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Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play is the New York theater’s scandal du saison. It’s a play about race relations in America meant to ruffle feathers and it did that even in its first workshop version at Yale Drama School two years ago. The Yale scuttlebutt (tales circulated of strained friendships and hostile silences), along with social media buzz carefully cultivated by Harris, ensured that its downtown opening last year at New York Theater Workshop felt like a rehearsed explosion. The show, directed by Robert O’Hara, sparked a Twitter war and change.org petition protesting “disrespectful displays of anti-Black sentiment,” whose signatories (I imagine) must have been pretty chapped at inflating the work’s renown. Now O’Hara’s production has moved to Broadway, heralded by a front-page “Arts & Leisure” feature headlined “Is Broadway Ready for Slave Play?”, and since I saw the show in both its downtown and uptown iterations, I thought I might weigh in, if only to distinguish the hoopla from the art. Here’s my take. Slave Play, while genuinely and gratuitously shocking to some, has a thesis to propose about shock as cultural and personal therapy. Granted, I am white. But I believe everyone ought to consider the author’s thesis seriously before dismissing his work as offensive and illegitimate. Slave Play presents interracial couples whose black partners suffer from “anhedonia” (failure to feel pleasure) acting out racially charged domination scenarios dressed in antebellum costumes. We learn this is a form of therapy. Although these scenes are presented comically, I, for one, was stunned the first time I saw their flagrantly racist tropes. NYTW released next to no information before the play’s opening so everything was a surprise. I gasped, then laughed, then listened very carefully to the satirized, jargon-slinging therapists explaining the purpose of this activity. Afterward I considered the cast incredibly brave, throwing themselves into all the crassly inflammatory language and behavior with the gusto and verve of lighthearted farce. Maybe it was callous of me to be so circumspect and avoid moral judgment on Harris’s racist display. He doesn’t just describe but avidly displays onstage the lingering erotic appeal that his characters say historical racism retains even for educated, contemporary people. I accepted that idea for the sake of artistic argument in Slave Play and tried to follow the mad comic logic of how it plays out. Black students and colleagues with whom I discussed the play last fall begged to differ, most vociferously women. Several told me at length that they couldn’t accept any comic or theoretical justification for Harris’s shocking scenes. Most didn’t support the change.org petitioner’s effort to shut the show down, but they considered those scenes socially destructive, not illuminating as distorting mirrors, because their crazy “what ifs” reduced black characters to degrading stereotypes and black history to humiliating, simplified scenarios. The world didn’t need any more examples of such toxic imagery, period. Call it what you will—privileged, insensitive, intellectual—but I don’t see things this way. Harris strikes me as a very canny and worldly provocateur: well-read and sharply tuned in to many sorts of convenient life-lies. Slave Play is practically a homage to one particular classic provocateur with similar attunements: Jean Genet. It repurposes Genet’s sort of theatrical provocation for anomalously sincere American ends. Slave Play’s structure closely mimics Genet’s The Balcony. Both plays begin with a series of sexual roleplaying scenes whose context isn’t explained until later. Only after Genet’s lurid opening scenes featuring a weirdly sleazy Bishop, Judge and General do we learn that the Balcony is a brothel where customers pay to enact fantasies of powerful social figureheads whose “real” counterparts are flattered by the requests. Only after Harris’s brazenly degrading interracial sexual encounters in the first three scenes of Slave Play do we learn that they’re part of a therapy program. While watching them (especially for the first time), we’re meant to be puzzled, titillated, and offended by them. The absurd therapy center in Slave Play is a sort of reinvention of the Balcony brothel. Both institutions cater to clients’ erotic desires while regarding themselves as forces for melioration and stability in the “real” (outside) world. That world is threatened by a rebellion in Genet, and by the persistent corrosive effects of historical racism in Harris. Clients seek refuge and succor in both retreats, only to find that the crises outside have wormed their way in. The settings are both microcosms of their outside worlds, offering magnifying histrionic activities that reveal those world’s deeper values and social assumptions. Slave Play even shares with The Balcony the weakness of growing needlessly windy in its verbose middle section. There is one crucial difference. The whole histrionic construct is a game and a technique to Jeremy Harris. For Genet it is the nature of reality itself. Genet was a criminal, orphan and prostitute who believed that all identity was performed, reality just endless layers of sham. Harris is a well-adjusted ivy-leaguer climbing the ladder of celebrity fast, who clearly believes in a grounded reality and reliable distinctions between truth and falsehood. He is wholly sincere, I presume, in suggesting that the wacky yet troubling confrontations with racist eroticism he depicts could be a catalytic force to heal black psyches. This became clear to me within 20 minutes of the Broadway remount of O’Hara’s production. The main difference between the downtown and uptown versions of Slave Play is in degree of realism. The actors uptown are playing those inflammatory opening scenes in a wholly new way. At NYTW they inhabited the antebellum characters in an enlarged way as if straining to make them convincing. When the scenes got hot and active, they deliberately played up the farce, mugging and posing for the audience. It was easy to understand, because of that, why some found the piece disrespectful and exploitative. The actors on Broadway make no attempt to convince us that their sexplay roles are real. They mug and pose only for their partners, as part of their negotiated foreplay, and they even drop character sometimes to check in with their couple-reality. There’s no doubt at the Golden Theater that we’re witnessing consensual roleplaying. At NYTW there was, and that made for an edgier and more dangerous experience. It’s worth pointing out that the appearance of a lot of spoilers online and in print since the NYTW run has changed audience expectations. O’Hara, I suspect, redirected these scenes to account for the fact that the racist provocations can’t be wholly a surprise anymore. In any event, all the play’s relationships are more nuanced now, the steps in their painfully revealing journeys much more realistic. The show has a credible psychological connective tissue that it lacked before and therefore seems deeper and less intent on courting scandal just for scandal’s sake. Oddly enough, Slave Play comes off as a more wholesome enterprise at the Golden Theater than it did at NYTW. It’s now, to me, very obviously an invitation to think and heal rather than rage and riot, which was doubtful before. Genet would be a little appalled at the normalization of his asocial techniques. He was proud of his abjection and lubricity per se. I’d like to believe, though, that he’d also be a little proud that a work by black artists so intensely invested in his sort of erotic shock is in a position to make people uncomfortable on Broadway. Photos: Matthew Murphy Slave Play By Jeremy O. Harris Directed by Robert O'Hara Golden Theater 252 W. 45th St. #JeremyOHarris #SlavePlay #RobertOHara

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu is the archetypal modern classic about a sexy woman. Precisely for that reason, it’s a very tough nut to crack today, no less for adaptors than for directors of the original texts. Wedekind’s first version, a 5-act “monster tragedy” written in 1894—about a sensuous young woman exploited, objectified and loved by a series of husbands and other men before being murdered by Jack the Ripper—couldn’t get past the German censor. So Wedekind fiddled with it for years, eventually expanding it into two plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box) that amplified the story’s lurid details and added background information that, in a teasingly neutral way, provided social commentary. Notwithstanding these doubtful improvements, the plays became notorious and classic, righteously championed by a generation of turn-of-the-20th-century artists bent on eradicating Victorian prudery and expanding the limits of what’s permissible onstage. In the film era Lulu became the prototype of a new, wildly popular character type: the “femme fatale.” The feminist credentials of this creature were always dubious, but the idea that it contained inherent social-critical content nevertheless came to seem credible because of the appearance of two spinoff masterpieces: G.W. Pabst’s 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box, starring Louise Brooks in the role of her lifetime, and Alban Berg’s atonal opera Lulu (incomplete at Berg’s death in 1935, completed in 1976 by Friedrich Cerha). All these milestones—these serious uses of the objectified, alluring young woman who either lacked all agency or had it only as a monster—are now historical artifacts. It’s a much stickier question what the socially conscious artist in the era of feminism and #MeToo is supposed to do with this venerated yet seriously problematic material. I call this conundrum The Lulu Problem: how do artists reuse the Lulu archetype and her progeny without replicating what they purport to critique? For Wedekind, it was edgy and new to show an irresistible gamine without a fixed name or past being used as a projection surface by a parade of ogling, exploitative men. After a century of being assaulted by media images of gratuitously titillating women pretending to own or control their objectification, we’ve seen quite enough of that, thank you very much. Many very fine artists have taken up The Lulu Problem, with varied results. Angela Carter tried rewriting the original play from a feminist angle in the 1970s, a project cancelled before its planned London premiere essentially because the adaptation was too much of a tract. Paul Auster used some Wedekind scenes in a 1990s romantic film about an actress playing Lulu, who turns out to be a murdered man’s cusp-of-death fantasy. Kathy Acker put Lulu into a postmodern mashup of the monster tragedy and Shaw’s Pygmalion, an excursus in a novel that turns Don Quixote into a sexually adventurous