bridgeport for 41 years, and we’ve never gotten recognition like this,” Mr. Hallinan said in an interview. “I just thought, ‘We’re going to soak it all up right now. We’re going to bask in it.’”Downtown Cabaret came close to shutting down last year. Downtown Cabaret Theater, in Bridgeport, Conn., which came close to shutting down, learned that it had been approved for a $541,000 grant. Richard Pettibone“If all patrons who had tickets called in and said, ‘I need a refund,’ it was game-over time,” Mr. Hallinan said. Instead, many opted for a credit on their account, and about a third of donated the cost of their tickets back to the venue, Mr. Hallinan said.The funding has not yet started flowing to Broadway. A spokeswoman for the Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, said that none of its members had notified the group about receiving application approvals. Charlotte St. Martin, the group’s president, had said last month that officials had told the group that money would start coming in by the end of May, but that deadline has now passed.And several major performing arts organizations in New York City that are planning summer or fall reopenings are also still waiting. Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, the Public Theater and the Metropolitan Opera have not yet heard. Many will not be eligible until a later round of awards.Mr. Sitter, in Oregon, said he had no idea why the Volcanic got its award so early. Like many applicants, it had lost at least 90 percent of its revenue during the pandemic, which qualified the Volcanic for the first round of grants. Others who lost less will be eligible for awards in mid- to late June.The Volcanic received some federal money last year from an earlier round of federal pandemic relief. That got it through 2020, Mr. Sitter said. But by last month, the Volcanic was down to its last few thousand dollars, not enough to cover its rent and monthly bills for June, Mr. Sitter said. He was considering whether to sell or shut it down.With the shuttered venue grant, the Volcanic can stay open until next year, when Mr. Sitter expects its pipeline of shows to be back to normal. This weekend, it is planning to put on its first shows since last summer, at 50 percent capacity.“There’s certainly not a lot of profit going to be made here,” Mr. Sitter said. “This is simply to lift the spirits of people, to say, ‘We can kind of do this, we’re doing good, and there is a way out.’” More

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      Broadway Theater Owner Cited by OSHA in Stagehand’s Fatal Fall

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      Federal regulators cited the Shubert Organization for four workplace safety violations in the death of an employee in the Winter Garden Theater.Federal regulators have cited the Shubert Organization for four serious workplace safety violations and proposed a fine of $45,642 in connection with the death of an employee who fell from a ladder while working at the Winter Garden Theater last fall.The citations, from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, were issued on May 11, six months after Peter Wright, a 54-year-old stagehand, fell nearly 50 feet from a narrow, raised platform while performing routine maintenance in the theater.OSHA issues these serious citations when, according to its review, lapses have led to hazards carrying a “substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result.” In the Shubert Organization’s case, OSHA did not find that the violations were willful ones, in which an employer “intentionally and knowingly” violates the law.The Shubert Organization has set up a meeting to discuss the citations and penalties, James C. Lally, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor, said. If the two parties do not reach a settlement, the company can still contest the citations, Mr. Lally said. Otherwise, they will be obligated to pay the full amount.A spokesman for the Shubert Organization declined a request for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.The violations issued to the group, which is the largest landlord on Broadway, included having a wooden ladder coated with a material that could obscure structural defects and two instances of a ladder used for a purpose for which it was not designed.Mr. Wright, who was from Milford, Conn., was a stagehand for Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the labor union that represents professional stage employees in New York, for 34 years. He and his wife of 23 years, Marcie Lowy Wright, met when they were both working as stagehands for a 1990s “Grease” revival at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local 1, wrote in a tribute in November that Mr. Wright “had a work ethic that was nothing short of exemplary, was extremely talented and skilled in his craft, and he was one of the finest riggers/flyman in our industry.”The last show to play at the Winter Garden Theater had been “Beetlejuice,” which had been set to end its run on June 6, 2020, before the theater, like all on Broadway, shut on March 12 because of the pandemic; “Beetlejuice” was not slated to return. A revival of “The Music Man” that will star Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster is set to begin performances in December and open next February.Bill Evans, a spokesman for the Shubert Organization, said at the time of Mr. Wright’s death that most stagehands had not been working at the organization’s other theaters during the pandemic shutdown.“We mourn the loss of our valued colleague,” he said in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences go out to the family during this difficult time.”Dylan Foley, who was a friend and co-worker of Mr. Wright’s, wrote in a Facebook tribute in November that Mr. Wright was “completely fearless in how he lived his life as a stagehand” and often did the work of three men.“He had a dry wit, an unstoppable work ethic, and a trademarked grin,” Mr. Foley wrote. “If you asked for something from Pete, his line was, ‘For you, the grid’s the limit.’” More

