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Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Tony Awards 2025 nominees
Best Musical Buena Vista Social Club Dead Outlaw Death Becomes Her Maybe Happy Ending Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical Best Revival of a Play Eureka Day — Author: Jonathan Spector Romeo + Juliet Thornton Wilder's Our Town Yellow Face — Author: David Henry Hwang Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play George Clooney — Good Night, And Good Luck Cole Escola — Oh, Mary! Jon Michael Hill — Purpose Daniel Dae Kim — Yellow Face Harry Lennix — Purpose Louis McCartney — Stranger Things: The First Shadow Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical Darren Criss — Maybe Happy Ending Andrew Durand — Dead Outlaw Tom Francis — Sunset Blvd. Jonathan Groff — Just In Time James Monroe Iglehart — A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical Jeremy Jordan — Floyd Collins Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play Glenn Davis — Purpose Gabriel Ebert — John Proctor Is The Villain Francis Jue — Yellow Face Bob Odenkirk — Glengarry Glen Ross Conrad Ricamora — Oh, Mary! Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical Brooks Ashmanskas —SMASH Jeb Brown — Dead Outlaw Danny Burstein — Gypsy Jak Malone — Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical Taylor Trensch — Floyd Collins Best Direction of a Play Knud Adams — English Sam Mendes — The Hills Of California Sam Pinkleton — Oh, Mary! Danya Taymor — John Proctor Is The Villain Kip Williams — The Picture Of Dorian Gray Best Book of a Musical Buena Vista Social Club — Marco Ramirez Dead Outlaw — Itamar Moses Death Becomes Her — Marco Pennette Maybe Happy Ending — Will Aronson and Hue Park Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical — David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts Best Scenic Design of a Play Marsha Ginsberg — English Rob Howell — The Hills of California Marg Horwell and David Bergman — The Picture of Dorian Gray Miriam Buether and 59 — Stranger Things: The First Shadow Scott Pask — Good Night, and Good Luck Best Costume Design of a Play Brenda Abbandandolo — Good Night, And Good Luck Marg Horwell — The Picture of Dorian Gray Rob Howell — The Hills Of California Holly Pierson — Oh, Mary! Brigitte Reiffenstuel — Stranger Things: The First Shadow Best Lighting Design of a Play Natasha Chivers — The Hills Of California Jon Clark — Stranger Things: The First Shadow Heather Gilbert and David Bengali — Good Night, And Good Luck Natasha Katz and Hannah Wasileski — John Proctor Is The Villain Nick Schlieper — The Picture Of Dorian Gray Best Sound Design of a Play Paul Arditti — Stranger Things: The First Shadow Palmer Hefferan — John Proctor Is The Villain Daniel Kluger — Good Night, And Good Luck Nick Powell — The Hills Of California Clemence Williams — The Picture of Dorian Gray Best Choreography Joshua Bergasse — SMASH Camille A. Brown — Gypsy Christopher Gattelli — Death Becomes Her Jerry Mitchell — BOOP! The Musical Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck — Buena Vista Social Club Best Play English — Author: Sanaz Toossi The Hills of California — Author: Jez Butterworth John Proctor Is The Villain — Author: Kimberly Belflower Oh, Mary! — Author: Cole Escola Purpose — Author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Best Revival of a Musical Floyd Collins — Book/Additional Lyrics: Tina Landau; Music & Lyrics: Adam Guettel Gypsy Pirates! The Penzance Musical Sunset Blvd. Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play Laura Donnelly — The Hills Of California Mia Farrow — The Roommate LaTanya Richardson Jackson — Purpose Sadie Sink — John Proctor Is The Villain Sarah Snook — The Picture Of Dorian Gray Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical Megan Hilty — Death Becomes Her Audra McDonald — Gypsy Jasmine Amy Rogers — BOOP! The Musical Nicole Scherzinger — Sunset Blvd. Jennifer Simard — Death Becomes Her Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play Tala Ashe — English Jessica Hecht — Eureka Day Marjan Neshat — English Fina Strazza — John Proctor Is The Villain Kara Young — Purpose Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical Natalie Venetia Belcon — Buena Vista Social Club Julia Knitel — Dead Outlaw Gracie Lawrence — Just In Time Justina Machado — Real Women Have Curves: The Musical Joy Woods — Gypsy Best Direction of a Musical Saheem Ali — Buena Vista Social Club Michael Arden — Maybe Happy Ending David Cromer — Dead Outlaw Christopher Gattelli — Death Becomes Her Jamie Lloyd — Sunset Blvd. Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre Dead Outlaw — Music & Lyrics: David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna Death Becomes Her — Music & Lyrics: Julia Mattison and Noel Carey Maybe Happy Ending —Music: Will Aronson; Lyrics: Will Aronson and Hue Park Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical — Music & Lyrics: David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts Real Women Have Curves: The Musical — Music & Lyrics: Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez Best Orchestrations Andrew Resnick and Michael Thurber — Just in Time Will Aronson — Maybe Happy Ending Bruce Coughlin — Floyd Collins Marco Paguia — Buena Vista Social Club David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber — Sunset Blvd. Best Scenic Design of a Musical Rachel Hauck — Swept Away Dane Laffrey and George Reeve — Maybe Happy Ending Arnulfo Maldonado — Buena Vista Social Club Derek McLane — Death Becomes Her Derek McLane — Just In Time Best Costume Design of a Musical Dede Ayite — Buena Vista Social Club Gregg Barnes — BOOP! The Musical Clint Ramos — Maybe Happy Ending Paul Tazewell — Death Becomes Her Catherine Zuber — Just In Time Best Lighting Design of a Musical Jack Knowles — Sunset Blvd. Tyler Micoleau — Buena Vista Social Club Scott Zielinski and Ruey Horng Sun — Floyd Collins Ben Stanton — Maybe Happy Ending Justin Townsend — Death Becomes Her Best Sound Design of a Musical Jonathan Deans — Buena Vista Social Club Adam Fisher — Sunset Blvd. Peter Hylenski — Just In Time Peter Hylenski — Maybe Happy Ending Dan Moses Schreier — Floyd Collins
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Eureka Day' playwright Jonathan Spector talks vaccine debates, vicious comment sections, and ‘the failure of a utopia'
Playwright Jonathan Spector describes his arrival on Broadway as a "wild" and "out of body" experience. Not only did he make his mainstream debut with Eureka Day, a comedy about vaccine mandates at an elementary school, he also became a Tony nominee. Speaking to Gold Derby, Spector describes the creation of that infamous Zoom live-stream scene, and why he believes that the play is actually about "the failure of a utopia." More from GoldDerby 'The worst has already happened, so now I have everything to gain': Meagan Good on love, loss, and empowering women in 'Forever' Breakout star Owen Cooper admits 'Adolescence' was 'very out of my comfort zone' Keanu Reeves gets his wings in 'Good Fortune' teaser, Taron Egerton sees 'Smoke,' and today's other top stories Gold Derby: was first produced in 2018. So much has happened in the world since then, especially as it relates to the core topic of this play, including a worldwide pandemic. How do you think the play lands now versus that 2018 production? Jonathan Spector: We were in rehearsal during the election and I guess I, probably naively, thought it was going to go the other way. So I had one idea about what I thought the play was going to mean in that context of opening with incoming President Kamala Harris. And then I have a different idea about how it landed now. It almost feels more like a document of how we got here, of the way in which caretaking and thoughtfulness and all of these tools of liberalism are just not quite up to meeting certain kinds of challenges, as evidenced by our failure to prevent [Donald] Trump from being reelected. Now [vaccines] are an issue that people have a much stronger personal connection to. Before the pandemic, people could engage with the metaphor of the play more easily as a sort of metaphor for democracy, or how you create a society with people when you can't agree on what's true. And then, coming out of the pandemic, it was hard for anybody to see anything but COVID in the play. And I think now it's a little more of a balance. The live-stream scene, although it's changed very little from what it was before, is very different for the audience because now everybody in the audience has lived through that experience many times. There's a much more visceral response to it. Did you ever want to alter the script in any way considering those changes in the world? There were a couple of very minor changes I made of just taking out a line here or there. Before COVID, I had to explain things a little more but now everybody knows what herd immunity is, so we don't need a character to explain that. Obviously the last line of the play is new, of looking forward to the 2019-2020 school year. Beyond that, all the changes I made were less about the pandemic and more about continuing to work on the play and just make it the best version of itself. That live-stream moment you mentioned gets the entire audience laughing with such recognition as we see these vicious comments projected on screen. What was the impetus behind that scene? When I was researching the play, I spent a lot of time on internet message boards where people would fight about vaccines and they would get so vicious with each other. So much of how we live now, how we engage with an issue, is online. So there was something that would be missing if I wrote a play about [vaccines], but left out that big part of how we engage with this. I also didn't want to make my characters be as nasty as people get online. The other part was just a desire to bring more of the school community into the play and not have