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    ‘Walden’ Review: My Sister! My Twin! My Astronaut!

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    Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters star in a new Off Broadway play that’s a climate disaster drama cohabiting with a domestic soap opera.Despite its name and original mission, Second Stage Theater, founded in 1979, has in recent years expanded its reach to include many new works by early-career playwrights.The latest beneficiary of that expansion is Amy Berryman, who makes her professional New York debut with “Walden,” the promising but unconvincing story of twin astronaut sisters on opposite sides of a philosophical divide in a devastating climate dystopia. It opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Off Broadway space, the Tony Kiser Theater in Midtown Manhattan.The promising part of the play is the new angle it offers on an old sci-fi setup. In Berryman’s vision of the near future, Earth has reached what the sisters call P.O.N.R., for “point of no return.” NASA, having (like Second Stage) expanded its original mission, decides to accelerate plans to build habitations on Mars. But unlike movies with a similar premise, the prime movers here are women.That makes for fresh takes on the usual questions of home and hearth and the fate of humanity. It’s nice to see that, at least at first, Cassie (Zoë Winters) is a gung-ho adventurer. Having just returned from a year on the moon, where she became the first person to “grow something from nothing” on its inhospitable surface, she has now been asked to lead an epochal mission to Mars.Not that Earth’s surface is much more hospitable, with violent weather and rising tides killing millions and causing wars. In response, Cassie’s skittish sister, Stella, has retreated to the American interior to nest in a corrugated but strangely chic wilderness cabin. Stella (Emmy Rossum) is also an astronaut — or was. Though she left NASA under mysterious circumstances, her design for a new habitation called Walden will be the one used on Mars. Cassie will likely live there for the rest of her life.On the weekend before she begins training for that future, Cassie visits Stella after a long estrangement. Inevitably, a debate breaks out between them about whether to prioritize saving the planet (as Stella favors) or preparing an escape route (as Cassie does). Encouraging Stella’s view is her boyfriend, Bryan (Motell Foster), a so-called Earth Advocate for whom expanding the reach of human depravity to virgin new worlds is a poor excuse for not cleaning up the old one.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leslye Headland’s ‘Cult of Love’ to Open on Broadway in the Fall

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      The play will be produced by Second Stage, which is also planning an Off Broadway production of a two-character drama by Donald Margulies.“Cult of Love,” a play about a fractious holiday gathering of a Christian family, will come to Broadway this fall via Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses.The announcement on Tuesday is a further sign that the current season is shaping up to be a robust one for plays, which had been considered an endangered species on Broadway, but which seem to be proliferating as the economic climate for musicals worsens.“Cult of Love” is written by Leslye Headland, a creator of the Netflix series “Russian Doll” and the Disney+ series “The Acolyte.” She has also written and directed films including “Sleeping With Other People.”The play is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 20 and to open Dec. 12 at the Hayes Theater.“Cult of Love” is Headland’s final work in a series, called “Seven Deadly Plays,” that is inspired by the seven deadly sins; this one is about pride. The play was staged in 2018 at IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles and there was a run early this year at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California. (A planned 2020 production at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts was canceled because of the pandemic.)The Broadway production, like the Berkeley production, will be directed by Trip Cullman. The play has 10 characters and casting has not been announced.Second Stage also said on Tuesday that it would stage an Off Broadway production of “Lunar Eclipse,” a two-character play by Donald Margulies (a Pulitzer winner for “Dinner With Friends”) that had a run last year at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.The new production, directed by Kate Whoriskey, is to star Reed Birney (a Tony winner for “The Humans”) and Lisa Emery as a long-married couple. It is to begin previews Oct. 9 and to open Oct. 30 at the Tony Kiser Theater.“Lunar Eclipse” is expected to be Second Stage’s final production in that space, which the company is exiting at the end of the year, citing financial considerations. Second Stage expects to present its spring season at the Pershing Square Signature Center while it explores options for an Off Broadway home. More

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      Review: In ‘Breaking the Story,’ All’s Unfair in Love and War

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      Maggie Siff plays a war journalist facing the most dangerous assignment of her life: domesticity.“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” So Chekhov instructed playwrights, and so they are taught in drama schools everywhere.But perhaps there should be a corollary: If you start your action with a bang, a gun had better follow.In Alexis Scheer’s “Breaking the Story,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage Theater, the initial bang is an earsplitting doozy: an explosion that throws a war journalist and her videographer to the ground. Nor is it the first life-threatening attack that the journalist has experienced. We quickly learn that in her 20 years on the front lines, Marina (Maggie Siff) has been knocked down, knocked out, cut up and resewn many times over. A scar runs up the right side of her face like a cherry gummy worm.Arresting and alarming though that is, it sets up an impossible comparison with the rest of the play, which, despite the director Jo Bonney’s efforts, is woefully light on dramatic ammunition. A rom-com is no match for a war.That’s not just the play’s problem, but also Marina’s. The slim thread of story concerns her attempted retirement from conflict journalism and sudden engagement to the videographer, Bear (Louis Ozawa). But on the weekend of the wedding, it turns out she isn’t so sure she wants (or can even survive) the safe, domestic life she has spent her career avoiding. Danger was not merely a risk she took in choosing to be a war correspondent but the reason for the choice in the first place.Thrill-seeking disguised as high-mindedness might be an interesting idea to explore, and indeed Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Still,” about a war journalist likewise returning to regular life, explored it movingly in 2010. But Scheer’s framing, in which a flock of comic and undermining kibitzers descends for the wedding on Marina’s new estate in Wellesley, Mass., is too lightweight to support much content. For most of the play they treat Marina’s war-lust as an endearing character trait, already factored into their love for her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Second Stage to Leave Its Rem Koolhaas-Designed Off Broadway Theater

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      The company said that it was leaving its space in a former bank in Times Square after 25 years because the rent was too high and the lease had unfavorable terms.Second Stage Theater, a leading nonprofit that presents work by living American writers both on and off Broadway, is giving up its Rem Koolhaas-designed Off Broadway home in a former bank near Times Square, saying its rent was too high and its lease had unfavorable terms.The theater company, which has nurtured multiple Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning shows over the years, until recently operated three theaters: the Hayes Theater on Broadway, an Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side and an Off Broadway theater, the Tony Kiser Theater, in a former bank building at the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue.Last year, Second Stage gave up the lease on its Off Off Broadway space. Now it is also relinquishing the Kiser Theater, a 296-seat theater space where it has been presenting plays and musicals since 1999. The Broadway house has been unaffected by the changes. The company said it was committed to continuing to produce work Off Broadway, and was searching for a new place in which to do so.Second Stage is letting go of the Kiser at a time of significant strain on nonprofit theaters everywhere, and at a time of transition for the organization. Carole Rothman, one of the company’s founders and now its president and artistic director, is leaving the organization this summer after a 45-year tenure; the board is conducting a search for her successor.The Second Stage board had agreed to an 8-year lease renewal for the West 43rd Street building in 2021, but decided late last year to exercise a one-time option that allowed it out of the lease at the end of this year.Lisa Lawer Post, the company’s executive director, cited financial concerns in explaining the decision by the organization’s board to terminate the lease for the West 43rd Street building, which is where the company presented early productions of shows including “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More