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      A Chance to Fix the Tonys, and So Many Things to Fix

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      It has been a tough year for Broadway. Now it’s time to get tough on the show that too often honors investors instead of achievers.You know that hideous scrum of investors storming the stage when their show is named best play or best musical at the Tony Awards?Well, they’re heading back unless somebody stops them.The 2021 Tonys, which because of the pandemic are actually the 2020 Tonys, will be awarded on Sept. 26. That will make 27 months since the last telecast, in June 2019: plenty of time to rethink what has become a reliably mortifying experience. But to do that, Broadway will have to face up to the way it has traditionally favored the financiers over the artists in its shotgun wedding of art and commerce.Take the 2014 telecast, on which Jennifer Hudson sang the bombastic title song from the musical “Finding Neverland.”Was that show in the running for any awards? No — it did not even open until the following season. Was Hudson at least supposed to appear in it? No, but she was more famous than anyone who did. Was the staging, in which Peter Pan performed a ballet in green camo while Hudson swanned nearby in silver lamé, even remotely understandable?Well, yes, if you knew that the producer of “Finding Neverland” was Harvey Weinstein.Even when not being manipulated by moneybags, the awards have regularly represented Broadway as a neurotic mess: defensive about its marginality, embarrassed by its serious works and insecure about its commercial appeal. In the opening number at the 2019 awards, the host, James Corden, spent more than nine minutes begging the CBS audience to honor the liveness of live theater, even as he listed the many delightful and far more accessible experiences available on television, including his own CBS talk show.James Corden, flanked by Kelli O’Hara, Brooks Ashmanskas and other Broadway performers, during the opening number of the 2019 Tony Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow is the time for the Tonys to pull their act together. Why should the best show people somehow keep making the dullest, tackiest hodgepodge of a show?Which is not to say it will be easy, especially this year. Aside from reflecting the disaster of the pandemic, which saw Broadway darkened, its ranks thinned by disease and thousands out of work, the Tonys will have to address, within the context of an entertainment product, the racism long built into the theatrical ecosystem and the recent calls for change. That’s a story not very susceptible to jazz hands.With so much to do, the announcement that only three competitive awards will be given out within the two-hour CBS broadcast — the other 22 having been relegated to a two-hour preshow on the streaming service Paramount+ — may prove to be good news instead of the abomination it at first seemed.That’s because pushing most of the awards into one compartment and most of the singing and dancing into another may allow the producers and writers of this year’s show, many of them veterans of previous Tonys, to celebrate both parts of the Broadway package more fully. The gravity and the razzmatazz can each have their say, in their own style, instead of fighting for dominance and airtime, and losing jointly.There was a time when razzmatazz had no part in the proceedings. In the early years of the awards, which were first televised, to a local New York audience, in 1956, the ceremony was more like a funeral directors’ dinner, with little or no entertainment, extremely brief speeches and some very odd categories. (Best stage technician?) Coaxing potential audiences, especially out-of-town ones, to see a Broadway show was not on the agenda, and television itself, blurry and black-and-white, was no competition anyway. The point was merely to honor the honorees.Now we accept that the Tonys are an industry marketing tool, the honorees merely bait.That can be fun, and even powerful, when staged with the wit and intelligence that the best musicals apply to the uneasy relationship between art and commerce. In recent years, numbers from “Fun Home” (2015) and “The Band’s Visit” (2018) were so beautifully conceived for the camera — largely by their original directors, Sam Gold and David Cromer — that without any loss of seriousness or subtlety they demonstrated why people might want to see the shows in the first place.And with enough savvy, even a crushing loss could be expressed in prime time, as when students who survived the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sang “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” on that year’s telecast.But for the most part, recent musicals appear in a poor light compared to the classics of past Tonys, not because they are necessarily worse but because the old telecasts often cushioned their selections in context and let you get to know their characters. Plays have it even worse: They are barely permitted to present themselves at all. “Choir Boy,” in 2019, was the exception that proved the rule, intercutting spoken elements of its story with a thrilling version of “Rockin’ Jerusalem.”Finally, at the bottom of the pecking order, come the artists, starting with leading actors, then supporting actors, then directors, choreographers, composers, book writers, designers and, well, does anyone remember the last time we got to hear an orchestrator say more than four words on television?All of this can be improved in a split show. With its increased total time of four hours — and especially this year, with fewer