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    Nathan Louis Jackson, Writer for the Theater and TV, Dies at 44

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    He wrote plays that tackled big issues like the death penalty and gun violence. He also wrote for series including the superhero saga “Luke Cage.”Nathan Louis Jackson, an acclaimed playwright who grappled with serious issues like the death penalty, homophobia and gun violence — and was also known for his work on television shows like “Luke Cage,” a Netflix series about a Black superhero — died on Aug. 22 at his home in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. He was 44.His wife, Megan Mascorro-Jackson, confirmed the death. She said that she did not know the cause, but that Mr. Jackson had had cardiac problems over the past few years, including an aortic dissection and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Jackson was still attending the Juilliard School when his play “Broke-ology,” premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. The story of a Black family in a poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., where Mr. Jackson grew up, it focuses on the confrontation between two brothers over the care of their father, William (played by Wendell Pierce), who has a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis — a disease that Mr. Jackson’s father, who died in 2001, also had.Reviewing the play in The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote that “what makes Jackson’s writing feel true and fresh — aside from its great humor”— was the way he portrayed the brothers. Malcolm, she noted, “isn’t just a selfish striver,” nor is Ennis “just a resigned martyr” — and William “isn’t just a passive victim.”Crystal A. Dickinson and Wendell Pierce in “Broke-ology,” which one critic called “a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA year later, after Mr. Jackson received his artist diploma in playwriting from Juilliard, “Broke-ology” opened at the Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.“‘Broke-ology’ is a decidedly imperfect work,” Robert Feldberg wrote in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Mr. Jackson’s next play, “When I Come to Die,” explored the emotional turmoil of a death row inmate whose execution goes awry — the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him managed only to stop his heart temporarily — forcing him to wonder what to do with an unexpected extension of his life, and if he will face another execution.“I started thinking about people in weird time positions, and these cats know exactly how much time they have left on this earth,” he said of death row inmates in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, when the play was running Off Broadway at the Duke Theater, a production of Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging playwrights. “But what happens if you get more of it?”Although Mr. Jackson established an early place for his work in New York City, he remained close to his Midwestern roots. In addition to living in Kansas, he was the playwright in residence at the Kansas City Repertory Theater, in Missouri, from 2013 to 2019.From left, Michael Balderrama, Chris Chalk and Neal Huff as Adrian Crouse in Mr. Jackson’s play ‘When I Come to Die.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat theater staged productions of “When I Come to Die” and “Broke-ology” and the world premieres of his “Sticky Traps,” about a woman’s response to protests by a homophobic preacher at the funeral of her gay son, who had killed himself, and “Brother Toad,” about the reactions in the Kansas City community to the shooting of two Black teenagers.“The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never told the audience what to think,” Angela Gieras, the executive director of the Kansas City Rep, said in a phone interview. “He’d share a story that was compelling and truthful and let the people have their own conversations.”Nathan Louis Jackson was born on Dec. 4, 1978, in Lawrence, Kan. His father, Cary, was a heating and cooling service technician. His mother, Bessie (Brownlee) Jackson, was a preschool teacher.Nathan said that he was not a good student in high school, and that he studied as little as he could.“Ironically, I failed English,” he told Informed Decisions, a Kansas State University blog, in 2017. “I didn’t want to read Shakespeare.”He graduated from Kansas City Kansas Community College with an associate degree in 1999. At Kansas State, where he majored in theater, he made his first attempt at playwriting by creating monologues for forensics competitions.“I’m there in the Midwest, and there ain’t no other Black folks doing this, so I’d just end up doing August Wilson every time,” he told The Times. “I wanted to do a piece that speaks for me, so I said, ‘I’ll just write my own stuff.’”Mr. Jackson wrote two plays in college that were recognized after his graduation by the Kennedy Center. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award twice, for “The Last Black Play” and “The Mancherios,” which he adapted into “Broke-ology,” and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, also for “The Last Black Play.”After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2003, Mr. Jackson acted in a children’s theater, took graduate courses in environmental science and writing, and worked as the manager of a barbecue restaurant.He moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 2007. He and his wife lived in a diverse neighborhood there, and he remembered seeing people from all over the world on the subway.But at the theater, “I did not see that,” he said in an interview with KCUR-FM, a public radio station in Kansas City, Mo., in 2016, “What I saw was predominantly white, older, and with a little money in their pockets.”He strove to write plays featuring “people marginalized by poverty, incarceration or gun violence,” Ms. Mascarro-Jackson said in a phone interview.“Lots of times they were Black characters,” she added, “because that’s what he knew.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his mother; a daughter, Amaya; a son, Savion; a sister, Ebony Maddox; and a brother, Wardell.Over the last decade, while continuing to work in the theater, Mr. Jackson also wrote episodes of several TV series, including “13 Reasons Why,” “Resurrection,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Southland,” Shameless” and “Luke Cage,” for which he was also an executive story editor. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he suffered the aortic dissection in 2019.“The series makes a bigger, grander statement about African American men and how we view them,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2016, referring to “Luke Cage,” a Marvel show whose title character is a former convict (played by Mike Colter) with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin who solves crimes in Harlem.He added: “It is undoubtedly a Black show. But at the same time, it’s just a superhero show. We deal with something all the other superheroes deal with. We just do it from a different standpoint.” More

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      Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?

