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      Review: The Internet and Real Life Blur in ‘Sin Eaters’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: The Internet and Real Life Blur in ‘Sin Eaters’Anna Moench’s play, about a woman working in social media content moderation, begins with dark humor but slides into psychological horror.Bi Jean Ngo in Anna Moench’s “Sin Eaters,” which is being streamed by Theater Exile in Philadelphia.Credit…via Theater ExileFeb. 18, 2021Sin EatersIf you think social media is a cesspool, Mary Lee knows that it’s even worse than that.Her story, recounted in Anna Moench’s play “Sin Eaters,” starts like the internet did: with the promise of a brighter, improved future. Mary (Bi Jean Ngo) and her partner, Derek (David M. Raine), are celebrating; she has finally landed a new job, and in tech at that. So what if she found the gig on Craigslist, it’s temporary, it pays $20 an hour, and she doesn’t know exactly what her duties will entail? It’s money, which the couple need to move out of their Staten Island hovel.“Sin Eaters,” presented on-demand by Theater Exile in Philadelphia, kicks off as a standard domestic dramedy. Derek, who has artistic aspirations, sulks a bit when Mary Lee points out that it would be easier for them to find a new place if they had two incomes, and suggests he should go back to catering.Darker waters, however, are churning underneath the banter. Noises from the neighbors bleed into the couple’s apartment, alternately gross and ominous. The petulant Derek has an unwelcome passive-aggressive streak. At one point, he adjusts a home surveillance camera on the ceiling, and it’s unclear whether Mary knows it’s there.Ngo, left, stars in the production with her real-life partner, David M. Raine, who plays all of the supporting characters.Credit…via Theater ExileThe unease grows more sharply defined when Mary turns up at her new cubicle (Matt Pfeiffer’s deft, inventive staging for this virtual production makes the most of the two main sets). She has been hired by a new social media platform, Between Us, to review anonymous posts that have been flagged for guideline violations. As anybody who has ever taken a wrong turn on the internet can attest, it does not always bring out the best in people.Mary’s days are a parade of gore, racism, child abuse and animal torture — a list of no-no’s helpfully hangs on a whiteboard, a constant reminder of the horrors people are capable of. “It’s a hard job,” her supervisor, Steve (voiced by Raine), tells her. “You eat the weirdos’ sins so normal people don’t have to.”Moench, whose play “Mothers” also displayed a penchant for dark humor, has set up a great premise. And the first half of “Sin Eaters” moves with assurance, layering paranoid, unsettling vibes and satirical barbs targeting contemporary corporate environments; the winner of a productivity challenge gets to choose between a $50 Starbucks gift card and a Skype interview with the company’s content managers.The play is on less solid ground when Mary’s job inevitably gets in her head. In theory, what happens on Between Us stays on Between Us; but the web has a nasty habit of spilling into real life, and vice versa. Just when Mary is getting used to — or rather, desensitized by — her daily parade of depravities, she thinks she recognizes somebody in one of the videos under review. She is not 100 percent sure, though, especially since everybody around her starts looking familiar. (Raine, who is Ngo’s real-life partner, plays all the supporting characters.)The turn into psychological horror — shades of Tracy Letts’s “Bug” or the Roman Polanski film “Repulsion” — feels a little tentative, in both the writing and direction. Still, it’s refreshing to see a play embrace genre instead of snobbing it as if it were the equivalent of a catering job.Sin EatersThrough Feb. 28; theatreexile.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History Books

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewA ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History BooksThe International Theater Amsterdam presented Ivo van Hove’s exhilarating Shakespeare marathon in a one-off, livestreamed production.Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra giving in to grief at the death of Mark Antony in Ivo van Hove’s staging of “Antony and Cleopatra,” part of the director’s “Roman Tragedies.”Credit…Jan VersweyveldFeb. 18, 2021, 4:05 a.m. ETSix hours have rarely passed so quickly, or been so smart.That was the immediate take-away from the livestream last Sunday of the director Ivo van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies,” an exhilarating distillation of Shakespeare’s three Roman plays performed throughout an afternoon and into the evening as part of the International Theater Amsterdam’s ITALive program.This marathon, modern-dress sequence of “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” first performed in the Netherlands in 2007 and widely toured since, was revived for one mid-pandemic performance. And where similar offerings often remain online for later viewing, in this instance live meant live. If you blinked last weekend, you missed it — though six hours, to be fair, is quite a long blink.Van Hove wasn’t yet a Broadway and West End favorite when “Roman Tragedies” was first produced, but the Belgian maverick has since moved into the mainstream, winning Olivier and Tony Awards for his searing reappraisal of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” Now as much of a star as the actors he draws to him, van Hove had just overseen the opening of his first Broadway musical, a production of “West Side Story,” when the pandemic shut down New York theaters almost a year ago.Despite van Hove’s gathering renown, I can’t think of a later production than “Roman Tragedies” that better exemplifies his skill for eliding past and present so that centuries-old texts acquire a hurtling immediacy. Precarious governments rocked by political infighting are common to all three plays, and van Hove links those machinations to our current age by playing video footage of contemporary world leaders in the background.The stage