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      Review: In a Nostalgic Revival, ‘Home’ Is Where the Heart Was

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      Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play about the uprooting of a Black farmer returns to Broadway for the first time.To say that Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play “Home” is old-fashioned is to say that “The Odyssey” and “The Wizard of Oz” are too: They are all tear-jerking stories about lost souls working their way back to the proverbial place where the heart is. But another way to see them is as keen records of how we thought, at particular points in time, about our place in the universe. Is that ever old-fashioned?For “Home,” which opened on Wednesday at the Todd Haimes Theater, the particular point in time is the tail end of the Great Migration, bringing millions of Black Americans to the North from the South in an attempt to escape racism and poverty. Among them is the play’s protagonist, Cephus Miles, a North Carolina farmer who winds up in a big city a lot like New York after spending five years in prison. His crime: taking too seriously the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor and the injunction not to kill. He refused to serve in Vietnam.Though the outline of the story might seem to warrant a furious response, like that of many antiwar and antiracist works of the ’70s, “Home” follows a different line, its honeyed cadences glazing its anger with affection. That’s apt because Williams is ultimately less interested in the embitterments of the world than in the ability, indeed the necessity, of masking the bad taste of unfairness with love.And Cephus (Tory Kittles) is certainly not angry at the South. His memories of hard work, tall tales and odd characters in segregated, fictional Cross Roads — likely based on Williams’s Burgaw, N.C. — are surprisingly upbeat. The poverty, being general, is bearable. (And funny: If a possum falls into the moonshine still, so be it.) The racism shows up mostly as marginalia, implied rather than prosecuted. Black boys shoot dice in the white section of the cemetery, Cephus tells us, because “that’s where the nice cement vaults were.” The Black section’s graves provide no level surface.The nostalgic style, unfashionable for decades, may be why “Home” has not until now been revived on Broadway, despite its successful and much-praised premiere. Kenny Leon’s production for the Roundabout Theater Company — a result of the company’s Refocus Project, designed “to elevate and restore marginalized plays to the American canon” — is thus especially welcome, if perhaps overly faithful to the original vision. With golden light (by Allen Lee Hughes) and a set consisting mostly of a rocking chair and a tobacco field that make the sharecropping life look strangely inviting (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado), it steers right into instead of away from sentimentality, giving us the full flavor of the writing at the cost of courting hokum.The play is mostly a monologue for Kittles’s character, while Ayers and Inge provide quick-take sketches of preachers, loose women, drunks and aunties.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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      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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      Public Theater Takes Shakespeare in the Park Out on the Town

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      The Delacorte Theater is being renovated, so a musical version of “The Comedy of Errors” is touring some of the city’s outdoor spaces.On a small stage, three actors practiced a sword fight — slowly, then faster. Behind them board operators ran a sound check and a wardrobe assistant shook out costumes.“This is the part of theater you never get to see,” Rebecca Martínez said.Martínez was speaking on Saturday in the southeast corner of Bryant Park. Behind her, the cast and crew of the Public Theater’s bilingual musical version of “The Comedy of Errors,” performed in Spanish and English, accomplished their preshow rituals. Martínez, who adapted the production with Julián Mesri, is also the show’s director and choreographer. Typically, routines like these are performed backstage, out of sight. But at Bryant Park, amid the birders, the tourists and the library patrons, a backstage was not available.With the Delacorte Theater closed for renovations, the Public is taking its summer production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and other outdoor sites in the city.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesFor over 60 years, the Public Theater has offered summer Shakespeare in one place: Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. This year, the Delacorte is closed for renovations (it plans to reopen next summer, with “Twelfth Night”), so the Public has taken this free show to the streets, parks and plazas of the city’s five boroughs.This “Comedy of Errors” was seen last year, as a production of the Public’s Mobile Unit, which brings high-energy, low-tech versions of Shakespeare to venues like libraries, correctional facilities and community centers. The Unit travels light, with a rug in place of a set, which allows a simple set up and strike.“Like, boom! Rug! Let’s go!” Martínez said.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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      Art and the Power to Heal

