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      ‘Six Characters’ Review: Making the Case Against a White-Centric Theater

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      At Lincoln Center Theater, Phillip Howze’s daring new play offers a hefty critique but takes aim at more targets than it can accommodate. Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a pre-performance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.Dustin Wills’s production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)Scott plays a cleaner and Julian Robertson is the Director in Phillip Howze’s play, a metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 work.Jeenah Moon for 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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      Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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      The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.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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      15 Summer Theaters for That Nearby, Out-of-Town Experience

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      Easygoing days of drama and comedy are just a few hours away (or even closer) in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.Summer used to be when playgoing in the city came to a full stop. With no air-conditioning, most shows closed, at least until fall.But now that urban theater is a year-round sport, Memorial Day is more like a comma than a period. Notable productions play straight through the hot months — some even opening in August, even on Broadway.So what has happened to the regional festivals, straw-hat theaters and avant-garde outposts that once flourished as the city languished? Many are struggling. Yet others are surging.Regardless, they’re worth visiting.There’s something different about summer theater outside the city. Subways are rarely involved, though a train ride or overnight stay at a lovely inn might be. Dress is casual — by which I mean “more casual than usual” because I’ve seen people at Shakespeare in the Park in pajamas. And the fare is more varied, including not just the prestige and tourist-bait extremes of the spectrum but also the hokey, offbeat and silly stuff in between.Another plus: what you spend on that inn, you’ll save on the tickets.So here’s a selection of theater that will help you get out of the city — or at least make you feel like you did.The Big MagnetsFormerly the jewel of the summer theater circuit, famous for classics and knotty new works, the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Mass., is regrouping after its production model, dependent on unpaid labor, collapsed. This season includes just one fully staged production: David Ives’s detective drama, “Pamela Palmer” (starting July 23). But much more is going on, including a multigenre, multistage event called “WTF Is Next” (Aug. 1-4). Think of it not as crisis management but as a tasting platter of ideas for the future.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: A 10th Life for Those Jellicle ‘Cats,’ Now in Drag

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      Resetting the “Memory” musical in the world of ballroom competitions makes for a joyful reincarnation.A D.J. pawing through a carton of old LPs — Natalie Cole, Angela Bofill — comes upon a curiosity: the original cast album of “Cats.” When he opens the gatefold, glittery spangles fly everywhere.That’s how “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” begins, and it’s basically what the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s drag remake of the Broadway behemoth does to the drab original. It sets the joy free.Whether upper- or lowercase, cats never previously offered me much pleasure. The underlying T.S. Eliot poems, ad libbed for his godchildren, are agreeable piffle, hardly up there with “Prufrock” as fodder for the ages. The musical, instead of honoring the material’s delicacy, stomped all over it, leaving heavy mud prints. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, and especially the rigged-up story and original staging by Trevor Nunn, tried so hard to make big statements from little ditties and kitties that it wound up a perfect example of camp.Camp, cleverly, is the new version’s base line, neutralizing that criticism. It turns out that the show once advertised vaguely (and threateningly) as “now and forever” — it ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 — works far better in a specific past.That past is the world of drag balls, which at the time of the original “Cats” was beginning to achieve mainstream awareness. Madonna’s appropriation of the participants’ style and dance moves in her videos and concerts, as well as Jennie Livingston’s celebration of them in her documentary “Paris Is Burning,” helped pave the way for the supremacy of RuPaul and dragmania today. But beneath that triumph lay a darker truth: that the thrill of ball culture depended on its drawing extravagance from destitution, meeting prejudice with bravery, and staring down death with style.The key insight of this “Jellicle Ball,” which opened on Thursday at the new downtown arts cube, is that at least some of those themes could resonate with Eliot’s subtext and Lloyd Webber’s score. The directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have thus transported Grizabella, Skimbleshanks, Rum Tum Tugger and the rest from a metaphysical junkyard to a hotel ballroom for a vogueing competition, accompanied by new versions of the songs that go heavier on the synthesizers, turn some lyrics into raps and add a distinctive house beat.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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      A Cave Explorer Died 99 Years Ago. Now His Story Is Broadway Bound.