she. And now there’s WaxFactory’s Lulu XX, which is one of the most complex and intelligent solutions to The Lulu Problem I’ve seen. This visually stunning, hour-long show is a reworked version of one of the company’s earliest pieces, now revived to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Developed by Ivan Talijancic and Erika Latta and performed by Latta, it consists of 9 scenes riffing on Wedekind, Pabst and Berg, with lots of additional sample material from Nietzsche, Pessoa, Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Jenny Holzer, and others. Lulu XX doesn’t tell a single, connected story. Its scenes are quick-moving, mixed-media tableaus very tightly choreographed on a steeply raked, narrow trapezoidal set whose walls are projection surfaces. Each scene turns on a different Lulu trope or tradition in art and media. Thus, “Noir” shows Latta posing with a pistol and cracking wise as a stereotypical hard-nosed dame. “Pandora” has her posing like a Geisha and mouthing Emily Post-like advice about manners and attractiveness. “Silent Film” shows her in a black-and-white footage breathlessly running down hallways and anxiously framed against high-rise windows, quoting from noir classics. A through-line of the piece is the absurdity of fashion photography. Accompanied by loud shutter sounds, Latta shifts countless times—skillfully, quickly, and strenuously—from cheerful on a chair, to backward on a chair, to vampy with an umbrella, to dead with legs in air, dead with legs splayed on floor, cheerful with purse, dead with purse, purse alone, shoe alone, Charlie’s Angelesque with gun, etc., etc. It’s a crazy routine that keeps coming back, as if Lulu had died and been sent to fashion-gymnastic hell. The show starts with an autopsy description and projections of Latta as an exquisitely made-up corpse, announcing the attractively victimized female body as the main subject matter. At the end, she is interrogated and apparently condemned by a tribunal—ensuring that her status as victim is ultimately mixed with that of a perpetrator, a murderer whose real crime is being seductive and feeling powerful. In past WaxFactory shows (e.g. Quartet and … She Said—I never saw the original Lulu) I’ve sometimes felt that the slickness of the multi-media technique to some extent blunted the critical edge of the action, which usually riffs on great writing by the likes of Heiner Müller, Marguerite Duras and those sampled in Lulu XX. The issue is that Talijancic is so adept at making, editing and perfectly blending projections with live movement that his shows’ live affect can come off as a little too flawless and airtight. You wonder where the worm in the apple is. Here, happily, Latta herself reads as a worm par excellence. Rocking an amazing series of flamboyant sculptural costumes (by Miodrag Guberinic) that stuff her into stiff, large couture elements like a Renaissance ruff, a bustle frame, a tight slicker, stiletto heels and more, she nevertheless bends, pumps, kicks, twists and flips like a crack acrobat, freely revealing all the effort, risk and skill behind her demanding moves. It’s easy to imagine this piece performed by Latta as a young thing 20 years ago. My guess is that it’s deeper and more interesting now, anchored by a mature performer whose strong angular features and thick, muscular legs exude maturity, confidence and competence. Latta plays deadpan almost all the time but the quality of her glowering nevertheless underscores every absurd pose she strikes and clichéd remark she utters with a silently articulated, “WTF???!!!” I won’t soon forget the “Dance of the Seven Veils” scene in which she rattles off a list demeaning things men say to women on the street (“hey darling,” “why don’t you smile more,” “wanna come to my truck?”) as her recorded voice speaks visionary words of Nietzsche (“Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me: it longs to find expression”). Her layered selves end up resolving into a single body apparently raped on the ground while staring straight out at us, as her rigid face seems to ask: “Well, what are you looking at? Do you know?” Photos: Tasja Keetman LULU XX Created by Ivan Talijancic and Erika Latta The Connelly Theater 220 E. 4th St. #WaxFactory #IvanTalijancic #ErikaLatta #Lulu

Betrayal is unique in the Pinter canon. Now beginning its fourth run on Broadway, it’s proving to be the sole durably popular play by this highbrow literary star (a Nobel-winner) who rather enjoyed being an irritant to casual entertainment-seekers and, in his later life, a political provocateur. Betrayal is about sex, infidelity and dishonesty, subjects most everyone can relate to, and its famous backward narrative technique makes puzzling out its plot a lot of fun. Fun, however, isn’t the first word Pinter usually brings to mind. Pinter aficionados have argued for years that this play’s critical dismissal as a lightweight anomaly at its 1978 premiere was unfair. The first reviewers were supposedly blinded by the play’s accessibility and didn’t see that it was just as complex, incisive and ruthless about self-deception, alienation, and sublimated malice as any other Pinter work. Maybe so. Thing is, I’ve now seen all four Broadway versions as well as the 1983 film, and I’m still not sure those first reviewers were entirely wrong. All these productions had their appeal. Each brought out fresh nuances and potentialities in a text that hugely depends (like all Pinter) on interpretation of pauses. The latest version—a British import directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox—is certainly the best I’ve seen. It’s tight, sleek, superbly acted, and elegantly stripped of realistic trappings, with the effect of making both cast and audience concentrate hard on the chiseled language. Lloyd beautifully clarifies the essence of the play, but he can’t make it deeper than it is. Some twenty years ago we learned that the extramarital affair in Betrayal was autobiographical. Pinter admitted that he was drawing on a seven-year clandestine relationship in the 1960s with the BBC-presenter Joan Bakewell while married to the actress Vivien Merchant, and Bakewell later wrote an article explaining that many plot details were literally accurate. Since learning this story, I’ve thought of Betrayal as a comparable career phenomenon to Samuel Beckett’s first television play, Eh Joe (1965). Beckett, like Pinter, conducted a long-term affair while married. Like Betrayal, Eh Joe is about infidelity, dishonesty and guilt; its action consists of a female voice vindictively haranguing an incorrigible womanizer about his past as the camera pulls steadily closer to his face. Also like Betrayal, Eh Joe is uncharacteristically realistic and explicit by its author’s standards, and has been similarly dismissed by staunch admirers as tasteless and unworthy of the author. It’s interesting that these two intensely serious writers both begrudged themselves a foray into the stuff of soap opera (Beckett also dipped into it in Play) when their personal lives got messy. As it happens, Eh Joe was first produced at the BBC by Michael Bakewell, Joan’s husband. The chief strength of Lloyd’s production is that its Spartan style effectively masks what’s dated in Pinter’s story and focuses attention on what’s still sharp, sad and mysterious. You almost forget, staring for 90 minutes at a set with just two plain chairs and some mottled pink and gray walls that don’t distinguish pub from bedroom from living room from hotel, that this play is one of the million that defines its leading woman primarily through her sexual relationships with men. Or that everyone’s responses to betrayal are so muted and unimaginative that the story basically wallows in the shallows of bored yuppiedom. Emma is educated and does acquire a profession late in the story (as an art gallerist), and Zawe Ashton brings enough steely poise to the role to make that believable. What I’ve never quite believed, in this or any Betrayal I’ve seen, is that the men are actually book hounds. Robert, Emma’s husband, is supposed to be a highbrow publisher and Jerry, Robert’s best friend and Emma’s lover, a literary agent. The stars who usually land these roles (e.g. Daniel Craig, Raul Julia, Liev Schreiber) are invariably too ripped, spiffy and hunky for anyone to buy that they spend their lives in reading chairs. The advantage of Hiddleston and Cox is that their suaverie needn’t stand the test of recognizable locations. They and Ashton are all particular people but they also come off as icons of behavior, vehicles for what feel like timeless types of self-deception. All three main actors are onstage the entire time, with any member of the triangle who isn’t in a scene constantly hovering and brooding nearby. This is a gorgeous touch that alters the nature of intimacy and secrecy in the action by ensuring that no key character is ever out of mind, even when they’re far away. Soutra Gilmour’s set also features a slow-moving turntable that most of the time just helps set the grinding mood and accentuates slow discoveries, but late in the show is also used to create “coincidences” where a player suddenly finds him- or herself face to face with the very person he or she is lying about. That’s a powerful and wonderfully subtle effect, an unremarked choreography of memory and spontaneous thought, and it’s the thing I expect I’ll most remember about this graceful and lucid Betrayal. Photo: Marc Brenner Betrayal By Harold Pinter Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre 242 W. 45th St. #HaroldPinter #Betrayal #JamieLloyd

