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    Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

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    Theater about current events — both literally and abstractly — is changing the conversation between playwrights, directors and their audiences.IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.What’s jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we’ve had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog’s reconception of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 “An Enemy of the People” as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction “Show/Boat: A River,” which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We’ve had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we’ve had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!”? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical “Cabaret” (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall’s immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even “Wicked,” 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that’s your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” — no, wait, damn it, there’s that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical “Real Women Have Curves,” which … nope, that won’t work either. It’s hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we’ve all become hammers.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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      What Do We Want From Political Theater?

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      Playwrights and directors wrestle with how a piece of art can galvanize its audience.In an era of vanishing cultural authority and ever-abbreviated attention spans, being called relevant is one of the best compliments a work of art can get. We’ve always celebrated art that seems to speak to our political and cultural moments, but these days — when the news relentlessly inundates us — art can feel like a surrogate, a response we’re unable to summon ourselves. Relevancy is less a compliment now than an expectation.And of all the creative genres — music, film, television, literature — the form that we most expect to answer the confusion of the time is, arguably, theater. This, says Mark Harris in his story about the politicization of American theater, is partly because of theater’s inherent intimacy. Unlike a movie, it can only be watched by a certain number of people over a limited amount of time; and moreover, those people have to be able to 1) afford to see a play, and 2) get themselves to the theater itself. Mass entertainment it’s not.On the CoversSwap wears a Louis Vuitton tank top and pants, price on request, louisvuitton.com; stylist’s own belt; and model’s own jewelry. His sons Heavn (left) and Jru’Angelo wear their own clothing.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioGabriel Medina (left) at State Management and Santino Guzman at Vision Los Angeles. From left: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, and pants, $1,200, celine.com; Celine by Hedi Slimane shirt, about $1,100, and tie, about $250, similar styles at celine.com. Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, shirt, about $1,100, pants, $1,500, and tie, about $250.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioYet despite its relative exclusivity, theater’s cultural reach is much broader than one might imagine, its reverberations more profound and longer lasting. And in 2025, Harris writes, “the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality.” The proof is in the current season of both dramas and musicals, with new offerings and revivals about, variously, immigration, race, vaccines and bodily autonomy. We want theater to articulate what we can’t; we want it to provide catharsis; we want it to speak to our anger and give us hope. But increasingly, Harris says, the question isn’t so much what can theater do for us as what we can do for theater. “What,” he asks, “does political theater want to do to its audience? Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanize us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us?” Any one of those things; all of them. What we may want most, though, is to feel something at all. More

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      in Movies

      Joseph Wambaugh, Author With a Cop’s-Eye View, Is Dead at 88

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      In novels like “The Glitter Dome” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field,” he took a harsh, unglamorous look at the realities of law enforcement.Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88. The cause was esophageal cancer, said Janene Gant, a longtime family friend.In “The Glitter Dome,” Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy “to kill people and do other good police work.” In “The Black Marble,” Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can’t last. In “The Onion Field,” his first work of nonfiction, Mr. Wambaugh wrote of what happened to Officer Karl Hettinger when his partner was slain by thugs: He suffered impotence, nightmares and suicidal thoughts, and his body shrunk.Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.Before Mr. Wambaugh’s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series “Dragnet” were implausible stories about clean-cut heroes doing good. He shattered the mold with portraits of officers as complex, profane, violent and fallible, sliding quickly from rookie illusions of idealism into the streetwise cynicism of veterans, who might have feared death but who feared their own emotions even more.Readers discovered an intimacy with Wambaugh’s cops, taking in the gallows humor, the boredom and sudden dangers; being privy to a partner’s bigotry and cruelty, but tagging along for the action and a share of the fatalism about the job — the inevitability of a murder, a rape or a child molested tonight — and then moving on to another sunset shift out of Hollywood Station.Mr. Wambaugh in 1972, the year after his first novel, “The New Centurions,” was published. He wrote it on the job while working as a police officer.Jill Krementz, all rights reservedWe 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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      For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger

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      Act 1 was a constant struggle for rent and opportunity. But now that these emerging dramatists have emerged, what will they make of Act 2?“Absolutely not,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared.Leslye Headland chuckled. “Oh never, no.”“I don’t know anyone who could!” was Samuel D. Hunter’s astonished response.“Not really,” hedged Bess Wohl. “Until maybe last year.”The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: “Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?”To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of “An Octoroon,” which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a “horrible sublet on an air shaft,” with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play “Bachelorette” made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he’d earned in any one year from his plays — including “The Whale” and “A Case for the Existence of God” — was “less than $30,000.”Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It’s hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity?Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. (“Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night” and “Othello” are dead center in Shakespeare’s professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can’t survive the start?Or so I have often worried.Katherine Waterston, Tracee Chimo and Celia Keenan-Bolger in Leslye Headland’s 2010 play “Bachelorette.”Joan MarcusWe 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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      in Movies

      Interview: Helen Fielding on ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ and Her Reading Life

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      With “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” streaming, the novelist talked in an email interview about what moviemakers keep cutting from adaptations of her best sellers. SCOTT HELLERDescribe your ideal reading experience.I love a vacation binge-read — I read all 800 pages of “The Goldfinch” in Greece (that’s Greece, not Greek). I also love it when you’re waiting for a novel to come out and can’t put it down when it does. It was like that with “Atonement.” I managed to escape and hide when it arrived and read it all at one sitting.What kind of reader were you as a child?I was crazy for novels as a child and teenager. I read several a week, never distinguishing between heavy and light. Enid Blyton, Jane Austen, Jackie Collins, Thomas Hardy — I loved them all. Ironically, the joy was dampened when I went to university to read English. I’d worked as an au pair in France all summer and somehow failed to tackle the reading list. I ended up trying to read the entire works of Dickens in three days. I lost my reading mojo for some years.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?I’ve got into trouble for not reading a book: “Bleak House.”What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?“Bleak House.” And I’ve got into terrible trouble for giving quotes for book covers. My quote once got a bad review: “There is only one thing wrong with this novel — the cover quote from Helen Fielding. Whilst it is true, it is also trite.”What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?“Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” It’s a brilliant collection of quotes about writing from his letters. I don’t know what I’d do without it.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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      in Theater

      The Next Hot Playwright? They Prefer the Ones Who Cooled Off.

