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      Susan Nussbaum, 68, Who Pressed for Disability Rights in Her Plays, Dies

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      In a wheelchair after being hit by a car in her 20s, she became an advocate for people with disabilities in her writing for the stage and as a novelist.Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concern for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.Her sister, Karen Nussbaum, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Ms. Nussbaum began using a wheelchair after being hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene.Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.“If the dominant culture was saturated with backward concepts of who we were, I would answer back with my own collection of disabled characters,” she wrote in a 2012 essay published in The Huffington Post.Ms. Nussbaum began her playwriting career with “Staring Back,” which was performed on the Second City’s E.T.C. stage in 1983. She then collaborated with Mike Ervin, a disability activist who writes a column for Progressive.org, on a series of satirical sketches about disability. Titled “The Plucky and Spunky Show,” it was presented at the Remains Theater.The first reading of her acerbic comic play “Mishuganismo” was in 1992 in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in an article about that reading, called it “a mad-sad-glad whirl of politics, activism, love, need, sex and other items.”Directed by her father, Mike Nussbaum, an actor, and based on her own letters, the play took its title from a term that one of Ms. Nussbaum’s friends coined, meaning “a syndrome when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a Latin guy.” The play was later published in the 1997 anthology “Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out.”Her last major play, “No One as Nasty,” which documented the relationship between a disabled woman and her paid caretaker, was performed in 2000 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.As a member of the Chicago-based disability rights organization Access Living, Ms. Nussbaum campaigned to make theaters more accessible to wheelchair users and participated in other protests, including efforts to make public transit in the city accessible.After decades of work in theater, she turned to fiction. Her novel “Good Kings Bad Kings,” which follows workers and residents in a Chicago care institution for people with disabilities, earned acclaim for its candor and sensitivity and won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.The book’s title came from reporting in The New York Times about Jonathan Carey, an autistic boy who was killed by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, near Albany, where Jonathan was living. “I could be a good king or a bad king,” the man told the boy as he asphyxiated him, according to court documents.That line stuck with Ms. Nussbaum, she said in a 2013 interview with the website Bitch Media. “It became the title because it reminded me how, when it comes to kids, the adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional connection to the child, and the child’s welfare is turned over to that adult — as is the case in institutions — terrible things can happen.”She continued: “The disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, monster. The fate of the disabled character is usually miraculous cure, death or institutionalization.”In writing the novel, as in her other work, Ms. Nussbaum said, “It was really important to me to give disabled characters — more than one — their own voices, and the agency to represent themselves and their own perspective on what happens.”Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on Dec. 2, 1953, in Chicago to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. Her mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.Interested in theater from a young age after running lines with her father, she began writing plays in high school. After graduating, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago.She was on her way to an acting class when she was struck by a car. She spent seven months in the hospital.She then navigated through life as a wheelchair user, becoming angry at the lack of accessibility. At one job, as she recounted in a 2013 Psychology Today article, the workplace did not have accessible bathrooms. Finding no ramps on public transportation, she and other wheelchair users began taking an ambulance to and from work. These experiences galvanized her to join Access Living and begin writing plays.Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. A longtime leftist, Ms. Nussbaum visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life she founded Empowered Fe Fes, a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father; a brother, Jacob Nussbaum; and a daughter, Taina Rodriguez. More

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      Joanna Barnes, Actress in ‘The Parent Trap’ and Its Remake, Dies at 87

