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      Ways to Enjoy Theater Virtually

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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 storyRevel in the Power of TheaterMissing live performances during the pandemic? Get your theater fix with a handful of online stellar productions (new and old).The Tony winner André De Shields will deliver a one-man performance in “Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” on Feb. 26.Credit…Lia ChangFeb. 13, 2021In another time, the highly anticipated spring season of Broadway would be beginning. Performers would be dropping their scripts, fans would be planning their show schedules and reviewers would be sharpening their pencils. Sadly, Broadway and many theaters around the world are in the longest pause in history, but an effort to keep the industry alive has major stars taking to the virtual stage and much-lauded past productions available for streaming. These productions can’t compare with the energy of a full theater, but what they make up in accessibility is something that can’t be underestimated. The theater community is experiencing a devastating loss right now, but its ability to innovate, invent and continue to create joy gives great hope for what will return.‘Medea’The startling exclusion of Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You” from the Golden Globe nominations has only drawn more attention to the once-in-a-generation talent of the performer, director and writer. Among the current streaming offerings of the National Theater in London is its 2014 production of “Medea,” which stars Coel as the nurse to Helen McCrory’s title character in the celebrated story of a wife’s revenge on her straying husband. The production also features an intense score from Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp, the pairing behind the musical duo Goldfrapp. Available to stream for three days for $9.99. ntathome.com/products/medea‘25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love’ If your kids think “Hamilton” was the first musical to transcend the genre, introduce them to the 1996 cult success that ran for over a decade. New York Theater Workshop’s annual gala will celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Rent” with a virtual concert that brings together an impressive assemblage of the show’s original cast, including Idina Menzel, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jesse L. Martin and Anthony Rapp. They’ll be joined by an all-star lineup of “Rent” fans including Neil Patrick Harris, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Billy Porter and Jeremy O. Harris. The program will also honor the “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson, who died at 35 on the morning of the show’s first performance. March 2, 8 p.m. Eastern, and available to stream until March 6. Tickets begin at $25. nytw.org/‘Elaine Stritch at Liberty’The streaming service BroadwayHD has hundreds of live performances (available for a monthly fee of $9 or $100 for the year). But a particular gem in the mix is Elaine Stritch’s raucous 2001 autobiographical show, which combines stories about her unique life with some of her most adored songs, most notably “The Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company.” This bio show, which was filmed at London’s Old Vic in 2002, recounts her Broadway victories, as well as her struggle with alcoholism and her many rocky romances. broadwayhd.com/movies/AW2GxBd-px3F9_4Aqe1K‘Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’As part of Black History Trilogy, a series of virtual productions from Flushing Town Hall, in Queens, the 2019 Tony winner André De Shields will portray Frederick Douglass in a stirring one-man performance. The transcendent “Hadestown” star also wrote the show, which explores the achievements and ingenuity of the abolitionist leader, as well as the darkness and horror that he experienced. The program comes after Flushing Town Hall’s “Divine Sass: A Tribute to the Music, Life and Legacy of Sarah Vaughan” from Lillias White on Feb. 18. All performances are free. February 26, 7 p.m., flushingtownhall.org/black-history-trilogy-iii‘An Evening with Ali Stroker from Enlow Recital Hall’Ali Stroker, who dazzled in her performance in the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!,” winning a best featured actress Tony for the role of Ado Annie, will appear on the stage of Kean University, in New Jersey, for a night filled with classics from the Great American Songbook. Stroker, the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony, will sing favorites from Stephen Sondheim, Carole King, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lin-Manuel Miranda during the livestreamed event. February 27 at 7:30. Tickets $25, kean.universitytickets.comAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living Subject