is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail. And there are cameras at the ready — another favorite van Hove device. (At one point in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Bart Slegers’s anxious Enobarbus broke the fourth wall to bolt outside into Amsterdam’s wintry streets, catching dismayed passers-by unaware.) But what has perhaps become predictable about his aesthetic over time works stirringly here, as does his insistence on the timelessness of the plays, which seem more apposite now, perhaps, than ever.The stage for “Roman Tragedies” is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail.Credit…Jan VersweyveldHe could never have guessed, in 2007, that talk of advancing upon the Capitol in “Julius Caesar” would link the death throes of the Roman Republic to events in Washington last month. When Hans Kesting’s bearish Mark Antony in the third and longest of the plays spoke of “a sudden passion for mutiny,” you couldn’t help but think of assaults on democracy then and now, from the classical world to modern-day Myanmar.The smoothed-out rendering of Shakespeare’s text — Sunday’s streaming was presented in Dutch, with English and French subtitles — dispensed with Elizabethan archaisms, allowing the plays’ meanings to emerge afresh. Key lines remained intact — woe betide anyone who messes with “Et tu, Brute?” — but elsewhere Tom Kleijn’s translation streamlined and brought clarity to the proceedings, highlighting themes that connect the plays without letting the obfuscations of language get in the way.Only in Cleopatra’s death scene did I miss the luxuriant wordplay of the original, which contains some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. And yet that cavil fell away with Chris Nietvelt’s piercing performance as an Egyptian queen so poleaxed by the death of her Roman lover that she let rip with a series of screams. Could this have been the same actress from the opening play, “Coriolanus,” where she embodied a TV anchorwoman always smiling, no matter how grievous the news she had to report? Nietvelt completed a tremendous theatrical hat trick with her performance in “Julius Caesar” as a Casca full of foreboding about the chaos to come.If Nietvelt stood out amid an astonishing cast of players from the International Theater Amsterdam’s ensemble, no praise is too high, either, for Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Coriolanus. He played the Roman leader not as some blood-spattered action movie hero but as a graying figure of great volatility who won’t be reined in by a jacket and tie when his natural habitat is the battlefield.Both Cassius and Octavius Caesar were played by women, and a neat reordering of the scenes in “Coriolanus” allowed a determinedly macho play to begin with a conversation between the mother and wife of the prideful general of the title: Van Hove, in a clever touch, grants these women voices well before the play’s surrender to toxic masculinity.How thrilling, too, to see a large cast onstage, unfettered by the constraints of social distancing. (The theater said in a statement that Sunday’s show “complied with all current governmental measurements surrounding the regulation of livestreaming for cultural institutions in the Netherlands.”) Shakespeare demands intimacy, but I’ve never seen such a hyper-affectionate “Antony and Cleopatra,” with so many lingering smooches, and not just between the title characters.And yet it’s the countdown toward extinction and death, whether politically or individually, that unites these three plays. “Roman Tragedies” began and ended to the strains of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a song that looks forward to a waiting calamity. The implication, as van Hove made plain, is that the times haven’t really changed at all.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Live From Mount Olympus’ Review: Oh My Godsss, Who Am I?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Live From Mount Olympus’ Review: Oh My Godsss, Who Am I?This audio series translates the Greek myth of Perseus for teens, making its hero a young man still figuring out his destiny.The cast, crew and producers of “Live From Mount Olympus.”Credit…via the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast networkFeb. 17, 2021, 4:54 p.m. ETPuberty, curfews, fights with parents: Adolescence is hard enough without having to face down a Gorgon. Perseus has his work cut out for him.In the delightful new six-part audio series “Live From Mount Olympus,” a classic Greek myth is translated into a story for teens — and for adults who fancy a lively reimagining of the tales they learned in English class.Bulfinch? Hamilton? Eat your heart out.Presented by the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast network, and produced with the Brooklyn theater ensemble TEAM, “Live From Mount Olympus” tells the tale of Perseus, the demigod hero who killed Medusa, the Gorgon with deadly peepers and a reptilian hairdo.This Perseus, though, isn’t the macho beefcake hero often portrayed in artworks and other adaptations of the story; here, he is an eager and naïve young man just figuring out his destiny. When he can focus enough to do so, that is. Divine Garland plays the excitable demigod with boyish charm and touches of the same brand of arrogance the Greeks loved to grant their mighty male protagonists.Perseus must travel to the far reaches of the human world to battle Medusa; good thing he’s got gods on his side. Libby King’s Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, comes off as an exasperated older sister — well, half sister, as she pointedly reminds Perseus, who is also a child of Zeus. “Let’s not get carried away, mortal,” she says, clearly irked by their kinship.The series’ biggest treat is a crossover from another work of mythic translation: André De Shields, who was the fleet-footed Hermes in “Hadestown,” appears as the messenger god again, and also serves as the suave narrator of the tale.Open-armed, fleet-footed: André De Shields plays the messenger god Hermes in “Mount Olympus,” as he did in “Hadestown.”Credit…Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDirected by Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) and Zhailon Levingston (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”), “Mount Olympus” is an accessible entryway into mythology. Running just about 15 to 20 minutes each, the episodes (written by Alexie Basil and Nathan Yungerberg) are snappy yet satisfying; the dialogue is set at a contemporary clip, with modern-day language. “Oh my godsss,” Perseus exclaims repeatedly, like a teen running into his crush at the mall.The grittier bits of the stories (violence, assault) are softened and maneuvered around gracefully without losing a sense of the problematic relationships and themes at work, especially when it comes to gender.David Schulman’s appropriately cartoonish sound design rises to the pep of the action and gameness of the dialogue, like the shuffle and flutter of Hermes making a hasty exit (he has to check on his “godcast” subscribers; popularity comes with a cost). And speaking of cartoons, this may be an audio production, but Jason Adam Katzenstein — whose often punny, sometimes droll and always comic illustrations make regular appearances in The New Yorker — provides eye-catching art for each episode.Perseus isn’t the only classic hero who’s gotten a teen makeover; theater makers have already been using Greek myths to appeal to this demographic. “The Lightning Thief,” based on Rick Riordan’s popular YA “Percy Jackson” series, targeted younger audiences on Broadway when it opened in September 2019. That same month, Public Works premiered “Hercules,” based on the 1997 Disney animated movie.Between the rivalries and the affairs, it’s everything tweens catch between the morning bell and sixth period, with the added bonus of fantastical landscapes and magical happenings. But there is also heft to these stories, which represent a belief system and vision of the world that no longer exists as a reality for a community of people, but nevertheless survives.So why not try on a pair of winged sandals and venture to a “cavern of serpent doom” as this young hero does? Grab your phone, too, in case you want to drop a quick TikTok with some nymphs on the way. Just be back by 10 p.m.: When in the heavenly realm of Mount Olympus, the worst thing you can do is get grounded.Live From Mount OlympusNew episodes through March 23; onassis.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Being Emily in ‘Our Town’: Readers Share Why the Role Mattered

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeing Emily in ‘Our Town’: Readers Share Why the Role MatteredEmbodying the Thornton Wilder character “helped heal something inside me that I hadn’t even realized had been broken,” says one.Barbara Andres, right, as Emily in a production of “Our Town” in which the young lovers were played by older actors.Credit…Heidi GrunerFeb. 17, 2021Prompted by the publication of “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ in the 21st Century,” Laura Collins-Hughes interviewed eight actors who’ve portrayed the tragic young newlywed Emily Webb. Then we asked readers to share their own experiences playing the part in a drama that continues to be produced in schools and on stages throughout the world. Edited responses follow.I was a small town Texas high school Emily in 1966. I had to talk the speech teacher — we had no drama teacher — into doing it because I loved it and so wanted to be in it. On the Monday after the weekend production, the toughest “hood” in school, a big burly guy complete with cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve, came up to me and said I must be a “real good actor” because I’d made him cry. I was so touched, and two years later he was dead in Vietnam. BETHANY PHENEGER, HoustonI played Emily in a summer stock theater in a former barn in the ’80s. There was not a dry eye onstage in the third act. My grandmother could not speak to me due to tears at the end of the show. Now I am facing a life-threatening illness, after living a very full life. The other Emilys I’ve seen — and mine — come back to me. GRETCHEN KEHDE, BrooklynI have often been asked how it felt to be 64 playing 18 in the 2002 Transport Group production. With six decades of life under my belt, I had the advantage of already knowing most of Emily’s thoughts, words, and relationships. Even in her remembering, I could walk through it all, reawakening in my own heart my present tense reality at the same time. My very age brought a resonance to the simplest, most profound thoughts. BARBARA ANDRES, New YorkI read “Our Town” in elementary school but didn’t really understand it at the time. Years later, right after college, our family had to unexpectedly sell my childhood home. It was the first of several deep losses I experienced in early adulthood. When I moved to Los Angeles a few years after, one of my first jobs was to play Emily at Sierra Madre Playhouse. When I came to that speech where she says goodbye, I finally understood what it meant to say goodbye to something and someone you will never see again. And when I said those words every night, I finally said goodbye to my childhood home — the rough red bricks of the front path, my favorite hidden tree which I would climb to read and write in solitude, the sun-dappled kitchen where I first learned to cook. Emily’s words, Thornton Wilder’s words, helped heal something inside me that I hadn’t even realized had been broken. LILA DUPREE, Los AngelesMy mom played Emily in her private high school’s production of “Our Town” — it had to have been about 1953-54. Her family always said she was amazing in the part. The same year as the play she became pregnant and had to leave school. The baby was put up for adoption; my mom returned to school, but life was forever altered. She eventually wed the father of the baby, never graduated high school, had two more children (I’m the youngest) and didn’t appear in a play again until she was in her late 40s when she was cast as Esther Franz in “The Price.”She always talked about “Our Town,” made sure I read it, saw the movie and shared her memories of performing that role often. When she was dying very prematurely in her late 60s, she discussed with her sister what she wanted