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      The ‘POTUS’ Playwright Is Making a Farce of the Patriarchy

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      “POTUS” will be the writer Selina Fillinger’s Broadway debut. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research. I have been all of those women,” she said.Three days before the first preview performance of her first Broadway production, the playwright Selina Fillinger perched in the middle of the empty mezzanine of the Shubert Theater, peering down upon the set. “I’m sorry, I can’t look away,” she said. “It’s like a crew of fairies and angels, just making things happen.”Down below, the crew building the set was buzzing around a re-creation of a women’s restroom in the White House — star-studded carpet, cream and gold wallpaper, coin-operated tampon dispenser. “It’s so specific,” Fillinger said of the tampon machine. “And of course it would be paid.”Fillinger’s new play, “POTUS,” is a comedy about seven women in the inner circle of the president of the United States. It takes place on a day when the president’s various sex and sexism-related scandals are blowing up so spectacularly that the women in his life are prompted to take increasingly desperate measures to keep his administration afloat.The idea began developing in Fillinger’s mind during Donald Trump’s run for office. “I was fascinated by the women in his orbit,” she said. And she noticed that, with every new headline about a man abusing women — Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — “there was always at least one woman, right there at the elbow.”The stars of the play include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe result is a farce about women’s relationship to male power — how they access it, what they are allowed to do with it, and who else they subjugate along the way. “I love farces, but they typically rely on sexist and racist tropes,” Fillinger said. So she wrote a comedy about women struggling to adhere to the rules of the patriarchy, which “literally causes a farce on a day-to-day basis.”In crafting the play’s characters, Fillinger wanted to create the most combustible combination — among them are the president’s weary first lady, Margaret (Vanessa Williams); his perfectionist personal secretary, Stephanie (Rachel Dratch); and his cocky convicted-felon sister, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria) — and dropped them onto a White House set that rotates dizzily like a turntable as the crisis mounts.As for the president, he is a cipher, appearing in the play only as limbs jutting occasionally into view. “I was interested in purposefully and consciously failing the Bechdel test,” Fillinger said, referring to the challenge popularized by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel that a movie ought to feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. “If you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”Also, she found the president character too tedious to actually write. “He’s an amalgamation of so many presidents,” she said, “and also several men that I’ve done group projects with in high school.” The play’s full title is “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.”When Trump announced his candidacy, Fillinger was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. Now, at 28, she is building a notable body of work, and her farce is being lifted straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. Even as she prepared to open “POTUS” in New York, she was writing for the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” in Los Angeles; she joined the writer’s room for its third season and has managed both jobs by flying cross-country and back, sometimes every weekend.When I met Fillinger on a Monday morning, she was jet-lagged and unfed in a plum jumpsuit and pale purple face mask, a look she described as “chic mechanic.” We talked until she politely announced that she should probably locate the nearest Starbucks instant oatmeal or “I might pass out.” When I asked about her relationship to her own success, she said, “I really didn’t expect it,” then joked of an alternate life: “I thought I was going to spend my early 20s WWOOFing or whatever.” (WWOOFing: visiting farms through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program.) “It has been a dream, and also, it has been a tremendously steep learning curve.”News stories have become a tool for Fillinger, seen her on the “POTUS” set, who then takes them into unexpected directions.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesFILLINGER WAS RAISED in Eugene, Ore., “by hippies in the woods,” she said. Her father is a sustainability-focused architect, her mother is a social worker who works as a partner in her father’s firm, and Fillinger grew up without television, except for the occasional “Sesame Street” episode and a VHS box set of Charlie Chaplin movies she watched when she was sick. “I read a ton and I wrote a lot of stories and I played a lot of pretend in the woods next to my house,” she said.When she arrived at Northwestern planning to study acting, “it was an intense culture shock,” she said. “There were all these kids from LaGuardia” — the New York performing arts school — “and they knew all the playwrights’ names, and all the directors’ names, and all the actors’ names, and they had all grown up going to Broadway shows, and I had no awareness of any of that.” But she now sees the upside to having waded into the theater world “when you don’t necessarily know what is being done, and what is not being done.”As a sophomore, Fillinger took an introductory playwriting class that she found so difficult she assumed it would be her last. But the professor, Laura Schellhardt, encouraged her to submit her work to a university-wide playwriting festival, and Fillinger was selected.The play was based on a 2013 news story about a Canadian bar that serves a shot garnished with a mummified human toe, and the American man who walked into the bar and swallowed that toe. At the time, “I didn’t know if I belonged at Northwestern. I didn’t feel, necessarily, good enough to be there,” Fillinger said. So