(Maya Phillips’s article appeared in The New York Times, 10/30; Photo: Robert Cuccioli as a Massachusetts pub owner who fancies himself more in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet.”Credit…via Irish Rep.)

Irish Repertory Theater’s ambitious virtual rendition of the O’Neill drama finds a family trapped by a father’s grandiose illusions.

It’s all Byron’s fault. Before James Dean and Gary Cooper and Heathcliff and Rochester — all the real and fictional men lounging at the center of the Venn diagram of “bad boys” and “sad boys” — Byron made such a career of drinking, lusting and gallivanting that he became a type. The Byronic hero: temperamental, hedonistic and romantic. “I am such a strange mélange of good and evil,” the poet once wrote of himself, “that it would be difficult to describe me.” Save it for your Tinder profile, bro.

Byron also embodied a masculine ideal defined by paradoxes. A man of society who scorns status. A virile lover made impotent by ennui. A dreamer plagued by disillusionment.

These contradictions sit at the heart of Eugene O’Neill’s 1942 play “A Touch of the Poet.” Irish Repertory Theater’s new online production, with its cunning use of technology and design — each actor filmed separately but sharing the same virtually rendered set — provides a hearty serving of digital theater that nearly matches the real thing.

But first, back to the sad boys. O’Neill wasn’t exactly known for happy plays, and “A Touch of the Poet,” one of his later works, bears that signature. A lengthy domestic tragedy about toxic pride and futile posturing in an American society that won’t validate delusions of grandeur, the play makes Byron its patron saint, heralded and prayed to and emulated as the “poet and nobleman who made of disdain immortal music.”

(Read more)

Visit Irish Rep for tickets.

(Kate Wyver’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/18; Photo: Clown theatre company Silent Faces would legally have to wait until 2059 (70 years after Samuel Beckett’s death) to perform Waiting for Godot with non-male performers. Photograph: Ali Wright).

Female and non-binary performers deal with issue of playwright’s instructions

A dead man’s voice can travel a long way. In 1988, Samuel Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company for casting women in his existential drama Waiting for Godot. When Beckett died a year later, responsibility for his estate was passed down to his nephew Edward, who has since continued to throttle any production that sways from his uncle’s precise instructions.

More than three decades and multiple court cases after Beckett’s death, the gender rule still stands. With a new show asking who art belongs to, a group of female and non-binary performers are once again challenging the Beckett estate’s rigidity.

“The more we read about the history, the more we realised we’d just get a big fat no,” said Jack Wakely, a non-binary member of the clown theatre company Silent Faces, who wanted to perform Godot. The copyright for a play runs out 70 years after the playwright’s death, meaning women and non-binary performers legally have to wait until the end of 2059 to be able to play Vladimir and Estragon. With an increasingly fluid understanding of gender today, the Beckett estate’s restrictions seem ever more archaic. “The irony of waiting for Waiting for Godot is not lost on me,” said Wakely drily.

“One of the responsibilities of any estate is they must remain frozen in time,” said Lisa Dwan, the Top Boy actor best known for her rendition of Beckett’s Not I. “It’s not as if they can go back and check with the author.” Beckett’s behaviour was changeable, and he’d often alter his work. “But [the estate] don’t have that privilege. They can only respect his final word.”

Like Dwan, many believe Beckett’s exactness is part of his genius, with his stage directions akin to a musical score. Others argue there should be more room for interpretation.

“In order to make theatre live and breathe,” said the director Deborah Warner, “it has to be newly made for not every year or every second, but certainly every generation.”

Warner’s 1994 production of Beckett’s Footfalls with Fiona Shaw, in which they altered the stage directions and switched two lines, led to Warner being banned from Beckett for life by his estate. The Guardian critic Michael Billington wrote that Warner’s transgression was “a bit like doodling on a Rembrandt.” The production’s European run was pulled.