categories and nominees than usual — the ceremony can honor the plays with meaningful excerpts, and the people who actually make the work with recorded segments that help us see what they do. The entertainment segment can likewise be given more time to breathe, allowing drop-dead production numbers and quieter, more intimate moments to create a rhythm more like the experience you actually get on Broadway.And if the Tonys would deign to take some pointers from the creators of the Antonyo awards, which in the worst of the pandemic managed to honor Black theater artists with dignity and warmth — or for that matter, this year’s surprising Grammys — they might remember that what they’re trying to promote, especially now, is human connection. The smarmy introductions and whirligig graphics and general aura of hectic oversell could be replaced with a more confident statement of what theater, at its best, has been and can be.Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas sang a moving rendition of “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” at the Tonys ceremony in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times ORG XMIT: FSTI’m afraid that means some drastic changes. First, let’s get rid of hosts whose Broadway cred comes mostly from untutored enthusiasm and the wishful thinking that they might boost ratings. (It never works; for years, the show has drawn only 6 million to 8 million viewers no matter what — and recently even fewer.) Homegrown talent — Billy Porter? Meryl Streep? — will do nicely, thanks.And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the overcaffeinated television directors, editing as if to induce convulsions and framing all scenes as if they were sitcoms. Recent highlights have repeatedly shown what should be obvious: Theater directors make the best televised theater.Not that Broadway’s identity crisis is going anywhere, even if we achieve the Best Tonys Ever. But to get to a healthier, more entertaining place, the American Theater Wing and the Broadway League, the organizations that present the event, have to stop favoring the commercial side so fawningly. Producers of individual shows should not be allowed to shape any content but their own; otherwise, the telecast winds up being hijacked by beamed-in celebrities singing songs from terrible musicals no one’s yet seen.And as for those stage-swarming investors? Let’s ban them too. The awards they bogart belong to the authors.In other words, let the artists be in charge. Money may talk, but it doesn’t sing. More

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      Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel.

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      Fuzzy puppet sheep. A light cutting through the haze. Hand-designed dreamscapes. There’s plenty to savor in the slow return of pixel-free theater.Striding across the plaza at Lincoln Center on a Saturday afternoon, past the bronze Henry Moore figure reclining in the reflecting pool, a man and a woman debated the sheep on the hill. Up ahead, off to their left, a small woolly flock had gathered.He was sure that they were actual animals, these five grown sheep and one darling lamb, each with its own shepherd in head-to-toe black. She argued the opposite, and was correct: These were life-size puppets, their shepherds puppeteers, and this was a pop-up performance. Under one of those broad-brimmed hats, maneuvering a long-lashed, tan-faced sheep named the Shredder, was the puppeteer Basil Twist.Yet with theater beginning its cautious tiptoe back from the sterility of the screen to the vitality (or so we hope) of in-person performance, these puppet sheep had a kind of realness that I’ve craved. As they gamboled about a fenced-off oasis of genuine grass that covers the sloping roof of a darkened upscale restaurant, their casual, nameless show was some of the truest theater I’d seen in many months.Because they were there, and so was I, and there wasn’t a pixel in sight.Theater, real theater, is an art form that we’re meant to show up for, meeting it in physical space with our physical selves. We take in the sights and scents and sounds as they happen; we note the feel of the air and the ground beneath our feet. Theater is a dialogue between artists and audience that’s also a ritual for the senses — which, after such a surfeit of digital drama, are primed to tingle.Admittedly, I had fallen in love with Twist’s charming creatures online, streaming his pandemic production of “Titon et l’Aurore,” which he had directed and designed for the Opéra Comique in Paris — a show so resplendent with puppet sheep that some were stacked into towers, and others floated through the sky.The Shredder and the rest of the gang at Lincoln Center — Splinter, Machete, Bertha, Fang and the baby, Mower — were modeled on their Parisian counterparts, with rattan skeletons and woolen coats made from wigs, whose white curls fluttered in the breeze.While a critic grew fond of the sheep puppets in an online performance, that was no match for getting close to them in person.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOn their patch of pasture, otherwise known as the Illumination Lawn (not to be confused with Mimi Lien’s nearby synthetic lawn installation, “The Green,” which is essentially set design as public art), they were like an apparition reflected in the vast glass front of Lincoln Center Theater.Toddlers were enchanted, determined to stroke Mower’s face, which the lamb’s playful puppeteer, Juanita Cardenas, warmly allowed. Spying the flock, passing dogs barked, jumped back or, if they were terribly brave, strained close to investigate.There was no plot to the performance, and barely any choreography, but it was chance-encounter magic nonetheless: puppets made by human hands and operated by artists exchanging energy — and even eye contact — with their audience.Which didn’t stop some adults who filtered through the plaza from wondering what was going on, and whether there was some deep meaning that eluded them.