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      ‘The Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

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      This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: Chekhov in the Fun Zone

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      Benedict Andrews’s production in London offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy.When Anton Chekhov wrote “The Cherry Orchard,” his 1904 play about a financially beleaguered aristocratic household in turn-of-the-century Russia, he thought of it as a comedy. Generations of theater directors — starting with Konstantin Stanislavsky in its original Moscow run — had other ideas, preferring to render it as a somber tragedy. In London, a new production sets out to do justice to the playwright’s vision by leaning in to the play’s comedic elements.Directed by Benedict Andrews, an Australian based in Iceland who had London hits with “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the show runs at the Donmar Warehouse through June 22. It is a funny and, at times, raucous take which, despite some flaws, breathes new life into this old classic.The German actress Nina Hoss gives a controlled performance as Ranevskaya, who returns to her family estate after a grief-stricken exile to find its residents depressed and broke. She is a poignant picture of frayed dignity, her aristocratic self-possession increasingly brittle as the story progresses toward it sad denouement. But the real star of the show is Adeel Akhtar (“Murder Mystery”) as Lopakhin, the rapacious self-made magnate who persuades Ranevskaya to put the estate’s prize jewel, her beloved cherry orchard, up for auction.Hoss with Adeel Akhtar, who plays Lopakhin, the businessman who convinces Ranevskaya to put her orchard up for auction.Johan PerssonAkhtar renders Lopakhin as a cockney wheeler-dealer, by turns chummy and aggressive, whose brazen acquisitiveness is tempered by a raffish charm — he is fond of corny catchphrases like “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” — and moments of humanity. A peasant’s son, he has transcended his origins but remains acutely conscious of them. (He tells us he is ashamed of his handwriting because it gives him away.) Despite Lopakhin’s almost cartoonish cynicism, we can’t help but like him, even when he buys up the orchard himself, intending to tear it down and turn it into a lucrative tourist resort.Michael Gould (“A View from the Bridge”) is outstanding as Ranevskaya’s brother, Gaev, the epitome of aristocratic dissipation as he pads about the stage in baggy sweatpants, sucking on a lollipop while delivering eccentric disquisitions. There are some eye-catching performances among the minor characters, too. June Watson is delightful as the octogenarian servant Firs, who is forever mumbling away to herself, semi-audibly, in irritable tones. And Eanna Hardwicke makes a brilliantly funny stage debut as the bookkeeper Epikhodov, whose clownishly squeaky shoes undermine the authority of his every utterance (most notably when he declares “I’m, quote-unquote, intellectually insatiable”).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s New Leaders