“We made the piece speak, I thought, remarkably,” says Warner now. “It was speaking a slightly different language, but nonetheless Sam’s.” At the time, Edward Beckett defended his action. “We’re not trying to produce cloned productions, but we insist they play the play as Sam wrote it,” he said. Warner sees now that she was dealing with a grieving estate. “It wasn’t so long after Sam’s death. [Edward] believes firmly he is doing what Sam wanted.”

How far is the restriction on a performer’s gender simply an extension of this fidelity to the author’s wishes? When Samuel Beckett was asked why the female Dutch company could not perform the show, he replied pithily: “Women don’t have prostates.” In the play, Vladimir repeatedly goes offstage to urinate, which is put down to a prostate problem. But the prostate itself is never actually addressed in the script, and, as Wakely notes, “there are plenty of reasons why you could have an urgent need to wee.”

For Wakely, these flimsy reasons are not good enough. “I think it’s fundamentally about this idea that the only person who can be an everyman character has to be a man. That if you put somebody else in that role, the play becomes about the fact that they’re not a man, as opposed to the fact that it’s about existence.”

Fed up with waiting for Godot, Wakely’s company’s rage and disappointment has fed into a new show, Godot is a Woman, which tackles the gender restrictions around Beckett’s work. If Beckett had lived longer, Wakely asked, “would he still believe that only a man could play that role?”

(Read more)

(Friedman’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/15; Photo: Chaotic and farcical … The Pin – Ben Ashenden, left, and Alex Owen – are coming to the West End. Photograph: Oliver Rosser/Feast Creative. )

The stage maestro says the magic of live performance is vital for our mental health. And now she’s bringing that alchemy back with comedy duo The Pin and their debut play The Comeback

It’s seven months since I shut my last show – and most theatres are still completely dark. It’s the longest prolonged closure since the days of Samuel Pepys. Theatre has endured war, riots, depression and, yes, even disease. Its absence is damaging this country and doing harm to the mental health of its people, and I’m determined to do anything I can to help bring it back.

Exactly two years ago, David Walliams took me to see a brilliant young double act called The Pin at the Soho theatre in London. Watching their hilarious sketch show, I cried with laughter. And I wasn’t alone. The whole audience lost it. It’s strange to think back on that evening now. I’m not sure I’ve laughed like that in months. You rarely do while watching TV, or surfing YouTube on your phone, do you? Not in that same sustained and unstoppable way. For that, a joke has to be shared. People have to set each other off. “I wasn’t alone” – that’s the key. There’s something about live comedy, live anything, that you can’t recreate at home. There’s a kind of alchemy to it. Everything’s enlivened.

Right now, we need that, maybe more than ever. This year has taken a huge toll on us all: mentally, physically and spiritually. We need the opportunity to let go. We’re craving connection and spontaneity. Live theatre – performance – offers that release, and has done for thousands of years. It lets an audience feed off each other’s emotions, whether laughter or tears, and share in a silence. It’s why Oscar Wilde called it “the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being”.

As social, emotional animals, we need that. Theatre’s vital to our collective well-being and mental health, and the overwhelmingly positive public response to the Palladium Panto and the Les Misérables concert announcement is testament to that.

Now, thankfully, theatre’s making a tentative return – albeit in a limited, socially distanced form. The financial constraints of producing socially distanced theatre are seriously prohibitive and there’s no way our industry can survive like this long-term, but for now, so long as we are allowed, it’s incumbent on us to get our shows back on our stages somehow. It’s a big financial risk, but it’s one we have to take wherever we can follow the health and safety guidelines. Socially distanced theatre will never work financially, but it is vital – in every sense.

That’s why, this December, I’m producing The Pin’s debut play The Comeback in London’s West End. It’s a dizzying and delirious new comedy that tells the story of two double acts fighting for control of the most chaotic, farcical and high-stakes gig of their respective careers. It feels like the right show for right now. Some people say farce encapsulates the human condition: people clinging desperately to dignity as their world spins out of control. Others just see door slams and slapstick. Either way: bring it on. Following all of the government-approved performing arts working guidelines, I hope The Comeback gives theatregoers of all ages the great night out they deserve after this year.