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      Barrington Stage Company’s revival of the 1998 musical brings vocal luster and newfound relevance to the story of a songwriter’s near-death experience.First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. It’s about a frog, and he hates it.In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. To write? To sleep? It’s almost Hamletian.But add an endless stream of groany rhymes and a life-threatening crisis, and it becomes something distinctly Finnian: a musical both twittery and existential, with an annoying tickle and a profound smack.For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone. After all, we must all decide how to balance the bed and the piano, or our versions of them: the thing that is our destination and the thing we do on the way there.The ragged yet nevertheless powerful revival that opened on Sunday in Pittsfield, Mass., succeeds best with the darker side of that chiaroscuro. As played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Schwinn, like his rhyme-sake Finn, is a songwriter who probably doesn’t need a near-death experience to confirm his morbidly anxious disposition. Being forced to write hideous ditties for a television character named Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen) is enough to stoke his neuroses.So when a previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation makes his brain “explode,” landing him in the hospital to await a risky procedure, he is already primed for a despairing review of his life, love, family and art. Joining him in these semi-hallucinatory retrospections are his best friend and work colleague Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), who tries to eke songs out of him; his indulgent lover, Roger (Darrell Purcell Jr.), who’s stuck on a sailboat; a homeless woman only tangentially related to the plot (Salome B. Smith); and various medical personnel including an absurdly alpha surgeon (Tally Sessions) who sometimes goes shirtless.And then there’s his mother, Mimi, a passive-aggressive tornado of Oedipal attachment and regret. (She cleans her son’s studio while he’s in the hospital by throwing away all his books.) Mary Testa, who in the original production played the homeless woman, deploys a lifetime of stage know-how (and intimacy with Finn’s style) to create a shattering portrait of manic optimism just barely outpacing fury at a world that has already cost her too much.In outline this might all seem grim, but in practice Finn’s songs, even ones called “Craniotomy” and “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat,” are almost always too bubbly or buoyant to sink. The homeless woman’s big number, “A Really Lousy Day in the Universe,” is a barnburner for Smith despite its bleak message: that disaster is the normal state of affairs for most humans. “Anytime,” a ballad for Roger that was cut during rehearsals in 1998 has been restored; Purcell makes it a lush tear-jerker.Chanler-Berat’s Gordon Schwinn, in green, with his lover (Purcell), at left, his mother (Mary Testa) and his best friend (Dorcas Leung), at right. Daniel RaderHow Finn turns emotional and lyrical indulgence into a kind of discipline, following no known rules of song construction yet scoring points anyway, is something I’ve never understood. Bombarded by rhymes that favor sound over sense rather than the other way around — “Thackeray” and “whackery,” really? — I alternate between cringing at their illogic and tearing up over them.Part of the trick, as in Finn’s “Falsettos” diptych and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” is surely how many of them there are. (“A New Brain,” originally formatted as a revue, is almost entirely sung.) So if at times Joe Calarco’s staging is as becalmed as Roger’s sailboat, its physical life stunted and those revue roots showing, not to worry. A fair wind will turn up soon.The fair wind will often be vocal. That’s evident not just in the unusually well-sung big solos but in the tricky ensemble numbers. (The music direction is by Vadim Feichtner; the superb original vocal arrangements by Jason Robert Brown and Ted Sperling.) “Gordo’s Law of Genetics,” a song led by the surgeon and a hospital chaplain, crystallizes Jewish fatalism (“the bad trait will always predominate”) in wacky doo-wop style. And the finale, revising the opening frog song as a hymn to the human capacity for reawakening — “I feel so much spring within me” — is almost impossibly moving.That capacity for reawakening is particularly wanted now. News of the disastrous effects of the Covid pandemic on the theater keeps coming, with aftershocks that are often worse than the earthquake itself. Through some combination of careful husbandry and audience loyalty, Barrington Stage has kept steady, continuing to succeed with worthwhile productions of thoughtful plays and complex musicals.Not all its neighbors have been so fortunate. Indeed, this production, which runs through Sept. 10, is being presented in association with the Williamstown Theater Festival, 20 miles up Route 7; Williamstown, facing an existential crisis as serious as Schwinn’s, needs all the help it can get. It’s not beyond the brief of “A New Brain” to suggest that everyone’s survival, especially in the arts, is ultimately linked to everyone else’s.Luckily, as this ultimately uplifting revival demonstrates, Gordo’s law of genetics isn’t always right. Sometimes the good trait predominates.A New BrainThrough Sept. 10 at Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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      The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      A Guide to Summer Theater Festivals in New York and the Berkshires