it just be these five people who are representing everybody. The first production in Berkeley, that theater has a very old subscriber base. I think when they had done plays in the past with text projection, they found that people didn't really pay a lot of attention to it. So our expectation was that maybe most people wouldn't pay attention to it. But the first time we had an audience, you couldn't hear a word on stage because people were laughing so much. So I used to have continuous comments all the way through the scene. Then after realizing how people react, I then went through and I had to sculpt it much more to make sure that the things that are important to hear come in the clear, so the focus can shift back to the actors and then go back to the comments. The five main characters all have these very different views, and yet they are all firmly committed to creating this ideal world for the kids and families. Why was that sense of empathy important to include within the main characters? I think it's much more interesting if you're going to have any play with any kind of political valence or issue, that it's hard for people to be dismissive of each other. Prior to COVID, vaccines and vaccine skepticism was not particularly politicized. Knowing someone didn't vaccinate their kids didn't actually tell you if they were Democrat or Republican in the way that it now is very correlated, but back then it was maybe the only contentious issue that was not correlated with your politics. People on the right and left were both skeptical of vaccines for different reasons. So that then allowed it to be about people who all basically had the same worldview and the same values and wanted the same things, and it was just this one thing that they lived in different realities about. To me, the play is really about the failure of a utopia. They had this thing that worked really well for a really long time, until it finally came up against something that it couldn't overcome. The skepticism side of the argument is highlighted quite beautifully in Jessica Hecht's monologue. Her character Suzanne reveals a heartbreaking loss of a child, which led her down the path of vaccine denialism. What went into creating that moment? When I was writing that, my daughter was less than 1. That first year, you're so paranoid, you're always going in and checking if they're breathing constantly. So, when I listen to that monologue now, I think that's a very visceral fear. It's so distant from my life now, but at the time you could really touch it. And then I feel like it's always the most interesting, sometimes the most fun, to be writing from the point of view of the character who you disagree with, and trying to find the most truthful and empathetic way that they got there. The other thing that informed that monologue is I watched this documentary created by Andrew Wakefield, who's the discredited doctor who put forward the link between autism and vaccines and lost his medical license in the U.K. He is kind of a charlatan, but he put out this documentary about vaccines, and they have these parents whose kids have really severe developmental disabilities that they believe are caused by vaccines. And the thing is, even though that guy is clearly just a fraud, when you see these parents, even if I think they're wrong about the reason their kids are like this, the pain they're feeling about their kids is very real. I wanted to somehow hold onto it as well. Just because you might not be right about what's happening doesn't mean that there's not real suffering there. After the show ended, I heard a lot of audience members remarking that they unexpectedly felt for Suzanne. Have you heard positive reactions from audience members on both sides of this issue? I wanted to be really careful about feeling like you're being fair and truthful about where people are coming from, but not just ethically. If I felt like if somebody walks out of the play and feels like, oh no, maybe I shouldn't vaccinate my kids now, that would be like I was doing some real harm. I don't think that's where the play comes down. And all the research is that it's actually extremely difficult to change someone's mind about vaccines, and so it's not going to happen with a play. I mostly found that people have responded pretty positively. I guess a handful of pretty committed people that I've talked to who have seen the play, felt like their point of view was represented fairly. Somebody said they feel like everybody's ganging up on them all the time, and that's what was shown in the play. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm glad that they felt that. But, it's a tricky line to walk. That's what's so great about having these wonderful actors like Jess and Amber [Gray], who can hold such nuance in their performances. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. SIGN UP for Gold Derby's free newsletter with latest predictions Best of GoldDerby Who Needs a Tony to Reach EGOT? Sadie Sink on her character's 'emotional rage' in 'John Proctor Is the Villain' and her reaction to 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' 'It should be illegal how much fun I'm having': Lea Salonga on playing Mrs. Lovett and more in 'Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends' Click here to read the full article.