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      In the decades when he was running the widely influential Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford would not have been the one driving to New Jersey to see a man about a tree.But his new theater company, a scrappy, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, is a more hands-on operation. So one day last month, he hopped into his S.U.V. and headed across the Hudson River to bring back a freshly felled tree — he couldn’t tell you what kind — to be used in the set of a Len Jenkin play he is producing, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”Such is the job that Sanford, 71, made for himself when he and his wife, Aimée Hayes, the former producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, founded the Tent Theater Company. Advocacy is intrinsic to its mission. Having exited Playwrights Horizons in 2021, after 25 years as its artistic director, Sanford has taken up the banner of a group of artists he sees as sidelined by an industry that thrives on discovering the latest hot playwrights, yet isn’t exactly diligent about sustaining them over their lifetimes of creativity.Kate Arrington and Fred Weller during a rehearsal for Len Jenkin’s new play, “How Is It That We Live or Shakey Jake + Alice.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThere is, Sanford said, a feeling afoot that older playwrights should simply make way: “That kind of, you know, ‘The baby boomers had their time. Let them all go into the ash pits.’”To him, though, age is an overlooked element of diversity — one that comes with accumulated knowledge of the human experience, and for which there is, and must be, room. It is a matter, too, of respecting these artists, whom the Tent calls elders.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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      Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

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      The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe 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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      in Theater

      Interview: S.E. Hinton on ‘The Outsiders’ and Her Reading Life

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      What books are on your night stand?I am currently rereading “Middlemarch” (it takes rereading), and “The Last of the Wine,” by Mary Renault. Socrates is a character in that book. So is Plato. To have them appear casually in a novel, yet be very faithful to what we know of them, is great.How do you organize your books?I have a beautiful library, organized by subjects: History (early to late), Author Biographies, Exploring, Women’s Studies, Journalism, Entertainment, English Fiction, American Fiction and Children’s Books. The Paranormal books are organized by Ghosts and Hauntings, Reincarnation, Coincidences, Strange but True.Why so many books on the paranormal?I have had many strange things happen in my life.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).Any time, on the sofa, with good lighting, my cat and a small glass of wine.What’s the last great book you read?“Demon Copperhead.” I don’t know a whole lot of Dickens but I know “David Copperfield” inside and out. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver followed some of the plot. Also, Demon is a great narrator — talking the way you can imagine him talking, thinking the way you can imagine him thinking.What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?I wish I knew more Shakespeare.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?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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      in Movies

      ‘The Interview’: Tilda Swinton Would Like a Word with Trump About His Mother

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      Unexpected, even uncanny, connections sometimes arise in this job. An interviewee might, for example, raise an idea that chimes with something I’ve long been thinking about. Or I’ll find while doing research that someone’s work illuminates a problem I’d been dealing with. Two such surprises occurred with this week’s subject, the Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Both shaped my feeling about the ensuing conversation, though in very different ways.Listen to the Interview With Tilda SwintonThe Academy Award-winning actress discusses her lifelong quest for connection, humanity’s innate goodness and the point of being alive.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppThe first: In a book of sketches and musings by the British writer John Berger called “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one drawing has always mesmerized me. It’s of an androgynous face with almond-shaped, almost alien eyes, and it exudes a deeply human compassion. That sketch is labeled, simply, “Tilda,” and I hadn’t much thought about upon whom it was based. Until, that is, when in preparation for my interview with Swinton, I watched a documentary she co-directed about Berger. In it, she mentions “Bento’s Sketchbook” — and a lightbulb went on. I’d long admired that sketch and Swinton’s daring, shape-shifting acting — in her avant-garde films with her mentor and friend Derek Jarman, her indie collaborations with directors like Bong Joon Ho and Wes Anderson and her Hollywood triumphs like “Michael Clayton” and the “Chronicles of Narnia” trilogy — but I’d never put together that I’d been entranced by the same person, the same presence, the whole time. I couldn’t help taking that as a good omen for the interview.The second connection was harder to interpret. Readers of this column may remember that my last Q&A was with a doctor about medical aid in dying — a subject with which I’ve had recent personal experience. Swinton’s upcoming film, “The Room Next Door,” directed by the great Pedro Almodóvar and opening in select theaters on Dec. 20, is about — and I swear I didn’t know this ahead of time — a distressingly similar topic. In the movie, Swinton plays a woman named Martha, who asks her friend Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, to support her decision to die by suicide after becoming terminally ill. I would have felt disingenuous not to be open about this coincidence with Swinton, but I also wasn’t exactly eager to explore it. She, as it turns out, felt otherwise.“The Room Next Door” is based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, “What Are You Going Through,” which takes its title from a quote by the French philosopher Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through?” So what are you going through? I’m enjoying right now the attention to that question, and the fact that our film puts that question into the air. The idea of bearing witness, and the question of what is friendship, but even more than friendship, what is it to coexist? What is it to not look away? I think of it actually as a political film.I have questions about that, but I want to preface them by sharing what I hope is a morbidly humorous anecdote. Sounds good! More