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      Review: Caryl Churchill Times Four Makes an Infinity of Worlds

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      “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp,” a new collection of one-acts by the great British playwright, is a cause for celebration, wonderment and grief.A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle.Just another day in Caryl Churchill’s world.The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. “Cloud Nine” (1979) explored gender as colonialism; “Escaped Alone” (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You” (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician’s precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both.Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin.“Glass” is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he’s useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs.The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They’re just us.In a 12-minute monologue, Deirdre O’Connell looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      Theater to Stream: David Tennant as ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Death of England’ and More

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      Take in Shakespeare, experimental theater and a three-play series on the fallout of Brexit, all available to watch at home.‘Macbeth’Stream it on Marquee TV.In the 2023 production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by Max Webster, an unusual request was made of audience members as they entered the theater: Wear headphones.The actors, too, wore headsets, their quips, shouts and whispers transmitted digitally into the audience’s ears, at times alternating between the left and right earphones. Writing for The New York Times, the critic Houman Barekat said that “the transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy.” The production conjures “just enough novelty,” he added, “to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory.”Luckily for Shakespeare fans, the show, which was nominated for three Olivier awards, including best revival, best actor and best sound design, was recorded live.From Barekat’s critical notebook, which praised David Tennant’s turn as Macbeth, a “gaunt, energetic bundle of angst”:Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go.The N.Y.C. Fringe FestivalAzhar Bande-Ali in “Bad Muslim.”Peter CooperStream it on frigid.nyc.Each year, the New York City Fringe Festival, presented by the nonprofit theater company Frigid, uses a lottery system to randomly select the plays it produces, giving less established theater makers a chance to stage their work.This year, the festival is running April 2-20, but you don’t have to be in Manhattan to take in the lineup. A large number of performances are available to livestream from home, including Jenn Howd and Roz Mihalko’s campy musical, “Texas Annie: The Legend of the Moan Ranger,” which follows the adventures of a renegade sex toy dealer in Texas; Azhar Bande-Ali’s comedy “Bad Muslim”; and Joanna M. Briley’s “Swipe This! My Life in Transit,” about the lonely life of a token booth clerk.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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      ‘I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan’ Review: What Are You Waiting For?

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      Mona Pirnot’s comic ode to the downtown artist doubles as a meditation on the precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.Nothing has made me regret Atlantic Theater Company going dark for more than two months this year like “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” the absolute tonic of a show that reopens the company’s second stage.Written for and performed by the downtown wonder David Greenspan, who has collected a half-dozen Obie Awards over his singular career, it was originally scheduled to open the day after Inauguration Day. But when previews were about to start, the stagehands went on strike, Atlantic Theater indefinitely postponed the production and we, the public, temporarily lost out on a source of comfort and delight in a time of chaos.With a union contract ratified, we have it now, and frankly the abrupt suspension of this comedy by Mona Pirnot (tonally a complete departure from her play “I Love You So Much I Could Die”) has only enhanced its effect, adding a stratum to what was already a multilayered affair. Because this clever, funny play is both an attentive ode to Greenspan’s extraordinary artistry as a playwright-performer and an unsparing meditation on the psychic and financial precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.It is, then, very much insider theater — yet it generously serves, too, as an initiation for the unfamiliar: into Greenspan’s exquisitely expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a small gaggle of millennial women, and into the costs and payoffs of pursuing artistic ambition at full tilt.Theatergoers can witness Greenspan’s expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a group of millennial women onstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Brooklyn in the summer of 2022, the action takes place in the apartment of Emmy, a playwright freshly cognizant of the danger of being too broke to afford health insurance. She has invited a few writer friends over to do a reading of her new work in progress — a litmus test that, no pressure, will tell her whether to give up theater forever. Mona, a fellow playwright obsessed with Greenspan ever since she saw him perform “The Patsy,” is the first to arrive, followed by Sierra, who writes for television and consequently has gobs of cash to throw around.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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      13 Off Broadway Shows to Tempt You in April