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Bay Area play, local artists get Tony Award nominations
Berkeley's not just on Broadway — it's now the toast of Broadway. 'Eureka Day,' about a mumps outbreak caused by undervaccination at an elite Berkeley private school, received a Tony Award nomination for best revival of a play. Written by Oakland playwright Jonathan Spector, it marks the first time in recent memory that a play about the Bay Area, written by a current Bay Area resident, has received a nod from the nation's highest honors for commercial theater, which are overseen by the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League. 'Eureka Day' premiered at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre in 2018, under the direction of Josh Costello. 'I feel amazing. It's surreal,' Spector told the Chronicle just after 6 a.m. Thursday, May 1, when the nominations were announced by actors Sarah Paulson and Wendell Pierce on the Tony Awards' YouTube Channel. 'I never could have imagined when this play started its life seven years ago at Aurora that this little Berkeley play made with Berkeley people would one day be on Broadway and have a Tony nomination,' Spector continued. 'It was not on my bingo card.' Spector isn't the only artist with Bay Area ties among this year's nominees. San Francisco-born Darren Criss and Hayward native James Monroe Iglehart both received nods for the best performance by a leading actor in a musical award. Criss got recognized for 'Maybe Happy Ending,' in which he plays a robot seeking connection, while Iglehart was nominated for 'A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,' in which he played the title role. San Francisco's own Francis Jue also took home an acting nod, for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a play, for his work in 'Yellow Face.' Additionally, 'Dead Outlaw,' with a book by Berkeley native Itamar Moses, got seven nominations, including best musical, best book of a musical and best original score. (Moses has won previously, for 'The Band's Visit.') 'Eureka Day' begins with an executive committee meeting among parents and a headmaster, with dialogue that nails the Bay Area's particular breed of progressive affluence: a stay-at-home dad in an open marriage and a babysitter he met at Burning Man; the mom who, embarrassed of her privilege, calls her kid's private school 'more of a community school.' There's lots of concern about 'holding space' and 'feeling seen' — all as the group debates something as trifling as adding an option to a drop-down menu on the school's admission application. But soon the mumps outbreak splinters people accustomed to agreeing politically and governing by consensus. It all detonates in an uproarious scene in which the executive committee tries to livestream a meeting about the surge of the viral infection to all the school's parents, only to get outtalked and overrun by increasingly beastly commenters (whose individual posts ping in real time, displayed via projection). For all its comedy, the show also achieves the trickiest of balances: It doesn't render vaccine skeptics as cardboard cut-outs, but it doesn't validate their points of view either. Rather, it reveals how on certain polarized issues, political common ground, and the idea we can somehow eke it out through productive debate, are mirages. The show's Tony nod comes as outbreaks of measles — declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 — have popped up in Texas, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio and Oklahoma this year, all while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to disseminate mixed messages about vaccines, drawing ire from health officials for an uncoordinated response. In the livestream scene of 'Eureka Day,' Spector said, 'There's a comment that I was really on the fence about cutting, because I felt like it was too extreme, where somebody says, 'These vaccines are all made from the cells of dead fetuses.' And then RFK Jr. said that yesterday about the measles vaccine in a press conference.' He added, 'It's maybe the monkey's paw of playwright gifts to have an eye towards things — but only bad things coming true.' The Tony nod isn't the only time 'Eureka Day' has been part of national news this year. In February, the show was part of the spate of cancellations at the Kennedy Center following Trump's self-appointment as chair of the flagship Washington, D.C., performing arts organization. 