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living SubjectThe acclaimed biographer’s life of the widely admired playwright and screenwriter follows her works about Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and others.The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new life of Tom Stoppard will be published on Feb. 23.Credit…Jamie MuirFeb. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEvery other year, at a botanical garden in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard throws a lavish, all-day party for his many friends and their families. There are bands, puppets, jugglers, stilt-walkers, staggering amounts of food and drink. Among the hundreds attending in 2013 were the biographer Hermione Lee, who was at the time also the very busy president of Oxford’s Wolfson College, and her friend Julian Barnes, the novelist. As they were leaving, Barnes recalled recently, Stoppard ambled up and asked Lee if she had any interest in writing his life.“Why me?” she said, taken aback.“Because I want it to be read,” he replied.That Stoppard wanted a biography at all was a surprise. He used to be hostile to the whole idea. In his play “Indian Ink,” a character calls biography “the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong,” and in “The Invention of Love,” Stoppard has Oscar Wilde describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes.”Stoppard came around, Lee thinks, because he knew a biography was probably going to get written anyway, and because at the time he asked her he was entering into what she calls the “tidying up” phase of his life — approaching 80, moving house, beginning a new marriage. And in choosing Lee, though she is too modest to say so, he wasn’t taking any chances. Lee’s “Tom Stoppard: A Life” came out in England last October (Alfred A. Knopf will publish it here on Feb. 23), and at the time Stefan Collini wrote in The Guardian, “It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life.”Lee, or to be formal, Dame Hermione (she was awarded the title in 2013 for “services to literary scholarship”) is a leading member of that generation of British writers — it also includes Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Jenny Uglow and Claire Tomalin — who have brought an infusion of style and imagination to the art of literary biography. She is probably most famous for her 1997 life of Virginia Woolf, which upended much of the received wisdom about Woolf and demonstrated that there was much more to say than that she was a depressive in a cardigan wading into a river. In similar fashion, her 2007 biography of Edith Wharton rescued Wharton from her snobbish, old-fashioned reputation and reimagined her as a modern.Lee said yes to Stoppard, of course. How do you say no to someone so famous for charm? And then, as she recalled over Zoom last fall from her house in Oxford, she immediately thought to herself, “Oh my God, what have I done?”The playwright Tom Stoppard in New York, 1967.Credit…William E. Sauro/The New York Times Stoppard outside of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, 2018.Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesLee, who turns 73 later this month, did not set out to become a biographer. She grew up in London in a house filled with music and books, and became a “culture hound,” she once told The Paris Review, the kind of teenager who would rather listen to Bartok than Elvis. She read all the time, but mostly novels, and had little or no interest in the lives of the people who wrote them.When her dreams of being an actress didn’t pan out, she became an academic, studying at Oxford, where she eventually became the first woman in the prestigious role of Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature. In the 1980s, though, she became uncomfortable with what was happening to the teaching of literature. “I think I was very ill-equipped to take on structuralism and deconstruction and French critical theory,” she explained. “I didn’t really buy the death of the author, and I think I went toward biography, perhaps not terribly consciously, as a sort of resistance.”Lee’s previous subjects — besides Woolf and Wharton, she also wrote about Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald — were all novelists, all female and all dead. Stoppard, obviously, was none of those things. He was also someone both fortunate and beloved, with hundreds and hundreds of friends and admirers, all protective of him. “She always has a natural and healthy anxiety,” Barnes said. “‘Can I do it?’ But this time I think there was also: ‘Will he like it?’”Lee was not a theater person. But she was an avid playgoer, at least, and had acted a bit when she was young. So she felt reasonably confident about handling that part of Stoppard’s life, though in the end writing about the plays themselves required a tremendous amount of homework. Nor was Stoppard’s being male something she worried a lot about. “Maybe I should have,” she said, “but I didn’t feel that in writing about a man I was entering into some strange, uncharted territory.”By far the hardest part of writing the life of Stoppard, she said, was that Stoppard, now 83, was still living it. How do you end such a book? She originally thought she might conclude with Stoppard’s 80th birthday, in July 2017. But in 2020, he finished “Leopoldstadt,” a series of three plays that are his most personal and emotional, touching on his Jewish heritage, and practically as soon as it opened the run was ended — for the time being, anyway — by the coronavirus. So instead, Lee’s book ends with a vanishing — Stoppard’s recollection of a famous outdoor production of “The Tempest” in which Ariel seems to run across water and then disappears into the dark.Lee worked on the book for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues. “I’m sure there were times when he said, ‘Oh, the hell with this,’ and ‘Crikey, she’s being thorough — she’s excavating my whole life,’” she said. “I think what happens is you don’t see it coming, really. You agree to be interviewed and you’re obliging about material