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      With These Experiences for Kids, All the Living Room’s a Stage

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWith These Experiences for Kids, All the Living Room’s a StageTheatermakers are devising new, immersive ways to engage children, with a few sending boxes of props and set pieces to your home.Alyce Liburd in “Charlotte Holmes,” a story box from children’s theaters in England.Credit…The Big TinyDec. 9, 2020, 2:23 p.m. ETBack in March, when New York’s governor abruptly ordered Broadway theaters to shut their narrow lobby doors, many of us thought they would soon open again — in April or July, surely by January. I remember kidding a friend, via text, about it: “If not, I’ll just make the kids do ‘Hamlet.’” Careful what you joke about.Because on Thanksgiving Day, my children put on a show. It wasn’t “Hamlet.” (“Hamlet” is dark. And very long.) But it had costumes, props, a set change and even a couple of light gels. This was courtesy of Play in a Box, a new initiative from Young People’s Theater in Toronto. For those who have tired of remote theater, Play in a Box joins several recent, child-friendly efforts to bring theater to you, for you and most importantly by you. And many of these makers have created holiday-themed work, which is (depending on your lighting rig) merry and bright.This summer we had a sublime experience with “Charlotte Holmes,” a story box from children’s theaters in England, about a young evacuee who solves rural crimes during World War II. Its cheerful videos taught my kids solitaire, a substitution cipher and the fundamentals of Morse code. (The “Charlotte Holmes” people have a new box in the works, the magic-themed “Balthazar Snapdragon,” which should arrive in time for Christmas.) After that success, we wanted to keep the theatrical, recyclable good times going. Enter Play in the Box.Play in a Box comes with props, a set change and eight scripts adapted from the children’s books of Robert Munsch.Credit…Ali SultaniThe excitement begins with the box itself, which is pleasingly large. Having attacked it with a butter knife, the children, discovered further boxes inside, plus some tubes, envelopes, an instruction manual and eight scripts adapted from the children’s books of Robert Munsch.Not every packet was assembled with the same care. The costume one held just a square of blue felt and an outline of animal ears. But our box was a prototype. And besides, polished elements run counter to the gentle, D.I.Y. ethos.After reading through a few plays, the children, chose “The Paper Bag Princess” and spent a cheerful morning attaching wings to a dinosaur bathrobe, repurposing packing materials as the paper bag and labeling a couple of cardboard boxes “CASTLE” and “CAVE.” With minimal squabbling, they performed a few suggested warm-ups, planned blocking, ran lines and drafted their not especially enthusiastic father to run sound (“Make your phone play castle music,” the 7-year-old ordered) and lights, shining a flashlight through gels to create a pretty decent flame effect.The enterprise had Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vibes, without the later descent into pill and alcohol addictions. It also had a very “Midsummer” rude-mechanicals feel. “This is a castle because this box says CASTLE,” the 4-year-old explained. But the audience (their grandmother) applauded vigorously. Though no one had explicitly requested an encore, they performed one in a friend’s backyard over dessert.In “Mountain Goat Mountain,” a sheet is repurposed as a river to jump over.Credit…Lakshal PereraThe next day, we tried a new experience from Threshold, a new company started by a pair of Australian theatermakers, Sarah Lockwood and Tahli Corin. A few months ago, Threshold had sent us a pass to “Mountain Goat Mountain,” an audio experience that asks you to gather a couple of props and then embark on a 45-minute journey through peak, lake and cave (also known as bedroom and combination living room/ kitchen) in search of a magical creature. The children have asked to do “Mountain Goat Mountain” again and again, and as it’s the closest we will come to actual travel for a while, I have agreed.In this new piece, “Feather Quest,” an adult hides seven cards around the house and the children find them, creating the story of a bird — from egg to chick to fledgling. It has less replay value than “Mountain Goat Mountain,” as a lot of the pleasure comes from the surprise of finding what each new card asks. Still, everyone enjoyed creating a family bird song, trying to keep a feather aloft using only breath, feeding pretend worms to pretend chicks in a pretend nest and reading a message using a mirrored reflection.A scene from “The Hot Chocolate Incident.”Credit…Improbable EscapesOn the following afternoon, in lieu of a working fireplace, we gathered around a cozy Zoom window for “The Hot Chocolate Incident,” a playfully designed escape-room style experience presented by a live actor from Improbable Escapes in Kingston, Ontario. The children, cast as trainee toymakers, had been invited to dress as elves, so one had selected a unicorn onesie, the other a zookeeper costume. Magic of Christmas, folks.Our assigned elf, Jingles (Candice Burn), took us through some employee basics before spilling hot chocolate all over her keyboard. (Extremely relatable.) To rebuild the mainframe and speed Santa on his way, we had to solve various puzzles, some doable, others more challenging. I may have become somewhat short with Jingles during a Santa suit calibration riddle. Several other puzzles seem like they would be more fun to solve in person. Remotely, it was like watching someone else lick a candy cane. But despite a last-minute snowflake miscalculation, we managed to save Christmas. Which I consider a particular triumph because I am Jewish.Lilli Cooper, who plays the Dream Queen, in “Sleep Squad.”Credit…Sleep SquadAt night, we settled down with “Sleep Squad,” an online bedtime experience from the Story Pirates with a companion box that includes sleep mask, dream journal, stickers and night light. It stars the buoyant Lilli Cooper as Siesta Shuteye, the captain of a sleepy-time spaceship. She introduces three stories, created using the Story Pirates methodology — kids outline, trained improvisers riff and perform. It’s an entirely admirable approach and also somewhat crazy-making. Children don’t always have the best sense of narrative momentum. (Actually, neither do improvisers.) But mine enjoyed creating each story behind their sleep-masked eyes. And this is the first time in 20 years of theater criticism that I can unashamedly make this claim: The show put me to sleep.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How ‘Wolves’ and ‘Heroes’ Are Saving Pandemic Theater