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      The Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic directors have put together a challenging debut season. But many visitors come to Stratford-upon-Avon seeking something more traditional.Outside peak tourist season, there’s something a little uncanny about Stratford-upon-Avon, the English market town famous as William Shakespeare’s birthplace and home. On a visit last week, with only a trickle of foreign sightseers and a few locals around, the town’s cobbled streets, mock-Tudor pubs and quaint tearooms were eerily quiet. The occasional flock of schoolchildren on a field trip provided the closest thing to bustle.And yet this tranquil place is home to one of the most venerable institutions of British cultural life: the Royal Shakespeare Company. Founded in 1961, with a mission to bring Shakespeare’s work to a contemporary audience, the company is renowned for its diverse and forward-thinking repertoire: It presents modern spins on Shakespeare’s plays alongside works by other playwrights, with a strong, craft-centric ethos geared toward nurturing emerging talent. With a roster of alumni that includes Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, the company’s global prestige transcends its modest environs.But when summer comes, the tourists will, too — and this presents a perennial challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leaders.A lot of those visitors will want to see classical, period-dress productions that transport them to a picture-postcard England of yore, in keeping with Stratford’s kitschy trappings. But contemporary treatments of Shakespeare’s texts — eschewing naturalism, foregrounding psychological elements and topical resonances — are more in vogue. This is the conundrum facing Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the troupe’s new co-artistic directors, as they embark on their first season in charge.For the first few decades of its existence, the company had one foot in Stratford and the other in London. It abandoned its London base in 2001, when the artistic director at the time, Adrian Noble, dismantled its permanent acting troupe in favor of a flexible model, with performers on short-term contracts.This made it easier to sign up big-name stars, but it upset actors’ unions and some theater purists, like the theater historian Simon Trowbridge. In his pointedly titled 2021 book “The Rise and Fall of the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Trowbridge argued that the company should have ditched Stratford, and instead made its primary home in London, where Britain’s largest theater audience is, only deploying the Stratford theaters during the busy summer season and perhaps at Christmas.But the symbolic allure of Shakespeare’s hometown was too tempting to give up. When I met Evans and Harvey for an interview, they made a persuasive case for the merits of keeping a base in Stratford. Harvey previously spent seven years as the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, an arts center in Wales; Evans, a former actor with two Olivier Awards to his name, enjoyed fruitful spells at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1990s and 2000s, and was the artistic director of the Chichester Theater Festival before taking his current job.From left: Brandon Bassir, Luke Thompson, Abiola Owokoniran and Eric Stroud in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”Johan PerssonThrough a window in one of the Stratford rehearsal rooms, Evans said, “you can see the church where Shakespeare was baptized and is now buried, and through another window you can see the school he went to, and through another you can see the house he bought for his wife and family later in life.”“Having rehearsed myself as a young actor in that space,” he added, there was something to “relish and savor about coming to make theater in the place where you can see and experience those things — not in a way that is touristic, but in a way that brings you closer to the source.”Harvey said that there was a “thing that happens when you are in a place that is not your everyday existence — the focus that comes from that, and the sense of company. Which is something that we can offer that London theaters can’t. It’s a very American model in some ways: America has an extraordinary network of theaters outside of major metropolises.”There has always been a strong U.S. connection to the theater at Stratford. In the Victorian era, the town’s burgeoning tourist industry was sustained by a constant flow of trans-Atlantic Shakespeare pilgrims.“It was actually Americans who first got it,” Harvey said. In the 19th century, when two local brewery magnates, Edward Fordham Flower and Charles Flower, proposed building a theater in Stratford, “the British public and the British theater world essentially said ‘that idea’s nonsense,’” Harvey said. The duo then “went across the Atlantic, and it was American philanthropists and supporters who got the idea, and came on board, and made it possible,” she added. The result was the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, built in 1879 and later renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theater.Today, that playhouse is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s flagship. Elsewhere in Stratford, the company also runs the 400-seat Swan Theater and a small studio theater called the Other Place. A new outdoor auditorium, the Holloway Garden Theater, will begin hosting outdoor performances from June.The program for Evans and Harvey’s debut season includes a Ukrainian production of “King Lear” and an abridged, 80-minute outdoor “As You Like It.” A period-dress “Othello” in the fall will cater to more conservative tastes. The non-Shakespeare offerings include a retelling of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 aristocratic comedy, “The School for Scandal,” and new plays on themes such as environmental politics (“Kyoto”) and language lessons (“English”). The key, Evans said, was “balance and variety.”The season began in April with a spirited take on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” In this early comedy, regarded as something of an anomaly because of its bathetic, unresolved ending, Ferdinand, the king of Navarre (Abiola Owokoniran) and his three favorite noblemen (Luke Thompson, Eric Stroud and Brandon Bassir) undertake a vow of abstinence — “to fast, to study, to see no woman.”From left: Ankur Bahl, Bettrys Jones and Dee Ahluwalia in “The Buddha of Suburbia.”Steve TannerThat is promptly derailed by the arrival of a princess (Melanie-Joyce Bermudez) and her retinue (Ioanna Kimbook, Amy Griffith and Sarita Gabony). In contravention of their oath, the men make advances on the sly and the wary women prank them to test their mettle. Cue a medley of exquisite tomfoolery, featuring bawdy badinage, dubious love-poems, mistaken identity, visual gags, a chaotic play-within-a-play and lots of linguistic whimsy.In this production, directed by Emily Burns and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater through May 18, the principal characters are reimagined as 21st-century tech mogul types, and the setting is a Hawaiian island retreat. It’s a clever update, not least because the men’s masochistic undertaking — to forego pleasure for the sake of an obscurely defined idea of personal advancement — prefigures the self-optimization fetish that today’s social media gurus are hustling.But the production doesn’t strain too hard for relevance, and needn’t jar with more traditionally minded audiences. (And the nuts and bolts of seduction haven’t changed all that much in 500 years.) Ultimately, it’s the script, ably brought to life by a talented group of actors, that does the work. Thompson (of “Bridgerton” fame) is the pick of the bunch as Berowne, one of the king’s noblemen, delivering his lines with satirical brio and a wonderful range of complacent smirks. He has one of those faces that suggest mischief, even when at rest.The Royal Shakespeare Theater, which seats over 1,000 people, was built in the 19th century. It reopened after a major revamp in 2010.Mary Turner for The New York TimesYouthful yearning is also on the menu at the Swan Theater, in a new adaptation of the British writer Hanif Kureshi’s coming-of-age novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” directed and adapted by Emma Rice with input from Kureshi himself. Set in late-1970s London, against a backdrop of political turbulence and racial strife, it follows a young British Pakistani man, Karim, as he grapples with the emotional fallout of his parents’ failing marriage while negotiating his passage to manhood — through music, drugs and heartbreak — before he finds his calling in the theater. (The show plays in repertoire through June 1.)Rachana Jadhav’s set is a cross-section of a ’70s suburban dwelling, featuring an orange-red sofa, a floral-patterned stair tread and several mirror balls. When we first meet Karim’s yogi father, Haroun (Ankur Bahl), he is wearing nothing but a pair of Y-fronts. His very first action, removing a piece of fluff from his bellybutton, sets the tone for this playful and irreverent romp. The sexual content — of which there is plenty — is rendered with disarming, pantomimic silliness: bananas to suggest erections; party poppers let off to signify the moment of climax.Dee Ahluwalia is well cast as Karim, with just the right blend of pretty-boy looks and callow impudence. When he periodically breaks off into first-person, audience-facing narration, he has the winking, conspiratorial aspect of an experienced crooner working the crowd between songs. Ewan Wardrop is outstanding as the creepy theater director who takes him under his wing, and Bettrys Jones excels in two very different roles: affectingly poignant as Karim’s long-suffering mother, Margaret, and riotously eccentric as his mercurial love interest, Eleanor.Though the play touches on somber topics — racist violence, the fragmented lives of the migrant diaspora — it is anything but earnest, with a jaunty, naïve quality that echoes the reckless esprit of early adulthood. “The Buddha of Suburbia” doesn’t have the sentence-level brilliance of the Bard — it’s more Ealing Comedy than Shakespeare — but there is something of his spirit in its ribald energy, and it doesn’t feel out to of place in Stratford. There was lots of laughter, and the mood was buzzing as people filed out.Both of these shows revolved around youth, and both went down well with a predominantly senior audience. Their freshness and exuberance augured well for the coming season. The hope must be that the more traditional audiences will move with the times, and come around to new visions. You can’t please all of the people all of the time — but you can do your best to take them with you. And if not, there are always the tearooms. More

