Ting, Eric

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    Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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    The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.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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      ‘Between Two Knees’ Review: A Virtuosic Romp Through a Century of Terrors

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      Two deadly standoffs at Wounded Knee are the bookends for a show that manages to narrate a violent history with moments of light and humor.Rapid-fire punchlines and crafty sight gags may not seem the most obvious means to convey a brutal history of displacement and extermination. But “Between Two Knees,” which opened at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan on Tuesday, uses both in an audaciously sidesplitting comedy that’s an indictment of Native American persecution.The show’s antic account of Indigenous struggle was written by the 1491s, an intertribal sketch comedy troupe that includes Sterlin Harjo, a creator of “Reservation Dogs.” The action is bookended by two deadly standoffs: the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that site in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who were protesting government injustice.A narrator named Larry (Justin Gauthier) welcomes the audience with the casual air of a stand-up breaking in the crowd, saying that Indians have experienced some “pretty dark” stuff. White audience members are warned that guilt pangs lie ahead — and encouraged to assuage them by depositing donations into a basket being passed around. “Don’t be cheap now,” Larry prods. “I promise, when you leave, you will still own everything.”Playful daggers like these are cloaked throughout the production, directed with ingenuity and finesse by Eric Ting, with a vaudeville-style emphasis on amusement and artifice.When we meet Ina (a wryly deadpan Sheila Tousey) clutching her baby during the Wounded Knee massacre, for example, an ensemble member demonstrates the severity of Ina’s wounds by detaching her false arm and absconding offstage with it. (Victims of the siege, many of them women and children, were unarmed.) A red streamer unfurls from Ina’s shoulder like a clown’s handkerchief, the show’s recurring signifier of bloodshed.Ina’s murder starts a multigenerational story that follows her descendants’ turmoil through the 20th century: Ina’s orphaned son Isaiah (Derek Garza) and his love interest, Irma (Shyla Lefner), defeat the wicked nuns at their Native American boarding school (a video-game-style showdown with witty projections by Shawn Duan) to become vigilantes. Their son William, a.k.a. Wolf (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), departs to fight in World War II. A cascade of soapy twists, including a baby left on a doorstep, eventually leads the family back to Wounded Knee.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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      At Soho Rep, Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons to Join Leadership Team

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      Following the departures of Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, the two will join Cynthia Flowers as the company continues its shared leadership model.Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons will join Cynthia Flowers as the next directors of Soho Rep, the Lower Manhattan theater announced on Thursday.They will replace Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who had directed the Off Off Broadway company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019 under its shared leadership model. (Both women, who departed in June, have said they wanted to focus more on their own creative output.)“The spirit of the theater centers risk and experimentation,” said Ting, 50, who made his New York City directorial debut with the Jackie Sibblies Drury play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915” at Soho Rep in 2012 before becoming the artistic director at the East Bay theater company Cal Shakes, a position he held until 2022. “There’s a boldness to the work and a kind of artistic rigor that I’ve never found anywhere else.”The size of the organization — with a 65-seat theater that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work — was part of the appeal for Hammons, who comes to the theater from the Fisher Center at Bard, an incubator for commercially promising new work in the Hudson Valley. (He has been the director of artistic planning and producing since 2020, after joining the organization as senior producer in 2013.)“After working at a larger organization outside the city, I knew I wanted to return to my roots in the smaller, scrappier and more experimental realm of theater,” said Hammons, 38, who previously served as a producer for Soho Rep from 2011-13.Flowers, who has been with the theater since 2012, said Hammons not only shares Soho Rep’s vision of trying to make its producing practices more equitable and sustainable, but also “has the practical experience to put those values into action.”And Ting, who recently directed the world premieres of Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country” at the Atlantic Theater Company and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “The Comeuppance” at the Signature Theater, has long worked “to make theater more anti-racist and humane in a very intense way,” she said.Ting said he was drawn to Soho Rep, which produced Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018, because of the premium the theater places on having practicing artists in leadership positions. He said he still plans to direct one or two shows each year at theaters in New York, “and also hopefully for Soho Rep from time to time.”As for Hammons, he said he plans to continue his career-long focus on sustainable and humane producing practices, including pay equity. That includes the continuation of Soho Rep’s Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. But he also wants to prioritize crew members.“We can’t put all our focus on just making strides to provide sustainable wages to artists when we aren’t taking the same consideration to providing sustainable wages to folks who work behind the scenes,” he said.Both men will start their roles in September. More