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      In summertime, a lot of stage talent heads for the Hudson River Valley and western Massachusetts, where curious audiences follow. Here is some of what theaters there have on tap this year.Hudson Valley Shakespeare FestivalAmong this summer’s offerings at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is a production of “Henry V,” directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director.T. Charles EricksonThis company has a knack for magnificent vistas. Its new home is high above the Hudson River in Garrison, N.Y., with breathtaking views. Picnicking, should you care to, is very much part of the preshow experience, and performances are alfresco, under a sturdy, festive, big white tent. But productions here often use the landscape just outside for striking tableaus, with the tent’s wide, arced entrance framing bits of action on the sloping lawn.This season’s shows are Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (through Aug. 21), directed by Davis McCallum, the company’s artistic director; a musical spin on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” (through Aug. 27), adapted and directed by Amanda Dehnert, who wrote the pop-rock score with André Pluess; and “Penelope” (Sept. 2-17), a solo musical re-envisioning of “The Odyssey,” directed by Eva Steinmetz, with music and lyrics by Alex Bechtel, who wrote the book with Grace McLean and Steinmetz. (hvshakespeare.org)New York Stage and FilmThe dance musical “Paradise Ballroom,” featuring choreography by Princess Lockerooo, above, will close out New York Stage and Film’s season next weekend.Kenny RodriguezThere is a particular excitement to seeing theater by daring artists while it is still taking shape. Such is the allure of New York Stage and Film’s readings and workshops, on the campus of Marist College in Poughkeepsie. Last weekend, people filing in to see Lauren Yee and Heather Christian’s new musical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” were handed a slip of paper advising that many lyrics would be spoken, not sung. “There is much music still to be written,” it said. Disappointing? Not if you approach these shows knowing that they are incubating. Also, Katrina Lenk was playing Mrs. Whatsit, fabulously.The company’s new-play readings this weekend are “The Good Name” (July 29), written by Sopan Deb, a New York Times reporter, and directed by Trip Cullman; and “Downstairs Neighbor” (July 29), by Beth Henley, directed by Jaki Bradley. The season closes with the dance musical “Paradise Ballroom” (Aug. 4-6), directed by Colette Robert, with book, lyrics and choreography by Princess Lockerooo, and music by Harold O’Neal; and a workshop presentation of “Like They Do in the Movies” (Aug. 5-6), a solo show written and performed by Laurence Fishburne, directed by Leonard Foglia. (newyorkstageandfilm.org)Williamstown Theater FestivalFrom left, Jon-Michael Reese, Natalie Joy Johnson and Eden Espinosa at a recent WTF Cabaret performance. The loose and lively weekend concert series has a rotating roster of performers.Emilio MadridWestern Massachusetts’s most powerful magnet for boldface-name stage artists is taking a sparer approach this year — minimal physical production, a focus on works in progress, blink-and-you-miss-them runs. But even as the company looks for a less costly, more sustainable way forward, it has not left glamour behind.At the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., the play reading on the main stage this weekend is Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (July 29-30), with Meryl Streep’s daughters, Louisa Jacobson, Mamie Gummer and Grace Gummer, in the title roles, and her son, Henry Wolfe Gummer, as the sisters’ brother. Next weekend, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Michael Chernus and Alison Pill star in a reading of Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” (Aug. 5-6).The loose and lively WTF Cabaret, on the same intimate stage, is hosted this week by the comedian Lewis Black (July 27-29) and next week by the comedian Jaye McBride (Aug. 3-5). The band is terrific.The festival’s Fridays@3 reading series takes place close by, at the Clark Art Institute, where you might want to leave time to see the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” or dip your toes in the three-tiered reflecting pool outside. (It’s allowed.) With Diana Oh in the cast, Clarence Coo’s “Chapters of a Floating Life” (July 28) is about two couples from China in postwar New York City. The series finishes with Aurora Real de Asua’s “Wipeout” (Aug. 4), a septuagenarian surfing comedy with Emily Kuroda, Becky Ann Baker and Candy Buckley. (wtfestival.org)Barrington Stage CompanyA revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” with Tsilala Brock, left, and Ryan George, is at Barrington Stage Company through Aug. 5.Daniel RaderIn downtown Pittsfield, Mass., this theater has a slate of full productions this summer. A beautifully acted, vibrantly designed revival of Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the Boyd-Quinson Stage (through Aug. 5), followed by a revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s musical “A New Brain” (Aug. 16-Sept. 10). With a cast that includes Adam Chanler-Berat, Andy Grotelueschen and Mary Testa, it’s produced in association with Williamstown Theater Festival.A few blocks away, on the St. Germain Stage at the