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      Artists and community organizations around the world are increasingly turning to art to create positive social change.Using her arms as a makeshift clapboard, a Sudanese woman in a black hijab and black-and-white caftan clapped her hands together, signaling the beginning of the rehearsal. The other amateur Thespians, wearing comic stick-on mustaches, moved to their marks, improvising a scene in a women’s beauty salon where one patron’s hair is accidentally dyed blue.As the scene ended, all the women were in hysterics, ribbing each other over how they could better play their parts next time. Scenes like this are common at the Kuluhenna Creative Workshop, which is held at a community clubhouse on the outskirts of this Yorkshire city. The workshop is open to all local women, but with a focus on immigrant communities, including refugees and asylum seekers.The 90-minute class, which the Mafwa Theater has held since 2019, is a happy space. Each week, some 15 women gather to tell stories, dance, act and gossip. They are provided with bus passes, a play area for their young children and an on-site health worker in case any of the women want to talk.Eman Elsayed, a mother of three originally from Egypt, said before she joined the workshop in 2020, she was “depressed, isolated and fed up” with her life in Leeds. But eventually, especially after joining Mafwa Theater’s associate artists program in 2021, she felt her life change.“Art, it’s a magic wand,” said Elsayed, who now has a paid job doing community outreach for the program. “But you need to believe, and you need to take the time to see what it will do.”Mafwa’s project is just one example of a larger trend — as more and more groups and individuals worldwide are using the arts to empower, unite and even help heal people who have suffered trauma, from war and natural disaster, or discrimination, poverty and displacement.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: ‘The Hours Are Feminine,’ a Family Braces for a Storm

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      In José Rivera’s latest play, a Puerto Rican family moves to Long Island in 1960, contending both with Hurricane Donna and their neighbors’ hostility.When it is revealed, the meaning of “The Hours are Feminine,” the title of José Rivera’s latest play, is an apt encapsulation of the work. A newly immigrated Puerto Rican mother is explaining the Spanish language’s gendered grammar to her neighbor within a larger conversation about how bored they are as housewives on Long Island: “Time is masculine, but …”It’s a poetic phrase that is almost too perfect, bordering on trite. Yet it contains such insight that it evokes a nodding mm-hmm from the audience. Like this line, the whole play, in its premiere production at Intar Theater in Manhattan, strikes a delicate balance between truism and genuine feeling.Rivera writes and directs it as a remembrance of his family’s move to Long Island in the summer of 1960, which ended with the arrival of Hurricane Donna. His stand-in, 5-year-old Jaivin (Donovan Monzón-Sanders), and his mother, Evalisse (Maribel Martinez), arrive in Lake Ronkonkoma from their native island a year after his father, Fernán (Hiram Delgado), has settled into their new home.Fernán has secured for them a ratty, illegally rented shack in the backyard of a picturesque house owned by Charlie (Dan Grimaldi), an aging Italian American creep who taunts them with slurs he knows they don’t understand. (The three family members perform their Spanish dialogue in English, so that their language barrier is revealed, poignantly, as a ghost might realize he’s invisible).At the diner where Fernán works for $99 a month, he overhears patrons worrying about the Black and Puerto Rican families moving into their white idyll. That’s also the reason Charlie’s son, Anthony (Robert Montano), has moved himself and his wife, Mirella (Sara Koviak), into the big house, fleeing an integrating Brooklyn.Mirella, though, is worldlier than that, and eagerly strikes up a friendship with Evalisse. Their interactions, hinged on the commonalities of midcentury womanhood, form the play’s tender core, before the families’ increasing friction culminates with the storm’s climactic arrival.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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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Headline Broadway ‘Romeo and Juliet’

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      A production featuring the screen stars, with music by Jack Antonoff, will open in October at Circle in the Square.Kit Connor, known for “Heartstopper,” is coming to Broadway in “Romeo and Juliet.”Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesRachel Zegler, who was in the movie adaptation of “West Side Story,” will also star in “Romeo and Juliet.”Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesRachel Zegler has already played a Juliet-inspired figure, starring as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” And Kit Connor has played a Romeo of sorts, starring as a yearning adolescent in the boy-meets-boy television series “Heartstopper.”Now the two actors are bringing a new production of “Romeo and Juliet” to Broadway. Their version, which seems to be leaning into the alienation of youth in a world of violent adults, is to begin performances Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 24 at Circle in the Square Theater.The production, which announced its timing and location on Wednesday, has said little about its concept, but there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas: The show is to feature music by Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer best known for his successful collaborations with Taylor Swift, and it is being marketed with a vulgarity about the plight of young people. On Wednesday, the show released a video of Zegler and Connor, in contemporary clothing and setting, flirting and dancing to a song from Bleachers, which is Antonoff’s band.“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and this will be its 37th production on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database. This production is to be directed by Sam Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” who has previously directed Broadway productions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and who is directing this season’s revival of “An Enemy of the People.” Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge!”, will add a dancer’s sensibility to the production; she is being credited with “movement.”This revival, first announced last month, is being produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea and partially owned by Sony Music Masterworks. 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