The critical responses to Taylor Mac’s Broadway debut, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, have been all over the place, from huffy dismissal to ardent encomium. I, for one, was too fascinated by what the show was trying to accomplish to think about a simplistic thing like thumbs up or thumbs down. Gary is a romp that tries to steer its laughter toward big questions. The big question it left me brooding on more than any other was the difference between superficial and radical queerness. I’m among those who think of Mac as a national treasure. His marathon work A 24-Decade History of Popular Music two years ago was the most fun I’ve had in the theater in decades and the strongest political use of the theater I’d seen since Angels in America. [Note on pronouns: I use “he” and “him” rather than Mac’s preferred pronoun “judy” because I’ve heard him accept “he” and “him” in interviews, and because for me making sentences work with “judy” is impossible.] Mac is the only American theater artist I’m aware of who’s currently working on the epic scale of Tony Kushner. His 24-Decade piece was electrified by his incomparable performing persona: a lavishly flamboyant, politically conscious drag act that drove the show’s surging, jolting communal-immersion experience. Framed as a concert, the 24-Decade History was a revelatory and original history of the United States, rigorously scripted to appear messy and impromptu. The show took audiences by surprise by treating brassy queerness as an alternative, radically inclusive American value system: a trope for openness, objectivity, and fairness that don’t collapse under challenge. Mac applied this value system to an astonishing range of historical figures and events—from Thomas Paine, Mary Baker Eddy and Ted Nugent to the Trail of Tears, abolitionism, minstrelsy, Jim Crow, the Opium War, Reconstruction, the Oklahoma land rush and much, much more—turning his fearlessly queer world view into a compelling sort of common sense. Queerness became a clarifying lens you were sorry to relinquish when you left the theater because it made everything appear lucid, funny, ethically sane, and negotiable. The plays Mac has written but doesn’t perform in don’t have the same miraculously radiant core. They are way more interesting than the bulk of what gets professionally produced—ambitious, smart, hilarious, formally inventive—but they don’t burn quite as bright. Queerness in them is typically a choice of certain characters pressured by quasi-comic situations that threaten to clip their wings and snuff out their innovative light. In Hir, for instance, Mac’s family-play satire produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2015, gender-queerness was a tool of revenge. Kristine Nielsen played an abused housewife who got even with her battering husband, after he was incapacitated by a stroke, by injecting him with estrogen and dressing him in women’s clothes. A gender-fluid teenage daughter (renamed Max) asked mom some tough questions about her actions and motives but was too young and clueless to serve as an ethical compass. Queerness in Hir thus came off as an unkept moral promise. In Gary Mac sticks with a positive spin on queerness but its affirmative power is limited by heavy helpings of decidedly conventional comedy. Nathan Lane, in the title role, plays a clown who miraculously survives the slaughter in Shakespeare’s ridiculously bloody Titus Andronicus, gets a job helping to clean up the mess, and then sets out quixotically to overturn the whole rapacious and patriarchal value system of the Roman Empire by using the huge mountain of corpses piled around him as props in a monumental performance artwork called a “fooling.” What could be queerer? The thing is, on the way to organizing this world-saving project Gary spends more than a half hour entertaining his stage partner (Kristin Nielsen) and us with shtick: a farrago of fart, poop and piss gags employing the dummy corpses whose essence comes straight from his branded repertoire of moues, yucks and nyangs, and her repertoire of bug-eyed mies and goonish double-takes. The bulk of it is standard grossout humor. Also, Nielsen’s character Janice—a maid who just wants to get on with the cleaning—is for half the play just a comic obstacle to Gary’s rebellion. He eventually wins her over with the stock (and rather unprogressive) comic device of appealing to her vanity (she starts seeing things his way after trying on the corpses’ expensive jewelry and clothes). Now, I thoroughly honor the difficulty and talent involved in pulling shtick off. And yes, I laughed. With an artist of Mac’s caliber, though, you have to ask whether his work is firing on all cylinders and has the conditions it needs to maximize its political traction. Gary is a rare bird on the Great White Way. Laura Collins-Hughes said at the terrific TheaterMatters panel this week where we discussed it with Marc Robinson and Michael Rogers: “This is as subversively political as Taylor Mac’s other work, and I just found it heartwarming that it’s on Broadway.” [Click here to listen to the recording.] I share Laura’s thrill at seeing it at the Booth Theatre, and at its Tony nominations, and at the prospect of Mac earning a pile of money. I don’t agree, however, that the show is as subversive as it could have been, or as Mac’s performed works have been. Gary strongly reminds me of another experimental, rebarbative, yuck-filled drama that amazingly found its way to Broadway—twice, in fact—without ever being truly popular: David Hirson’s cult hit La Bete. Like Gary, La Bete used rhymed verse self-consciously to pose questions about high and low art and centered on a mad comic performer whose primitive, chaotic force pointed to the destruction and redemption of theater all at once. Interestingly enough, both plays also culminate in a distended, over-the-top monologue by this central comedian that describes his dubious triumphal vision. Here is a section of Gary’s monologue, his epiphanic vision of the great, redemptive “fooling” he foresees as “an artistic coup” and “a comedy revenge to end all revenge.” … it’s gotta have all the history in it. All the conflicts. Like you said, put all the murder and mayhem in one place so they can see what’s what. What they’ve been. What they could be. Which means we gotta squeeze all the sequels of revenge in. We gotta theatricalize the sequels after the sequel after the sequels. And all the orgies of hyperbole, the grabbing of privacy and privates, takeovers, tantrums, endless campaigns, pillaged elections, apocalyptic weather-spewing-forth-shark-attack-family feuds! Yes Janice, shark attacks. There must be wars in stars, and geriatric stars at war. Heroes must battle heroes, winged rodents must clash with cleft chins, there must be an explosion of an explosion, a massacre of a massacre, an ensemble of an ensemble, to such a ridiculous degree ya can’t see anything but its ridiculousness. And Janice, when the court sees it, they’ll be a little taken aback at first. There’ll be a moment of silence, don’t kid yourself. But then, in the distance, one soul will feel a bubbling finding its way to their hands. “What am I doing”, they’ll wonder. “Why am I clapping?” And they’ll realize. They're clapping for hope. And soon it spreads. Not just one court member but two. Then more. Row after row, gaining speed, soon all the court, the clapping turns to cheering, then standing on their feet, on chairs, reaching ever higher to touch the ingenuity that could be theirs as well. This is like a Taylor Mac manifesto. The speech’s playful language articulates a maximalist aesthetic that outdoes all spectacles (and spectacle-exhaustion) of the media age and regards the world as a giant political stage filled to bursting (and thus changing) by a formerly powerless, queer-minded comedian suddenly endowed with infinite theatrical resources. The vision is meant to be inspiring. Stupefying. Seductive. Except . . . it fails to materialize. You kind of expect that all the impossible Artaudian excess won’t prove possible but you do expect Gary to at least keep his promise to “put all the history” into the performance he creates—as Mac astonishingly, unforgettably DOES in his 24-Decade History. That doesn’t happen. Instead, Gary settles for historyless shtick and a climactic musical number in which stripped dummy corpses dance obscenely via a crazy Rube Goldbergesque mechanical contraption. For me, the closest the play came in the end to genuinely biting critique was in its prologue, when the third character, Carol—a midwife played by Julie White—delivers a speech in verse, with blood spurting out of her severed neck, asking whether “gore” and other sensationalistic “thrills” can ever avoid becoming “routine.” Radical queerness, I realized, is when an outsider artist speaks truth to power unignorably by transforming himself into a fool so brilliant his subversive political critique wins national awards and gets him on Stephen Colbert. Superficial queerness is when a fictional clown who aspires to be that sort of fool is played for slapstick laughs by Nathan Lane on Broadway. Superficial queerness is moving penises from right to left on Roman soldier dummies who dance and grow erect and calling that a revolution. Radical queerness is making the world safer, freer and more inclusive for the owners of actual left-leaning penises (and brains). Superficial queerness is using camp to tweak the noses of straight people. Radical queerness is using camp to make everyone—queer, straight, and otherwise—see the world more fully and clearly, way beyond their noses. I don’t take lightly the appearance of a pointedly rancid satire like Gary in a ruthlessly commercial environment notorious for flattening every sharp political provocation it handles into easily digestible bromides and feel-good morals. Mac is no ordinary artist, though, and it’s his own fault that some of us have come to expect the very world from him. Photos: Julieta Cervantes Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus By Taylor Mac Directed by George C. Wolfe Booth Theatre #GaryASequeltoTitusAndronicus #TaylorMac #NathanLane #KristineNielsen

Lately, whenever people ask for advice on what theater to see in New York, the show I’ve mentioned more than any other is Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me. That’s because this unusually smart and charming, tactically humble play, drawn from Schreck’s teenage experiences competing in debates about the U.S. Constitution in American Legion halls, seems to me in a class of its own. The rarity isn’t just that it’s entertaining and informative in ways that even the jaded and well-informed are likely to enjoy. It’s also that the particular questions the show poses about citizenship, privacy, domestic violence, reproductive freedom, enumerated rights, and much more tap directly into the awful anxieties we’re all feeling right now over the state of our democracy. Interestingly enough, What the Constitution Means to Me is deeply, even confrontationally feminist, even though it’s popular. How it pulls off this trick without getting preachy—considering how women are and aren’t equally protected, seen, and heard in our world—is fascinating in itself. One crucial factor is the way the show stays interactive despite being predominantly a monologue. Schreck is effectively in dialogue with her younger self, and also all the other women in her stories. She also makes sly, understated use of the guy who shares the stage with her (Mike Iveson, who she says represents “positive male energy”). Then, late in the action, she brings out an actual New York high schooler and debates the Constitution with her—a contest judged by a random audience member. Just as important as all this, though, is that the show has such a generally genial profile (Schreck’s character calls herself “psychotically polite”) that its troubling stories and observations about women’s vulnerabilities, which ultimately stand for all of our vulnerabilities, never feel alien or arbitrary, like special pleadings. Instead they feel necessary, organic and universal, products of a conversation