read and sung at her memorial service. I was surprised to find out after she’d passed that she wanted me to somehow work into my eulogy Emily’s speech from “Our Town.” Of course I did, and for a brief second there, at the lectern in the Episcopal Church of East Hampton, I did get to “play” Emily — conjuring up those stories of when my mom played that part and realizing just why she wanted it read at her memorial. ELLEN DIOGUARDI, Sag Harbor, New YorkAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Theater to Stream: Revisiting ‘Rent’ and ‘Angels in America’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Revisiting ‘Rent’ and ‘Angels in America’Presentations include the 30th anniversary of George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum”; Andréa Burns in “Bad Dates”; and a solo show by Riz Ahmed.From left, Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Anthony Rapp in “Rent,” whose anniversary is being celebrated with a reunion presented by New York Theater Workshop.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 17, 2021A pair of game-changing shows are celebrating big anniversaries, so now is a good time to revisit them and their legacies.George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” an anthology of sketches about Black culture (called exhibits), felt like a bolt of lighting when it premiered in 1986. At its heart, as Frank Rich said in his New York Times review, was the question “How do American Black men and women at once honor and escape the legacy of suffering that is the baggage of their past?”From left, Reggie Montgomery, Vickilyn Reynolds, Tommy Hollis and Suzzanne Douglas in the streaming production of “The Colored Museum,” filmed in 1991.Credit…Nancy LevineThanks to Crossroads Theater Company — where the show originated before moving to the Public Theater, and which is streaming the “Great Performances” capture from 1991 — we can confirm that while a few details have aged, “The Colored Museum” retains much of its satirical charge.It’s fascinating, now, to see how playlets in the show — such as “Git on Board” (about welcoming guests on a “celebrity slaveship”) and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” (a blistering take on “A Raisin in the Sun” — have influenced contemporary works like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon” and Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo.’” Through Feb. 28; crossroadstheatrecompany.comWhen Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” opened at New York Theater Workshop in 1996, its young, often queer and racially diverse characters felt new in musicals; it also dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis, one of the biggest issues of the day. The show immediately found a passionate audience, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and transferred to Broadway, where it remained for over 12 years. Hindsight makes it clear that “Rent” has endured because a fairly conventional heart beats under its edgy demeanor, and that this “rock” musical is built out of zhuzhed-up show tunes; those are solid bones.New York Theater Workshop is revisiting the phenomenon with the tribute “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” in which Eva Noblezada, Ben Platt, Billy Porter and Ali Stroker join original cast members, including Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal, Anthony Rapp and Daphne Rubin-Vega. March 2-6; nytw.orgNathan Lane in the National Theater’s production of “Angels in America” on Broadway.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCatching up with British productionsThe National Theater’s streaming arm, National Theater at Home, has just made available its acclaimed production of “Angels in America,” which stars Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane and Denise Gough Some of us in the United States were lucky enough to see it when the production traveled from London to Broadway three years ago. Perhaps even more exciting, then, is the opportunity to discover older shows that didn’t come to New York, like “Antigone” starring Christopher Eccleston and Jodie Whittaker; “Medea,” with a pre-“I May Destroy You” Michaela Coel as the nurse; and Lucy Kirkwood’s “Mosquitoes,” in which Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams play sisters. ntathome.comAndréa Burns in Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates.”Credit…via George Street Playhouse‘Bad Dates’A good rule of thumb: Whenever the wonderful Andréa Burns (“In the Heights,” “On Your Feet!”) pops up in something, just check it out. In this case it’s Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman play “Bad Dates,” presented by the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey, which should provide good opportunities for Burns to flex her considerable comic muscles as a divorced woman looking for love. Feb. 23-March 14; georgestreetplayhouse.orgMichael Guagno stars in the Kafka-inspired “Letter to My Father.”Credit…Eileen Meny‘Letter to My Father’In 1919, a 36-year-old Franz Kafka penned, but did not send, a long missive to his father, Hermann. The text (published in English as “Letter to His Father”) was an impassioned of indictment of a domestic tyrant, the now-grown son still possessed by fear, his wounds still fresh. The M-34 company, captures the live show with multiple cameras, offering various perspectives to the audience. The show is directed by James Rutherford, and performed by Michael Guagno. Feb. 19-March 28; m-34.orgRiz Ahmed in his solo show “The Long Goodbye.”Credit…Kelly Mason‘The Long Goodbye’The British actor Riz Ahmed, whose performance in “Sound of Metal” recently earned him a Golden Globe nomination, is also a rapper. A solo show expanding on themes explored on his album of the same name, “The Long Goodbye” was livestreamed in December and is now available on demand from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Manchester International Festival, which jointly commissioned it. Recording himself on a cellphone, the charismatic Ahmed prowls the empty Great American Music Hall in San Francisco while blending hip-hop and spoken word, autobiographical accounts