Sydelle and Lee Blatt Performing Arts Center, Julianne Boyd directs Brian Friel’s classic “Faith Healer” (Aug. 1-27), a drama told in monologues. Downstairs, Mr. Finn’s Cabaret presents a lineup of Broadway veterans: Lillias White (Aug. 13-14), currently playing Hermes in “Hadestown”; Hugh Panaro (Aug. 21), a former Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera”; the composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown (Aug. 31-Sept. 1), whose musical “Parade” just won the Tony Award for best revival; and Alan H. Green (Sept. 2-3), a company favorite. (barringtonstageco.org)Berkshire Theater GroupChristine Lahti in Berkshire Theater Group’s production of the actress’s autobiographical solo show “The Smile of Her.”Emma K. Rothenberg-WareThis is the final weekend to catch Christine Lahti in “The Smile of Her” (through July 29), an autobiographical solo show about her suburban family in the patriarchal 1950s, at the Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Mass. Next up, also at the Unicorn, is the world premiere of the musical “On Cedar Street” (Aug. 12-Sept. 2), about two widowed small-town neighbors who start sleeping side by side to alleviate their loneliness. Adapted from Kent Haruf’s final novel, “Our Souls at Night,” it has a book by Emily Mann, music by Lucy Simon and Carmel Dean and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. (berkshiretheatregroup.org)Shakespeare & CompanyBrian D. Coats and Ella Joyce in a production of August Wilson’s “Fences,” through Aug. 27, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.Eran ZelixonNot a lot of Shakespeare is among the theater happening this summer in green and gorgeous Lenox, Mass., but “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10) is coming right up in an open-air production, with the excellent Jacob Ming-Trent as Bottom. Ken Ludwig’s two-hander “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” (through July 30) is wrapping up its run in another of the company’s outdoor spaces.Indoors are August Wilson’s “Fences” (through Aug. 27), William Gibson’s “Golda’s Balcony” (Aug. 5-20) and Donald Margulies’s “Lunar Eclipse” (Sept. 15-Oct. 22), making its world premiere with Karen Allen and Reed Birney at the tail end of summer. Also inside: a staged reading of “Hamlet” (Sept. 1-3), with Finn Wittrock in the title role and Christopher Lloyd, who played the mad monarch in Shakespeare & Company’s “King Lear” two summers ago, as Polonius. (shakespeare.org) More

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      A Bold Concert of Songs and a Potent Play Leave Audiences Abuzz

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      At the Williamstown Theater Festival, Daniel Fish’s “Most Happy in Concert” confounds and Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” raises its own question.WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Saturday matinee of “Most Happy in Concert” had just let out at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and grumbling disgruntlement hung in the air, along with surprised puzzlement.“Was there supposed to be a story involved in that?” a woman asked her companions, on a patio outside the ’62 Center for Theater & Dance at Williams College.No, ma’am, evidently there was not. Or if there was, it isn’t the story that Frank Loesser tells in his 1956 musical “The Most Happy Fella,” about the romance between the unhandsome middle-aged Tony and the waitress Rosabella. To be fair, no one promised that it would be. This is not the musical but rather a 70-minute program of songs (and song fragments) from the score. And it may leave you, as it’s left me, humming those tunes for days. This, though, is no friendly, pattering cabaret.Conceived and directed by Daniel Fish, this fast and busy show on the festival’s main stage (through July 31) is far more aggressively experimental than the sexy, bloody reboot of “Oklahoma!” that he put on Broadway with its book intact. That production was so conscious of the audience’s presence that intermission featured a communal meal of chili and cornbread. Granted, Fish wanted ultimately to implicate us in the American culture of gun violence that’s at the core of that show. But it mattered that we were there.“Most Happy in Concert,” whose fella-free cast of seven includes two terrific veterans of Fish’s “Oklahoma!,” Mary Testa and Mallory Portnoy, is a starkly different creature: aurally rich and gorgeous, visually austere and glamorous — and utterly aloof from its audience.It’s not just that one song bleeds into the next with no pause for breath, let alone applause. It’s that from the opening number, “Ooh! My Feet!,” which the actors perform in a remote corner way upstage, there is the strange, shrugging sense that this production needs nothing from us, and would hurtle right along even if no one were watching from the auditorium. Maybe that will change in future iterations, as Fish gets closer to solving the show’s mysteries. For now, it’s a real obstacle.From left: Maya Lagerstam, Erin Markey, April Matthis, Tina Fabrique and Testa in Fish’s minimally staged production. Emilio MadridThe trouble isn’t an absence of artistry, and it certainly isn’t the cast, which also includes Tina Fabrique, April Matthis, Erin Markey, Maya Lagerstam and Kiena Williams. Songs like “Somebody, Somewhere” and “Big D” are lovely, and Fabrique makes every second of “Young People” entirely her own. The sole case that this concert unambiguously makes is that someone needs to hand Fabrique a big, juicy role in a full-on musical as soon as humanly possible.But