and all that, but what you don’t imagine is that this person is going to be talking to practically everyone you know, and that inevitably every one of those people will ring you up and tell you.” Only when Lee was well along in her research did Stoppard trust her with what became her two most crucial sources: the almost weekly letters he wrote to his mother until her death, in 1996, and a journal he kept for his son Ed.Hermione Lee worked on her new biography of Tom Stoppard for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues.Credit…Tom PilstonLee is sure that when Stoppard finally read the book, he inwardly groaned. Because there was so much to read — 834 pages, including notes — and because there were things that must have embarrassed him and that he wished had been left out. But he asked for only one change: that she not reveal the name of an actor who had been fired from the revival of one of his plays. “I was very impressed by that,” Lee said of Stoppard’s minimal demand. “And of course I agreed.”Most of Lee’s biographies have a shape related to their subject. Her life of Woolf is Woolfian, formally experimental and arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It begins with a question asked by Woolf herself: “My God, how does one write a biography?” Her biography of Wharton resembles a Wharton novel, with a lot of richly furnished rooms: the French room, the Italian room, the Henry James room. And her life of Penelope Fitzgerald is shorter and sparer than the others — like Fitzgerald, who was elusive and a little mysterious, a great writer of concealment.Lee’s life of Stoppard starts with a chapter called “First Acts,” and is divided into five parts. But in the beginning it reads less like a play than a boy’s adventure story, with 2-year-old Tomas Straussler fleeing with his parents and brother from their native Czechoslovakia to Singapore in 1939. When that city falls to the Japanese, they flee again, this time to India, with the father dying on the way, and remain there until 1945, when Mrs. Straussler meets and marries Major Kenneth Stoppard. A year later, the family is living in Nottinghamshire and, overnight, Tomas has become an Englishman — the luckiest thing, he always said, that ever happened to him.Lee’s 97-year-old father read that part of the book before he died and told her that it wasn’t written in her usual style. “He was always my sternest critic,” she said, and added, laughing, “I could never work out whether this was a compliment or a criticism. The plan, anyway, was that I really wanted this part to come along and whoosh. You get on the journey and away you go.”The rest of the book describes a life of extraordinary busyness, with Stoppard not just writing (and rewriting and rewriting) his plays but serving on committees, plunging himself into the politics of Eastern Europe, working for Hollywood — and not just on the movies we know as his, like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Empire of the Sun.” He also did work — uncredited but handsomely paid — on such unlikely projects as “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “102 Dalmatians.” There are stretches in the book when he takes the Concorde back and forth across the Atlantic as if it were a cab.To judge from the British reviews, some readers picked up “Tom Stoppard: A Life” just for the gossip: the parties; the friends; the hobnobbing with the likes of Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Mick Jagger and David Bowie; the three marriages; the love affairs, including a not-so-secret one with Sinead Cusack, the wife of Jeremy Irons. There were others who skipped that stuff and wanted to read instead all about the influence of Isaiah Berlin on “The Coast of Utopia.”“I suppose I always felt it was a sort of double narrative,” Lee said. “I’d rather be boring than faulty. I could well imagine people saying, ‘Do you really have to go on about the plays at such length?’ I wanted to make people feel they were reading the plays as they were reading the book, as it were, or watching them again. I was also trying to do a service to myself, getting these plays clear in my head and trying to understand how they worked in his life at the time.”Over the years, Lee has thought a lot about biography, and even about how much, paradoxically, she would resist the idea of anyone writing her life. In her brief book “Biography: A Very Short Introduction,” a sort of biography of biography, she argues that in some ways the form has evolved less than we think, and that the same questions keep coming up about the responsibilities and limitations of the form. “I’m perfectly aware that there are many things we can’t know,” she said. “I’m sure in Tom’s case there are one or two affairs that I don’t know about, that nobody knows about. And maybe nobody ever will know. I like that, actually.”She added that she already had a new subject in mind — “just a glint in my eye, though, and too soon to be talking about it.” But she did volunteer three clues. Not a man. Not a playwright. And, yes, dead.Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Amber Ruffin to Co-Write Broadway Musical ‘Some Like It Hot’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAmber Ruffin to Co-Write Broadway Musical ‘Some Like It Hot’The Emmy-nominated writer and performer will work with Matthew López to adapt the comedy for the stage.Amber Ruffin is getting her first taste of Broadway as a co-writer of the musical “Some Like It Hot.”Credit…Miranda Barnes for The New York TimesPublished More