and pointed insights. Through March 1; bam.orgTelling someone else’s storyTwo of the most storied performers you could dream of seeing are appearing in a solo biographical shows they also wrote. First, Lillias White, a Tony Award winner for “The Life,” pays tribute to the jazz great Sarah Vaughan in “Divine Sass” (Feb. 18-20). Then André De Shields, who stole the show every night in “Hadestown,” portrays an abolitionist and social reformer in “Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” (Feb. 26-28). Both will be presented on Flushing Town Hall’s virtual stage, flushingtownhall.orgWendell Pierce, left, and Charlie Robinson in “Some Old Black Man.”Credit…Doug Coombe‘Some Old Black Man’One of the greatest actors of his generation, Wendell Pierce (“The Wire,” “Treme”) is fiercely committed to theater. In 2018, he starred in the James Anthony Tyler two-hander “Some Old Black Man” in New York; last fall, he quarantined in Ann Arbor, Mich., to participate in a virtual, fully staged version of that play for the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society. Pierce plays a middle-aged college professor who reconnects with his father (Charlie Robinson) as the two men confront their experiences with racism. March 1-12; ums.org‘The Past Is the Past’Manhattan Theater Club revisits some of its past productions in Curtain Call, a new reading series. Ron Cephas Jones — a captivating stage actor despite being most famous for the series “This Is Us” — and Jovan Adepo (“Watchmen”) lead Richard Wesley’s “The Past Is the Past.” The New York Times called the play “a poignant evocation of families and generations in conflict” when the company presented it in 1975, a year after its premiere at the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn (Feb. 18-28). Head over to Manhattan Theater Club’s YouTube channel to watch the playwright John Patrick Shanley and Timothée Chalamet discuss the 2016 production of “Prodigal Son” — with generous excerpts from the show, which just predated Chalamet’s stardom. manhattantheatreclub.com‘48Hours in … El Bronx’For this year’s digital edition of Harlem9 and Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s “48Hours in …” festival, the playwrights Julissa Contreras, Nelson Diaz-Marcano, Alisha Espinosa, Andres Osorio, Alejandra Ramos Riera and Andrew Rincon looked to the work of photographers from the South Bronx collective Seis del Sur to create six 10-minute plays. Feb. 18-22; harlem9.veeps.comAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      For My Next Trick … Opening a New Musical in Tokyo in a Pandemic

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor My Next Trick … Opening a New Musical in Tokyo in a PandemicOur writer’s adaptation of “The Illusionist” was slated for a tryout run. Lockdown, a tragic death, cancer and quarantine got in the way, but didn’t stop the show.Peter Duchan, who wrote the book for “The Illusionist,” watches its Tokyo debut from 7,000 miles away.Credit…via Peter DuchanFeb. 17, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETAs I settled into my seat before takeoff, I felt, improbably, a sense of accomplishment. That I’d made it onto this (nearly empty) plane felt like a big deal. That I was permitted to travel abroad, a miracle. The road to J.F.K., to this flight, to my seat had already been long and steep.It began in 2016, when, over Skype, the London-based composer-lyricist Michael Bruce and I wrote the first draft of our musical adaptation of the 2006 film “The Illusionist,” itself based on a short story by Steven Millhauser. It wound past second, third and fourth drafts, past two developmental workshops.We were working toward a world premiere in Tokyo in late 2020. Our director, Thom Southerland, had a fruitful history with Umeda Arts Theater, one of Japan’s larger producing entities. They were itching to develop a new musical, and “The Illusionist” would provide that opportunity. For the creative team, it was a chance to not only further refine the writing but also to incorporate a crucial, as yet unrehearsed element: the illusions. (The protagonist is a magician, after all.)Enter the coronavirus. Theaters in America and the United Kingdom shut down. I anxiously tracked the situation in Japan, distraught when they stopped admitting foreign visitors, buoyed to see them make it through the first wave with the virus largely under control. Theaters, crucially, were open, so our production could go ahead as planned, even if the creative team was barred from entering the country.No matter what, I wanted the production to happen. I’d already had two 2020 regional productions canceled: one, a musical I’d written; the other, a show on which I was consulting. Like so many others in my sidelined industry, I was desperate for any crumb of professional validation.Umeda had announced that the December debut would star Haruma Miura as Eisenheim, an illusionist in fin de siècle Vienna who reunites with his first love, now engaged to a Hapsburg prince, and, in trying to win her back, upends the fragile, carefully constructed social order. (Edward Norton played the role in the movie.)Miura, who headlined Tokyo’s “Kinky Boots,” had participated in a workshop of Yojiro Ichikawa’s Japanese translation of our show in 2019. We knew his Eisenheim, intense and charismatic, would be a strong anchor for the piece. The production — and his involvement — seemed to be generating some buzz.On July 18, I woke to an email relaying the news: Miura, at 30 years old, was dead. Japanese media reported he had hanged himself. The entire team was stunned and saddened, unsure how or if we would proceed.In the past, I’d been suspicious of “the show must go on” — it seemed designed to coerce workers into tolerating unacceptable labor practices — but now I heard an earnest yearning in the phrase. Theater is, by nature, communal. Surely it would be more healing for all involved to gather and perform the show. What would be gained by giving up?Then from our producers came a barrage of questions. Would I be willing to quarantine in Tokyo? How quickly could I get myself to the Japanese consulate? (Deus ex machina: Japan began allowing