NEW YORK (AP) — The long-delayed Tony Awards have been given a fall air date and a four-hour streaming canvas to celebrate the pandemic-shortened Broadway season that upended the theater world.
Producers of the telecast announced Wednesday that the Tonys will be held Sept. 26 and will air on CBS as well as Paramount+. As if making up for lost time, the usual three-hour event has added a fourth hour.
This year, the award show will start at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on Paramount+ exclusively, then two hours later continue on CBS with a live concert event “featuring superstar Broadway entertainers and Tony Award winners re-uniting on stage to perform beloved classics and celebrate the joy and magic of live theater.” Capping the evening will be the awarding of the three top awards: best play, best play revival and best musical.
“There is nothing that compares to the magic of live theater — and we are thrilled to be able to share its celebratory return and the incredible talent and artistry of the abbreviated 2019-2020 season with theater fans everywhere,” said a statement from said Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, and Heather Hitchens, president and CEO of the American Theatre Wing.
There was no word on whether there would be a host.
The news was met with excitement from theater fans but with grumbles that the bulk of the awards — the acting, directing and technical ones — would only be accessible to Paramount+ customers. The plan is similar to that employed by the Grammys — the bulk of those awards are streamed in a pre-show event — although that is accessible for free.
Broadway theaters abruptly closed on March 12, 2020, knocking out all shows — including 16 that were still scheduled to open in the spring. Broadway shows have been given the green-light to restart and the first will be “Hadestown” on Sept. 2.
Organizers are looking for a Broadway theater to be the base for the in-person event. But presumably, the Sept. 26 date for the Tonys means that the nominated shows can be ready to perform on the telecast from their respective home theaters to cut down on overcrowding.
This season’s nominations were pulled from just 18 eligible plays and musicals, a fraction of the 34 shows the season before. During most years, there are 26 competitive categories; this year there are 25 with several depleted ones.
The sobering musical “Jagged Little Pill,” which plumbs Alanis Morissette’s 1995 breakthrough album to tell a story of an American family spiraling out of control, has the most nominations with 15.
There are three best musical nominees: “Jagged Little Pill,” “Moulin Rouge: The Musical” and “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” And there are five best play nominees: “Grand Horizons,” “The Inheritance,” “Sea Wall/A Life,” “Slave Play” and “The Sound Inside.”
Nipping on the heels of “Jagged Little Pill” for overall numbers of nominations is “Moulin Rouge!,” a jukebox adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive 2001 movie about the goings-on in a turn-of-the-century Parisian nightclub, that got 14 nods.
Two very different offerings are tied with 12: “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical,” which tells the rock icon’s life with songs that include “Let’s Stay Together” and “Proud Mary,” and “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’ ground-breaking, bracing work that mixes race, sex, taboo desires and class. The dozen nods make “Slave Play” the most nominated play in Tony history.
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The Stage surveyed the top and bottom ticket prices of shows running at 74 presenting and producing theatres across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland on the Saturday evening performance of November 11
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Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who played leading roles in stage productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “On Golden Pond” as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Monday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.
Her son Tony Carlin confirmed the death.
Ms. Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Square,” she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Doctor,” Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.
Ms. Sternhagen came into her own in mature Off Broadway roles: as the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1988, when she was still in her 50s, and the concerned retirement-agewife in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” in 1979, when she was 49.
She received Tony nominations for her roles in the original productions of “On Golden Pond,” “Equus” and the musical “Angel” and in revivals of “Morning’s at Seven” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”
People who never saw a Broadway show or even went to the movies may have known Ms. Sternhagen’s face from television. Beginning in the 1980s, when she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” she sailed through a period of playing maternal figures in memorable recurring roles in a number of hit series.
On “ER,” she was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother. On “Sex and the City,” she was Trey MacDougal’s rich but peculiar mom. Most recently she played the mother of Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern character on the police procedural “The Closer.” She received three Emmy Award nominations, two for “Cheers” and one for “Sex and the City.”
Ms. Sternhagen was known to turn down movie roles because they would take her away from her family for too long, but over the years she did appear in some two dozen films. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in “Starting Over” (1979), a perfectionist magazine researcher in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), and the cookbook author Irma Rombauer in “Julie & Julia” (2009). Her other films included “The Hospital” (1971), “Independence Day” (1983) and “Misery” (1990).