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      Review: ‘The Far Country’ Brings a Neglected History Closer

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      Early 20th-century San Francisco and Guangdong, China, overlap in Lloyd Suh’s artful examination of the emotional price of immigration.A young man in a fine suit outlines the terms of the deal: The ocean crossing will be maddening, the detention that follows worse. Even assuming release, a person of Chinese descent will feel no welcome in America. The “Gold Mountain” that has been promised? It’s a mirage. And yet, if one wishes to pay for passage, the young man will offer — for a very high price — his American name and scant protection.This is the devil’s bargain at the center of Lloyd Suh’s fluid, artful “The Far Country,” at the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in the early decades of the 20th century, in both China’s Guangdong Province and San Francisco, it examines the cost — literal and emotional — of immigration. Those who have suffered in their pursuit of a larger, more prosperous life might, the play suggests, inflict that same suffering on others. Then again, they might also find redemption.The drama, directed with sensitivity and spirit by Eric Ting, begins in 1909. Han Sang Gee (Jinn S. Kim) sits at a table in an interrogation room. A more recent iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act has made his citizenship tenuous, and Gee must substantiate his American birth. He has difficulty proving his status to a skeptical white interrogator (Christopher Liam Moore), as his papers have been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. But a sympathetic interpreter (Whit K. Lee) gives him subtle aid. (Translation is another interest of Suh’s.)Most spectators’ sympathies will incline immediately toward Gee, owing both to Kim’s sturdy affability and to our innate compassion for anyone demeaned or distrusted by officialdom. But Suh and Ting aren’t interested in easy answers; there’s a more sophisticated moral calculus at play here.Citizenship is, among other things, a moneymaking tool. Its possession will lead Gee to China, where he can offer others the chance at an American life, however constricted that life may be. In Guangdong, Gee encounters a widow (Amy Kim Waschke) and her teenage son, Moon Gyet (Eric Yang, in an impressive Off Broadway debut). Moon Gyet, in his turn, will make a vexed proposal to a young woman (Shannon Tyo, a Suh regular, always dynamic).Clint Ramos’s set, with shadowed illumination by Jiyoun Chang, appears simple at first: a square platform backed by a dark mirror. But no element — walls, floor, mirror — is exactly what it seems. Like our sympathies, the set shifts and shifts again. Fan Zhang’s rumbling sound design suggests layers below the surface.As with Clint Ramos’s shifting set, no element of Ting’s production is exactly as it seems.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the center of the play’s overlapping worlds is Angel Island, a detention center that opened in 1910 as a curb to immigration. The majority of its detainees were Chinese men, men like Moon Gyet, who undergoes his own interrogation there. Some eventually gained entry; others were deported. In 1970, nearly three decades after the center had closed, a park ranger discovered poems etched into its walls, lyrics of despair and love that had re-emerged from beneath putty and paint. Here is one: “Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness?/After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow,/Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?”Like Suh’s other plays (“The Chinese Lady,” “Charlie Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery”), “The Far Country” meditates on ethnicity and identity. It is also an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans. These men left their fields for the same reason almost any immigrant does: the promise of a better life. Suh is specific in his imagining of the particulars of the Chinese American, but as America is a nation of immigrants, there is space here for others (including others like me, whose great-great-grandparents came from Eastern Europe) to trace vestiges of their own histories.“The Far Country” ends in 1930. That ending isn’t necessarily abrupt. But it does feel somewhat arbitrary. Why not 1950? Or 1970? There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain. Moon Gyet claims that the strenuous physical labor required of an immigrant is nothing compared with the work of being Chinese in America. This takes patience and focus, he says. A serious mind and a necessary grace. Suh possesses these qualities in full. He has more work to do, more stories to tell.The Far CountryThrough Jan. 1 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More