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      Review: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’Patrick Page writes and stars in a meditation on the Bard’s villains, moving swiftly through a catalog of characters as if he were a chameleon.Patrick Page in “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” filmed at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyFeb. 11, 2021Updated 1:00 p.m. ETAll the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainNYT Critic’s PickProspero steps out onto the stage, a sturdy white staff and book in hand. He kneels, opens the book and strikes the stage three times. As the last heavy thud echoes throughout the empty theater, the lights dim to an icy, concentrated glow. This is the magician, and this is his art.But it isn’t actually Shakespeare’s vengeful sorcerer we’re seeing; this is Patrick Page, and when he opens his mouth, it’s not Prospero but Lady Macbeth who speaks, in a jagged whisper. It’s a summoning: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.”It’s enough to make you shiver, and fitting for a play called “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” an enchanting one-man show full of Shakespeare’s vilest, silliest and most misunderstood characters: the baddies. Produced by the Shakespeare Theater Company at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, and directed by Alan Paul, “All the Devils Are Here” is a chronological catalog of Shakespeare’s villains — including the lady with stains on her hands that no amount of Purell can get out, and the cuckolding, crown-stealing sibling. Page, who also wrote the script (and is lately known for his performance as another grand villain, Hades, in the musical “Hadestown”), begins with some general context, bringing us back in time to the flimsy villains that showed up in 16th century morality plays and how a young Shakespeare, influenced by such shows and those of his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, first broached the role of the villain in his early works.In the roughly 80-minute production, Page peppers in tidbits about his personal relationship to the texts, like how he remained haunted by “Macbeth” even when he stepped off the stage, along with a few nods to Shakespeare in pop culture — like the imprint of “Hamlet” in “The Lion King” and the echoes of “Richard III” and “Macbeth” in “House of Cards.” Addressing some of the nuances behind the characterizations of these rapscallions and miscreants, Page asks worthwhile questions: Is Iago a sociopath? Does Shylock reflect Shakespeare’s early prejudices, and does Othello later subvert them? Is the jolly old rascal Falstaff not just a fool, but another villain to contend with?In the production, Page blends casual analysis with personal reflections on Shakespeare’s plays.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyThe production reminded me of another I’d enjoyed recently: the Irish Repertory Theater’s “On Beckett/In Screen,” written by and starring Bill Irwin (and available to stream this month as part of the theater’s Home Winter Festival). Both work in a form that speaks to the audience as not just vessels of the actor’s performance, but also as fellow scholars examining the text with him. I’m a student at heart, one of literature especially, so I count any piece that melds the virtuosity of stage performance with the intellectual rigor of a classroom, minus any didacticism, as a precious night of theater.And yet for Shakespeare stans like myself, the contextual analysis is a touch light, no more than the connective thread between villains. But when we do arrive at those villains — alas! — Page, with his bottomless bass (soon to be set to audio in a Shakespeare@Home production of “Julius Caesar”), seems possessed by such a mastery of his craft, moving teary-eyed through the pain of Shylock and the comic pomposity of Malvolio with such swiftness that it’s like watching a chameleon change hues before your eyes: stupefying, effortless.Does Page have the Weird Sisters casting spells by his side? I don’t think so, but just as well, he has Elizabeth A. Coco’s revelatory lighting, heralding and punctuating his tonal and oratorical shifts. Then there’s Gordon Nimmo-Smith’s exacting sound design, to create an air of mischief and terror, or usher in a scene in a verdant garden or rowdy pub.But it’s Page — looking exceptionally svelte in an all-black ensemble, standing or sitting at a lonely desk and chair onstage while the cameras follow him with a pristine eye and perfect attention — who is the devil, the mage, the usurper.In the final scene, he arrives at Prospero, who ends “The Tempest” rehabilitated and delivers one last monologue to the audience — here, the camera moves to show Page facing the empty theater — denouncing his magical games and bidding us farewell. Page does the same, snaps the staff in half and closes his book onstage.But has the spell really ended, just like that? Hours later, I’m still utterly beguiled.All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainThrough July 28; shakespearetheatre.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Theaters Go Digital to Talk About Life (and Death) in the 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 storyTheater ReviewTheaters Go Digital to Talk About Life (and Death) in the PandemicGerman playhouses are finding innovative ways to forge connections while their doors are closed.Jonny Hoff as Werther and Florian Gerteis as his friend Wilhelm in “werther.live.”Credit…werther.liveFeb. 