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      Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow to Star in ‘The Roommate’ on Broadway

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      The production is to begin performances Aug. 29 at the Booth Theater.Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, longtime friends, had no intention of returning to Broadway until a script about two women sharing a house caught their eye.The play, called “The Roommate,” was written by Jen Silverman, and had a 2017 run, with a different cast, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where the New York Times critic Jesse Green called it “a kind of chemistry experiment. Can two women of utterly different temperaments and backgrounds help each other? Can they help each other too much?”Farrow, 79, and LuPone, 75, met in 1979 while working on Broadway — Farrow in “Romantic Comedy” and LuPone in “Evita” — and then they were reconnected via a mutual friendship with Stephen Sondheim. (Farrow and LuPone both have houses in western Connecticut, as did Sondheim.)Farrow, in a telephone interview, said she had been sent the script for “The Roommate” and was intrigued. And she said she wanted to work with LuPone.“I would normally have said no, had I not been swept away,” she said. “This play is very funny, and odd. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s about secrets, and there are a lot of surprises in it.”Now a Broadway production is to begin performances Aug. 29 and to open Sept. 12 at the Booth Theater, where “Kimberly Akimbo” closed last weekend. It will be directed by Jack O’Brien, a three-time Tony winner (for “Hairspray,” “Henry IV” and “The Coast of Utopia”), and also a friend of Farrow.Farrow, best known for her work on film, has done occasional stage work over the years, starting at age 18 in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” but it’s been a while. Most recently she spent a month in a 2014 Broadway production of “Love Letters.”She said she was both excited and nervous about returning to the stage. “Unlike some people, I really enjoy my retirement,” she said. “I’m never bored. So this takes a bit of a push for me, but I got on board.”She added, “I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again, but if this is the last thing that I do, then I’m lucky to be involved.”LuPone is a Broadway veteran and three-time Tony winner, for productions of “Evita,” “Gypsy” and “Company.” In 2022 she said she had given up her membership in Actors’ Equity Association, saying, “I knew I wouldn’t be onstage for a very long time.” In a statement announcing “The Roommate,” LuPone said, “I certainly had no intention of being back on Broadway so fast. But when I read the play and heard Mia was attached, it became the easiest decision of my life.”The production said it expected that LuPone would be able to work on Broadway. When asked about LuPone’s ability to do so, Equity said in a statement, “It is Actors’ Equity Association’s policy to not comment on the membership status of individual workers.”“The Roommate” is being produced by Chris Harper, who produced the revival of “Company” in which LuPone starred (that revival had a first preview in early 2020, but then didn’t open until late 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic). More