But stage was her first home, and her career flourished in Off Broadway productions. She made her New York stage debut at 25 in Jean Anouilh’s “Thieves’ Carnival” at the Cherry Lane Theater, and she won her first Obie Award the next year, for George Bernard Shaw’s “The Admirable Bashville” (1956). She won again in 1965 for two performances (“The Room” and “A Slight Ache”) and received a lifetime achievement Obie in 2013.
Her reviews were positive from the beginning. “When an intellectual comedy is about to be staged, it is always a wise notion to send for Frances Sternhagen,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in 1959, reviewing “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” an Off Broadway comedy. “She is the mistress of sardonic fooling.”
Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born on Jan. 13, 1930, in Washington, D.C. She was the only child of John Meier Sternhagen, a United States tax court judge, and Gertrude (Hussey) Sternhagen, a World War I nurse who became a homemaker.
Frances attended the Potomac School and the Madeira School, both in Virginia. At Vassar College, she originally studied history but was persuaded by an adviser to give drama a try.
After graduation in 1951, Ms. Sternhagen taught briefly at the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass. When she auditioned at the Brattle Street Theater in nearby Cambridge, she was rejected. “They said I read every part as if I was leading a troop of Girl Scouts out onto a hockey field,” she told The Toronto Star decades later.
Returning to Washington, she took theater courses at the Catholic University of America and began appearing in Arena Stage productions.
At the same time she began working in New York theater, Ms. Sternhagen also ventured into television work; she made her small-screen debut in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” alongside Helen Hayes,on the series “Producers’ Showcase.” But she didn’t make her feature film debut until a decade later, with a supporting role as a high school librarian in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). Like many working actors, she appeared on soap operas, including “Love of Life,” and in television commercials.
She continued working into her 80s. Her last Broadway appearance was in a 2005 production of Edward Albee’s “Seascape.” Her last New York stage appearance was Off Broadway in “The Madrid” (2013) at City Center, playing the mother of a kindergarten teacher, played by Edie Falco, who up and leaves her job and family.
InMs. Sternhagen’sfinal film,“And So It Goes” (2014), a comic drama with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, she played a wise, snarky and chain-smoking real estate agent.
Ms. Sternhagen married Thomas Carlin, a fellow actor, in 1956, and they had six children. The couple had met briefly at Catholic University, acted together in “The Skin of Our Teeth” in Maryland and fell in love when both were in the cast of “Thieves’ Carnival” in New York. Mr. Carlin died in 1991.
In addition to their son Tony, she is survived by three other sons, Paul, Peter and John; two daughters, Amanda Carlin Sanders and Sarah Carlin; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. She lived in New Rochelle for more than 60 years.
In 2001, Ms. Sternhagen talked to drama students at Vassar and gave an interview to the college’s alumni publication. She revealed that as an actress she liked working from the outside in, starting with how a character speaks and walks rather than with her inner motivation. And she attributed a good deal of her personal emotional development to acting.
“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate,” she said.
As for young aspiring actors who look down on paying their dues by appearing in commercials, Ms. Sternhagen suggested, “Think of it as children’s theater.”
“The Fabulous Invalid” is the title of a 1938 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy about a theater’s struggles to survive. The phrase, which outlasted the show, refers to the resilience of theater in the face of insane odds. In the past six months, it has been an apt image for the demise of not-for-profit companies across America. Since the pandemic ended, dozens of theaters across the country have closed; many others have laid off staff or cut down their seasons. Longtime artistic leaders left their jobs. Data collected by Theater Communications Group shows that 60% of the country’s nonprofit theaters are predicting deficits this year, compared with 10% in 2021.
The reasons for the crisis are numerous: competition for audiences from streaming and phones; corporate philanthropy’s pivot away from the arts; crime driving audiences away from downtown districts; didactic plays that alienate audiences. Even at the best of times, making theater is a financial challenge. In their 1966 study “Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma,” William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen identified a central problem: It “takes a long time and a lot of work to create a play…and it still takes about four hours to watch Hamlet. You can’t shorten the creation time—or performance time—without greatly reducing the quality.”
The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s an excellent time for theatergoers to pack into cozy venues for a feast of the eyes. Our critics have selected a handful of options for tourists and locals looking to catch up on Broadway and Off Broadway shows this holiday season. And we’ve included some other choices as well.