11, 2021, 4:41 a.m. ETAn interactive thriller about the race for a vaccine. A morbid installation on the stage of a theater no one can visit. A literary classic set during lockdown and narrated through social media posts. This is what theater in Germany looks like in early 2021.Nearly a year after the pandemic first shuttered playhouses in the country, German theatermakers have become increasingly adept at working around virus-related restrictions. Now, instead of the deluge of archival recordings or the broadcasts of productions planned before the pandemic, an increasing amount of digital theater is using technology to address Covid-era concerns.A recent spate of online productions from state-run and fringe theaters have examined contemporary themes of loneliness, isolation, fear of death and our chances for beating the virus. As lockdowns throughout Germany continue to be extended — Berlin has already announced that theaters in the city won’t reopen until after Easter — it’s heartening to see directors and actors finding new ways to forge connections with remote audiences by focusing on contemporary themes, even when taking well-known works as their starting point.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” from 1774, is one of the foundation texts of German literature. The epistolary novel, about a young artist who kills himself because of unrequited love, catapulted Goethe to fame and jump-started the Romantic movement in Germany. (The book also inspired a rash of copycat suicides). These days, “Werther” is sometimes seen like other classics that are required reading in school: musty, quaint and cloying in its depiction of adolescent passion and confusion.The director Cosmea Spelleken gives Goethe’s Sturm und Drang hero a refreshing update in “werther.live,” an intricately built and skillfully executed production with a live digital run through March 3 that replicates the in-person theatrical experience. This means that the show can be viewed — for a modest 4 euros (about $5) — only when performed in real time by the actors and technical team.Werther chatting with Lotte, played by Klara Wördemann.Credit…werther.live“werther.live” is a successful experiment in subjective storytelling: The audience experiences the plot almost exclusively from Werther’s perspective, via screen recordings from his computer. Over 120 minutes, we follow the novel’s four main characters through their Facebook profiles, Instagram feeds and WhatsApp conversations. Despite the 21st-century interventions, the production remains surprisingly faithful to the plot and emotional tone of the 18th-century original.At the start of the production, Werther (Jonny Hoff), a university student, is glad that he decided to put his academic career on hold during the pandemic. In his free time, he Skypes and chats regularly with his friend Wilhelm (Florian Gerteis), who is studying in France and, the coronavirus notwithstanding, seems to be having the time of his life.Werther, on the other hand, never seems to step away from his computer, let alone leave his room. He e-meets Lotte (the love interest in Goethe’s original) after buying an illustrated book of antique firearms (foreshadowing!) from her on eBay. Then, after some cyberstalking, Werther’s interest in Lotte becomes an infatuation. As they trade text and voice messages and video chat, we experience Werther’s increasing infatuation with a woman he’s never met. Klara Wördemann’s Lotte isn’t cruel or calculating, but she is careless in the way she leads him on. We understand, however, that she does reciprocate his feelings, at least in part. Their video chats are shot through with tenderness, but also sorrow. Of all the theatrical productions I’ve consumed over the past few months from my laptop, “werther.live” is among the most genuinely innovative. A manifesto of sorts posted on its website outlines the creative team’s aesthetic approach. “Filmed stages? Theater monologues in front of webcams? You’ll find none of that here. We believe that digital theater makes a new form of storytelling possible, in which the digital surfaces are actively part of the story.”The same evening as I watched “werther.live,” I downloaded and logged in to Webex, a web-meeting app, to take part in the Nuremberg State Theater’s production of “The Doses,” an “interactive choose-your-own-adventure” by Philipp Löhle about the race for a coronavirus vaccine.The three characters in “The Doses,” a production of the Nuremberg State Theater.Credit…Staatstheater NürnbergIn the video chat room, I gazed around at a mosaic of participants who had punctually joined the meeting. (Others who tried to log in late were refused entry.) A man in a Guy Fawkes mask instructed us to turn off our cameras. One by one, the faces of the roughly 90 audience members vanished. For the next half-hour, we watched as three actors performed, in real time, a high-octane biological thriller that seemed at least partially ad-libbed and contained a healthy dose of humor.In “The Doses,” a researcher, a human guinea pig and a radical anarchist scramble around a lab in search of a coveted vaccine. Each actor is equipped with a camera while navigating the research facility, and Webex’s split-screen format allows us to follow them on their increasingly frenzied quest.The audience, too, gets to play a role, via poll questions that appear onscreen. Should the anarchist enter the lab