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      In 1961, she played a vixenish fortune hunter. In 1998, she played the character’s mother. In between, she kept busy on TV and also wrote novels.Joanna Barnes, whose many screen roles included the conniving fiancée of a divorced father in the 1961 film “The Parent Trap” and, 37 years later, the character’s mother in the remake — and who, while still enjoying success as an actress, embarked on a successful second career as a writer — died on April 29 at her home in The Sea Ranch, Calif. She was 87.The cause was cancer, her friend Sally Jackson said.Ms. Barnes’s role in the hit Disney movie “The Parent Trap” was part of her busy first five years in Hollywood, which began in television on series including “Playhouse 90” and “Cheyenne” and then advanced to supporting roles in “Auntie Mame” (1958), opposite Rosalind Russell, and “Tarzan, the Ape Man” (1959), which starred Denny Miller in the title role.Ms. Barnes, as Jane, in the 1959 film “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” with Denny Miller, left, in the title role and Cesare Danova.FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty ImagesLife magazine featured Ms. Barnes in a photo spread that promoted “Tarzan.”“The silk-clad debutante, above, and the barelegged tree climber at right are the same — Miss Joanna Barnes of Boston and Hollywood,” the article said in part. “She is the latest and, MGM insists, the brainiest of the 20 girls who have played Jane, the genteel Englishwoman in the Tarzan films.”In “The Parent Trap” (1961), starring Hayley Mills in the dual role of long-separated twin sisters who meet and conspire to reunite their divorced parents, Ms. Barnes played the vixenish fortune hunter dating the girls’ father, played by Brian Keith. When the film was remade 37 years later with Lindsay Lohan as its star, Ms. Barnes played the mother of her former character, who was portrayed by Elaine Hendrix.“She had no judgment about being in a remake,” Nancy Meyers, the director of the film, said in a phone interview. “And she was one of those people who, after you say, ‘Cut!’ you want to keep talking to her.”Ms. Barnes never became a major star, and in the 1960s she began to find diversions from acting.In 1967 she hosted the ABC television series “Dateline: Hollywood,” on which she took viewers behind the scenes on studio tours and interviewed stars. She wrote a syndicated column, Touching Home, and a book, “Starting From Scratch” (1968), about interior decorating.Her first novel, “The Deceivers” (1970), was a sexy Hollywood exposé that swirled around a former child actress and the powerful people in her orbit.Ms. Barnes’s first novel, published in 1970, was a sexy Hollywood exposé. She went on to write three others.“Joanna Barnes is Jacqueline Susann with a brain,” the critic John Leonard wrote in The New York Times, referring to the author of the saucy 1966 saga “Valley of the Dolls.” He added, “A few of the characters in ‘The Deceivers’ seem to have been stamped out of stale Saltines; the sex grows like grass between each block of plot; and, as in too many first novels, everything gets resolved at a big party. But Miss Barnes is an excellent guide for tourists in the land of the plastic cactus.”She also wrote the novels “Who Is Carla Hart?” (1973); “Pastora” (1980), about a 19th-century woman’s rise in San Francisco society, which was a New York Times paperback best seller; and “Silverwood” (1985).“Acting and writing feed each other,” she told The Associated Press, adding, “When I’m beginning to feel confined at writing, I take time out for acting.”And socializing. In 1971, she briefly dated Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser at the time. When Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post reported that she and Mr. Kissinger had attended a party in Hollywood together, she noted that Ms. Barnes had written “The Deceivers,” “which Kissinger hasn’t read.”Ms. Barnes was born in Boston on Nov. 15, 1934, and raised in Hingham, Mass. Her father, John, was an insurance executive, and her mother, Alice (Mutch) Barnes, was a homemaker. She studied English at Smith College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 — the year she earned her first screen credit in the TV series “Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers.”In 1961, she was booted from the Boston Social Register, which, she told The St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times, did not approve of actors. She had just been in the hit movie “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas.“Played a degenerate Roman lady,” she said. “Delicious part.”Over the next three decades she was seen on many TV series, including “Bachelor Father,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Love American Style,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Trapper John, M.D.” In the 1965-66 season she was a regular on “The Trials of O’Brien,” a short-lived series about a defense lawyer, played by Peter Falk. She played his ex-wife.She is survived by her stepdaughters, Laura and Louise Warner; her stepson, John Warner; and her sisters, Lally Barnes Freeman and Judith Barnes Wood. Her marriages to Richard Herndon and Lawrence Dobkin ended in divorce; her marriage to Jack Lionel Warner ended with his death in 2012.For all her success on the screen, her interest in acting had faded — until the remake of “The Parent Trap” came along.“Her part was small but memorable, and I definitely didn’t need to tell her how to play it,” Ms. Meyers wrote in an email. “She knew exactly what to do and played it to the hilt.” More

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      James Ijames on Winning a Pulitzer and Making ‘Hamlet’ a Comedy

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      The 41-year-old playwright’s show “Fat Ham,” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the pandemic.The play “Fat Ham,” a comedic riff on “Hamlet” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the coronavirus pandemic.But on Monday, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on its script and following a streaming production mounted last year by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And on Thursday, performances of the first production before live audiences are scheduled to begin Off Broadway at the Public Theater, in a coproduction with the National Black Theater.“Fat Ham” was written by James Ijames, 41, who grew up in Bessemer City, N.C., and was educated at Morehouse College and Temple University (he studied acting). He now lives in Philadelphia, where he is one of several co-artistic directors experimenting with a shared leadership model at the Wilma Theater; his other notable works include “Kill Move Paradise,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”About an hour after the Pulitzers were announced, I spoke to Ijames (his surname is pronounced “imes”) about the play and the award. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Brennen S. Malone and Lindsay Smiling in the Wilma Theater’s streaming production of “Fat Ham.”via The Wilma TheaterSo for those of our readers who have never heard of “Fat Ham,” what’s it about?“Fat Ham” is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that has been transported to the American South, and it takes place in the backyard of a family that owns a barbecue restaurant. At its core, the play is about how this Hamlet character, whose name is Juicy, is meeting and undermining his family’s cycles of trauma and violence. It’s really about how he brings the rest of his family with him to that realization that they don’t have to continue these cycles of abuse and violence, and that they can do something completely different with their lives. It’s a comedy in the end, so I take “Hamlet” and I essentially make it not tragic anymore.Where did the idea come from?I just have always loved “Hamlet.” When I was in college, I did a truncated production of it. And the scene when we first meet Hamlet, in the court, I did that scene, and it was just like, “This is such a great scene. I think the whole play could exist inside of this moment. All of the players are in the same room together, and what if everything just erupted in this court in this moment, so the whole sweep of Hamlet was in one scene?” And I wanted to take that and bring it a little closer to my experience by putting it in the mouths of people that look like me and sound like me, that have my rhythms and eat the kind of food that I grew up eating. And I think it illuminates something about the original.Obviously, we’ve been living through a pretty unusual period, and you have won this prize after a virtual production. Tell me about that.We basically got Airbnbs and put all of the cast and the crew in a bubble, and they filmed it over the course of a month. It turned out really beautifully, and we were all really proud of it. And I’m really thrilled for people to see an in-person performance of it.How do you think the in-person experience will be different from the streaming experience?The actors can feed off of the reactions from the audience that they hear. So I’m really excited about having that experience. I also did a few tweaks on the play because it’s moved from the digital format to the live format. So I’m curious to see how that meets audiences.Why are you a playwright?When I was about 13, my parents split up and I had a lot of anger and frustration, and one of the ways that my family tried to encourage me to work through that was to write. And so I started writing little skits and plays, and I just have been writing in dramatic form ever since. I think it’s a way for me to metabolize all the things that I’m thinking about or curious about.The 2022 Pulitzer PrizesCard 1 of 12The awards. More