Straw hats thrown like Frisbees. Death-defying aerial acts. Dizzying foot juggling routines. All accompany the contortionist, trapeze and tightrope circus classics that spectators young and old have come to ooh and aah at. This year, Big Apple presents “Journey to the Rainbow,” a collaboration with the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, complete with humans dressed as polar bears and cotton candy galore. Through Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Read the review.
It’s a New York City classic. It’s a Christmas classic. The Rockettes are back with sensational high kicks set to state-of-the-art lighting and projections. Little ones will be dazzled by animated trains, ribbons and wintry displays. Their adult companions will delight in a Nativity procession and holiday maximalism. Through Jan. 1 at Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan. Read the review.
Set in a home built in 1862, in an intimate parlor room, this telling of the timeless Christmas tale stars John Kevin Jones as Charles Dickens. Audience members, surrounded by 19th-century holiday décor and candlelight, will travel back more than a century, to when Dickens wrote the story. The production also features a streaming version. Through Dec. 24 at the Merchant House, Manhattan.
Josh Groban stars on Broadway as everyone’s favorite tall, dark and handsome throat slitter. Opposite the demon barber is a superbly zany Annaleigh Ashford as the murder-accomplice-baker Mrs. Lovett (our critic called her “a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means”). The two stars will leave the production after the Jan. 14 performance, so be sure to catch them in full bloody glory before they go. Come for the meat pies and Stephen Sondheim’s gigantic score, stay for the shadowy lighting, which won Natasha Katz her eighth Tony Award. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan.Read the review.
Jonathan Groff stars alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez in this acclaimed revival of the former Sondheim flop, directed by Maria Friedman. Our critic called the show, which sweetly and gravely warns of the dangers of great ambition, “a palpable hit,” with “a thrillingly fierce central performance” by Groff and “high-wattage, laser-focused performances” by Radcliffe and Mendez. Through March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.
Underfed and yet very full: Will the people who have it all ever find something to eat? Inspired by two Luis Buñuel films, David Ives’s chic, surrealist musical was one of the most anticipated Off Broadway shows of the year, and a star-studded farewell to Sondheim’s final work. Through Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan. Read the review.
Five members of a rock band try to record a studio album. That’s the premise, which hinges upon heartache, copious drug use and fragile rock star egos, of David Adjmi’s first New York production since 2013, set entirely in a recording studio. It’s a play, not a musical, so it’s not squarely in the song-and-dance category, but the music, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), is chock-full of captivating pop songs and gripping ballads. Through Dec. 17 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. Read the review.
Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young star in Ossie Davis’s raucous 1961 comedy, directed by Kenny Leon, about a charismatic preacher who must outwit a plantation owner to buy and restore the local church. The play exposes racism as laughably absurd in a Broadway revival our critic called “scathingly funny.” Through Feb. 4 at the Music Box, Manhattan. Read the review.
In his New York debut, the playwright York Walker’s Southern gothic, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, follows a small Georgia town’s reaction to a bluesman’s homecoming. The potent little Off Broadway play, about communing with God and making deals with the Devil, is based on the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, whose technique inspired rumors that he had traded his soul for musical genius. Through Dec. 17 at Roundabout Underground, Manhattan. Read the review.
If a cornucopia of puns is your thing, this lowbrow comedic musical about a small-town woman who leaves home to save her corn just might scratch the itch. With a book by Robert Horn, songs by the country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and campy scenes — including a mini-kickline of plastic corncobs — directed by Jack O’Brien, our critic called the show low humor “but hard not to laugh at.” Through Jan. 14 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.
Arguably one of New York City’s crown jewels of immersive theater, the Hitchcock-style take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is set to close on Jan. 28 after 12 years. In an enchanting act of voyeurism, audiences members wear masks — the Venetian type, not the health-protecting kind (those are optional) — and follow characters from room to room, into densely packed apothecary dens, eerie miniature forests and dark, elaborate dining halls. Through Jan. 28 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan. Read the review.
As summer creeps into fall, Mark William is ready to make up for lost time.
The 25-year-old actor and singer, who is based in New York, will take the stage of Manhattan’s Green Room 42 this Saturday with a new concert, “Back With a Beat.” The show will feature songs from his 2019 debut album, “Come Croon With Me,” as well as a selection of new material that reflects his perspective on 2021 and renewed passion for Broadway after an unprecedented 18-month shutdown.