any larger point is lost. What does it mean to take the girl-watching harmonies of “Standing on the Corner” out of the mouths of men and put them into the mouths of these actors? Unclear. Given that no one is playing a character from the musical, what is the actors’ relationship to one another meant to be? Ditto. Fish has uprooted these songs from their original context without planting them in a solid new one. (Music arrangements are by Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci, vocal arrangements by Koci and Fish, orchestrations by Kluger. The music director is Sean Peter Forte.)On a set by Amy Rubin whose main feature is a kinetic curtain of golden fringe that we see stagehands lower so it puddles on the floor and raise so it spins in the air, Fish seems more interested in exploring architectural space and the geometry of bodies within it than he is in communicating with audience members. Who, depending on where they’re sitting, can’t necessarily see the parts of the show happening in the wings.Is this chilly production — which boasts choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the Urban Bush Women founder, but is hardly rife with dance — an album in three dimensions? Is it a music video? As striking as “Most Happy” is to look at (lighting is by Thomas Dunn, costumes are by Terese Wadden), it feels like something less alive than theater, and less shared.In a Q. and A. in the digital program, Fish says that the show — seen in an earlier version last year at Bard SummerScape, with many design elements not yet in place — is ideally “a proposition or a provocation to the audience that asks ‘What happens when this person sings this song in this space with these people?’”It’s an interesting question, but he doesn’t help us to hazard a guess. He is provoking his spectators, absolutely, but to what end?From left, Erin Rae Li, Ji-young Yoo, Shirley Chen and Emma Galbraith as high school students on a mission trip to Bangkok in “Man of God.”Stephanie BergerNext door on Williamstown’s smaller Nikos Stage, Anna Ouyang Moench’s “Man of God” (through Friday) builds and builds, bringing its audience along on an unsettling, darkly comic ride. Not that a plot summary suggests hilarity.A pastor (Albert Park) has taken four high school girls from his California church on a mission trip to Bangkok. He has also hidden a camera in their bathroom, the discovery of which, as the play begins, throws the teenagers into crisis — inciting some of them into thoughts of murdering this supposedly holy man who took such advantage of their trust.“If you read the Bible,” one says, “it’s full of examples. People get killed for a lot less.”At 15 and 16, the girls have little in common beyond their church. Jen (Emma Galbraith) is a brainy, ambitious feminist; Mimi (Erin Rae Li) is a knee-jerk rebel with a fondness for four-letter words. Samantha (Shirley Chen at the performance I saw) is naïve but more intelligent than the others give her credit for, while Kyung-Hwa (Helen J Shen, who took over the role on July 16, the day I saw the show) is deeply conservative, keen to give the pastor the benefit of the doubt.Directed by Maggie Burrows on a messily lived-in hotel room set by Se Hyun Oh, “Man of God” could use some tightening, in both text and performance. But it’s a play whose potency accumulates as it balances ordinary adolescent bickering with stomach-dropping realizations. We see the girls’ illusions crumble as they consider the common ground between lurid sexual exploitation and quieter, more insidious predation.It’s a smart and thoughtful play, with a wordless, minutes-long penultimate scene that’s a tour de force of tension: the girls packing their suitcases to go home, radiating fury and betrayal. And the revenge fantasies that lead up to it? They’re lots more fun than contemplated homicide ought to be.All of which sparks its own kind of post-show chatter — people heading to their cars, eagerly asking one another: “Would you have killed him?”Man of GodThrough July 22 on the Nikos Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Most Happy in ConcertThrough July 31 on the Main Stage, Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Changing of the Guard at Williamstown Theater Festival

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      Mandy Greenfield has resigned and Jenny Gersten will be interim artistic director. The festival gave no reason for the move, but it follows complaints about working conditions.The artistic director of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival has stepped down after complaints by some employees about working conditions there.The festival said Monday that Mandy Greenfield, who has been the artistic director since 2014, had resigned late last month. Jenny Gersten, who had led the festival from 2010 to 2014, will return as interim artistic director during the search for a new leader.The summer festival, which runs in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts and has traditionally relied in part on a pool of young seasonal workers, did not offer a reason for the change of leadership. But it follows a pair of reports in The Los Angeles Times detailing concerns by employees — sound crew members who objected to working outdoors, on a show set in a reflecting pool, during rainy weather, and former employees, many of them onetime interns, who expressed other safety concerns.The festival said in a news release that the leadership change “will ensure a future vision that not only expands on the Festival’s well-respected legacy, but one that is accountable, safe and equitable for all.”In a statement, Greenfield said that her “goal as artistic director was to swing for the fences, make art and try to improve and evolve every day.”