she transplanted the story to a fictional Oregon town, and shaped the bizarro news item into a drama about a middle-aged woman fighting to save her bar from being bought by an outsider — a big-city guy whose initial display of dominance over her is to gulp her prized appendage.When Fillinger first entered that class, “she came in and identified as an actress, and she said that several times,” Schellhardt said. “The second she took ownership over the piece, her hold on the identity of being an actress began to loosen. She could tell her own story and not just to be an instrument for someone else’s story.”News stories became a tool for Fillinger — a snapshot of the culture that she could twist into new meanings and steer into unexpected directions. As a senior, she took part in a Northwestern program meant to simulate a play commission, and worked with the Northlight Theater in Illinois to develop “Faceless,” inspired by the story of a white woman in Colorado who is recruited to join ISIS through an online network. The simulation turned real when Northlight staged the play in 2017.Later, her 2019 play, “Something Clean,” a Roundabout Underground production, imagined the parents of a college student convicted of sexual assault in a scenario modeled after the Brock Turner case. After reading Turner’s parents’ statements in that case, “I was just fascinated by the cognitive dissonance that would have to go into their survival,” Fillinger said; the play imagines the mother shielding her identity so she can volunteer at a rape crisis center. The Times critic Ben Brantley called it a “beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama,” adding that Fillinger “uses traditional forms to frame toxic contemporary subjects” and “keeps readjusting our point of view” along the way.Kathryn Erbe and Daniel Jenkins in “Something Clean,” an earlier work by Fillinger that Roundabout Theater Company staged in 2019.Maria Baranova for The New York TimesFillinger is still affected by current events, but “you don’t necessarily see the stitching as much” in her more recent works, she said. In “The Collapse,” commissioned through the Manhattan Theater Club’s Sloan Initiative for developing new plays about math and science, environmental devastation plays out in miniature in a California apiary, where a bee researcher is dying alongside her hives. When it came time to write “POTUS,” she said she didn’t focus on any particular political figures. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research,” she said. “I have been all of those women at some point.”All of her plays bear certain imprints: they are interested in interrogating women in power, in finding human tenderness and absurd comedy even in great tragedies, and in placing several generations of women in conversation.“It’s a shame that people stop writing love, sex and violence for women after a certain age,” Fillinger said. But exploring women at middle-age and older, as she tends to do, is also a canny defense against those who might reduce a young woman’s work to mere autobiographical stenography. When she does write a 20-something woman, “everyone projects assumptions upon that character,” she said. “All of my plays have so much of me in them, but not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.”AT A TECHNICAL REHEARSAL the week before previews were to begin, the “POTUS” cast practiced on the rotating set for the first time. Under a bust of the suffragist Alice Paul, Dratch, wearing nude shapewear and a lace dickey, writhed on the floor in an inflatable pink inner tube as DeLaria stomped around in camo cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read “SHUT UP, KAREN.” Lilli Cooper, playing a White House reporter, was strapped to a portable breast pump affixed to bottles sloshing with milk; both Cooper and her character recently had a baby. As the set rotated, Suzy Nakamura, who plays the White House press secretary, raced among the rooms to hit her cue at the briefing room podium and stumbled over the president’s disembodied legs, which had accidentally been left splayed on the floor. The cast fell into laughter.“When it gets toward this time of night, they get tired and they get hysterical,” the director, Susan Stroman, said; it was 9 p.m. and nearing the end of the day’s second rehearsal stretch. “Sometimes we laugh so hard that we cry and we have to stop.”Stroman said that when she first read the play, she was startled to find a farce that put women not in secondary or tertiary roles but primary ones. “I couldn’t believe that it had all these things going for it, and that it was really funny,” she said. Then she met the playwright, and “I couldn’t believe she’s 28,” said Stroman, a five-time Tony-winner who directed and choreographed “The Producers.” “She’s an old soul. She carries the spirit of women who have come before her.”If Fillinger were to play a “POTUS” character, it would be Stephanie, the type-A personal secretary who is always subverting her own self-doubt into an exacting performance of perfectionism.She knows that her early success means that she is leaving a very public trail of the emotional and intellectual state of her 20s. Early works are “time capsules of you — sometimes in a good way,” she said. “But they also hold all of your blind spots, and all of your little work-in-progress moments, all of your ignorance and all of your youth. It’s so mortifying to have yourself, frozen at 22, out in the world, just being read.” But that’s been a gift, too: “I’ve been forced to become not so precious.”As “POTUS” nears its opening, she is still tinkering. “I’ve been reworking the ending a lot to try to calibrate the tone,” she said. “POTUS” drives frantically toward a shift among its seven women, who begin to question why they are working so hard in the service of male power. But how that change will shake out — and what it will cost — is somewhat open to interpretation.Fillinger’s relationship to optimism in her work, she said, is complex.“As a young person and a woman, I’m expected to perform hope for people, without having the luxury of expressing my rage,” she said. “But I feel like rage can be hopeful as well.” More