we’re all either already having with ourselves or should be having. The other day, my friend Liz, who’d seen the show on my recommendation, and loved it, asked a practical question that I realized was more substantial than I’d previously understood: how is the meaning of the show’s ending affected by the different configurations of the debate each night? As Liz knew, I’d seen What the Constitution Means to Me twice, first at New York Theater Workshop in November and again at the Helen Hayes Theater in April. I had no strong feelings about the supposedly open ending—which tries to make the audience feel democratically involved in the debate—because it seemed obvious to me that the whole thing was scripted even though it was cleverly written to seem extemporaneous and accidental. Thinking about it again with Liz, I realized hadn’t considered this deeply enough. To explain things for the uninitiated: about fifteen minutes before What the Constitution… ends, Schreck brings out one of two teenagers (Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams alternate in the role) and introduces her as her partner in a debate over the question, “Should we abolish the United States Constitution?” Who takes which side is settled with a coin toss, the debate takes place, and then a randomly chosen spectator decides the winner. Theoretically four different outcomes are possible. Either “Abolish” or “Keep” wins, argued either by the teenager or by Schreck. Now, at New York Theater Workshop the outcome I witnessed was a victory for “Abolish,” argued by Schreck. She forcefully insisted on scrapping the flawed and badly dated Constitution and replacing it with a fresh, positive-rights document sensitive to 21st-century realities. Rosdely Ciprian counter-argued that the Constitution remained a strong basis for improving democracy and that today’s politicians were unlikely to create a better document if given the chance. A 30ish dude from the second row took five seconds to decide in Schreck’s favor, and the audience groaned their mild surprise along with slightly ambivalent clapping. In a talkback afterward, Schreck said that this outcome was rare. The “Keep” side almost always won. The decision, however, was welcome and gave her confidence that her script’s arguments were balanced. At the Helen Hayes Theater, I witnessed a different outcome. The “Keep” side won, argued by Thursday Williams. When this decision was announced (by a reluctant 40ish woman in the first row), the audience erupted in ardent applause that felt a lot like patriotic cheerleading. I recognize now that all this was much more interesting—and unpredictable—than I gave it credit for. Most audiences on and off Broadway skew older, and it’s perfectly understandable that most of these parent-generation spectators incline to favor the teenagers—either from real benevolence or the false kind known as virtue signaling. A subtler aspect of this reaction, though, has to do with how the “Abandon” proposal necessarily sounds in the mouths of different debaters. As Schreck said at the NYTW talkback, the “Abandon” position is usually seen as risky, even reckless. Given that presumption, one inevitably asks, who does middle-aged Schreck think she is to impose such a political dice-roll on an innocent youngster, possibly threatening her future, when the coin-toss goes that way? The radicalism of “Abandon” is fine if it comes from the teenager herself, but elders (like ourselves) feel obligated to leave kids a world with as many political protections as possible. Is that kind of caution part of the problem, or the solution to our current political impasse? You get to decide! It should be said that neither Ciprian nor Williams is a pushover or a wallflower. Both are extraordinarily poised and self-possessed young people who easily convince you they know the full consequences of their arguments. Since that’s impossible, though, the illusion of it becomes an important part of the singular beauty of this odd dramatic anti-spectacle, which outlines a possible revolution only to leave it up to us to carry it out if we dare. This revolution will consist of nothing more or less subversive than truly listening and sharing stories with one another, refusing easy cynicism, and joining each other in face-to-face civic engagement in absurdly old, communal institutions like American Legion halls, or the theater. Photo: Joan Marcus What the Constitution Means to Me By Heidi Schreck Directed by Oliver Butler Helen Hayes Theater #HeidiSchreck #WhattheConstitutionMeanstoMe

Suzan-Lori Parks has written a dark and disturbing allegory about the seemingly impossible dream of a post-racial United States. As you’ve probably heard, White Noise (now nearing the end of its run at The Public Theater in Oskar Eustis’s production) is about a young black man—a college-educated, present-day painter—who is roughed up by the police one night and decides that the only way he can work out (“transcend”) his feelings of powerlessness is to sell himself as a slave to his best friend. Perhaps you found this premise as familiar as I did when you heard it. Pretty much the same outrageous idea propelled one of the most celebrated novels of recent years, Paul Beatty’s Man Booker-winning The Sellout, which I read when it appeared in 2016 and deeply loved. Curiously enough, only one critic I know of (Robert Hofler) has even mentioned this comparison in passing and none have examined it. It’s worth considering, though, if only briefly, because it illuminates Parks’s drama. In both works, a black man in career doldrums who is desperately upset by racist humiliations insists that a close friend relieve his feelings of pointlessness and ineffectuality by formally adopting him as a slave. It’s an ironically regressive gesture, meant to be read politically in both works, that shines a spotlight on various forms of blindness, bad faith, and denial, black and white. There are obvious differences between the works. Beatty’s is antic, fluid, and tactically hysterical—a hilarious and blistering satire. Parks’s is earnest, carefully carpentered, and faintly didactic—a quasi-realistic allegory. Also—no minor matter—Beatty’s slave-owner is black where Parks’s is white. Yet the contrast here is telling. The difference between using an antic and a serious tone with such a fantasy is the difference between opening our imaginations expansively to its larger implications and blocking imagination with questions of plausibility. Beatty conjures an amazing, carnivalesque world out of all the hatred, opportunism, and moral laziness he evokes and exaggerates. Parks soberly selects a few typical instances of such hatreds and lazinesses that she knows the theatergoing class will recognize and depicts them in vivid detail. This is powerful in its insular way, but it does rather narrow the conjured world to a horrific parable of irreparable mistrust and antagonism. White Noise introduces us to four friends, two white, two black, who have been close since they met at a small liberal arts college about fifteen years earlier. They once formed a band and hooked up in different ways. The guys were bowling stars. Now they’re configured as a pair of hetero, interracial couples who groove to their old songs and bowl together once a week for fun. (The set by Clint Ramos features a clever facsimile of a bowling lane that’s actually used.) Dawn (Zoe Winters), a “do-gooder” lawyer who joined a second-rate firm to gain experience defending “hopeless cases,” is with Leo (Daveed Diggs), the painter and chronic insomniac who will enslave himself. Ralph (Thomas Sadoski), a blocked and possibly talentless writer, is an untenured college professor who grew up poor but is now rich after inheriting a chain of bowling alleys from his absentee father. He is with Misha (Sheria Irving), the smartest among them, who self-produces and stars in a weekly live-stream call-in show called “Ask a Black.” Each one of these characters has a long monologue that supplies detailed background information. We do know a lot about them. Nevertheless none of them ever quite comes across as a fully rounded human being. That’s the drawback of deliberate allegory (think of plays like Frisch’s The Firebugs and Dürrenmatt’s The Visit): its characters are always a bit predictable because, no matter how surprising or well-constructed the plot, their actions are contrived to hit pre-planned structural milestones rather than flow with the quicksilver randomness of real life. It’s a credit to Eustis and his extraordinary cast that Parks’s people actually do feel real about half the time. Diggs in particular is so charismatic as Leo he can charm us into losing our compass for contrivance and implausibility for twenty minutes at a time. Also—and this is important—the play’s contrived milestones are weird and diabolical enough to be genuinely upsetting. Don DeLillo once used the title White Noise to refer to death and fear of death. Here it refers to both a white noise machine that Ralph bought for insomniac Leo years ago to help him sleep and also to the potentially fatal racist reality that keeps him awake. Leo’s violent run-in with the cops occurs just as Ralph is at maximum resentment over losing an academic promotion to a person of color. These feelings make him susceptible to the allure of playacted “mastery” that Leo’s mad proposal holds out to him: Leo will be his slave for forty days in exchange for $89,000, the amount of Leo’s debt. We know as soon as Ralph talks himself into signing this contract (and Misha talks herself into witnessing it, and Dawn talks herself into notarizing it) that the friendly and innocent playacting will soon turn toxic and real. The only truly open question from then on is how the love- and friendship-trains will leave the rails. As you might expect, all the characters but Leo betray their partners sexually. Parks also gives each of them an ethical contradiction at work that the slavery experiment forces them to confront, and they all eventually admit their weaknesses. Dawn cops to taking “impossible” law cases for virtue-signaling and reputation-building, even admitting to defending a boy she knew was guilty just to feel her “superpowers.” Misha admits to “dial[ing] up the ebonics” and performing stereotypical blackness on her call-in show to make money, even interviewing enslaved Leo to boost viewership. And Ralph, closest of all to villainy, eventually drops all pretense to friendship and ethics and espouses the most abysmal white suprematism. It’s all just as schematic and contrived as it sounds. But here’s the thing. The play doesn’t irritate in performance the way most such works do. There’s something bold, candid and honest about its clunky straightforwardness. The characters’ hypocrisies really are very familiar to us, and because we know they’re way too seldom dramatized we get a rush out of seeing them laid bare. The play is three hours long but it feels like two, or less, moving swiftly and intensely to a morbid, ugly, and frightening conclusion (don’t take your eye off those bowling balls) that leaves everyone in the theater feeling soiled. No one gets to look good, Parks seems to be telling us. We are all complicit in this world that refuses to confront its structural racism. We ought to stop trying to put dramatic lipstick on that pig. photo: Joan Marcus White Noise By Suzan-Lori Parks Directed by Oskar Eustis The Public Theater #SuzanLoriParks #WhiteNoise #OskarEustis