The evening aims to establish William as a 21st-century song-and-dance man who harkens back to Dick Van Dyke and Frank Sinatra, while embracing a contemporary pop vibe ― and, if his past performances are any indication, he’ll pull it off with panache. The show is also auspiciously timed, taking place just one day before the belated Tony Awards.
“It’s really a celebration of being back, being alive again and just getting things rolling once again,” he told HuffPost. “I think we’ve all grown and changed, even in small ways, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I have a different perspective on what I’m singing about and what I want to discuss with my audience than I did before. I’m ready to connect with a new mindset.”
Watch Mark William sing “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” below.
Like many young artists, William had high hopes for 2020. The Toledo, Ohio, native was riding a wave of critical acclaim for “Come Croon With Me,” which had been released in fall 2019. Less than a week before COVID-19 shuttered theaters and music venues worldwide, he and his six-piece band performed their sixth sold-out Green Room 42 engagement. The night’s starry audience included Tony winners Chita Rivera and Warren Carlyle.
“Our momentum was really going,” William recalled. “I had a wonderful show, but two weeks later, I was back in Ohio. It was very abrupt and worrying. Hopefully, the momentum just paused, and didn’t get pushed back.”
In spite of COVID-19’s devastations, William used the unexpected downtime to pursue new professional endeavors. He and longtime musical director Clint Edwards took their live act on the road, playing to socially distanced crowds at Maine’s Deertrees Theatre and Feinstein’s at Hotel Carmichael in Carmel, Indiana, this summer. He also filmed a pilot for an as-yet-untitled television series, in which he plays a Catholic priest grappling with his sexuality, that’s currently aiming for a streaming release.
"I’m creating a story, a fantasy to go on with the audience,” William said.
Meanwhile, William has also been collaborating with musician Andrew Morrissey on a new musical, “A Wilde Affair,” which transplants the works of Oscar Wilde into the disco days of the late 1970s.
For now, however, William’s focus is on “Back With a Beat,” which, if all goes according to plan, will serve as an artistic reentrenchment. Next year, he hopes to embark on a national concert tour. He’s got his sights set on Broadway too, with Patrick Dennis in “Mame” and Bert in “Mary Poppins” among his dream roles. A sophomore album, he adds, is “definitely on the docket,” though no release date has been set.
“Broadway and classic standards is where I feel the most comfortable, but I’m always trying to stretch myself and give my audience something they might not expect out of me,” he said. “A lot of singers that people go to see ... they just pull up sheet music and sing. That’s not what we do. I’m creating a story, a fantasy to go on with the audience.”
Mark William plays New York’s Green Room 42 on Sept. 25.
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Top: Joyce Torres and Joey Datuin work on "Breaking," part of Breaking the Wave Theatre's "Unspoken" series, and Sunni Patterson in Junebug Productions' "Gomela." Bottom: A screenshot from San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company's "Live With Rod & Marce," and Vernon Medearis, Marissa Ampon, and Chuck Lacsona perform "Prelude" as part of Bindlestiff Studios' "Stories High" audio series.
Editor’s Note: In partnership with the Doris Duke Foundation and the Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation, TCG’s THRIVE! Uplifting Theatres of Color initiative offered $1,140,000, equaling 46 grants in 3 categories, to U.S.-based (including Tribal lands and Territories) Black Theatres, Indigenous Theatres, and Theatres of Color (BITOC). In addition to the funds, 21 BITOC receiving RECOGNIZE category grants also participated in REBUILD, a learning cohort working with BIPOC consultants to strengthen their effectiveness in specific areas. The initiative was created with an advisory committee of 14 BIPOC theatre leaders and artists. To further uplift these companies, American Theatre magazine approached myself (Regina Victor, editor of Rescripted) and fellow cultural critic Jose Solís to curate and edit six articles highlighting the RECOGNIZE companies, with each of us guiding three pieces. It was our work to divide and then re-thread these companies together into articles with common themes, source writers and assign them, and edit their drafts, with American Theatre seeing to the final copy edit. These stories are examined through the lens of this year’s critically focused Rising Leaders of Color cohort (Amanda L. Andrei, Citlali Pizarro, and afrikah selah), as well as three Chicago-based writers (Dillon Chitto, Madie Doppelt, and Tina El Gamal). This six-part essay series showcases 21 examples of people doing the work, championing their culture, and finding creative solutions to generational problems. Thank you to Jose for being a wonderful thought partner in this project, and to Emilya Cachapero and Raksak Kongseng for your invitation and support.