business travelers to apply for visas!) Could we cut the intermission? (Socially distanced restroom use would take too long.) Were we OK with a shift in the schedule? Shortening the run?Yes, yes to all of it, yes to anything. We just had to do the show.Duchan flew to Tokyo for rehearsals, only to be kept in quarantine until it made best sense to head back to the United States, where he quarantined again.Credit…via Peter DuchanRecasting the main character was a thorny business so we’d decided to keep it in the family, inviting Naoto Kaiho, originally set to play the prince, to step into the role of Eisenheim.And then, another shoe. Thom was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He had confidence in a full recovery, but he would have to remain in London for treatment. He wasn’t going to be able to make the trip to Japan. Michael and I were worried about him. “Prioritize your health,” we implored.But Thom was adamant his illness need not derail the show. Our producers once again scrambled and came up with a plan. Thom would direct remotely, via live feed. A solution that might have seemed unreliable, even unthinkable, before the pandemic was now the only way we could carry on.With the necessary travel permissions, I’d made it to J.F.K., to this flight, to my seat. I snapped a selfie. Everything that could go wrong seemed already to have gone wrong. I felt palpable relief.At every juncture from here, there would be safeguards and precautions. I tested before flying (nasal swab at an overpriced boutique medical practice) and upon landing at Haneda Airport (spit test in a booth outfitted with photos of pickled plums to encourage salivation). I would join rehearsals after two weeks in quarantine, but even then, I wouldn’t be engaging much with Tokyo: We’d all agreed to avoid indoor dining, bars, museums — any and all crowds.The safety measures in the rehearsal studio were extensive. Upon arriving each day, participants zipped their personal belongings into assigned garment bags, including the face masks worn during their commutes. The production provided a new mask each day, to be worn throughout rehearsal. No eating was permitted in the room. No sharing phone chargers. The schedule included regular “airing breaks.”During my first week of quarantine in a Tokyo hotel, I attended rehearsals via Zoom. The choreographer, Ste Clough, was already in the studio, but the rest of the foreign creative team remained sequestered, back-channeling over WhatsApp. Over the course of the week, we cut 15 minutes from the show, replaced a song and juggled notes coming from multiple directions. We staged the first half of our intermission-less musical.Then, the morning of my eighth day in quarantine, I got a call from a producer. One of the actors was experiencing symptoms and had tested positive for Covid-19. Rehearsals were on hold. Those exposed — 19 cast members; various producers, stage managers and production assistants who were in the room every day; as well as those who had merely stopped by, including our orchestrator and a vocal coach — were being tested that afternoon.The more optimistic among us shared the hope that the results would validate the precautions taken, allowing work to start again in two weeks, after everyone in close contact with the afflicted actor had waited out their quarantine period.The next afternoon, at a Zoom production meeting, our lead producer relayed the results. Seven positives. Five onstage, two off. Our efforts may have limited, but certainly didn’t prevent, the virus’s spread. It was becoming increasingly difficult to adapt to the constantly changing circumstances. “Sometimes,” she said, “the bravest thing to do is walk away.”If we were to resume, I recognized, it would have to be with the fewest possible people in the studio. And, I had to admit, I wasn’t sure I was going to feel safe being one of them. As the apparatus for rehearsing remotely was already in place, I decided to return to New York.Watching a rehearsal for “The Illusionist” from a Tokyo hotel room.Credit…via Peter DuchanI went straight from J.F.K. into yet another quarantine. I woke at 5 a.m. for daily production meetings that stretched on for hours as our hardworking interpreters made sure every comment was understood in two languages. The Umeda team outlined the path forward. They didn’t feel comfortable asking folks to rehearse in a cramped studio, but our venue, the vast Nissay Theater, with its 1,300 seats and substantial cubic space, would provide a less risky environment.We would have to shorten the rehearsal period. We would have to simplify the staging to limit physical contact between actors. We wouldn’t have time to implement the tricks, forcing us to refocus those scenes on the reaction to magic rather than on the magic itself.We would have to inform the audience they’d be seeing a concert staging and offer refunds to the disgruntled and disappointed.Yes, yes to all of it. We just had to do the show.We made it through a few days of virtual rehearsal before Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced a state of emergency for Tokyo. We were canceled. Our choreographer returned to London. But the state of emergency didn’t actually order theaters to close. If other shows remained open, why not ours? Uncanceled.Thankfully, none of the positive cases in our company seemed to be severe, but, as our restart date approached, some weren’t yet healthy enough to work. Would we be willing to delay the opening, further shortening the run? Could we simplify the already streamlined staging?Again, yes. But why? Why were we fighting so hard? Was it because our story, exploring the fragility of truth, felt so relevant to the moment we were living? Or was it because, having overcome so many challenges already, it felt illogical to cower in the face of any new obstacle?Or were we driven by the need, however selfish, to have something, anything, to show for our efforts? The briefest of runs at 50 percent capacity — how helpful could it be really? No matter what happened in Tokyo, my British collaborators and I — and the show itself — would return to a numbing holding pattern, waiting for