via the door or the window? (The audience chose the window). Should she disguise herself as a cleaning woman or a cat? (A cat, obviously!) Should the researcher grab the blue or the red vaccine?I’m not certain that the audience always chose wisely, since the short production ended in bloodshed and mayhem. Even so, if all the applause emojis in the chat window after the performance were any indication, the viewers were well pleased.Despite their unusual formats, both “werther.live” and “The Doses” told dramatic stories, however avant-garde their means. In late January, however, Darmstadt State Theater, in southwestern Germany, put together a timely livestream that, on the surface, had little to do with conventional theater.On the main stage of an auditorium, which has been empty for most of the last year, the German artist Gregor Schneider mounted his installation “Dying Room” (“Sterberaum”). First exhibited in Innsbruck, Austria, in 2011, “Dying Room” was conceived by the artist as a sculptural space where a person could die with dignity. Gregor Schneider in the livestream “Dying Room,” from the Darmstadt State Theater.Credit…Benjamin WeberInitially, Schneider said he was looking for a real person to die in the room over the course of the exhibition. He even enlisted a doctor to help him find volunteers. But even for the outré tastes of the European art establishment, the concept was a step too far. Among the general public, it was treated as a morbid publicity stunt.The ubiquity of death over the past year — to date, Germany has recorded over 60,000 Covid-19-related deaths — has provided a more sobering context for “Dying Room.” In Darmstadt, the installation was streamed on the theater’s website for three days and nights, and shot from three angles to give different perspectives on a modest room, with white walls and a herringbone floor, that had been constructed on the stage. In lieu of an expiring subject, Schneider himself provided the performative element: The artist, clad in all black, stayed onstage throughout the more than 70 hours of the livestream. In this new framework, and against the backdrop of the continuing pandemic, it seemed neither tasteless nor sensational, as previous presentations were called. Instead, Schneider succeeded in creating a space for contemplation and stillness that was heightened by his own high-endurance performance. Like “werther.live” and “The Doses,” the livestream showed that art and technology, when ingeniously combined, can respond to our age of solitude and disquiet with an urgency and immediacy more readily associated with live performance.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: Fathers, but Not Yet Men, in the Prison Drama ‘Shook’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Fathers, but Not Yet Men, in the Prison Drama ‘Shook’Samuel Bailey’s knockout professional debut isn’t so much about the pipeline to incarceration as it is about the toxic masculinity that keeps it flowing.Josef Davies, left, and Ivan Oyik as teenagers in a British “young offenders’ institution” in Samuel Bailey’s play “Shook.”Credit…The Other RichardFeb. 9, 2021ShookNYT Critic’s PickGreat injustice makes great drama, so it’s no surprise that playwrights have been drawn to the epidemic of incarceration among neglected young men.Or should I say the pandemic? “Shook,” Samuel Bailey’s knockout professional debut, diagnoses much the same disaster in Britain as some recent American plays have diagnosed here.But if “Shook” echoes stateside dramas like “Pipeline,” “Notes From the Field” and “Whorl Inside a Loop” in its mash-up of themes, it is so specific to its own milieu that it rings with fresh truth. That milieu is an English “young offenders’ institution,” roughly the equivalent of a juvenile detention center. Three young men — Riyad, Cain and Jonjo — are the offenders in question, though calling them young men is part of the problem. They are teenagers: Riyad and Cain, 16; Jonjo, 17.Andrea Hall, left, as Grace, who teaches parenting lessons to a trio of boys at the institution, including Oyik as Riyad.Credit…The Other RichardStill, they are old enough to be fathers, which is what brings them together, lifeboat-style, for the play. Over the course of six weekly lessons, a woman named Grace (Andrea Hall) introduces the boys to diapering, feeding and CPR while Bailey introduces us to the violent lives they lived outside and the even more violent ones they live while locked up.That structure could easily be a defect; with so much of the action described in retrospect, “Shook” might have felt distant or placid. And it’s true that Grace is given only the most basic demographic information to suggest a life offstage: She’s in her 30s and has a son of her own. But for the most part, the production from Papatango — a London theater dedicated to new plays and early career playwrights — avoids such pitfalls, thanks to propulsive pacing and sharp characterizations in roles that spark with specificity.That’s especially true of Cain (Josh Finan), who talks as if he were spraying ammunition. Both a threat and a cutup, he says he probably has dyslexia, A.D.H.D. and “problems with boundaries,” as if these were impressive battle scars. Hardly able to read and completely unable to focus, he is more interested in getting a look down Grace’s shirt than in learning to care for a son he never sees.A new arrival, Jonjo (Josef Davies), is introduced as Cain’s counterweight: On the rare occasions he does talk, he stutters. After