After entering an era of hybrid and digital programming, how have our stories expanded, and even become untethered to the stage? And how can we sustain this work in the American theatre?
Spreading across 2,549 miles on land and 6,949 miles by sea, THRIVE! recipient theatres Junebug Productions, Last Call, Su Teatro, Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, and Breaking Wave Theatre Company have embraced new digital mediums and made them part of their programming by setting clear intentions that prioritize relationships, safety, and community-building. In doing so, each theatre has presented programming they would have not been able to do before, and continue to bring forth digital programs as a means to stay connected with their communities and missions.
Programming and Inspirations
At the height of the pandemic, each theatre focused on a medium that allowed them to reimagine storytelling unbound by the proscenium stage. From film and livestreams to podcasts, and even on-demand viewing, these theatres found new modes of expression that blur the lines between the outreach of small and regional theatres.
In New Orleans, Junebug Productions incorporated Junebug Films to expand the reach of their New Orleans-based John O’Neal Cultural Artist Fellows, who are storytellers in their own traditions. With the success of two productions, Gomela and The Here Woman, Junebug looks forward to expanding to include the Story Circle tradition. Hailing from the same city, Last Call—a brilliant collective of queer and trans global-majority artists, oral historians, and archivists—have embraced podcasting to amplify QTBIPOC voices and stories of the South. In employing this medium, Last Call has produced more than three seasons of oral history interviews, transmuting personal narratives into collective performances.
Meanwhile out West, Colorado’s Su Teatro has made local and national impact in the larger theatre ecology. After moving their XicanIndie Film Fest and The Wordfest to virtual platforms, the cultural and performing arts center discovered new artists on a nationwide scale that was not achievable before, as well as creating unexpected opportunities with local videographers and local TV stations.
Further west, nestled in the SoMa neighborhood of the San Francisco Bay Area, Bindlestiff Studio has embraced livestreaming and on-demand viewing to uplift Page to Stage (a new-play development company), premiere new plays, and present live music. Through programs like Queer AF, concerts, and other live-streamed performances, Bindlestiff has continued to be a lifeline in creating community and dialogue in both the States and the Philippines in the face of displacement, gentrification, and navigating post-pandemic safety. Down the road from Bindlestiff, San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company has created hybrid and on-demand programming, providing opportunities to create new pathways for artists and new models of new play development.
SImilarly, Breaking Wave Theatre Company has broken down barriers in Guam and among a newfound international community through Unspoken, Hita Mane’estoria: We Are Storytellers, and Legends of Guåhan. By embracing this new medium, combined with in-person elements, BWTCO has been able to deepen their nontraditional leadership model with support from their board and a growing, inclusive, intergenerational community dialogue, to destigmatize issues such as mental health, addiction, and seeking community support.
Sunni Patterson in Junebug Productions’ “Gomela.”
On Discoveries, Challenges, and Impacts
After the pivot to digital programs during the pandemic, these theatres continue to witness the impact hybrid programming has had on their audiences and their process. Last Call co-director indee mitchell summed it up beautifully: “I feel like we’re at this place where people are really calling to not just tell stories of different identities, but also to have those stories be told by those people and created by those people, which I think takes time and intention and like opportunities.” With a rise in intergenerational, youth, and elder-centered spaces, created and cultivated through this medium, there is more room to grow for new opportunities to be planted.
When asked how she envisions this program’s impact on the American theatre landscape, Breaking Wave executive director CJ Ochoco said, “I hope that the rest of American theatre can show that collaboration and connection is possible. I hope that our impact, wherever we impact and whoever we impact, shows folks that it is possible to take our culture, take the things that matter to us, and put that into our art, family, community, doing things that matter. We hope to continue to open up our doors for collaboration, not just with folks who have connections to Guam, but also just folks who are aligned with us. I think that through hybrid formats we can continue to connect in many ways as theatres of color, but also theatres in general and artists for all of us to bridge these gaps.”