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      Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

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      The British Congolese playwright earned the $25,000 prize for her memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

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      A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

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      A Playwright Makes the Scene in New York’s Living Rooms

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      In the fall of 2020, a young playwright named Matthew Gasda decided to entertain some friends by staging a one-act drama on a grassy hilltop of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The masked audience quickly realized that what they were watching was conspicuously relatable: Performed on a picnic blanket by seven actors, “Circles” presented a group of pandemic-weary friends who gather over wine one night in a city park to catch up on their lives.After the applause, Mr. Gasda, 33, passed around a hat for donations. Then he began plotting his next play.A few months later he unveiled “Winter Journey,” a drama loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came “Quartet,” a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged his next play, “Ardor,” about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. He was a long way from Broadway, or even Off Broadway, but he was grateful for the attention.“I’d long been staging plays in New York in anonymity,” he said, “but during the pandemic I became like the rat that survived the nukes. Suddenly, there was no competition.”In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.From left, Bob Laine, Bijan Stephen, Ms. Grady, Mr. Lorentzen and Eunji Lim rehearse a scene from “Dimes Square,” a new play about a downtown scene.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe reflected face of the critic Christian Lorentzen during a rehearsal of Matthew Gasda’s “Dimes Square.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe actor Cassidy Grady, under a flag blanket at the same rehearsal.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSet in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Adding a touch of realism, Mr. Gasda cast friends in key roles: Bijan Stephen, a journalist and podcast host, portrays a frustrated magazine editor; Christian Lorentzen, a literary critic, plays a haggard Gen X novelist; and Fernanda Amis, whose father is the author Martin Amis, plays the daughter of a famous writer.Since the play opened in February at a loft in Greenpoint, “Dimes Square” has become an underground hit that consistently sells out performances. The people who see the show include insiders eager to see their scene committed to the stage, as well as those who have kept track of it at a distance via Instagram. The writers Gary Indiana, Joshua Cohen, Sloane Crosley and Mr. Amis have all attended.The play, which is scheduled to start a Manhattan run at an apartment in SoHo on Friday, also won Mr. Gasda his first big write-up, a review by Helen Shaw in New York Magazine’s Vulture, that compared him to Chekhov and declared: “Gasda has appointed himself dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”After the appraisal ran online, Mr. Gasda received a text from a friend on his battered flip phone congratulating him on the fact that he had been “dubbed our chekhov.” But even as Mr. Gasda is getting his shot at success in literary New York, something about the noise surrounding his play has been troubling him.The playwright in his Brooklyn apartment.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I’m thankful for the attention, but the people coming to see the show seem to think the play is complicit with the scene, and that’s getting totally warped by them,” he said. “The play is pessimistic about the scene.”Moments before actors took the stage at a recent performance, audience members sipped cheap red wine and made small talk about the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. As the lights dimmed, Mr. Gasda, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and his usual scarf, reminded his guests to pay for their drinks on Venmo.After the performance, as the loft cleared out, one audience member, Joseph Hogan, a 29-year-old filmmaker, offered a critique: “The likability of these characters is irrelevant to me,” he said. “What’s important to me is if their insecurities are relatable. And as a person who moved to this city from somewhere else and is trying to make it here in New York like they are, I feel I can identify with them.”“If they’re not considered likable,” he continued, “then neither am I. And that’s fine with me.”The play’s cast made its way to its usual bar, Oak & Iron. There, Mr. Gasda nursed a Fernet as Mr. Lorentzen passed along an evaluation of the show.“A journalist came up to me and told me she thought you’d be just another Cassavetes rehash,” Mr. Lorentzen said, referring to John Cassavetes, the noted indie filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. “But afterward she told me, ‘No, he gets it. He’s doing his own thing.’”“I’ve gotten Cassavetes references before,” Mr. Gasda said. “But it’s not my job to be interested in what people think. My job is to keep secreting and writing.”He took a sip.“It’s great we’re getting attention,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m making money out of this. I still have my day job.”“It reminds me of this story I heard about a guy seeing ‘Einstein on the Beach,’” he continued, referring to Philip Glass’s 1976 opera. “Then the guy needed to get his toilet fixed, so he called a plumber. The plumber shows up, and the guy asks him, ‘Aren’t you Philip Glass?’ Glass tells him, ‘Yeah, but I’m not making money on the show yet.’”Mr. Gasda watches from below as George Olesky and Cassidy Grady act out a scene from his play “Minotaur.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMr. Gasda’s quest to become a New York playwright began during his teenage years in Bethlehem, where his father was a high school history teacher and his mother was a paralegal. He grew up watching Eagles games on TV with his dad and hearing stories about a grandfather’s days as a steelworker. He became bookish, compulsively reading “Ulysses” and devouring the works of the poet John Ashbery and the novelist William Gaddis.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, Mr. Gasda hopped a bus to Port Authority. He spent his first day walking aimlessly until he stumbled on Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village institution that was once a gathering spot for bohemians and Beat Generation poets. And there, even among the New York University students doing their homework, he felt at home. He soon moved into an apartment in Bushwick and started his reinvention.He wrote on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. He rocked the scarf and turtleneck to literary parties. He hung out in the stacks of the Strand and made Caffe Reggio his office, writing parts of over a dozen plays there. To make the rent, he taught English at a charter school in Red Hook and worked as a debate coach at Spence, the Upper East Side private school. He is now a college prep tutor and lives in a book-cluttered apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.But even after a decade in the city, he could get few people aside from friends and family members to see his work — until his luck changed during the pandemic, when young New Yorkers, weary of Netflix, seemed up for some live theater.Now, in addition to the second run of “Dimes Square,” another one of Mr. Gasda’s plays, “Minotaur,” is scheduled to open soon at a small venue in Dumbo. An early and intimate staging of the production included the actress Dasha Nekrasova, who has a recurring role on “Succession” and co-hosts the provocative politics and culture podcast “Red Scare.”Mr. Gasda at home.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAfter a recent “Minotaur” rehearsal in Midtown, Ms. Nekrasova and another cast member, Cassidy Grady, huddled for a smoke on the street while Mr. Gasda chatted with them. They discussed the debut novel of the moment, Sean Thor Conroe’s “Fuccboi,” as well as the new play that was rounding into shape.“‘Minotaur’ is a kind of Ibsenian drama,” Ms. Nekrasova said. “I’m enthusiastic about Gasda because he represents a burgeoning interest in theater, post-Covid, in the city.”Mr. Gasda slipped into a nearby sports bar. He ordered a glass of Fernet, and as he considered the impending run of “Dimes Square,” he suggested that audiences think about his play differently.“Ultimately, ‘Dimes Square’ is a comedy,” he said. “I’m not trying to send people to the therapist. And I’m not saying I’m better than the people in my play.”“The other side of the play is about striving in New York,” he added. “So it’s about something that’s universal, too.” More