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow ‘Wolves’ and ‘Heroes’ Are Saving Pandemic TheaterSerious new plays are always in danger of disappearing — never more so than now. But inventive virtual productions, such as “The Wolves” and “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” offer hope.With nine players, the 3-by-3 Zoom grid of “The Wolves” turns out to be powerfully expressive.Credit…Philadelphia Theater CompanyPublished More

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      What’s Playing in Dallas? With Streaming, I Could Find Out

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat’s Playing in Dallas? With Streaming, I Could Find OutOpen-air shows. Joint productions. Filmed dress rehearsals. Here’s a faraway close-up on how one theater community has stayed reasonably robust in adversity.Stage West, a notable Fort Worth theater, hosted a drive-in production from a smaller company at a local university.Credit…Bryan StevensonPublished More

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      Review: Chagall Comes to Life in Enchanting ‘Flying Lovers’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Chagall Comes to Life in Enchanting ‘Flying Lovers’Charming performers, elegant design and a smart video capture bring a bittersweet chamber play about the artist and his wife to the screen.Marc Antolin, left, as Marc Chagall, and Audrey Brisson as Bella Chagall in “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk.”Credit…Wise ChildrenPublished More

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      Flea Theater to Shut Down Programs for Emerging Artists

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlea Theater to Shut Down Programs for Emerging ArtistsActors, directors and playwrights who fought for changes at the Flea say they feel betrayed. The theater said it is eliminating their roles, but is promising future residencies that pay.In-person shows are on hold at the Flea Theater’s TriBeCa home, which includes three performance spaces.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesBy More

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      Review: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its Destination