At the risk of throwing a wrench in your schedule, you really do have to drop everything (for the second time in 6 months) and head over to Madison Square Park. Pick a day and do it at dusk this week. The canny visual artist Arlene Shechet has once again used her residency in this park to give lucky New Yorkers another look at a rare bygone theatrical performance, reinventing it as a wonderfully odd and reverberant environmental experience. Shechet has some awesome friends. In October, she invited Oscar-winning Dianne Wiest to perform a half hour of excerpts from Beckett’s Happy Days (which Wiest had just done exquisitely at Theatre for a New Audience) in a dry fountain arena in the Park. It was an astonishingly rich event (see my blog on it). This time her guest is Tony- and Olivier-winning Fiona Shaw, reprising her legendary version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—again as a miraculous pop-up, with zero advance publicity. The performance is free and will be repeated three times this week, every day from 6:00 to 6:30 through Saturday. It’s not to be missed! Shaw began performing The Waste Land in the mid 1990s at beautifully run-down theatrical spaces she scouted out with the director Deborah Warner. It played in an old rotting music hall in London, a deserted nightclub in Brussels, a former distillery in Toronto. And in NYC it ran in 1996 at the Liberty Theater in Times Square, with most of the 1000 seats of that long-derelict house draped in black, emphasizing the place’s cavernous emptiness. About 200 people a night saw Shaw move about the Liberty stage like a shape-shifting ghost, playing all the poem’s multitudinous voices with stunning specificity and clarity as her huge shadow stalked her on the crumbling walls. The atmosphere of Madison Square Park is completely different, the polar opposite in a way, as daylight and skyscrapers steal attention, nannies scurry home with kids on scooters, guys in trim suits eyeball girls or one another and dash to happy hour somewhere. The Liberty’s controlled silence is replaced now with arbitrary street noise, absorbed fascination with the crushing indifference of the “unreal city.” This is the slick and sterile chaos that we call modern civilization, and one soon realizes, listening to Shaw, that it is precisely Eliot’s subject in his stubbornly hermetic yet strangely magisterial poem. Shaw’s performance is terrifically apt in this place in a whole new way. She walks around speaking both to us (whoever will listen, that is) and to the marvelous, purposely artificial figural and mineral-shaped sculptures by Shechet that populate the dry fountain area. In doing this, she animates the suggested life force within the sculptures while also wryly acknowledging the absurd impossibility of real communication in such a circumstance. Neither the mute porcelain, wood and iron figures nor we can wholly attend. The power of Shaw’s Waste Land in the theater lay in making Eliot’s famously forbidding medley of disappointed, self-important and acerbic voices seem like an immediate and accessible parade of specific people we kind of felt we knew, had heard, and had probably struggled to tune out in the course of our presumably productive and cultured lives. The power of this park performance, by contrast, lies in its ready admission that the disease of modernity Eliot movingly diagnosed, indifference masquerading as industry, a sort of core desiccation within our vaunted productivity, is surely further advanced now, an even more critical condition than it was in 1996 (let alone 1922 when the poem was written). And yet we press on—there’s the tie to Beckett—assuring ourselves like mad archeologists that the cultural fragments we call precious and shore against the ravages and ruins everywhere around us will somehow amount to an ark and save us from ourselves. And who’s to say? Maybe they will. “Here is no water but only rock,” wrote Eliot. Go watch the streams of preoccupied New Yorkers walk past the extraordinary Shaw, as a trickle of exceptions watch her rapt, to understand why it is all so heartbreaking. Photos: Jonathan Kalb The Waste Land By T.S. Eliot, performed by Fiona Shaw Madison Square Park, NYC, Apr. 10-13, 2019, 6:00-6:30 #FionaShaw #ArleneShechet #TheWasteLand #TSEliot

In the winter of 1977, at age 17, I played Petruchio/Fred Graham in a Kiss Me, Kate production at my high school in suburban Baltimore. It’s a crazy thing, but I loved this show from a very early age. That’s because, about six or seven years earlier, I’d watched my father play Petruchio/Fred Graham in a community theater production of the show in the New Jersey town where we lived at that time. Since seeing my father perform, I’d played the original cast album a hundred thousand times on our phonograph, electrified by the bounce and wacky inventiveness of the Cole Porter songs, not to mention the sexy innuendo of their lyrics, which I only dimly understood. I learned about locker room talk as much from Kiss Me, Kate as from actual locker rooms. This is a rather singular situation, I know. Not many families treat the vain, blustering, patriarchally preening role of Petruchio as a hereditary occupation, let alone a masculine rite of passage. Mine did. Or half of it did. I have only fuzzy memories of my father’s brash and buoyant performance. I always thought he was a strong and intelligent amateur actor, even when I grew old enough to know a hawk from a handsaw. What I vividly remember is how my mother, a schoolteacher with a Ph.D., hated his doing that play. She’d savored and celebrated his other roles—particularly the King in The King and I—but the weeks he spent devoted to Kiss Me, Kate were tense and unhappy. To my young eye, it looked like a lot of inexplicable bristling and stomping around the house. By the time I played Petruchio my parents were separated. My mother had moved back to New Jersey and I’d stayed with my dad—it was a “men's house.” The obligation to see my show forced my mother’s first return to Baltimore since she’d fled. Once again, I remember her reaction more vividly than the show itself. All young actors try on the attitudes and behaviors of their roles in their real lives, and for weeks I’d been gadding about like the puffed up peacock I took Petruchio to be, mansplaining and making rumbustious and facetious remarks about spanking, walloping, and womanizing. Some people laughed. It was all just innocent fun, right? When my mother saw this behavior she blew a gasket. She would have thrown pans and crockery if she had a kitchen handy. There was no point in telling her that the play was making fun of such boorishness and so was I. She knew the play. Seeing me experiment with that gender-role was unbearable to her. At the show, she sat in the second row, never smiled, gave me a bristly hug afterwards, and drove back to New Jersey. Among the clearer lessons of that experience, for me, was the knowledge that, for all its popularity, Kiss Me, Kate has some ferocious enemies. It’s never been merely a romp or a simple love letter to showbiz. It’s always been (like its source play, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew) also a velvety face-slap that invites the masses to yuck it up collectively, for the millionth time, over all the hoary lowbrow japes about “broads,” “dainty debbies,” “bags” and “kicks” (in the Coriolanus). This just has never been funny to everyone. Now, I will admit that I still giggle at this show, and not just out of nostalgia. Moreover, I think Shakespeare’s Shrew is playable in the right hands, even for woke audiences in an age fed up with the likes of Harvey Weinstein. I worked as dramaturg on a good example: the 2012 Theatre for a New Audience Shrew directed by Arin Arbus, in which Maggie Siff and Andy Grotelueschen played Kate and Petruchio as intelligent misfits who miraculously found each other in a dimwitted, cartoon-Western world that had treated them both like Martians. The key in both cases—Kate and Shrew—seems to me the same. The audience has to be made to believe that the lead couple is really in love. That’s the only way to make all the crude gender stereotypes and jokey misogyny seem tactical rather than embarrassing. When Kiss Me, Kate returned to Broadway in 1999, starring Brian Stokes Mitchell and the late Marin Mazzie, I did believe they were in love. Mitchell and Mazzie cleverly located crucial breather moments in the mad bustle of the opening scenes that plausibly suggested a fiery core of buried sincerity beneath all their bickering. The truth is, Sam and Bella Spewack’s book for Kiss Me, Kate is no dramaturgical triumph. Its love setup is downright flimsy. The actors of Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi (Petruchio and Kate) have to conjure all the magic of a divorced couple’s banked fire for each other out of a few nostalgic lines about bygone road tours and a keepsake champagne cork, followed by the inane duet “Wunderbar.” If they can’t seal the emotional deal in those few busy minutes, then “So in Love,” which immediately follows, can’t infect us with longing to see Lilli get what she wants, no matter now magnificently her voice soars. Scott Ellis’s new Kiss Me, Kate at Studio 54 is smart and bright and rollicking. There’s some splendid fresh choreography in it (“Why Can’t You Behave,” “Too Darn Hot”), and its stars, Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase, both have world-class voices and charm galore. What they don’t have, alas, is plausible chemistry as Fred and Lilli. Yes, they can belt. O’Hara’s rendition of “So in Love” is so powerful it almost manages to substitute for chemistry. When it’s over, though, both actors revert to relying on the brittle archness of the Spewack dialogue, which doesn’t contain any heat of its own, and they end up looking like stereotypes. That’s the chief reason why the audience can’t just lighten up and ignore the clank of skirt-chasing jokes in the #MeToo era. Politics rushes in to fill the space that love abandons. Interestingly enough, the snappiest number in the new show is the anthem to Bianca/Lois Lane’s marital availability, “Tom, Dick, or Harry.” David Chase’s acrobatic, pelvic-thrusting choreography is hilarious, and performed with cool circus panache by Corbin Bleu, Rick Faugno and Will Burton, manically orbiting and pulsating around the delightfully ditzy Stephanie Styles as Lois. Like Lois’s Act 2 number “Always True to You in My Fashion,” “Tom, Dick, or Harry” is a salute to female sexual agency and freedom, and in this production salutes often have to stand in for ardor. Women are duly given the floor and the mic, even the upper hand in fighting—O’Hara’s Lilli/Kate kicks Fred/Petruchio so savagely and relentlessly it starts too seem like assault. The lyrics to Kate’s concluding song—originally borrowed from Shakespeare’s forever problematic “I am ashamed that women are so simple” speech—have been altered so that “people” are now simple and respect and loyalty are owed to “mates” rather than “husbands.” It’s all nicely PC. It just feels a little dry and safe. We need another reason to indulge one more time in this tricky old Cole Porter confection, and that reason has to be love. Photos: Joan Marcus Kiss Me, Kate Music and lyrics by Cole Porter Book by Sam and Bella Spewack Directed by Scott Ellis Studio 54 #KissMeKate #ColePorter #ScottEllis #KelliOHara