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      Writers Guild Awards Keep up Momentum for ‘CODA,’ ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      The victories are good news for those films’ Oscar chances: The best picture winner usually also picks up a screenplay trophy.A sudden Oscar front-runner and a dark-horse contender took top honors at the Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night, as the heartwarmer “CODA” and the satirical “Don’t Look Up” prevailed in the adapted and original screenplay categories, respectively.“This is real, legitimate excitement,” the writer-director of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay, said in a pretaped speech. Though several awards shows have returned to in-person gatherings, the WGA ceremony was virtual, and nominees were asked to send in their acceptance speeches ahead of time. Only the winner’s was played during the ceremony.Several major films were ineligible for the WGAs this year because they were not written under a bargaining agreement with the WGA or its sister guilds. So “Belfast” and “The Worst Person in the World” (in the original-screenplay category) and “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” (in the adapted category) were not in the running. And because that significantly whittled down the pool of big contenders, most pundits expected the writer-director Sian Heder’s “CODA,” based on the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” would prevail with the Writers Guild, though “Don’t Look Up” still faced stiff competition from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.”Can the WGA victors also win their Oscar races now that “Belfast” has lost its awards mojo and the surging “CODA” beat “The Power of the Dog” at this weekend’s influential Producers Guild Awards? In a recent screenplay contest at the BAFTAs, “CODA” pulled out another surprise win over “The Power of the Dog,” its biggest best-picture rival. Since the path to the top Oscar almost always winds through the screenplay categories, an adapted-screenplay win for “CODA” on Oscar night could foreshadow the film’s ultimate fate.And though “Don’t Look Up” has a tougher path to the best-picture Oscar, with no notable awards-season wins until now, the WGA victory at least suggests that the original-screenplay race will remain one to watch.Here are some of the other WGA winners:Documentary: “Exposing Muybridge”Drama series: “Succession”Comedy series: “Hacks”New series: “Hacks”Original long-form series: “Mare of Easttown”Adapted long-form series: “Maid” More

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      Margaret Atwood and Others Confront Grief in ‘The Nurse Antigone’

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      A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Johns Hopkins Hospital, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the author Margaret Atwood.Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”Clockwise from top left, Amy Smith, Charlaine Lasse and Aliki Argiropoulos.Theater of War ProductionsWhile most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand … and on the other.’”The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.Bryan Doerries, center bottom, with, clockwise from top left: Marjolaine Goldsmith, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Nyasha Hatendi and Frankie Faison in a reading Sophocles’ works in 2021.Theater of War ProductionsIn May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King,” starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Samuel L. Jackson and Walter Mosley Team Up for a Sci-Fi Fable