“In 2019, I declined to renew a multiyear contract offered to me by the Festival; while flattered to be asked to continue, I agreed instead to stay on for two years, on a year-to-year basis,” she said. “I also publicly committed to leadership transition as I deeply believe, influenced by the British tradition, that theatrical institutions must empower new, diverse leaders in regular, shorter intervals than is the custom in the United States.”Jenny Gersten, who had led the festival from 2010 to 2014, is returning as interim artistic director.Stewart Cairns for The New York TimesGreenfield’s tenure featured a notable number of artistic successes, including Broadway transfers for “Grand Horizons,” “The Sound Inside,” “The Rose Tattoo,” “Fool for Love” and “Living on Love,” as well as multiple Off Broadway transfers.Gersten has held a variety of positions in the theater world. Currently, she is producer of musical theater at New York City Center, and is a line producer of “Beetlejuice,” which is returning to Broadway next spring. She plans to continue in both of those roles. More

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      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More

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      A Guide to Theater Festivals in New York and the Berkshires

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      From the Williamstown Theater Festival to New York Stage and Film, theatergoers can experience world premieres, concerts and more.Most summers, as tourists pour into New York City to see theater, New Yorkers pour out to see theater elsewhere. This summer, though, they may do so with extra ardor. As the pandemic lifts, the pent-up demand for live, in-person theater is first being met in the Berkshires and in the mid-Hudson region, where companies are putting up tents, arranging outdoor immersive experiences and welcoming audiences to buildings that have been empty for too long.Some of those companies are old and some new: The Williamstown Theater Festival has been at it since 1955, but Great Barrington Public Theater just started in 2019. Shakespeare & Company, as its name implies, goes heavy on classics — starting July 2, Christopher Lloyd plays King Lear — while Barrington Stage Company focuses on musicals and new plays. For mainstream fare (if “The Importance of Being Earnest,” opening next week, counts as mainstream), look to the Berkshire Theater Group. For something more experimental, try Bard SummerScape or New York Stage and Film.Wherever you go — below, our critics highlight five possibilities — you will still find pandemic precautions in place. (Check each theater’s website for specific safety policies.) Even so, after a dark time, these summer shows and festivals truly offer something to celebrate. JESSE GREENWilliamstown Theater FestivalAudiences have always been drawn to the Williamstown Theater Festival for its artistry, which is strong, and its geography, which is sublime. Tucked amid the Berkshires on the campus of Williams College, in a corner of western Massachusetts that’s just a meander away from Vermont, it seems like the kind of spot that would have an open-air stage or two.In an ordinary summer, no such luck. But this year, Williamstown is taking its slate of world premieres outside.The first stop is the front lawn, where the season starts with “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” Curated by Robert O’Hara, a current Tony Award nominee for his direction of “Slave Play,” the production offers three separate programs, each made up of three 30-minute plays: by Guadalís Del Carmen, France‑Luce Benson and NSangou Njikam (July 6 to 10); J. Nicole Brooks, Terry Guest and Ike Holter (July 13 to 18); and Charly Evon Simpson, Ngozi Anyanwu and Zora Howard (July 20 to 25).“Row,” a production of the Williamstown Theater Festival, will take place on the grounds of the Clark Art Institute, which a reflecting pool.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesDown the road at the Clark Art Institute, from July 13 to Aug. 8, the museum’s vast reflecting pool will become the stage for “Row,” Daniel Goldstein and Dawn Landes’s musical, starring the singer-songwriter Grace McLean, part of the original Broadway cast of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, “Row” is inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir, “A Pearl in the Storm,” about rowing solo across the Atlantic Ocean.And from July 20 to Aug. 8 around the town of Williamstown, audiences can experience the immersive performance “Alien/Nation” on foot or by car. The director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden, who made last summer’s immersive “American Dream Study” in the Hudson Valley, teamed up with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman for this one, which uses local history from 1969 as a starting point. (wtfestival.org) LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESBard SummerScapeThe Frank Loesser musical “The Most Happy Fella” boasts one of the most wondrous scores of the 1950s — a decade filled with stiff competition. The show is packed with songs whose styles are mixed and matched with formidable agility, going from operatic arias to dance romps to jazzy croons and back again.Yet “The Most Happy Fella” is less famous than, say, Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls,” and that might have something