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      Library of Congress Acquires Neil Simon Papers

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      The collection of approximately 7,700 items, donated by Simon’s widow, includes dozens of unfinished shows, including a screenplay written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg.As Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library of Congress, was digging through the playwright Neil Simon’s manuscripts and papers earlier this year, he made a surprising discovery.Simon, the most commercially successful American playwright of the 20th century, could also draw. Like, really draw.“They’re almost professional,” Horowitz said in a recent phone conversation of some of the pen-and-ink drawings and paintings he found tucked among the scripts. “There are two watercolors in particular that are quite beautiful landscapes.”More than a dozen notepads filled with drawings, cartoons and caricatures by Simon, who died in 2018, was just one of the surprising discoveries Horowitz made in the trove of approximately 7,700 of the playwright’s manuscripts and papers (and even eyeglasses), a collection that the library on Monday announced had been donated by Simon’s widow, the actress Elaine Joyce.An event on Monday at the library in Washington, which will stream live on its YouTube channel at 7 p.m., will include a conversation with the actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who are starring in the Broadway revival of Simon’s 1968 comedy “Plaza Suite,” as well as remarks by Joyce.The collection includes hundreds of scripts, notes and outlines for Simon’s plays, including handwritten first drafts and multiple drafts of typescripts — often annotated — as well as handwritten letters to luminaries like August Wilson. There are more than a dozen scripts (sometimes many more) for some of his most celebrated shows, including “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “The Odd Couple” and “Lost in Yonkers,” Simon’s dysfunctional-family comedy that won a Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991.Sometimes, Horowitz said, it took some detective work to identify a famous play, which existed in an early version under an alternate title. (An early script for “Lost in Yonkers” has the title “Louie the Gangster,” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was once “The War of the Rosens.”)“Sometimes you’re not sure when you open the title and then you realize, ‘Oh, this became that,’” he said.The collection includes materials from the 25 screenplays Simon wrote, including “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “The Heartbreak Kid” and “The Goodbye Girl,” for which he won a Golden Globe in 1978. There are also several scripts for shows never completed or produced, such as one titled “The Merry Widows,” written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg, and a musical that uses the songs of George and Ira Gershwin, called “A Foggy Day.”“Every time you open a carton, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to be in here?’” Horowitz said.Beyond dozens of unknown works in progress — some comprise just a few scenes, while others have multiple drafts — the archive also includes Simon’s Pulitzer Prize, his special Tony Award and at least two Golden Globes, as well as photographs, programs, original posters and even baseballs signed by several Hall of Famers, among them Tommy Lasorda, Eddie Murray and Tony Gwynn. (Simon was a noted baseball fan.)Dozens of spiral notebooks are also packed not just with revisions and “miscellaneous attempts at plays,” as Simon wrote in one, but drafts of speeches and tributes Simon delivered. In one case, a script for a show called “202 and 204” is interrupted by handwritten letters to cast members of “Lost in Yonkers” for opening night — plus the set designer, lighting designer, even the casting director, Horowitz said.Horowitz said that, once the library finishes combing through the items and putting scripts in alphabetical order, it plans to develop a digital tool similar to the ones they have to search other collections of work by theater professionals like Simon’s close friends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, with whom he collaborated on the musical “Sweet Charity.”He also hopes that not just researchers, but also producers, might dive into the archives — and that some of the unproduced works might be staged, and the unfinished ones perhaps completed.“It’s so frustrating,” he said, laughing. “I desperately want to know how they end.” More

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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