theaters in our respective countries to reopen. All we would gain by doing the show would be having done the show. Was that reason enough?After a tragic death, Naoto Kaiho stepped up into the lead role of Eisenheim in “The Illusionist.”Credit…Chisato OkaOne month to the day after I left Tokyo, “The Illusionist” resumed in-person rehearsals. Of the creative team, only Michael was at the Nissay Theater. Thom and Ste, both in London, rose at 4 a.m. for work. In the United States, I rehearsed most nights until about 3 a.m. The show came together quickly. It had to.The process felt distant, but the thrills were the sort well known to anyone who works in musical theater: hearing the score animated by a full orchestra after years of it played on one piano; seeing Ayako Maeda’s sumptuous, intricate costumes soak up the stage light and sharpen the actors’ characterizations; watching the talented and brooding Kaiho sink his teeth into the role of Eisenheim.I watched the Jan. 27 opening performance on our trusty live feed. During curtain call, the cast wept with joy and relief. Afterward a producer walked her phone to each dressing room so those of us celebrating remotely could shower the cast with congratulations.Filtered through screens, I could still feel the merry, frenetic backstage energy. Nearly 7,000 miles away, I was able experience the elation of opening night. I was making theater again. We were doing the show.Two days later, after playing its five scheduled performances, “The Illusionist” closed. Now we wait.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant Motion

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The Times‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant MotionThe playwright Tom Stoppard during an interview in New York City, 1972.Credit…William E. Sauro/The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021Updated 6:49 p.m. ETThe Czech-born Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard arrived in England with his family in 1946, when he was 8. They’d managed to flee Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis, and had spent years in Singapore and in India. He’d later call himself a “bounced Czech.”Stoppard took to England, his adopted country. He was impressed with its values, especially free speech. He was as impressed by one of its sports: cricket.He played in school (Stoppard skipped college) and, once he’d found success in the theater, on Harold Pinter’s team in London, the Gaieties. Their rival was a team from The Guardian newspaper. Pinter was an ogre on the pitch. He presided, Stoppard said, “like a 1930s master from a prep school.” Stoppard was the wicket-keeper, stylish in enormous bright red Slazenger gloves.Stoppard is not an autobiographical playwright. But his obsession with cricket led to one of the great moments in his work. His play “The Real Thing” (1982) is about theater, relationships and politics — one character is an actress, another tries to help free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest. The play includes what’s become known as the cricket-bat speech, of which here is an excerpt:“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly … (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.)”The way the cricket bat taps a ball, and makes it sail an improbable distance, becomes, in Stoppard’s hands, a metaphor for writing. No living playwright has so regularly made that beautiful (clucks his tongue to make the noise) sound.Credit….[ Read Charles McGrath’s profile of Hermione Lee. ]The adjective “Stoppardian” — to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. His plays are trees in which he climbs out, precariously, onto every limb. These trees are swaying. There’s electricity in the air, as before a summer thunderstorm.Stoppard’s best-known plays include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia” and “The Coast of Utopia.” (His most recent, “Leopoldstadt,” is closed, for now, because of Covid-19.) He co-wrote the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love,” and has written or worked on dozens of other movie scripts. He’s written a novel and flurries of scripts for radio and television.Now 83, he’s led an enormous life. In the astute and authoritative new biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package.There’s been one previous biography of Stoppard, by Ira Nadel, published in 2002. Lee says that Stoppard “didn’t read it.” She must be taking his word.Lee is an important biographer who has written scrupulous lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15 percent of its body weight.Lee owns a sharp spade, but don’t come here for dirt. Stoppard has long been a tabloid fixture in England; the spotlight on his relationships sometimes became a searchlight. But Lee makes the case that people, even his ex-wives, of which there are two, find him a decent sort. He’s remained loyal to old friends. He’s a family man who kept his office door open to his children. He kept the same agent and publisher for decades.The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new book is a life of the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard.Credit…John CairnsHow did he get it all done? I’m with Antonia Fraser, who wrote in “Must You Go?,” a memoir of her years with Pinter, that she loves to hear the details of a writer’s craft, “as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.”First of all, Stoppard does a landslide of topical research before he begins to write. Second, he needs cigarettes. Lee says he lined up matches on his desk sometimes, and told himself he wouldn’t stop writing until he’d lit 12. He doesn’t drink much; that has helped. Although he has had spacious offices in which to work, he prefers to write at the kitchen table, late into the night, after everyone else has gone to bed.He will obsessively listen to one song while working. He wrote one of his first plays to Leadbelly’s “Ol’ Riley.” He listened to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while writing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” and John Lennon’s “Mother” while writing the play “Jumpers.”He liked to have breakfast every morning