The Founder of Théâtre du Soleil speaks about the Controversy around Robert Lepage's play KANATA before its opening at the Cartoucherie in Paris Translated from French by Nora Armani Interviewer Joëlle Gayot Published on the Théâtre du Soleil website In July [2018], while Canadian director Robert Lepage was preparing his show Kanata, a letter signed by 18 First Nations artists and intellectuals, along with 12 of their non-native allies, sparked a heated debate. The show, performed by the actors of the Théâtre du Soleil founded by Ariane Mnouchkine, journeys through Canadian history by addressing the oppression suffered by native peoples. Faced with the absence of actors from their communities in the production, some representatives of these communities accused the production of cultural appropriation. In the process, one funder and co-producer withdrew from the project, pushing the director to cancel Kanata at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Ariane Mnouchkine and her troupe determined to continue with the production of Robert Lepage’s play anyway. [The run, which began on Dec. 15, 2018, has been extended through Mar. 31, 2019.] What does the term "cultural appropriation" mean for you? Ariane Mnouchkine -- This term evokes nothing for me because there can be no appropriation of what is not and has never been a physical or intellectual property. That is to say, cultures are not anyone’s property. No bounds limit them because, precisely, they have no known geographical or, especially, temporal boundaries. They are not isolated, and they have been cross-pollinating since the dawn of civilizations. No more than a peasant can prevent the wind from blowing a spray of healthy or noxious seeds sown by his neighbor onto his field, can people, even the most insular, claim the definitive purity of their culture. Finally, the stories of groups, hordes, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, peoples, nations cannot be patented, as some claim, because they all belong to the great history of humanity. This great history is the territory of artists. Cultures, all cultures, are our sources and, in a way, they are all sacred. We must drink from these sources studiously, with respect and gratitude, but we can not accept to be forbidden to approach them, because we would then be pushed back into the desert. It would be a frightening intellectual, artistic and political regression. The theater has doors and windows. Theatre tells the entire story of the world. What has transpired in the history of First Nations that can explain this controversy? I am not a historian of Canadian colonization, but let us look at history. An insidious spoliation, turned violent. Endless betrayals. Promises that were never kept. Treaties that were not respected. And in 1867, at the time of independence, a genocidal treatment of First Nations. Exclusion and systematic marginalization. And -- something that has left the deepest traces -- a real assault by the Catholic Church and the Canadian state on native culture through the elimination of the involvement of parents and the community in the intellectual, cultural and spiritual development of their children implemented through a system of infamous boarding schools where a forced, sadistic, abusive, violent, mindless, unimaginable assimilation of children was practiced. It’s similar to what happened in Australia with Aboriginal children. This system was still practiced in Canada until 1996. That is to say until very recently. So many horrendous things happened that despite undeniable efforts in recent years, nothing could be repaired at the snap of a finger. The legitimate claims of the indigenous people far exceed this controversy, which didn’t only have to do with a group of their artists. Moreover, and I wish to say it again, it was not aimed at canceling Kanata, but also, maybe more, was a vindictive movement of thought, advocating the "return of the baton" rather than the long and difficult path of reconciliation that the majority of natives go through with determination and resilience. Are you worried about the turn of events? I must admit, I am a little. Enclosures are being defined within which identities that are reduced to themselves alone are cloistered. Is it to better classify them? Infinitely? On September 22, 1933, at the initiative of Joseph Goebbels and through the creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture, Jewish artists were excluded from the cultural arena and could only appear in productions intended for Jewish audiences. Do not panic, I am not accusing anyone of being a Nazi, in this context, but when one starts to examine my theatre company’s ethnic composition, I cannot but recall what the Nazis did. I sound the alarm bell. Beware of certain similarities of thought or methods. Even inadvertent ones. How should artists react to this? Are you calling for a mobilization? The first censor is our fear. Being accused of racism is very scary, and our accusers know that. They use it. But as long as we are concerned, in all conscience, we know that we are not racist and that our work, the diversity of the group with which we have been creating works for so many years, is not. In short, our whole life proves the opposite. We must refuse, in the light of the ethnic composition of this cast, even before anyone has seen our production, to be labelled spoliators and racists, and consequently criminals. We all have eyes, ears, memories, legends, all of which are interrelated in many ways. We are not ''only'' French or ''purely'' white. Or ''only'' indigenous. Should we bow our heads to an ancestral curse, of biblical dimensions, that continues to plague us from generation to generation? Are we, forever, for centuries, racists and colonialists, or are we human beings, carriers of universality: Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Khmers, Indians, Afghans, and natives, whose epic stories we sometimes want to tell, and who, like us, as the basis of their cultural particularities, carry within them the universal human being? And after all, who benefits from tearing society apart, in this way? How will this interminable tribalization help dismantle the savage capitalism that is ruining our planet? How will it stop the greed of multinationals? What is the purpose behind it? How will it give us the meaning and the love of the common good? Why do some ideologues try to fool our youth by taking advantage of their idealism, their generosity and their thirst for solidarity and humanity? Kanata at Cartoucherie, Paris Who are these ideologues? I do not have to name them. By their answers and their attacks, I believe, they will show that they have recognized themselves. Is it not a discourse that falls on deaf ears? It's worse than that. It is a trial, where every word of the defense is inverted and added to the indictment of the self-appointed prosecutors. It becomes necessary to constantly navigate between forbidden words that are more and more numerous. How to speak sincerely, and with confidence, when each word can become, at the whim of the interlocutor, an incriminating clue, revealing our ignominy? Under the scrutiny of such commissioners, how can one escape artificial language, clichés, hypocrisy, and finally the inevitable lie? Is it possible to avoid guilt? Once all paths of material, legislative and symbolic reparations have been made and these repairs, always imperfect and insufficient, have been definitively obtained, we must recognize that we may still be guilty of many things, but not of everything, not all the time and not forever. The path is identical for those who are, or think of themselves as the victims, because it may be somewhat indecent to appropriate too much of the suffering of an ancestor, or make it one’s own. The grandchildren of deportees did not suffer what their grandparents or great-great-grandparents suffered. I am one of these grandchildren, and as such I cannot build eternal bitterness and hatred on the fate of my ancestors. Hatred and bitterness that my grandparents who died in Auschwitz would not have wanted to leave me with. They loved me too much, I'm sure, to want to inflict the pain of such hatred on me. I cannot boast of their legacy and through it hold the whole world guilty and responsible, and forbid a young German actress, innocent of what her great-grandfather could have done to mine, from playing Anne Frank, when she has the talent and the moral stamina to do it. How do you feel today? At a meeting in Montreal back in July, Robert and I sought out the indigenous artists who had expressed their incomprehension, not to say their disapproval, at the lack of native actors and actresses in the Kanata cast. We had to remind them again and again that this play had been rehearsed and produced in France, with actors of very diverse origins, first of all refugees, then residents in France, then most of them naturalized as French in recent years. Many of the artists who met with us that night had heard vaguely about the Théâtre du Soleil, but were unaware of its principles and its way of operation. The meeting was held in a respectful atmosphere, on both sides, and I thought we were moving forward on the difficult path of understanding and reconciliation. This meeting, which I will remember all my life with a very special emotion, lasted more than five and a half hours, but we would have needed, and we will still need, more time. We will take this time. We promised. But the next morning, all those who did not want this meeting to conclude with an agreement, and who had not attended it, attacked us. And, I admit it today, Robert and I have been plagued by accusations of all kinds resulting from the amount of intimidation and misinformation on certain forums or blogs and springing up on social networks where a multitude of anonymous people are involved. After the announcement of the cancellation [of the show in Canada], many of the native artists we had met with that night did not hide their disappointment and even their disapproval of this outcome, which they had not asked for. So we pulled ourselves together and decided that the best answer to the attacks would be to present the first episode of the production ourselves. Will you be the co-author of this episode of the play with Robert Lepage? No. But I'm the co-author of the manifesto explaining the decision to present it. Photo credit 1: Martin Chamberland for La Presse Photo credit 2: Archives Théâtre du Soleil #ThéâtreduSoleil #ArianeMnouchkine #RobertLepage #Kanata