Clearly there is more conversation to be had around funding, capacity, and quality for hybrid theatre. In addition to benefits, being online has surfaced new challenges for these theatres, especially as theatres have transitioned to or restarted in-person programming. While these new mediums have created new ways to stay engaged and find community miles apart from their audiences, all six theatres acknowledged that the visceral experience of theatre will never be replaced by digital programming.
Said Tony Garcia, artistic director of Su Teatro, “At the core of what I want to do is engage our community in conversation. If that’s the primary thing, there has to be a tactile piece. I think what the artists will do, in terms of our leadership, is we will find ways of utilizing technology to unleash those feelings and those senses that are not part and parcel of technology .That’s what I hope our kids and our future generations does, because I trust them that they will say, ‘Okay, that’s the technology’—that the technology only leads you to a path of humanity, of humanness. It’s about being human, and technology is our tool, it is not a goal.”
Similarly, Junebug Productions’ interim executive artistic director Mariana Shepard noted how we can hold space for community through this new medium. “Community can exist,” she said. “A new way that we’re organizing can create room for both online and in-person—and I think there is room. This is just a different type of community. We still rely on people to show up, we still rely on people to come to things like story circles and share, and offer and, you know, be amongst one another.”
As the prevalence of technology expands, our everyday social media creates competition for our attention and challenges us to stay both relevant and accessible in the realm of the internet. Echoing this, rising expectations of quality in regards to on-demand theatre create new challenges around funding, staffing, and production process. Said Bindlestiff Studio artistic director Aureen Almario, “I think for us, as a small little black box theatre, it would be great to have more funding to be able to really imagine a quality experience for audiences, and for us to be able to pay for videographers and editors that will make our online presence a lot more stronger.”
In the end, Junebug Productions, Last Call, Su Teatro, Bindlestiff Studio, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, and Breaking Wave Theater Company have shared that when it comes to hybrid programming, there’s no going back any time soon. On the contrary: They’re just getting started.
afrikah selah (they/them) is a Boston-based multihyphenate cultural worker specializing in producorial dramaturgy, new-play development, and arts journalism.
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Two years of post-shutdown theater has brought to New York stages a slew of solo performers wrestling with subjects like grief, death and the apocalypse — and those are just the comedies. Solo shows are inexpensive to produce and relatively low-lift endeavors for an industry still on shaky ground.
There has been no shortage this fall, and now four solo shows running Off Broadway demonstrate a range of approaches to the form, proving, at least for this round, that baring your inner thoughts and fears pays off. “A Good Day to Me Not to You,” at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, and “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, opt for all-out vulnerability, dissecting the psyche as if the stage were an operating table. “School Pictures” and “Amusements,” also at Playwrights Horizons, take the opposite tack, with performers who hold themselves at a distance to direct attention elsewhere, but with devices that can be distracting and evasive.
The middle-aged narrator of “A Good Day to Me Not to You” divulges intimate details from the start: She is nursing a surprise case of genital warts, she tells the audience, that has been dormant for the decade since she last had sex.
In this wryly candid confessional, presented by Waterwell, the writer and performer Lameece Issaq plays a New Yorker with a mordant sense of humor who is weathering a downswing: She was forced to to quit orthodontics school because of her bouts of vertigo, and then she was fired from a dental lab for filing away the imperfections in patients’ plaster molds. Now she is nursing HPV and moving into a convent boardinghouse named for St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins and sexual abuse survivors. (The weathered sanctuary set by Peiyi Wong shifts locales under Mextly Couzin’s dynamic lighting.)
Directed with graceful sensitivity by Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of Waterwell, Issaq’s performance is both tender and frank, flipping with ease between directly addressing the audience as the narrator and voicing succinctly sketched characters (everyone’s teeth tell a story). Driven by her maternal impulse, first toward her nephew and then a potential child of her own, the narrator is betrayed by what she cannot control, but always returns, by some elliptical path, to the care she owes herself.
In “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” a thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown of a show, Alexandra Tatarsky, who uses they and them pronouns, inhabits a graduate seminar’s worth of German literary characters like kindergarten drag (the scenic, costume and especially inventive prop design is by Andreea Mincic). A self-described “anxious clown,” they so frequently disrupt their own act with reflexive interrogation that the interruptions become the point. With vibrating eyes, Tatarsky sips from proliferating coffee cups, and they appear locked in a discursive effort to come of age, create something new and reckon with their death drive. (No pressure.)