'I … struggled with whether having work there in these circumstances would be an act of resistance or an act of complicity. There's compelling arguments both ways,' Spector told the Chronicle in March. As time has passed, he added on the morning of the Tony nomination, his feelings have shifted more and more to relief. In any event, the show has a slew of other productions currently running or planned across the country — Boston, Denver, Houston, Pittsburgh and Sacramento — and the globe, including in Nottingham, England; Sydney and Vienna. Past Tony Award winners with connections to the Bay Area include Menlo Park native Will Brill (for 'Stereophonic,' which tours to BroadwaySF's Curran Theatre in the fall); San Francisco native Lena Hall (for 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch'); and Pickle Family Circus co-founder Bill Irwin (for 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'); Irwin also starred in 'Eureka Day' on Broadway, alongside Jessica Hecht, whose performance earned her a Tony nomination for best performance by an actress in a featured role in a play. Spector's other notable local world premieres include 'This Much I Know' at Aurora Theatre and 'Best Available' at Shotgun Players. His 'Birthright,' about American Jews on a Birthright trip to Israel, premiered in April at Miami New Drama in Florida.
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?
IT'S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of 'political' to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That's all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you. The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it's good, it's like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you're in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here's where it easily can turn into a parlor game. 'Hamilton'? Yes, obviously 'Hamilton' is political. OK, what about 'Death Becomes Her'? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. 'The Outsiders'? Class war with songs. The 'Great Gatsby' musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on. Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It's no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy 'Eureka Day,' in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector's play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner 'English,' a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump's first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape. What's jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we've had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog's reconception of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 'An Enemy of the People' as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction 'Show/Boat: A River,' which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We've had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in 'Gypsy,' originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we've had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in 'Oh, Mary!'? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical 'Cabaret' (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall's immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even 'Wicked,' 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur. The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that's your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical 'Sunset Boulevard' — no, wait, damn it, there's that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical 'Real Women Have Curves,' which … nope, that won't work either. It's hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we've all become hammers. CONSIDER SOME OF the offerings in the week after the vote that returned Trump to power. In Midtown Manhattan, City Center was presenting a concert revival of the 1998 musical 'Ragtime,' an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's kaleidoscopic 1975 novel about a family of well-to-do suburban WASPs; a Jewish immigrant and his daughter; and a Black musician radicalized by racism, cruelty and murderous assault. The show, set in the New York of more than a century ago, suddenly seemed impossible to watch from a safe distance — and it no longer played as 'How far we've come,' as it may have in the Clinton years, but as 'Maybe we should have seen this coming.' The election-straddling timing of its two-week run was intentional, but 'Ragtime' was scheduled well before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, and no one involved could then have anticipated the real-world reverberation in a climactic second-act song, the female lead's anthemic solo about moving ahead into a new world. Rejecting 'the days when I let you make all my choices,' she soars to the fierce refrain, 'We can never go back to before.' If it wasn't precisely the Harris campaign's chant 'We're not going back,' it was close enough. The audience, composed largely of women and gay men — the kind of Broadway stalwarts who buy tickets to short runs of semi-staged revivals of musicals — knew it was coming. When the actress Caissie Levy started to sing, they