“Just a little herd of sheep on the hill, for the sweetness of it,” Twist said afterward, standing at one end of the reflecting pool with the Shredder in his arms.Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design proves to be an emotional highlight of “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTHE FIRST LIVE SHOW I saw when theater started returning this spring was “Blindness,” which is arguably neither live nor a show. The only actor’s voice is recorded — Juliet Stevenson, whisper-close through our headphones.But we, the audience, are live: distanced yet gathered nonetheless at the Daryl Roth Theater, off Union Square, to experience a work of art together. The thing that most moved me about it could never have happened on a screen.I’d wondered since the start of the shutdown how lighting designers would ever use haze again without freaking the audience out, since the nature of haze is to make the air visible, which makes us think about what we’re breathing, which in the past year-plus has been a very scary thing. I’d worried a little about whether it might freak me out.But there came a point in “Blindness” when the lighting designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun, broke the pitch-blackness with a soft and gorgeous beam of illumination angling through the air. As I gazed at it, I realized that the theater had been filling with haze while we were submerged in darkness, that through our masks we’d already been breathing it.And so I sat there, headphones clapped to my ears, and felt tears trickle down my cheeks — because it hadn’t unsettled me, because it felt safe and because, wow, had I missed great lighting design.IT’S SO EASY, gazing into a screen, to lose awareness of your own body. In-person theater doesn’t let that happen — and this early in the industry restart, that is double-edged.To go to a small show called “Persou” — directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos at the Cell, a performance space in Chelsea — I signed a lengthy Covid liability waiver “on behalf of myself and all of my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,” whoever those might be.Once there, I realized that even masked and fully vaccinated, in a well-ventilated room, I am not wild about the idea of standing close to strangers for a long stretch of time. Also, I will actively resist if you try to get me to dance as part of your show — though that was true even before the pandemic.I don’t regret going, though. A four-piece band played music from Cyprus and Greece that I could have listened to all night, and we spent a brief but lovely part of the performance in the incense-scented back garden, under the moon and a tall, spreading tree.And I’m pretty sure I will remember for a long time the stroller-pushing woman who walked by with her little boy as the audience waited outside, preshow, on West 23rd Street. Swearing, she muttered that we were taking up the whole sidewalk, which was a valid gripe. We are out of practice at sharing collective space.THERE ARE SENSATIONS you don’t realize you miss until you encounter them again. Like the paint-wood-adhesive smell of a freshly made set, which is part of what I loved about “A Dozen Dreams,” the En Garde Arts production at the downtown mall Brookfield Place. It’s a show that can feel, with its lack of actors, pleasingly like a walk-through of an installation.“You are the actor,” each audience member is told through headphones, at the start of a trek through 12 disparate sets belonging to 12 short plays by women, each of whom speaks her own text on the recording.Solo or in pairs, we find ourselves in Ellen McLaughlin’s “The First Line,” with its maquette scale and cracked theatricality; in Martyna Majok’s “Pandemic Dreams,” which is eerily and unambiguously a nightmare; in Rehana Lew Mirza’s “The Death of Dreams,” whose color-saturated intensity and interlocking pieces reminded me of the imagery in my own pandemic dreams.A couple of sets include video of the playwrights speaking their text, and I wish they didn’t. When I see an on-screen performance in an in-person show now, a part of me just shuts down — a reaction to online theater, but probably I have always been like this. In art museums, I look for the signature on a canvas, because to me that’s proof that a human was there. Similarly, I want my theater handmade.To a gratifying extent, “A Dozen Dreams” provides that. Irina Kruzhilina, who did the visual and environment design, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, who did the lighting, offer us something we haven’t had much of lately. We are bodily immersed in this show, and very, very far from the lonely, make-do experience of streaming theater.FIVE DAYS after I watched Twist and his band of puppeteers frolic with their sheep, I was sitting under the trees at Lincoln Center, looking out over the reflecting pool. It was early evening, and chilly shadows had crept over most of the plaza. But up at the top of the Illumination Lawn, a slice of sunlight beckoned, and I went toward it.As I stepped onto the grass, I noticed something curious on the stairs, where the flock had milled about to meet the public: a fuzzy white curl, caught on some blades of green.This remnant of puppet sheep — surely that’s what it was — filled me with disproportionate joy. Off I paced across the lawn, scanning the ground like Mare of Easttown searching for forensic evidence. The grass was scattered with it: tiny puffs of puppet wool, physical artifacts of a performance that had happened live, in 3-D, in front of an audience that was close enough to touch.Call me a traditionalist if you like, but no digital trail will ever compete with that. More