Tatarsky continues circling back to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, an affluent boy toiling in his bedroom struggling to write a play about self-loathing and inaction. Occasionally, Tatarsky’s madness is expressed in deranged melodies (sound composition is by Shane Riley). How is anyone supposed to create art that makes their identity legible? And why be legible at all?
Directed with bracing invention by Iris McCloughan, “Sad Boys” has the delirious effect of twisting you into communion with a live-wire artist, even if it is hard to tell whether they are laughing, crying or both. Tatarsky’s cumulative argument seems to be that, like the character of the Wandering Jew, whom she plays with a gray beard that trails on the floor, identity exists in process rather than as a fixed set of signifiers.
First names scrawled on pieces of colored construction paper form a set list for “School Pictures,” a mostly sung-through collage, written and performed by Milo Cramer, of impressions gathered from tutoring New York City students. Cramer, who uses they and them pronouns, aims to assemble brief snapshots of the privileged youth: their naive clarity, rowdy insecurity and mandate to excel in a system rigged in their favor. (Cramer notes in the script that the subjects here are fictionalized.)
These portraits of middle schoolers whose parents could afford the tutoring fees are presented, under the direction of Morgan Green, with the sonic equivalent of a crude crayon: a ukulele and atonal talk-singing. Twee? Yes. And grating once it becomes clear that this will be Cramer’s sustained mode of expression for most of the show’s 60 minutes. Sounding out syllables and striking chaotic notes invokes a youthful spirit, but makes a trying task out of tracing artistic intent in the lyrics. A lecture about systemic inequality in the city’s education system comes as a welcome recess, and finally allows Cramer to level with the audience as adults.
There is a childlike quality to the persona assumed by Ikechukwu Ufomadu in “Amusements,” despite the writer and performer’s shawl-collar tuxedo and gentleman’s demeanor. The humor in this stand-up set is, as the title suggests, airy and mild nearly to a fault. In the chasm between Ufomadu’s erudite exterior and simple-minded affect comes a steady breeze of inoffensive punchlines (“Happy Friday to all who celebrate!” “How many of you are alumni of school?”). The resulting eye-roll-to-chuckle ratio will come down to a matter of taste.
As directed here by Nemuna Ceesay, Ufomadu has the gracious and charming sensibility of a spiffed-up Mr. Rogers, never more so than when he ventures into the audience to ask if anyone needs a volunteer and then offers his services. Ufomadu is suave, but also halting and unpolished; his set floats along on a stream of appealing humility.
It’s an act, of course; how much performers reveal of their true nature onstage may be impossible to know. At its most profound, Ufomadu’s brand of literalism indicates the extent to which we all stand on common ground. Where would we be without clothes or shoes? At home, probably, not brave enough to show our naked selves.
A Good Day to Me Not to You Through Dec. 16 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; waterwell.org.
Sad Boys in Harpy Land; School Pictures; and Amusements All through Dec. 3 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org.
Ifyouwalk through Battery Park in lower Manhattan, you will find the Netherland Monument — a 1926 piece by the Dutch sculptor Hendrik van den Eijnde, and one of the many structures in New York that perpetuate the myth of the sale of this island. In all his glory, you can see Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit “purchasing” the land with wampum beads, worth a staggering sum of $24, from a “Lenape Native” whose name no one seems to know. This Native man is wearing a headdress of the sort typically worn by Plains Natives hundreds of miles away. One doesn’t get the sense that van den Eijnde tormented himself trying to get the details right.
The only proof of the “sale” of Manhattan is a small section in a letter written by a colonist in 1626. There’s no mention of beads or trinkets, and no deed of sale, only a passage cited from the Dutch National Archives that reads: “Our people are in good spirit and they live in peace. They have purchased the island of Manhattes from the savages for the value of sixty guilders.”
The problem here is that Lenape peoples, along with most Indigenous peoples, are inextricably connected to the land as stewards, and did not share the concepts of money or land ownership as Europeans did. And so they were strategically displaced from their ancestral homelands, despite having shown graciousness to the Shouwunnok, otherwise known as salt water (read: white) people.