It’s taken a lot to get here, but I have been determined to get back to work. Audiences need a chance to escape. Freelancers, many of whom have gone without financial assistance, need opportunities to return to work. From March to May, I was in shock and survival mode. Having shuttered 18 productions worldwide in two weeks, and paused another 10 in the pipeline, I tried to stay sane by focusing on the other side.

(Read more)

(Brent Lang’s article appeared in Variety, 10/15.)

Tony Awards

“Jagged Little Pill,” a ferocious reimagining of Alanis Morissette’s album of the same name, captured a leading 15 Tony Award nominations on Thursday. The show, which pulls back the curtain on a seemingly perfect suburban family to show their struggles with everything from sexual assault to drug addiction, was a hit with critics and audiences before the Broadway season was cut short by coronavirus.

“Jagged Little Pill” nabbed a best musical nod. To win the top prize, it must contend with “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” an adaptation of the 2001 film that picked up 14 nominations. The show was a huge box office success before Broadway dimmed its lights in March, attracting sellout crowds and celebrities such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Nicole Kidman, star of the original movie.

“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” was also nominated for best musical. “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’ searing look at race and sexuality, nabbed 12 Tony noms and set a new record for the most nominations for a new play. It was followed closely behind by Matthew Lopez’s epic “The Inheritance,” a two-part look at the legacy of the AIDS crisis, that scored 11 nods. Other best play contenders include Bess Wohl’s “Grand Horizons,” Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside,” and Simon Stephens and Nick Payne’s “Sea Wall: A Life.”

Best play revival nominations went to “Betrayal,” “A Soldier’s Play” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” There were no best musical revival nominations. The cutoff for nominations was Feb. 19, which meant that several shows that would have been likely contenders such as revivals of “Company” and “West Side Story” either opened after that date or were still in previews when the pandemic hit. Due to the shortened season, categories had fewer nominees than normal or were skipped entirely, which explains why Aaron Tveit (“Moulin Rouge!: The Musical”) has the leading actor in a musical race entirely to himself.

The year’s acting contenders were sprinkled with some A-list Hollywood talent, including Jake Gyllenhaal (“Sea Wall/A Life”), Tom Hiddleston (“Betrayal”) and Laura Linney (“My Name Is Lucy Barton”).

James Monroe Iglehart, who won the 2014 Tony for best featured actor for his role as Genie in “Aladdin,” announced this year’s nominees on Thursday morning on the Tony Awards YouTube channel.

No date has been set for this year’s ceremony, but sources say organizers are tentatively planning for the first half of December. Most award shows have gone virtual this year due to social-distancing guidelines around the country, and sources say Tonys organizers intend to incorporate live or pre-taped performances of some kind.

See the full list of nominees

(Read more)

(Vinson Cunningham’s article appeared in The New Yorker, 10/5.)

With so much time away from in-person performance, we are undergoing a worldwide reconstrual of what it means to be a member of the crowd.

Alot of work goes into seeing a show at home. For one thing, it’s impossible to settle on a seat. I’ve watched plays while sitting at the desk where I write, or on the floor next to the desk, or on the couch across the room, or at the kitchen table, or, least proudly, lying in my bed, under the covers. I’m never even close to dressed up; I’m there to see but not be seen.

One of the preoccupations of theatre-makers and critics during the past six months has been the construction and presentation of plays to be performed on laptop screens and smart TVs instead of on stages. “Virtual theatre”—a sprawling category, more experiential than formal, which ranges from high-quality performance recordings, such as the recently released filmed version of “Hamilton,” to staticky live Zooms, and is unified as a genre only by its reliance on Wi-Fi—is still in its vulnerable infancy. But something else, perhaps even more important for the future of the art, is happening, too: we are undergoing a worldwide reconstrual of what it means to be a member of the crowd.