leaned forward in palpable tension: They were bracing for a moment the song delivered. When she finished, some people stood and cheered; others remained seated, in tears. It was a reaction that didn't fit any easy definition of political theater. The show was giving the people what they wanted, but what they wanted varied from seat to seat; some took the lyrics as a promise to believe in, others as an occasion for frustration and grief. A few blocks south, at the Music Box Theatre, a different kind of transaction between audience and performers was unfolding. Several months earlier, 'Suffs,' a new musical about the suffragist movement, had transferred to Broadway after a run at the Public Theater. Last June, its creator, Shaina Taub, won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score, but that wasn't enough to keep the show afloat and, in the fall, the producers announced it would close in January. But immediately after the election, attendance surged. Cynics might suspect that buying a ticket to a musical that numbered Hillary Clinton among its producers had become a gestural statement (virtue signaling, as conservatives would have it), the late 2024 equivalent of donning a pink pussy hat. Yet the emotional interplay between theatergoers and a show that consistently warns them away from both complacency and self-regard proved to be more complex than 'Resist!' That week, 'Suffs' played not as a rally or, God knows, a victory lap but as a surprisingly sober assessment of how wins are achieved and of what they cost. The mood shift wasn't confined to mainstream work. A week later, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a five-night run of a 2020 play by the Portuguese writer-actor Tiago Rodrigues; it was, pointedly, called 'Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists' and concerned the impending ritual execution of a right-wing demagogue. Toward the end, the politician, who had so far been silent, unleashed a torrent of ugly invective that continued even as members of the audience (possibly plants, possibly actual ticket holders, possibly plants who then inspired actual ticket holders) started shouting back, cursing at the stage and walking out. It was what political theater is often accused of being — blatantly manipulative — but in a way that forced attendees to confront the idea that knowing how and when to strong-arm an audience is intrinsic to both theater and fascism. The reactions in those three audiences weren't identical, but what the experiences shared was a quality that people who go to the theater prize dearly — a sense that they are somehow in dialogue with what's happening onstage. That kind of communality can feel like the forging of a bond, a sense that one's view of the world is being affirmed. And in all three cases, it seemed that at least some members of the audience were left interrogating not just what they had seen but their own reactions to it, which is as good an indication as any that the shows worked. IF THERE'S ONE thing that has remained consistent about American political theater in the 21st century, it's the suspicion with which the term itself is greeted by a large segment of its presumed target audience. It doesn't help that today the two words, when applied to actual politics, have become a shorthand intended to connote performative nonsense, a showy but empty gesture aimed at the easily manipulated. Wikipedia's 'disambiguation' page, somewhat brutally, asks those who search the phrase whether they're interested in 'a theatrical genre' or 'political acts made only for the sake of appearance'; too many theatergoers might answer, 'Is there a difference?' Some people have an almost atavistic mistrust of anything that they think they've caught trying to convince them of something — it tends to get tarred as hectoring or didactic, or just as a slog. Conversely, critics have long nurtured deep contempt for any piece of theater they can dismiss as preaching to the choir and thus write off as smug or self-congratulatory. The overall aversion is understandable: The worst of political theater, blunt-instrument stage work that is only scolding or only flattering, tends not to be very interesting either as politics or as theater. But the genre isn't defined by its dullest examples. There's nothing inherently vulgar or anti-theatrical about a desire to bring people around to your way of thinking and, as for the choir, it needs nourishment and encouragement as much as anyone in the pews. Impassioning the faithful has been a valued function of theater since the Greeks. Nor is there anything wrong with attempting to speak truth to power — or, if power doesn't show up to listen, to at least speak truth about power; that has always been a central goal of theater, the talkiest of all art forms. We saw it literalized a decade ago, when 'Hamilton,' the final stage blockbuster of the Obama years, provided the occasion for the opening culture war salvo of the first Trump