the crime that brought him to the institution — involving, too predictably, a vicious stepfather — he has been forbidden contact with his pregnant girlfriend. The most eager of the trio to practice his parenting skills, but also the one least likely to use them, he is, at first, lost in a stupor of grief.Cain and Jonjo are white; race is more submerged in “Shook” than in typical American plays on the subject. But as Riyad (Ivan Oyik), who is Black, gradually moves to the play’s center, we nevertheless sense the disastrous way racism intersects with ordinary neglect in an atmosphere of toxic masculinity. That he is “clever” at math, and that Grace, also Black, might bring out his potential, is a hoary first-play device. And yet the scene in which she encourages him to apply to college is perhaps the saddest, if not the subtlest, in the play.“This moment in your life, this place here, doesn’t have to define you,” she says, seemingly referring to the unsparing fluorescents and abused walls of the prison classroom. (The grim lighting is by Max Brill and the grimmer set by Jasmine Swan.) But Riyad needs just one glance at the college catalog to know that the happy students and teachers pictured there “ain’t gonna want me.”It would be an even sadder scene, and play, if Oyik, Finan and Davies — all riveting — were not so obviously a decade older than the characters they portray. Perhaps the gap was not as evident during the original Papatango run in 2019. But just as “Shook” was about to transfer to the West End last spring, coronavirus precautions shut down the industry. What the director, George Turvey, has created on film (with James Bobin) is a record of an apparently excellent staging that the camera’s fixed eye cannot flatten no matter how hard it tries.Credit, in part, the vividness of the dialogue, which is naturalistically profane and comically aggressive but also thematically valid. These boys are mouthing off as fast as they can so they will not open themselves to accusations of softness or be caught short by an incriminating insight. Even if they do say something painfully true, they usually toss it off as a joke. When Jonjo asks whether the other inmates’ children ever come for a visit, Cain answers flippantly: “Not me, la. He’ll be in here himself soon enough, like.”Ultimately, “Shook” is less interested in how young men get into the prison pipeline than in how they get stuck there forever. One answer is embedded in the plot: catastrophic fathering. Riyad observes, and the story bears out, that people like Cain, no matter how gentled by proximity to dolls and diapers, are “programmed” to repeat the injuries they’ve suffered at their fathers’ hands. “When it gets hard,” he says, “they get shook and come back to what they know, innit.” He is clever enough to include himself in that fate.American plays about the prison pipeline typically indict its machinery, which, at least theoretically, can be retooled. The much more despairing drama that “Shook” enacts is the one in which the machine isn’t broken it all; it’s a very efficient system of breaking people, and keeping them broken, in order to feed itself. All the Graces in the world can’t undo that damage.ShookThrough Feb. 28; papatango.co.uk.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Working in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.

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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 storyWorking in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.“We Play Ourselves” finds a struggling playwright exiled to Los Angeles and obsessing over New York. Then she meets the manipulative filmmaker next door.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” Jen Silverman said of her debut novel. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021“Theater only feels like an accomplishment if you’re part of the cult,” a character in Jen Silverman’s new novel, “We Play Ourselves,” says. “The rest of the world thinks we’re all wasting our best years.”The book’s flailing heroine, Cass, an emerging playwright, flees New York after a disastrous opening night. At loose ends in Los Angeles, she drifts toward an unscrupulous filmmaker and the teenage girls in her orbit. Like much of Silverman’s writing, the book balances what Silverman’s colleague, the showrunner Lauren Morelli, praised as a “razor-sharp absurdism alongside a deep reverence for humanity.”Silverman (“The Moors,” “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties”) started the novel in 2018, having temporarily moved to Los Angeles for a stint in Morelli’s “Tales of the City” writers’ room. Most days, she would arrive at her office an hour or two early and sit at her desk, trying to translate theater’s ephemerality into prose. She thinks she could only write the novel, her first, because theater felt so distant, which acted as a kind of deprogramming.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” she said during a recent video call. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side. It’s not an idealized love.”Dana Delany, left, and Chaunté Wayans in Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” which had an Off Broadway run in 2018.