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      Abe Koogler’s Ominous ‘Staff Meal’ Has Something for Everyone.

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      Restaurant patrons and staff members are oblivious to the impending apocalypse in Abe Koogler’s new show at Playwrights Horizons.A woman in the audience started grumbling around 30 minutes into a recent performance of “Staff Meal” at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan. “What is this play about?” she hissed. A few uncomfortable seconds after she stood up and repeated her gripe for everyone to hear, it was clear that she was part of the show, which opened on Sunday.The disgruntled audience member, played with relatable side-eye by Stephanie Berry, goes on to summarize the setup so far: Two strangers buried behind their laptops, Ben (Greg Keller) and Mina (Susannah Flood), strike up an awkward flirtation at an anodyne cafe. (“Singles in the city? I’ve kinda seen it before,” Berry’s heckler says.) They head to a restaurant where, just outside the kitchen, two veteran servers (Jess Barbagallo and Carmen M. Herlihy) are schooling a new waiter (Hampton Fluker) on his first day. (“Is this a play about restaurants or the people who work there?” the heckler asks.)She goes on to bemoan the frivolity of “emerging writers” who keep “doodling on the walls” as the world burns. “Take a stand! Inspire action!” she pleads. She’s not alone in that sentiment.Embedding self-conscious commentary about the worthiness of a new play, as the writer Abe Koogler does here, is an increasingly common trope. (Alexandra Tatarsky did it with unhinged gusto in “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” presented at this theater in November.) Blame it on the world being in flames, and the playwrights who can’t help but notice.But preemptively asking what the point is raises the expectation of a satisfactory answer, or at least one that responds to the provocation.There is no one else to object when Berry’s character does what she has just harangued others for doing: relaying a bit of autobiography — she’s a widow and onetime aspiring dancer — that has no obvious plot significance. Back at the restaurant, the chef, Christina (Erin Markey), unveils her own surprising origins: a fantastical tale of class, opportunity and reinvention.Koogler’s previous plays — “Fulfillment Center” premiered Off Broadway in 2017, and “Kill Floor” in 2015 — set up uneasy contrasts between wounded characters and their dystopian workplaces. “Staff Meal” is more loosely constructed and absurdist. Though Ben and Mina eventually forge an incidental unity, and the unnamed restaurant servers bond over industry expertise, the dialogue is less concerned with human connection than with exploring the circumstances that generally necessitate it: proximity in public, collaboration on the job, sitting down in a theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tony Nominations 2024: Biggest Snubs and Surprises