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      In a joint interview, the actor and writer discuss “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” their “fairy tale” about an old man negotiating dementia and family drama with the help of a wonder drug.Samuel L. Jackson made his name in the movies, Walter Mosley in literature. But when it was time for these two arts legends to collaborate, they knew television was the only medium that would work.“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” a new limited series starring Jackson and written by Mosley, based on his 2010 novel, tells the story of an elderly Atlanta man with dementia and a family that wants his savings. Just when it looks like all Ptolemy has left is to count his remaining days, two people alter the course of his life. One is Robyn (Dominique Fishback), a teenage family friend who decides Ptolemy is worth taking care of. The other is a neurologist (Walton Goggins) working on a new drug that will bring back Ptolemy’s cognizance — but only for a short time, after which he’ll be worse off than ever (shades of the Daniel Keyes novel “Flowers for Algernon” and its film adaptation, “Charly”).In the series, Jackson’s title character reclaims his life with the help of a young caretaker played by Dominique Fishback.Hopper Stone/Apple TV+In his newfound lucidity, Ptolemy comes to terms with events and people from his past, including the one true love of his life, a beauty named Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and Coydog (Damon Gupton), a childhood mentor who left behind an unusual inheritance. As these figures come and go from his mind, Ptolemy also takes it upon himself to solve the murder of a beloved nephew (Omar Benson Miller), a task appropriate to Mosley’s bread-and-butter turf of crime fiction.Jackson and Mosley were also executive producers on the series, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. The project was personal for both of them: Each has had loved ones who suffered from dementia. During a freewheeling video interview — Jackson was in London (where he’s filming the Marvel mini-series “Secret Invasion”), Mosley in Los Angeles — they discussed the fairy tale quality of “Ptolemy,” why television was the best option for the project, and how the story jumped across the country from Los Angeles to Atlanta, among other subjects. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s a fairy tale,” Jackson said of his new series. “In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesWho is Ptolemy Grey?WALTER MOSLEY He’s all of us everywhere. This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death. These things impact everybody’s lives. It’s a great thing to have Sam taking it on and bringing it to a neighborhood that other people don’t seem to think about very much.SAMUEL L. JACKSON As based in reality as we want it to be, he’s actually at the center of a fable. He’s this mythical character that Walter created who has a real-life problem at the beginning, but Walter allows us to circle back and see a life well lived. It’s a fairy tale. In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily, that allows him to be clear about everything that’s happened in his life, in a flash.How does the series address the experience of dementia?MOSLEY A lot of people will see somebody who’s experiencing dementia or Alzheimer’s, and they think, ‘They’re crazy.’ But in reality, there’s something really going on in there, no matter how far gone they are. We allow an audience to identify not only with the character that Sam’s playing, but with our own lives. That was what the book meant to me, to be able to do that.JACKSON Those of us who have had to deal with that know that when those people are sitting there, they may not answer your questions or be present for what you want them to be present for, because they’re busy inhabiting something else that gives them solace in the lost space that they’re in, or that we think they’re in. But they may not be lost at all. They just don’t bother with what you are trying to put on.I talked to my mom when she had dementia and she’d be like, “You’re disturbing me. Stop asking me things that I’m supposed to know the answer to, or you think that I know the answer to, or that I don’t want to be engaged in right now.” When she wanted to engage, she engaged. So this story touched me in a real place.