The English author Samuel Butler once quipped grimly that the death of a father was “a new lease of life” for any man, and therefore “those who have never had a father can . . . never know the sweets of losing one.” Butler didn’t know Jeremy O. Harris. Daddy, Harris’s thoughtfully outrageous play about a queer, young, fatherless black artist finding a substitute father in a middle-aged, white art collector shows that such macabre “sweets” are freely available. They even come flavored as melodrama. Harris is a masterful provocateur. Still a third-year student at the Yale School of Drama, he has already marked out distinctive theatrical territory for himself at the radioactive crossroads of race, sex and pop music. His two debut plays produced in New York this season, Slave Play and Daddy, have both been hilarious, exciting and seriously discomfiting. Both have also been lucky to have shrewd and strong directors—Robert O’Hara on Slave Play and Danya Taymor on Daddy—helping to smooth their tricky pacing and clarify their impertinent questions about social and racial categories. Slave Play shocked people because it explored the erotic power of racist tropes and stereotypes among conscious, well-meaning, contemporary Americans—and then declined to pronounce simple moral judgments. Harris imagined antebellum cosplay as a seriocomic form of sex therapy for interracial couples, and while major white critics celebrated that gambit as “daring,” “raunchy,” and “subversive,” some African-Americans on social media excoriated it as degenerate and disrespectful of black history. A change.org petition to shut the play down gathered more than 4,000 signatures. Daddy’s material is scarcely less incendiary. It explores how whites and historically white cultural institutions—such as museums, galleries, and theaters—use minorities to signal their virtue and fuel their hype machines. Written before Harris entered Yale, it now looks remarkably prophetic about his current situation. He is opening a play in a major Off-Broadway theater a few short months after receiving a profane YouTube tirade from Tariq Nasheed about his previous play that blasted: “Let’s be clear; this is a white suprematists agenda because they are the ones who fund that n***a.” The run of Daddy, co-produced by The New Group and Vineyard Theater, is completely sold out. Here’s the setup. Twenty-something visual artist Franklin (Ronald Peet), about to have his first solo show, hooks up one Molly-addled night with filthy-rich, 50- or 60-something Andre (an astonishing Alan Cumming). Soon Franklin is living and working in Andre’s Bel Air mansion and calling him “daddy” while getting spanked. Franklin’s gallerist Alessia (Hari Nef, terrific) has qualms about the arrangement, wondering why his mostly nude, black soft-sculptures (akin to Cabbage Patch Dolls) have suddenly acquired stylish and expensive clothes. Articulate Franklin, just out of art school, reassures her, spouting verbiage she knows just how to use for a pseudo-critical PR spin on his new work and “patron.” Harris has a keen ear for self-serving art-crit jargon. Franklin’s show is a sold-out hit, and everyone is thrilled except his visiting mother Zora (Charlayne Woodard, superb), a devout Baptist who dubs the dolls “coon babies” and marvels at the spectacle of white folks carrying them around like precious objects. Her boy, she thinks, is so cut off from his roots he doesn’t even know where his inspired idea truly comes from. Subtitled “A Melodrama,” Daddy, like Slave Play, is nine parts sass and social satire to one part psychological realism. As a white, middle-aged, educated viewer, I’m positioned to see its virtues, if only because I can follow its flurry of cheeky-smart references. Franklin, for instance, at one point mentions Martha Nelson Thomas, the Kentucky outsider artist who may or may not have originated the Cabbage Patch idea and had it stolen from her. He also drops copious perceptive remarks about Basquiat, Twombly, Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta and others, at one point using his disgust at Kara Walker’s gargantuan “Sugar Baby” (unnamed but pretty clearly intended) to explain white privilege to Andre. For all the dropped names, though, Daddy is also a romp. Its set features a real swimming pool (design by Matt Saunders)—talk about generous funding!—and a crack gospel choir (Carrie Compere, Denise Manning, and Onyie Nwachukwu) that enters in Act 1 and helps further the plot with countless absurd breaks into song and wacky theatricality. Andre suddenly breaks off from an intimate moment with Franklin, for instance, reaches behind a pillar for a mic, and sings the entirety of “Father Figure” like a narcissistic rock star. Suave and slithery Cumming kills as George Michael! Taymor has great fun adding droll touches such as Andre forgetting where his kitchen is, or Franklin twisting his body in time to his mom’s twists of a salt-grinder. The pool is also used for lots of activities other than swimming, such as sex, dancing and baptism. Water and bathing suits are the perfect environment for the play’s campy exchanges about defiant superficiality. Franklin invites two young friends to hang out with him on the deck: Bellamy (Kahyun Kim), an Asian-American Instagram and fashion junkie, and Max (Tommy Dorfman), a white actor. Bellamy is oblivious to Franklin’s “patron” dilemma because she also has an older sugar-daddy who she thinks really “sees” her even though she can’t read the love letter he wrote to her in cursive. Max says he’s “worried” about Franklin selling out to Andre, but Bellamy points out that he happily screwed a director and producer for a part in a pilot. So much for ethical purity. For all the cleverness and verve of all this, Daddy seems to run out of breath in its final act (the play is nearly 3 hours long). The main problem is that Franklin shrinks rather than expands under the pressure of Andre and Zora’s struggle for his soul. Andre evidently wants to teach and care for him, which means possibly pocketing and cultivating him like some sort of living doll or privately-funded outsider artist. Zora, for her part—the play’s only likeable character in Woodard’s hands—wants to save him for God the Father and truth, which strangely seems to mean emasculating him with aggressive comparisons to his feckless, absent father. This psychodrama quickly grows long-winded and schematic, and in a play like this, that’s a political as well as a theatrical matter. For the rising-star, black, queer hero of a new play by a rising-star, black, queer playwright to be reduced to a thumb-sucking, abject child as soon as he’s challenged to fly the nest is . . . well, kinduva big deal. Black rage rang out loud and clear in Slave Play, but it’s oddly dormant and recessive in Daddy. By the time the choir baptizes Franklin near the end he’s so shockingly limp and infantilized he’s practically a zombie. Allesia tries gamely to rouse his righteous ardor—“Women African-Americans/ We are finally pushing aside the white cis het blowhard art bros of the past and just, like, proclaiming it, right? THIS IS OUR TIME WE ARE HERE. WE CAN TAKE UP SPACE TOO”—but she might as well be talking to a corpse. This turn of events is puzzling. If nothing else, it undercuts the theatrical pleasure of parricide that the play sets us up to expect. Nevertheless, I’m still dazzled by the panache and vision, and yes, the daring, raunchy subversiveness of this new dramatic talent. Anyone who cares about the pulse of theater ought to welcome his arrival. Photo credits: Matt Saunders and Monique Carboni Daddy by Jeremy O. Harris directed by Danya Taymor Signature Theatre Center #JeremyOHarris #Daddy #SlavePlay #DanyaTaymor

Sam Shepard’s True West has always been a magnet for celebrity hamming, particularly in the role of Lee, the drunk and broke, not-quite-civilized half of the brother pair at the play’s center. From Peter Boyle to John Malkovich to John C. Reilly and Phillip Seymour Hoffman to Ethan Hawke in the current Broadway revival, Lee has again and again provided movie stars (or near-stars—Malkovich was just rising then) a ready platform for lowlife antics and slovenly macho strutting. The role requires shameless scenery-chewing but it conveniently comes with legit-theater cred. I don’t say this to carp. The play is what it is and I’ve enjoyed all the hamming as much as anyone. I didn’t see Boyle (almost no one did because that production closed shortly after opening when the author disclaimed it, protesting that Boyle and Tommy Lee Jones were movie stars imposed by Joe Papp), but I remember Malkovich, Reilly and Hoffman vividly. Each was a hilarious font of anarchic antics, a daft human coyote setting mayhem loose in a modest, So-Cal kitchen. These antics all felt meaningful and moving rather than merely vain or showboaty, one realizes in retrospect, because they were rooted firmly in a believable sibling relationship. Every credible Lee was part of a symbiotic duo with his Austin, the other brother, a buttoned-up, domesticated, professional writer. Malkovich’s animalistic flamboyance was downright bizarre but it was no solo act. The performance drew reality and comic fuel from the equally weird, obliging patience of Gary Sinise’s Austin. Reilly and Hoffman too, who exchanged roles nightly, conjured a strange, sick co-dependency in two different ways. Their rivalry seemed to involve very specific unspoken rules about the limits of teasing, coaxing, flattering, threatening and more. The biggest disappointment of the new Roundabout production starring Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano is that it wholly lacks this rich interdependence. I never believed for a moment that these actors were really brothers. True West’s situation is that Lee and Austin both show up at their mother’s house while she’s away on vacation. Austin, who usually lives with his wife and kids “up north,” has come to write, tend house, and water plants, and Lee’s arrival spoils his quiet composure. Lee takes Austin’s car to commit petty burglaries, butts into Austin’s meeting with a strangely pliable