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      The day of the Tony Award nominations is like college acceptance day a bit earlier in the spring, but on the scarcity model: Of the dozens of artists eligible in each category, only five or so are “admitted.” That means some great work gets left by the wayside — but also, because the number of nominators is small enough to be idiosyncratic, that plenty of outcomes defy all prediction. Here are our thoughts on this season’s inadvertent (and possibly advertent) snubs, delightful (or mystifying) surprises and other notable anomalies. A melancholy morning for ‘Vanya.’Television stars are considered good box office but not always good Tony bait. This year’s crop, including Sarah Paulson, Jeremy Strong, Steve Carell and William Jackson Harper, complicates that wisdom. Paulson is a likely winner but the men are already canceling each other out. Though Carell, in his Broadway debut, and Harper both play characters competing for the love of a married woman in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Uncle Vanya,” only Harper, excellent in a role that is usually considered supporting, was nominated as best leading actor in a play. (The production, which featured many lovely performances, was otherwise shut out.) Note that Chekhov let neither man win.Deep cuts for ‘Stereophonic.’How the nominators handled the ensemble in David Adjmi’s recording-studio-set play was going to be one of the morning’s most interesting questions. The answer: Generously, as five members of the young cast were singled out for their supporting performances, including Tom Pecinka and Sarah Pidgeon as the fraying central couple, and Juliana Canfield and Will Brill as their bandmates. Without an instrument in hand, Eli Gelb got in, too, as the ’70s rock group’s frazzled sound engineer. Spreading all that love helped take the show to Number One with a Bullet — the most nominated play in Broadway history.Too many riches to go around.On the other hand, the superb ensemble casts of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” and “Illinoise” were skunked. That’s no accident: As more works these days distribute the storytelling burden equally among many members of a cast, odd nomination outcomes — feast or famine — can result.That’s why we often argue here for a new category that honors ensembles. And Actors’ Equity, the national union representing actors and stage managers, goes further, with its annual award for Broadway choruses. Of the 23 musicals that opened this season, 21 are eligible; the winner will be notified on June 15 — pointedly, one day before the Tonys.Women lead in directing.In the history of the awards, only 10 women, beginning in 1998, have won prizes for directing. This year that number seems likely to rise, with seven of the 10 possible directing slots filled by women. Anne Kauffman, Lila Neugebauer and Whitney White have been nominated for best direction of a play, and Maria Friedman, Leigh Silverman, Jessica Stone and Danya Taymor (the niece of Julie Taymor, the first woman to win for direction of a musical) are in contention for best direction of a musical.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alicia Keys on Nabbing 13 Tony Nominations for ‘Hell’s Kitchen’

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      Alicia Keys has been working on “Hell’s Kitchen” for 13 years, so she found it serendipitous — in addition to thrilling — that on Tuesday morning her musical picked up 13 Tony nominations.In an interview shortly after the nominations were announced, Keys was clearly heartened by the news. The show, featuring her songs and a book by Kristoffer Diaz, is personal for Keys. The show is about a 17-year-old girl whose life circumstances have enormous echoes of Keys’s own upbringing — the single mother, the hunger for independence, the passion for piano, even the same subsidized housing development.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations! What do you make of this?Whoa! I’m definitely in a deep state of freaking out in a really great, awesome, grateful way. I don’t know what’s happening to me — I’m a songwriter and I can’t put my words together, but I feel unbelievable. I’m so excited for everybody to be recognized.Did you ever have any doubts, or were you always confident about this one?I’ve always felt really good about it, and I know that we’ve put the work and the time into it, and so I do feel a sense of strength and joy around it, but you just never know how people receive things. You never know how it all goes. And ultimately you can’t create with that in mind — you have to create with your mission in mind.Do you really burn palo santo around the theater?Absolutely! Every crevice, every backstage place, every dressing room, on the stage itself, in the theater, in the seats. Just creating that good energy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sarah Paulson on Her First Tony Nomination for ‘Appropriate’

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      After Sarah Paulson moved to New York City when she was a young girl, her mother took a job as a waitress at Sardi’s, a storied Broadway restaurant. It opened up a world that she would not have otherwise been exposed to, helping to nurture her ambitions of performing onstage.Paulson’s first acting job, at 19, was as a Broadway understudy, beginning a career that returned to the stage several more times but found its rhythm on television, with steady roles on Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” and a career-defining turn as the prosecutor Marcia Clark in the limited series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” for which she won an Emmy.Despite complex roles as famous public figures and, once, a pair of conjoined twins, Paulson said her most challenging role has been in the Broadway drama “Appropriate,” for which she received a Tony nomination for best leading actress in a play on Tuesday.In “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Paulson plays an older sister clinging to her memories of her father as she and her siblings clear out his home after his death, confronting the family’s dark secrets and their grievances against one another in the process. In the script, Paulson gets to play with cutting insults, weighty monologues and plenty of yelling.After learning of the news while still in bed, hours before taking the stage again, Paulson spoke about the endurance that it takes to be a stage actor and about her career coming full circle. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me how you’re feeling right now about your first Tony nomination.I feel very moved and certainly overwhelmed to be in a category with such extraordinary women, some of whom are my friends. More than anything there’s that little girl in me who moved to New York at 5 years old and whose mother got a job as a waitress at this theater hangout, to wake up and have a Tony nomination for the first time in my life, at 49, feels just wildly moving to me and something that I have dreamed about since I was a girl.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More