“This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death,” Mosley said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAnd through the story, you get to invent a cure, albeit a temporary one.MOSLEY That’s the great thing about imaginative creativity. You look at Jules Verne: He’s the guy who invented the [electric] submarine, who invented the rocket to the moon. He invented all of this stuff in his imagination, and of course, it’s stuff we wanted. I was reading the newspaper yesterday, and they said umbilical cord stem cells have cured a woman of AIDS. This one woman is cured, and they did it from umbilical cord stem cells. If you put the possibility out there, lots of people are going to be thinking about it.Walter, you’ve worked in television quite a bit by now, including as an executive producer on the crime drama “Snowfall.” Sam, you have mostly stuck to movies. What made TV the right medium to tell the story of Ptolemy?MOSLEY Television has the potential to do some amazing things that are good for drama, good for actors, and good for an audience to be able to understand and identify with characters who have real arcs of change. We’re coming up on our final season of “Snowfall,” and we’re going to get to see how things are going to work out or fall apart. That’s what’s been fun.JACKSON There’s a great satisfaction for me to have a character development that allows an audience to go back and say, “OK, that’s where he started. Oh, that’s why he’s this guy. Oh, that’s why he treats women this way.” We watched movies for a very long time before we realized something like “Roots” could come along and be a mini-series. All of a sudden, boom, there’s “Roots,” and you go, “[expletive], that’s the way to tell the story.”The novel takes place in Los Angeles, but the series takes place in Atlanta. Why the move?JACKSON Georgia has better tax breaks.MOSLEY Yes, it wasn’t feasible to do it in L.A. First, we were going to go to Atlanta and try to make Atlanta look like L.A. But Atlanta doesn’t look like L.A.JACKSON There’s not one palm tree in Atlanta.Did setting the series in Atlanta add anything thematically?JACKSON There are certain elements of Atlanta that are historically indigenous to telling a story like this. Anybody who’s lived in any place that’s full of Black people will recognize this. How many white people are in this story? There’s the doctor, and the nurse. A lot of people are going to look at this and go, “Where are the white people?” You didn’t encounter them unless you had to when I was growing up in the South. In Atlanta, they had Black insurance companies, they had Black newspapers. Everything you needed, you could get in the Black community. You didn’t have to go outside of it.MOSLEY I really do think that all of those things are trace elements that impacted the making of the series, with the actors and the crew just being in Atlanta. We would tell the story anywhere we were, but making it in Atlanta was in itself an experience, and that experience had to impart some of its history to the series.Let’s talk a little about the collaboration between you two. Walter, why was it important to have Sam onboard for this?MOSLEY Sam is a great actor, but that’s just a very small part of the answer to your question. I wrote the book 13 years ago. Sam knew the book better than I did. He’d say, “No, no. Don’t you remember? You did this,” and I’d say, “Oh, yeah. OK.” He’s also an executive producer, and his commitment to the book and getting it made is why we got it made. When I was shopping it, people would say, “Sam Jackson doesn’t do television.” Well you’re right, but he’s going to do this. His commitment to it, his talent in doing it, his willingness to play a very different kind of role than he usually does and to make that work so beautifully — it was really great.Sam, what is it about Walter’s work that pulls you in?JACKSON Walter is a very feet-on-the-ground kind of guy that understands and knows his characters and knows the environment that those characters are in. Environment is very important when you’re a reader. I read a lot, two or three books at a time. Descriptions and character development are very important things, no matter what, and Walter has a command of those things that a lot of writers don’t. I read bad novels along with good ones, but I always know that I’m going to get something very satisfying when I’m reading a Walter Mosley book. More

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      in Theater

      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More