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      New short plays by Caryl Churchill, a comedy with one erstwhile Derry Girl and a musical starring Anika Noni Rose — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.Theater in New York is nearing its seasonal crescendo, with stages Off Broadway and beyond teeming with activity. Of the many notable productions happening in April, here is a baker’s dozen to tantalize you.‘All the World’s a Stage’The composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, best known for the chamber musical “Ordinary Days” and more recently for the charming “Macbeth” riff “Scotland, PA,” sets his new musical in the 1990s in a conservative small town, where a gay high school teacher is helping a student to prepare for a statewide theater competition. With a cast of four that includes Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”), Jonathan Silverstein directs for Keen Company — his swan-song production as artistic director of the theater, which commissioned this musical. (Through May 10, Theater Row)‘Danger and Opportunity’The Obie Award-winning director Jack Serio loves intimate, nontraditional venues — like the lofts where he staged his breakthrough production of “Uncle Vanya” — and he has one for this new play by Ken Urban (“Nibbler”). With the audience at close range, arrayed around a living-room-like space, Ryan Spahn and Juan Castano play a married couple enduring a sexual dry spell, and Julia Chan plays the long-lost high school girlfriend whose reappearance rattles their relationship. (Through April 20, East Village Basement)‘Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.’A major production of any Caryl Churchill play becomes a reason for pilgrimage by the faithful. Now here is a program of four brief works by the 86-year-old playwright, a master of shape-shifting and the short form; three are from 2019, one from 2021. Her longtime interpreter James Macdonald, who staged Churchill’s “Top Girls” on Broadway, directs a large cast that includes the Tony Award winner Deirdre O’Connell and John Ellison Conlee. (Through May 11, Public Theater)Bailey Williams, left, and Emma Horwitz in their production of “Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods.”Lee Rayment‘Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods’The cleverly inventive, very funny playwrights Emma Horwitz (“Mary Gets Hers”) and Bailey Williams (“Events,” “Coach Coach”) are also the performers of this comedy, which appeared in an earlier form at last year’s Exponential Festival of experimental work. A co-production of New Georges, which incubated the show, and Rattlestick Theater, it is directed by Tara Elliott. (Through April 26, Here Arts Center)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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      8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

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      A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel 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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      “We Had a World” Review: A Poignant New Play From Joshua Harmon

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      Joshua Harmon’s new play features uniformly standout performances and tells a poignant story of family dynamics.At the onset of Joshua Harmon’s wonderfully textured new play, “We Had a World,” Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style work about their family.The play we’re seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright’s answer to his grandmother’s request. It’s not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there’s viciousness here, it’s the complex, often vicious nature of the truth.“We Had a World” is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see “Medea” and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it’s not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she’s an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder.“We Had a World” gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee’s decline and death, though not in a way that’s at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events.Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon’s life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother’s and grandmother’s personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles’s Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character’s more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams.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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      Review: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’

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      In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.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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      ‘Amerikin’ Review: A White Supremacist’s Undoing: DNA

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      The protagonist of Chisa Hutchinson’s new play is proud of his racial heritage, until he gets some unexpected test results.There was a guy I knew when I was in my teens. Blond and blue-eyed, popular at the beach, he named his puppy after a superstar. It made him laugh to let people in on the gut-punch nasty joke behind it: that, as far as he was concerned, both were black female dogs.Chisa Hutchinson’s layered new play, “Amerikin,” has me thinking about that for the first time in decades. Her central character, Jeff, has named his own dog in the same spirit — after a racist slur that he is not shy about shouting into the neighborhood to summon his pup. I’d hate for anyone to think that detail was too exaggerated. Not in these United States it isn’t.Directed by Jade King Carroll for Primary Stages, “Amerikin” is set in Sharpsburg, Md., which was Confederate country back when the bloody Battle of Antietam was waged nearby during the Civil War. In 2017, it is Trump country, and when the working-class Jeff (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), take their newborn son home, Jeff is eager to give the child he adores every social advantage in their small town.If that means accepting an invitation from his pal Dylan (Luke Robertson) to join the local white supremacist group, Jeff would be honored. It would bolster his sense of belonging in this place where he’s lived since childhood.But his nomination comes with an asterisk: He must take a DNA test to prove that he is 100 percent white. To his alarm, the results say otherwise — and even though his tech-savvy best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal), doctors the results, word gets out.And you know what happens when a band of white racists discovers a nonwhite family living in its midst. As Gerald (Victor Williams), a reporter for The Washington Post, frames it in a headline: “White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.”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