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReview: An Audio ‘Streetcar,’ Not Yet Reaching Its DestinationAudra McDonald stars as Blanche DuBois in a radio-like production of the Tennessee Williams classic that still has a way to go.Audra McDonald, left, and Ariel Shafir in a rehearsal for the Williamstown Theater Festival and Audible Theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreDec. 3, 2020When a great play like Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” gets a major revival with an ideal star like Audra McDonald, but the result is nevertheless a blur, you might be tempted to fault the director, in this case Robert O’Hara.But don’t blame O’Hara so fast. As a stager of revivals, he is probably perfect: both a bomb-throwing activist and a strict constructionist. His production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” for the Williamstown Theater Festival last summer was faithful to the text yet, with just a few theatrical gestures, managed to graffiti over Hansberry’s slight optimism with an awful truth for our times. My colleague Ben Brantley aptly wrote that O’Hara burned “a hole right through” the 60-year-old play.So I was more than eager to see what O’Hara would do at Williamstown this summer with “Streetcar,” a play so overripe with opportunities for rethinking that it almost seemed like low-hanging fruit. Since its debut on Broadway in 1947, it has graduated from American classic to cultural touchstone, many of its lines even better known (thanks in part to the 1951 movie) than the story that gave them birth.Yet that story — of the “apelike” Stanley Kowalski and his “delicate” sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois — was problematic enough to make the first major production after the #MeToo movement a rich opportunity. Its atmosphere of perfumed longing for a past that included Black servants working on white people’s crumbling plantations made it singularly vulnerable, too.McDonald, left, rehearsing the play with Robert O’Hara, the director.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat O’Hara’s Williamstown production was to star McDonald, our leading vocal tragedienne — in a part that, though spoken, seems like one long, ascendant aria — made this “Streetcar” a must-see event of the summer.But of course it could not be seen, not then and not now.After the pandemic forced the cancellation of its live season, Williamstown took the novel and in many ways noble route of reconfiguring most of its planned offerings as, essentially, radio dramas, produced with Audible Theater, the audiobook and podcast division of Amazon. “Streetcar,” the first out of the gate, was released on Thursday; three other titles will follow this month, three more in the new year.Most of those upcoming plays being new works, they may not suffer as much as “Streetcar” does from the unasked-for translation to a medium in which it is literally impossible for a director to show us anything. And it turns out that Williams’s pungent language, full of poetic touches for Blanche and brutal ones for Stanley (Ariel Shafir, replacing the better-suited Bobby Cannavale), needs more showing than prosaic plays do, not less. Without faces and bodies to anchor them, and despite McDonald’s willingness to go anywhere emotionally, the lines too often float away or, in Stanley’s case, sink with a thud.What remains isn’t so much bad as flat. Even with sophisticated engineering, audio has a difficult time detailing subtle emotional contours: Everything seems to be happening everywhere all at once. That problem is exacerbated by a podcast limitation O’Hara discovered during rehearsals: “Silence doesn’t help you,” he recently told my colleague Alexis Soloski. “Most times it sounds like someone missed the line or there’s a been a mistake.”Skipping over those aurally unhelpful empty spaces makes for a swift production; it clocks in at 2 hours and 30 minutes, with the play’s three acts combined into one uninterrupted sequence. But haste also eliminates many of the inflection points in the characters’ development as they hustle from high point to low. Carnality, so central to the story — “The four-letter word deprived us of our plantation,” Blanche laments — gets lost in the shuffle.Carla Gugino, left, stars as Stella alongside McDonald’s Blanche DuBois.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreThat’s particularly injurious to our understanding of Stella (Carla Gugino): the fulcrum keeping Stanley and Blanche, her husband and sister, in tenuous balance. Her own swings of affection are almost impossible to register without some of that uncomfortable silence to frame them. And why in any case should we be comfortable about her returning to Stanley after each of his violent outbursts? Williams wants us to struggle with that contradiction.As O’Hara has demonstrated in staging his own work — and in his Tony Award-nominated direction of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” — he usually relishes discomfort and contradiction. But for most of this “Streetcar,” he seems surprisingly hands-off, following Williams’s elaborate instructions about music and sound (rendered for this production by Lindsay Jones) a bit too obviously. If someone is eating, we’re sure to hear the slurp.Only in the climactic scene between Stanley and Blanche, when Stella is at the hospital about to give birth, do things begin to get usefully wild. As Blanche succumbs to panic — and then to Stanley’s sexual violence — O’Hara amps up the expressionism inherent in Williams’s script and lets loose with a hooting, cackling, grunting soundscape of terrifying nightmare noise.This characterization of Stanley as a jungle animal, and Stella as his prey, struck me as a neat reversal of the racist trope usually aimed at Black men, turning it instead into a comment on white men’s violence against women in general and, because we know McDonald is Black, against Black women in particular. To the extent that the playwright’s obvious sympathy for Blanche can sometimes drive “Streetcar” dangerously close to antebellum nostalgia — the DuBois plantation was, after all, called Belle Reve, or “Beautiful Dream” in French — O’Hara’s choice rebalances the picture and subtly detoxifies the narrative.It’s that kind of theatrical activism I expected to hear more of, and that I hope O’Hara gets to explore more fully in a live production with McDonald. She has all the elements of a great Blanche in place, just not the place itself.Onstage, she and O’Hara might also get closer to the molten core of the drama, which isn’t just about the tragedy of the modern always supplanting the antique, the dynamic overcoming the delicate. It’s also about not letting regret for those facts blind you to their necessity. Blanche, however the world has harmed her, has harmed plenty of others. Plantations weren’t pretty; they were sites of violence. If O’Hara can steer “Streetcar” further in that direction, it’ll really be something to see.A Streetcar Named DesireAvailable on Audible; audible.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More