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to plays, teleplays and now novels, Silverman also writes poems, essays and short stories. (She denies being prolific, which is funny.) Across genres, her style is mutable, her word choice precise, her interest piqued by tales of transformation and how people do and don’t resist it. The director Mike Donahue, a frequent collaborator, said that he admires her work because he never knows the form it will take. “It’s always an entirely new world to try to crack and a new language to understand,” he said.Speaking from the Upper Manhattan apartment that she shares with her partner, the set designer Dane Laffrey, Silverman discussed art, autobiography and what it means for the book to arrive in a world without theater. “It’s hard because I want so desperately to be back in a theater,” she said. “But when I think about hearing somebody three rows behind me cough, like, I feel this cold panic.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How’s your pandemic going?It’s the best pandemic I’ve ever had. I’ve been working on the book. I got galleys for it in April. It felt a little crazy, because the world was on fire and I’m trying to decide between a semicolon and a comma. And I’ve been reading a lot. That’s saving my sanity. Maybe.How did this book come about?I had been writing a different book. But something about being in L.A. and being plunged into a different medium, I longed for theater, like in a visceral, full-body way. And I found that when I would sit down to write, I would just start writing about theater. I ended up calling my editor and saying, “I’m writing a completely different novel. I hope that’s OK.”Do you think that people outside the theater understand theater?What everybody understands is the desire to be transported outside yourself, the desire to experience something larger than you, the desire to be deeply moved. Everybody wants to feel magic in their lives.How autobiographical is the novel?The part that feels really aligned with my personal experience is the way that theater became something so much larger than a career, that it took the place of a spiritual life. Cass longs for it and needs it in a way that was a really personal, active thing for me. But there are a lot of divergences and one of them is Cass’s hunger for visibility and acknowledgment and her desire to be famous. Attention makes me really nervous, to be honest. So I found it really interesting to follow a character who desperately wants to be a public figure and whose sense of self is constructed around what is being said about her.Silverman started the book while working in the writers’ room for the Netflix reboot of “Tales of the City.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesYou’ve written an intense opening night scene. What are opening nights like for you?Like a particular ritual or ceremony that we’ve all agreed to participate in. From the gathering of the crowds to the party. Then there’s a judgment that’s going to come down and what will that judgment be? Depending on whether you’re a writer who reads reviews, that judgment can feel different, but it’s like running a gauntlet.Are the parties fun at least?I’m shy. Crowds scare me. I was not cut out for like a life of extroverts. I try to bring a friend who is an extrovert, and then just watch them thrive in this company of humans.Do you read reviews?I’ve gone back and forth. There was a time when I was like, “I’m not going to read reviews.” Then I was like, “No, there’s a lot to learn, I don’t have to agree with it. But I should learn.” At this point, there are a set of critics that I find really smart, thoughtful, nuanced, complex. I don’t always agree with them. They don’t always say good things about me. But I always want to know what they’re saying.In the novel, the theater world is rife with professional jealousy. Is that your experience?The arts economy in the U.S. is defined by scarcity, because we don’t have government funding. Institutions don’t have a lot of support beyond ticket sales. If you are a woman, queer, an artist of color, it’s very clear that there is a slot and the people who are your community, your collaborators, your family, are also being positioned as your competitors. I don’t think that is good for the arts. I don’t think that is good for the culture.Still, the book makes theater seem very sexy. Is it?It can be. What interests me is that it’s a really intimate place. No matter your role, you are performing essentially a mind meld in a really rarefied, intensified environment. Some of my closest friends, people who are family, are people I met doing shows.Cass has a nemesis in Tara-Jean, a younger playwright. And she falls for a TV star and an elegant director. Are these based on real people? Did you worry that readers would think so?I did have a moment of real anxiety about it. It is very much fiction. I had theater friends read it. A few of them actually called me after and they were like, “I didn’t know you knew this person.” But each of them had a different person. I’ve heard five different theories for who Tara-Jean is.What does it mean to have this novel arrive in a world largely without theater?I have no idea. I thought it was a different world that the novel was going to be entering. For myself, I have dreams almost every other night about theater. Sometimes it’s my play; most of the time it’s somebody else’s play. Sometimes the dream is really good. And sometimes, I have this feeling of like, “Wait a minute, aren’t we in a pandemic? Where’s my mask?” But because my longing for theater is such a big part of my life, I’ve been really enjoying reading about theater. I hope that this book can be that for other people.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More