with his family (he has four children), along with a pile of newspapers. When does he sleep? Lee mentions an occasional nap at sunset.Lee tracks the arc of Stoppard’s politics over time. Most people turn to the right as they age; Stoppard went the other way. One reason this book entertains is that Stoppard has had an opinion about almost everything, and usually these opinions are witty.He thinks, for example, that art arises from difficulty and talent. “Skill without imagination,” one of his characters says, “is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” (The character’s name is Donner, and Stoppard has said: “Donner is me.”)Stoppard is a maniacal reader who collects first editions of writers he admires. Asked on the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs” in 1984 to choose the one book he’d bring to a desert island, he replied: Dante’s “Inferno” in a dual Italian/English version, so he could learn a language while reading a favorite. His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: Beware the Text, and Other Tales From ‘Smithtown’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: Beware the Text, and Other Tales From ‘Smithtown’Four not-very-believable characters in a chain of monologues are rescued by a cast of exceptionally believable actors.Ann Harada in “Smithtown,” which takes the dangers of technology as its theme.Credit… via The Studios of Key WestFeb. 14, 2021SmithtownIt’s often said that great actors can make compelling drama just by reading the phone book. But should they? Do we really want the Yellow Pages aspiring to the status of Shakespeare?These dispiriting questions arose for me while watching “Smithtown,” a play by Drew Larimore made up of four linked monologues that contain nothing very original except what the cast brings to them. Michael Urie, Ann Harada, Colby Lewis and Constance Shulman give riveting performances in material so thin it barely demands a paper clip.The technology that binds us is in fact the theme. Phone books may be things of the past, but “Smithtown” treats modern communication platforms — Zoom, email, Facebook, text messaging, YouTube and others — as if they were strange new forces teeming with unheard-of dangers.The first monologue makes this shopworn theme explicit. Urie plays Ian A. Bernstein, a graduate student teaching a class called An Introduction to Ethics in Technology at a fictional college in a small Midwestern town that gives the play its title. At the class’s first meeting — or, rather, online session — Ian immediately veers from the syllabus to provide what he thinks will be a mind-blowing example of high-tech horror.Michael Urie plays a graduate student teaching a class in the play.Credit… via The Studios of Key WestBut the example is both too familiar and too grotesque to function as drama. Set your alarm for a spoiler alert because here comes the plot: Having been dropped by his girlfriend, Ian texts Melissa — “famous for being the No. 1 human doormat of the student body” — with demands for sexy photos. She provides them, Ian instantly ghosts her, the photos get disseminated and tragedy ensues.This is presented in an entirely upbeat, faux-professorial manner that makes everyone involved, especially Ian, look not only insensitive but also moronic. Or it would, if Urie were not so expert at pulling the thread of moral anxiety within the artificial character to animate his performance.The remaining three monologues — each, like the first, about 15 minutes long — connect to Ian’s in ways evidently intended to illuminate contrasts between real and virtual intimacy, between engagement and mere witness.In “Text Angel,” Ann Harada plays Bonnie, an excessively chipper former guidance counselor running a small communications business from her basement. Customers pay her to send their loved ones helpful text messages: some meant as validation, some as slaps of tough love. When the wrong kind of message goes to the wrong kind of person, Bonnie gets mixed up in Melissa’s story.Colby Lewis as a photographer in another of the monologues in “Smithtown.”Credit…via The Studios of Key WestLikewise, in “If You Were Here,” Lewis portrays a “groundbreaking” photographer currently working as the head of social outreach at the Smithtown Heritage Center. The YouTube video he’s making to promote local treasures (a renovated window, a settler’s sock) quickly devolves into a fatuous humblebrag about his connection to the tragedy: He took pictures of it. Art, he tells us, prioritizes documentation over intervention, lest one miss the beauty inherent in the victim’s struggle.By the time we get to the final monologue, the fog of condescension around these Midwestern nitwits is too thick to see through. And yet Shulman, playing Cindy, a bereaved woman welcoming new neighbors to her kitchen with feeble jokes and an explosion of lemon cookies, somehow produces visible, relatable emotions. The evidence of watery eyes and shaky hands is incontrovertible.The opportunity to see actors working at such a high level can be worth it regardless of the play but, again, is every play worthy of such actors? This one, a production of the Studios of Key West, is so slick and pandemic-ready in its minimal physical (and attentional) requirements that thespians everywhere will probably vie to star in it; they’ll smell hot content for their sizzle reels even when there’s no meat.Constance Shulman, playing a bereaved woman, somehow produces visible, relatable emotions.Credit… via The Studios of Key WestBut it’s not the job of actors to make a play sensible and meaningful; that responsibility falls on playwrights and directors. Stephen Kitsakos, the director of “Smithtown,” seems to have focused his energy on delivering a very neat, shiny package regardless of what’s in it. Larimore, too, seems interested mostly in the surface, bending his characters to the concept instead of the other way around.To be fair, Larimore does know how to write piquant, playable dialogue. Which may not be saying much; according to the great actor theory, so did Bell Telephone.SmithtownThrough Feb. 27; tskw.orgAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More