It’s easy to forget that, in the theatre, each ticket buyer plays a role. The quality of our attention—silent or ecstatic, galled or bored—is a kind of freestanding, always improvising character, and makes each in-person performance unrepeatable. Call it the congregational art, and remember how you once practiced it: it has something to do with location, and feeling, and your invisible relationship with individual performers and the whole panoply of action on the stage.

The particulars of the audience member’s role change over time, often because of extremity in the wider world. In the nineteen-thirties, during the New Deal, when the Federal Theatre Project cropped up under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration, Black performance groups, called Negro Units, helped build a bridge away from minstrelsy—which was still very much alive on the mainstream stage—and from other exploitative portrayals of Black characters and performers, toward new, more complex forms of societal and political expression. In a book released earlier this year, “Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal,” which explores the output and the outlook of the Negro Units, the scholar Kate Dossett shows how, by using “folk dramas, domestic tragedies, black realist dramas,” and other forms, they “pushed generic boundaries and explored what it meant to be a black hero in American culture.”

The new plays—like Theodore Ward’s Marcus Garvey-influenced family drama “Big White Fog”—were received gratefully by Black Americans, who, for the first time, could “imagine themselves as the audience for a drama.” In turn, F.T.P. playwrights always had their new public—which, in addition to individual theatregoers, included “federal agencies, unions, professional associations, and civil rights organizations,” along with “poets, novelists, essayists, politicians, and activists”—in mind as they went about their work. If the crowd was unsatisfied, the manuscript changed; these new spectators were also collaborators. The result was a dramatic reimagining of what a theatre audience could be. And, because of the racially integrated nature of F.T.P. audiences, communities who were usually isolated from one another were now brought uncomfortably together in the seats. “For many Americans,” Dossett writes,

a Negro Unit drama was their first experience of theatre as a black event for black communities. In Harlem, opening night of a Negro Unit production was the place to be, and be seen, for black celebrities and political figures alike. But what was embraced by black communities could be alienating and even shocking for whites: white critics and audience members who traveled uptown were fascinated, and often troubled, by the vocal manner in which African American audiences asserted their ownership of a production.

The discovery of our own time, when it comes to audiences and the performing arts, feels like the diametric opposite of the one Dossett describes. Our great crisis, the coronavirus, forces us to watch plays alone, in the crannies of our homes, instead of drawing us into proximity with strangers. Our current government, unlike that led by Franklin Roosevelt, doesn’t see a connection between economic privation, social estrangement, and the kind of nourishment that can come only through an encounter with art—and has no sense of responsibility to encourage the flourishing of art and public life. And so, in a very real way, each of us is on her own. The work of playwriting, acting, and theatrical production today might be to reintroduce us to one another, one at a time.

Ifound myself startled by interaction during “Theatre for One: Here We Are,” a program of very short plays commissioned by Arts Brookfield. Before the social-distancing era, “Theatre for One” made its name with productions of uncomfortably intimate works which paired one performer with a single audience member. The latest iteration of the program features plays written by women of color, and brings actor and spectator together via Webcam. I’d somehow forgotten about my end of the bargain while getting ready for the show, and, as my Webcam lit up, I jetted into my bedroom and changed from my grungy T-shirt into the blue chambray button-down number that I’ve come to think of as my “Zoom shirt.” It felt strange to dress for the theatre again.

But, before the performer for the first of my shows popped up, I was plopped into a digital “waiting room”—just a dark screen with a bar to type into. Other audience members sent messages into the seeming void. Some asked where the others were from. Others got more speculative. “When do you think we will be back in theatres together?” somebody asked. “When a vaccine comes,” the deadpan but still somehow hopeful answer came. “I feel like I’m being punked,” somebody else said.

(Read more)