This displacement of the Lenape peoples was a huge motivation for Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play “Manahatta,” which tells the story of Jane Snake, a Lenape woman who moves to Manahatta from Oklahoma during the 2008 financial crisis for a banking job — thus reconnecting with her ancestral homeland. “When I go back to our lands, there’s a connection there that you feel ― it’s inside you. I only feel it when I step on those lands,” Nagle tells me, about her inspiration for Jane’s character, who embodies the playwright’s connection to her own ancestral Cherokee homelands.
As an Indigenous woman, there is a deep-rooted blood memory I feel when I set foot on my ancestral homelands in the Alberta Plains. There is an ancestral connection when I bend down to pick my sage from the earth and place my tobacco as offering. The connection that Indigenous people feel for our ancestral homelands is sacred, and it exists deep within our bones. For Nagle, this emerges in the way Jane moves through the world.
Western Christian ideologies place humans at the center of the universe. By contrast, Lenape beliefs hold that humans grew directly from the earth itself, tethering us to the land. The earth is our original ancestor to care, love, respect and tend to.
These differences of Western and Indigenous ideologies are often expressed in our traditions of storytelling. Nagle explains what these differences mean for the role of the playwright. In American theater, the playwright is placed on a pedestal. We hear about the genius of Arthur Miller, the genius of Shakespeare. But for most Indigenous writers, storytelling is about our connection to community and our ancestors.
“What we’re doing here is a very communal form of storytelling,” Nagle says. “The playwright is a vessel that the story comes through — but it’s not really about the playwright.” Writing is a way for Nagle to connect with her lineage, history, and ancestors. Sometimes, she says, she doesn’t even remember writing down a scene or idea, but she feels as if it comes from ancestral memory: “I do believe the ancestors speak through us, if you allow them to, and if you’re open to that.”
Communal storytelling and discourse is a multigenerational tradition because we are never severed from our lineages, even when we have been forcibly separated from our lands and families. Nagle brings this sentiment to her most recent production of “Manahatta,”which premieres Nov. 16 in New York. And if it takes a village to tell a story, Nagle gathered hers intentionally: Joe Baker serves as a Lenape cultural consultant; movement director Ty Defoe crafted the cultural nonverbal language; and Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors alike contributed perspectives that have created a vibrant and diverse iteration of “Manahatta.”
“That’s how [we] learn and grow — that’s where the magic lies,” says Rainbow Dickerson, who plays Debra, Jane’s older sister. “Yes, it’s nice having a shorthand with people who are similar to you, but to me, beauty lies in the differences.”
Jane’s story emphasizes the struggle of reconciling a new city life with expectations and traditions of her Nation and family, while interweaving the tragic and very real history of the Delaware Nation’s expulsion from their ancestral lands. The story is resonant now, as the Lenape people fight for their ancestral land back and are attempting to rectify the erasure of their languages and traditions.
Joe Tapper, who plays Jakob, a Dutch fur trader and liaison between Peter Munuit and the Lenape, tells me how his own understanding of Lenape and Indigenous peoples and histories have shifted since his involvement in the play. As a non-Indigenous person, he took it upon himself to do some research when he was cast. He said learning was one thing, “but then to really be in this play... It’s really changed me.” Thanksgiving this year would feel very different to him, he says.
Tapper’s sentiment represents a paradigm shift we need in order to eradicate the “us versus them” mentality that’s become prevalent in American politics. Acknowledgment and accountability for land displacements and for the injustices and violences committed against Indigenous peoples are now more important than ever.
For that reason, “Manahatta” was written intentionally for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. “If you’re Indigenous, you’re going to understand it in a way that non-Indigenous people will never understand,” Nagle tells me. But the play “isn’t an educational piece for non-Indigenous people — there are gonna be things non-Indigenous people don’t understand.”
Nagle wants her audience, regardless of identity, to connect with Jane and her journey emotionally — whether you feel it as an Indigenous person affected by these histories, or as a European settler understanding the buried and forgotten histories, or just as a person who’s struggled with a sense of belonging in your own life. By empathizing with Jane, a deeper sense of Indigenous identity and place in this country is inevitable.
The erasure of Indigenous histories has been a shameful reality throughout North America for generations. To have these histories represented in “Manahatta,” on the island of Manhattan, the sacred homelands of the Lenape peoples, is an act of resistance and a step toward acknowledgement and change that has been demanded for decades.