movie producer named Saul (sharply played by Gary Wilmes), and bamboozles Saul into backing his ridiculously lame idea for a movie over Austin’s. The brothers then plunge into an absurdly intense struggle in which each adopts the other’s nature and tactics. Their battle is physical and psychological and also mythical—it’s been said that the brothers are the two sides of Shepard. When we first see Hawke he’s standing in shadow behind the kitchen counter, dangling a 6-pack ominously from its plastic rings, instantly domineering and thug-like. That’s fine, and funny. But then he unfortunately sticks to that menacing note for the rest of the play, pretty much ignoring every chance the script offers to mix in other music. In this exchange early on, for instance, all he does is snarl when it’s pretty clear that Lee’s one-upmanship is also a tired joke between brothers, and maybe a plea for intimacy too. Austin: How’s [the old man] doing? Lee: Same. He’s doin’ just about the same. Austin: I was down there too, you know. Lee: What d’ya’want, an award? You want some kinda’ medal? Austin: What’d he say? Lee: He told me. Don’t worry. Hawke never uses the brotherly tough talk to conduct any subtle negotiations over sympathy, care, or boundaries. Everything with him comes out as a straightforward play for power, a cool move on a hard surface, and parts of the play just make no sense from that angle. Lee’s encounter with Saul, for instance: Hawke relies so completely on bullying rather than charm when interacting with Wilmes that Saul’s decision to take Lee’s side is incoherent, even as comedy. In this production, it feels like a script lie. Dano shares responsibility, of course. His mild Austin is the monotonous counterpoint to Hawke’s undifferentiated thug. Yet I’m not sure how much more Dano could’ve done in this circumstance. Shepard put Lee in the brotherly driver’s seat. I’m tempted to speculate that the production’s British director, James Macdonald, either didn’t like or didn’t trust the American reality of this most realistic of Shepard’s family plays. How else to understand his choice to cast an actor as the guys’ mother (Marylouise Burke) who looks old enough to be their grandmother? Or his choice to frame the stage with a bright white light-rectangle that blasts our eyes in the blackouts and scene-shifts as if announcing the appearance of a magical Western Portal? Evidently, the play’s surreal and mythical elements were too subtle for Macdonald and needed punching up with neon. I’ve long admired Ethan Hawke’s sustained commitment to the live, serious stage. I’m glad he keeps sticking his theatrical neck out in everything from Shakespeare to Stoppard to Chekhov to Brecht to Rabe. All his stage performances have had at least something searingly powerful in them, including True West, and a few have been brilliant. In some cases, though—True West and his Macbeth are the egregious examples for me—he just doesn’t listen enough to his stage partners or sufficiently collaborate with them on generating the play’s shared reality. It’s irresponsible in those cases not to call him on it. In fact, in criticism as in families, telling truths of that kind is the flip side of love. Photo: Joan Marcus True West By Sam Shepard American Airlines Theatre #TrueWest #SamShepard #JamesMacdonald #EthanHawke #PaulDano

“Immersive theater” is a gimmicky term that can be an indiscriminate pitch nowadays for any show where the audience has to move, or enter through a different door, or just sit in a specially constructed environment. The Jungle at St. Ann’s Warehouse is no environmental lark or gimmicky funhouse. It’s a gut-punch of a play about a notorious, sprawling Calais refugee camp that the French government bulldozed in 2016 and a nearly three-hour crash-course in empathy whose fierce immersion experience feels urgent, important, and utterly necessary to its artistic purpose. Anomalously enough, this play filled with panic and outrage feels like an antidote to outrage-exhaustion. It dumps you all at once into the lives of frantic, desperate, no-status people akin to panhandlers you might easily tune out, and then grips you with a flow of intimate detail and canny narration about them that peels away your emotional calluses. At intermission the night I attended, a push notification came through on my phone from the New York Times reporting that the Supreme Court had thwarted Trump’s effort to subvert America’s asylum law. Our government couldn’t summarily deny asylum anymore to those who crossed the Mexican border illegally. We actually had to live up to our compassionate PR. It was an eerie moment, as if Washington had suddenly supplied program notes for The Jungle, which happens to be about people in a nearly identical circumstance. The migrant characters in it, from seven different far-flung countries, are desperate to get through the Chunnel to the UK, whose law treats asylum-seekers much more generously and humanely than France’s. Yet in Calais, gathered in a roadside, town-size camp nicknamed The Jungle, they’re stymied by elaborate security measures put in place—mostly by the UK—to prevent people like them from ever reaching the other shore and benefiting from the law. Co-directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, The Jungle is a co-production of The Young Vic and The National Theatre in London and Good Chance Theatre, a group established by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson in an 11-meter geodesic dome in the Calais Jungle camp in 2015. These young British playwrights lived for 7 months there and established the dome as a center for creative expression in art, dance, and music as well as theater. The dome has been transported intact to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the audience can inspect its densely graffitied walls hung with hundreds of soul-bruising child’s drawings as they walk through to the playing area. A concession stand operates there, and a bearded guy plays plaintive melodies on a triple-flute during pre-show. There’s also a warren of makeshift refugee living quarters and a recreation of an Afghan restaurant that once thrived in the camp. The playing hall is a large rectangle where long restaurant tables serve as acting platforms and mulch-covered aisles divide the seating into country-specific areas: Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Palestine. (I sat in Palestine.) The walls are ad hoc plywood-and-chicken-wire constructions like those in every ramshackle place you’ve ever seen. TVs at the corners silently flicker with Bollywood dance numbers, terrorism news, and occasionally footage of police actions in the real Jungle. The play’s storytelling is jagged, agitated, and untidy—exactly right for a drama of lives on the edge. You have to work a little harder to understand. The action opens on a flurry of announcements by some Brits in dirty down vests: a French court has authorized the police to clear half the camp, an area that includes the beloved restaurant where everyone gathers. The reaction is a panicked flurry by those who speak accented English and a babel of other languages. The 14 migrants in the cast are mostly men: guys in skullcaps and gym pants, keffiyehs and camo, the women in headscarves and sweatshirts, an abandoned little girl. They jostle us in the mulchy aisles, or bonk our drinks beside the platform-tables, then apologize graciously. There isn’t enough space for anyone, you soon understand, even this small theatrical sample group, and it’s about to get smaller. Soon, we know, it will be eliminated. In this way, the play starts with the awful end. “I know a little bit about telling stories. Always start at the end,” says gentle and worldly-wise Safi (Ammar Haj Ahmad), the Syrian English-lit student who serves as our on-again, off-again narrator. Then we backtrack to individual stories that make us care even more about the catastrophe yet to come. The pith of the migrant tales is in their enactment. The cast is uniformly extraordinary, making each highlighted character so unforgettably particular that his fate breaks your heart. John Pfumojena plays Okot, for instance, a 17-year-old Sudanese who fled his village because otherwise his mother would be tortured by Janjaweed trying to snatch the local young men for their militia. Pfumojena is so concentrated in his stony determination that his statuesque presence reads as an energy cell powering the scenes he’s in. Ben Turner plays Salar, the Afghan restauranteur who’s such an angry hothead to begin with you recoil from him. He slowly wins our affection with unexpected flexibility in the camp’s pivotal resistance debate and also by his care for orphaned 15-year-old Norullah (Mohammad Amiri). Amiri, for his part, also surprises by transforming Norullah’s racist contempt for Okat believably into fateful friendship. The complex cross-cultural bigotries in the camp are in no way papered over. Nor are the equally complex Western politics of immigration. The playwright “Joes” have made the very smart choice of subjecting the do-gooding British volunteer organizers in the camp to the same skepticism as everyone else. Paula (Jo McInnes), a woman in her 50s bent on helping children, Beth (Rachel Redford) and Sam (Alex Lawther), 18-year-olds just out of secondary school, all swoop into the camp on the wave of international sympathy for refugees that came with the viral internet pictures of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. The self-congratulatory bleeding hearts of these naïfs are laid witheringly bare to everyone. These privileged Brits prove capable of some self-awareness, though. They launch into a discussion about “virtue signaling,” the cynical practice prevalent in their country and ours of announcing help for the needy that isn’t real or effectual, and this is the closest The Jungle comes to an explicit political message. Thankfully, it’s not pressed to too sharp a point. I found myself grateful that although these well-meaning people do end up actually helping out—with schooling, temporary housing, translation, legal aid, and more—they never acquire even provisional haloes. All the white people in the play remain recognizably flawed, and that’s a crucial strength. Such a ripped-from-the-news drama, bringing stories of the downtrodden into first-world cultural palaces like The Young Vic and St. Ann’s, can easily become a sort of self-serving virtue-signal itself if it can’t make its privileged audiences somehow recognize their own secret dodges, excuses and blind spots in the vexed arena it dramatizes. Only then can it possibly hope to transform whatever empathy it generates into meaningful action. Photo: Teddy Wolff The Jungle Written by Joe Murphy & Joe Robertson Directed by Stephen Daldry & Justin Martin St. Ann's Warehouse #TheJungle #JoeMurphy #JoeRobertson #StephenDaldry #JustinMartin