to do with what some might generously call its baggage. The middle-aged, homely title character, Tony, an Italian immigrant prone to mangling English, falls for, deceives and eventually wins over a younger waitress. This plot has not aged well.This makes the prospect of the director Daniel Fish’s “Most Happy in Concert” (Aug. 5-7) even more intriguing — especially since his ensemble is made up of seven female and nonbinary performers. (While SummerScape events usually take place on the Bard campus, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., this year’s productions will be performed at the Stage at Montgomery Place, an outdoor venue in nearby Red Hook.)Daniel Fish’s upcoming “Most Happy in Concert” at Bard SummerScape will feature Mallory Portnoy, third from left above, and Mary Testa, above right. They both appeared in Fish’s “Oklahoma!” production, above, at Bard in 2015, with, from left: Mitch Tebo, James Patrick Davis, John Carlin and Benj Mirman.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesOf course, the experimentally minded director has been there and successfully done that already: In 2015, also at Bard, he took “Oklahoma!,” long associated with a certain aw-shucks all-Americanness, and pulled off a “vibrant, essential excavation,” as Ben Brantley put it in his review of the premiere production. The show went on to win the Tony Award for best revival four years later.Now Fish is teaming up again with his “Oklahoma!” musical collaborators, Daniel Kluger and Nathan Koci, and the actresses Mary Testa (Aunt Eller) and Mallory Portnoy (Gertie Cummings), who will sing alongside the likes of the “Toni Stone” star April Matthis and the protean performer Erin Markey. Whether a full production ever happens remains a mystery for now, but the prospect of this director with this cast and this score is enough to light up August. (fishercenter.bard.edu) ELISABETH VINCENTELLIBarrington Stage CompanyLast year, this regional theater in the Berkshires, a proving ground for new musicals, announced a truncated summer season. But state directives meant that its artistic director, Julianne Boyd, had to constrict it even further, moving an indoor show, “Harry Clarke,” outdoors. But summer 2021 promises more shows in more venues, inside and out.Mark H. Dold in last year’s production of “Harry Clarke,” at Barrington Stage Company.Daniel RaderThis season begins, in a tent on the Barrington Stage Campus, with a celebration of the songs of George Gershwin (June 10-July 3). Directed by Boyd, it stars Allison Blackwell, Alan H. Green, Britney Coleman, Jacob Tischler and Alysha Umphress. The tent will also host “Boca” (July 30-Aug. 22), an evening of Jessica Provenz’s short comedies about Florida seniors; as well as concert evenings featuring the Broadway stars Elizabeth Stanley (June 28), Jeff McCarthy (July 24) Joshua Henry (Aug. 16), and the husband-and-wife pair Orfeh and Andy Karl (Aug. 23). The couple, who met in the Broadway adaptation of “Saturday Night Fever” and later appeared together in “Legally Blonde,” call the show “Legally Bound.” Aaron Tveit, a current Tony nominee for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” will perform at the theater’s gala.Indoors, the father-and-son Reed and Ephraim Birney star in the lachrymose two-hander “Chester Bailey,” starting on Friday. Harriet Harris then appears in “Eleanor” (July 16-Aug. 1), Mark St. Germain’s one-woman play about Eleanor Roosevelt. And the New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson adapts his article about the conceptual art project, the Apology Line, into a new play, “Sister Sorry” (Aug. 13-29), directed by Richard Hamburger. (barringtonstageco.org) ALEXIS SOLOSKINew York Stage and FilmTheater is not just what you see when it’s finished, it’s what goes on beforehand. New York Stage and Film, an incubator of works in development, provides that “beforehand”; something called “The Hamilton Mixtape” showed up there in 2013, two years before it opened as “Hamilton” on Broadway.Usually held on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, the festival looks a little different this year. The pandemic has pushed its events into various venues around town, and the Black Lives Matter movement has pushed it, like all arts organizations, to rethink programming. The new artistic director, Chris Burney, has responded with a promising slate of work from Black, Latinx and Asian American artists.The big draw, on July 31 and Aug. 1, is Michael R. Jackson’s “White Girl in Danger,” a follow-up to his 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner, “A Strange Loop.” Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, “White Girl” is a satire of Lifetime Original-style movies as seen from a Black woman’s perspective, but Jackson’s radically sympathetic worldview suggests more than a little love in the critique.Daveed Diggs, left, and Lin-Manuel Miranda working on “The Hamilton Mixtape” at New York Stage and Film in 2013.Buck Lewis, via New York Stage and FilmJackson is not the only theater artist exploring race and danger in Poughkeepsie this summer. “Mexodus,” a “concept album” created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, is about the thousands of enslaved people who instead of heading north on the Underground Railroad went south to Mexico (July 17 and 24). “South,” by Florencia Iriondo and Luis D’Elias, is a one-woman musical inspired by Iriondo’s experiences as a Latina in the United States (July 23 and 24). And “Interstate,” by Melissa Li and Kit Yan, follows a transgender slam poet and a lesbian