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      “Floyd Collins,” a musical about a trapped spelunker and the media circus surrounding his failed rescue, had a brief Off Broadway run in 1996.In 1925, a spelunker named Floyd Collins got trapped in a Kentucky cave and the unsuccessful efforts to rescue him became a media sensation, with print and radio reporters breathlessly tracking the endeavor.Now a musical about the tragedy is heading to Broadway, three decades after it was first performed and a century after Collins’s death.Lincoln Center Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, said on Monday that it would stage a revival of “Floyd Collins” at its Vivian Beaumont Theater next spring, with previews beginning March 27 and an opening on April 21.The musical features a bluegrass score by Adam Guettel and a book, as well as additional lyrics, by Tina Landau, who will direct the production. No cast has been announced.The show debuted in Philadelphia in 1994, and then had a generally well-received Off Broadway production in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons; it won an Obie Award for music, has periodically been staged at theaters in the United States and Britain, and has fans thanks to an Off Broadway cast album.Guettel, a Tony winner for “The Light in the Piazza,” is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. He is a Tony nominee again this year, for “Days of Wine and Roses.” And next spring, in addition to “Floyd Collins,” his new musical “Millions,” adapted from the novel and film of the same name, will have an initial staging at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.“Floyd Collins” will be one of two Broadway shows staged by Lincoln Center Theater this season, which is the final season of its longtime producing artistic director, André Bishop. The nonprofit previously announced that this fall it would stage a Broadway production of “McNeal,” a new play by Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a novelist.The theater also announced on Monday that it would stage Off Broadway productions of “The Blood Quilt,” written by Katori Hall and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” revised by Mark O’Rowe and directed by Jack O’Brien.They join an already announced Off Off Broadway production of “Six Characters,” a new play by Phillip Howze, directed by Dustin Wills. As a fund-raiser in December, the theater is planning a one-night reunion concert of its Tony-winning 2008 revival of “South Pacific.” 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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      Two More ‘Succession’ Actors Are Broadway Bound, in ‘Job’

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      Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon will star in the two-hander, a psychological thriller that previously found success downtown.“Job,” a two-character thriller about a psychological evaluation going awry, started small, with a run last year at SoHo Playhouse. Word-of-mouth was good, the New York Times review was positive and sales were strong, so early this year it transferred for another Off Broadway run at the Connelly Theater in the East Village.Now the play, written by Max Wolf Friedlich and directed by Michael Herwitz, is planning to make the leap to Broadway, with a two-month run beginning this summer at the Hayes Theater.The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway runs, will star Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon. Both of them appeared in the HBO series “Succession” — Friedman was a member of the principal cast, playing Frank Vernon, the chief operating officer of Waystar Royco, and Lemmon appeared in the show at one point as a love interest of Kendall Roy.Friedman is a mainstay of the New York stage who was nominated for a Tony Award for “Ragtime.” Lemmon has worked mostly onscreen, including in the Hulu streamer “Helstrom”; if her surname sounds familiar, that’s because she is also the granddaughter of the great actor Jack Lemmon.In “Job,” Friedman plays a therapist who has been hired to evaluate Lemmon’s character for her suitability to return to work. (She has been suspended after a videotaped workplace breakdown.) Their interaction is fraught, and frightening, from the get-go.“Job” is scheduled to begin previews July 15 and to open July 30 at the Hayes Theater, which, with about 600 seats, is the smallest house on Broadway. The run will be brief — it is scheduled to end on Sept. 29.The play is being produced by Hannah Getts, who has been with the show at each stage of its production history; Alex Levy, a speechwriter and media strategist whose work includes communications consulting for New York Times executives; Craig Balsam, who co-founded the music company Razor & Tie; and P3 Productions, the company that was the lead producer for last season’s musical “How to Dance in Ohio.”“Job” will be the latest sign of a surge to the stage by “Succession” alumni. Those include two of this year’s Tony nominees — Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy on “Succession,” is nominated for “An Enemy of the People,” and Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall’s assistant, Jess, is nominated for “Stereophonic.”Also on Broadway, Natalie Gold, who played Kendall’s ex-wife, Rava, is featured in “Appropriate.”Meanwhile in London, Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy) won an Olivier Award last month for her performance in a one-woman version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” that is expected to transfer to New York next year. Also in London, Brian Cox (Logan Roy) is starring in a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and J. Smith-Cameron (Gerri Kellman) is planning to star in a revival of “Juno and the Paycock” this fall. More

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      Review: In ‘Three Houses,’ a Dark Karaoke Night of the Soul

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      It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.It’s only fitting that a bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday at the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, after all, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the show’s linked monodramas. And hung over is how it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters at the end of a dark karaoke night of the soul.You may feel that way too: lost in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, each having radically relocated during lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) found herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch home in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, where a life-simulation game akin to Animal Crossing was her only companion. Having holed up in a “red brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) soon turned into an Amazon shopaholic.As each now takes the open mic at the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic,” it becomes clear, though, that more was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not incidentally called Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they reveal to us, and perhaps to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the only threat to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.A recent seismic breakup is part of all their stories. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to another state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine kept “messing up” household routines with her spontaneity. Beckett did not feel safe letting his wife, Jackie, see fully “the darkness within” him. That these accusations are so transparently thin does not weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, because we recognize the behavior, as storytelling.But Malloy’s attempt to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute stories with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s easy enough to write off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a kind of light rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of red currant wine in Susan’s tale that become eight cases of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The point is that people drink heavily in isolation.The meaning of the more ornate linkages is less clear. Each segment includes an obligatory puppet — a Latvian house dragon, a video game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels more like a stab at theatrical variety than an expression of a relevant human need. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as various loving grandparents, indistinguishable despite their accents. But all the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.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