singer-songwriter on an eventful cross-country journey (July 25).New York Stage and Film is for artists, yes, but since artists need feedback, it’s for audiences as well. (Most events are “pay what you can.”) Who isn’t it for? Critics. We can go, but can’t review, which makes it a real vacation for everyone. (newyorkstageandfilm.org) JESSE GREENHudson Valley Shakespeare FestivalThe serenity that descends on visitors upon arrival at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival has everything to do with the landscape as seen from the bluff — breathtaking river, low mountains and sky. Never mind the saber-rattling name of the town, Garrison, or the fact that West Point is across the water, barely downstream. These grounds, at the historic Boscobel House and Gardens, are a soothing setting for pre-performance picnics and a gorgeous backdrop to the stage in the open-air tent as sunset turns to night.“As You Like It,” at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in 2016.T Charles Erickson, via Hudson Valley Shakespeare FestivalStill, it is an area with a particular reverence for the Revolutionary War, which makes the festival’s season opener an enticingly provocative match. “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington” — directed by Taylor Reynolds and running June 24 to July 30 — is by James Ijames, one of the most exhilarating playwrights the American theater has right now. Set at Mount Vernon as the widowed Martha lies ill, tended to by enslaved people whose freedom is promised as soon as she dies, it is described as a fever dream — and if it’s anywhere near as brilliant as Ijames’s Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson satire “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever,” it could be unmissable.So it’s helpful that both of the festival’s live productions this summer will be filmed for streaming. But if you can, do yourself a favor and go in person. “The Tempest,” directed by Ryan Quinn and running Aug. 5 to Sept. 4, will be the company’s goodbye to Boscobel, its home of 34 years. The theater isn’t going far — just upriver to Philipstown — but if you want to catch that stellar view from the tent, this is last call. (hvshakespeare.org)LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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      Williamstown Festival Will Take the Shows Outside

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      After a lost live 2020, the theater will stage a musical at a museum’s reflecting pool and an immersive show, all over town, based on real events.The Williamstown Theater Festival, which was forced by the pandemic to convert its 2020 season into a series of audio plays, will present live performances again this summer, though not in its indoor venues.Instead, the festival announced on Wednesday three shows that will be staged outdoors throughout the festival’s college-town home. Alongside new plans for scaled-down seasons at Tanglewood and at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival, it marks a tentative step toward business as usual for the culture-rich region of Massachusetts.The Williamstown season will open on July 6 with “Outside on Main: Nine Solo Plays by Black Playwrights,” to be staged on the front lawn of its main venue. The series, curated by the writer and director Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), includes short works by the writers Ngozi Anyanwu, Charly Evon Simpson, Ike Holter and Zora Howard, among others.The world premiere of the musical “Row,” with songs by Dawn Landes and a book by Daniel Goldstein, will be staged at the reflecting pool of the nearby Clark Art Institute starting July 13. The show, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is about a woman who intends to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Initially slated to be produced last summer, “Row” was recorded as part of the festival’s deal with Audible, and will be released April 8 on that platform.The third show, “Alien/Nation,” is a world premiere immersive production that asks audiences to journey through Williamstown by foot or car and “plunge themselves into the center of stories inspired by real events that took place in Western Massachusetts in 1969,” according to a news release.Scheduled to run from July 20 to Aug. 8, it is the brainchild of the Tony Award-nominated director Michael Arden and a company called the Forest of Arden, who devised it along with the playwrights Jen Silverman and Eric Berryman. Early last summer, Arden and some of his collaborators created a similar, experimental piece called “American Dream Study” in New York’s Hudson Valley.The festival typically presents seven shows per summer; according to a publicist, digital-only productions are still to be announced.The Berkshires ended up a national center of attention last summer when Berkshire Theater Festival’s “Godspell,” staged outdoors in a tent next to its main venue, became the first musical production in the country to get approval by the leading actors’ union since the theater shutdown.This summer Berkshire Theater Festival has announced outdoor productions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Nina Simone: Four Women,” while Shakespeare & Company will open its season with Christopher Lloyd in the title role of “King Lear.”Barrington Stage Company, another notable theater in the region, promises a seven-show season that features a Gershwin revue and the comedy “Boca” outdoors and four shows indoors, including two world premieres and a solo play about Eleanor Roosevelt. More