presidency. A week and a half after the 2016 election, then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a Broadway performance of the show that ended with a curtain speech prepared by the creative team in which the actor Brandon Victor Dixon (who played Aaron Burr) spoke on behalf of 'the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us' and expressed hope that he would feel inspired to 'work on behalf of all of us.' (Eight years later, the content, timing and tone were matched almost note for note by the very first of this year's post-inaugural Trump controversies, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde's call for mercy and compassion during a prayer service. Forced to sit and listen in silence, Trump couldn't have looked unhappier if he'd been stuck at a Broadway musical other than 'Cats.') Much about the 'Hamilton' moment has now been forgotten — including the fact that Pence was already in the lobby when the speech was made and was basically fine with it; it was, of course, Trump who had a meltdown and demanded an apology. Days later, 'Saturday Night Live,' playing to an even more privileged live audience, derided the curtain speech as a sop to bubble-dwelling liberals; there's never been a shortage of people on the left, or elsewhere in the arts, who will sneer at theater the minute they sniff self-importance, although, in retrospect, that speech seems both appropriate and generous to a fault. In the years that followed, political theater largely gave up on challenging the views of conservatives (to the extent that it ever tried to; it's hard to pick a fight with people who, by and large, don't show up to take the bait). It became, instead, an arena in which playwrights found fresh and energizing ways to involve and sometimes even indict their audiences. Jackie Sibblies Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, 'Fairview,' produced in New York in 2018 and brought back in 2019, was a meta-theatrical event in which a birthday party in the home of a Black family becomes an occasion for white characters to comment on the action and to play Black roles themselves; it ends with a Black character directly telling the audience that white people need to step aside and learn to listen to Black stories — and to underscore the point, white audience members are called up onstage as a way of denying them the safety of believing that they themselves aren't a culpable element of the dynamic they've just witnessed. Some white people who saw 'Fairview' felt pushed around; others experienced the intended discomfort but relished the theatricality of the gesture even if it came at their — our — expense. In ways its author may not have anticipated, 'Fairview' turned out to be the shape of things to come, heralding the arrival of a stage subgenre in which theater itself — our relationship to it, our complacency about it, the wealth that allows only some of us to regularly buy tickets to it — became a central subject of what we were seeing. Heidi Schreck's 'What the Constitution Means to Me' explicitly presented a debate on Broadway in 2019 about who is left out of a text intended to enshrine American values and ended each performance by putting the fate of the Constitution to an audience referendum. Those in attendance voted not to discard it at most performances, but you couldn't fail to consider the combination of money, access, geography and cultural predilection that limited who 'we the people' were each night. (That self-awareness didn't make much difference to the conservative publication National Review, whose critic harrumphed about well-heeled elite-lefty audiences and 'their imaginary Constitution.') Then came Covid-19 and, when live New York performances resumed after 18 months of dark theaters, the landscape had altered. During that hiatus, the protests over the murder of George Floyd breached whatever walls theater had managed to erect around itself and sparked a series of manifestoes, arguments and reckonings with the institutional whiteness and structural racism of much of American theater, both in New York and across the country. If there was one thing political theater could now speak about with authority, it was the democratic failures of theater itself. The most provocative work of that time added up to a searing demand that audiences consider not only what they were watching but their own role in the troubled history of an art form more defined by gatekeeping than its leaders had ever admitted. The young Black playwright-actor Jordan E. Cooper's 'Ain't No Mo',' which played Off Broadway before the pandemic and on Broadway in 2022, is a scabrous revue-style comedy about a plan to repatriate all Black Americans to Africa that explicitly acknowledges its audience several times, notably in a profane call-and-response segment about Barack Obama that hilariously reminded white theatergoers that they were in a house that didn't, for that night, belong to them. And Suzan-Lori Parks's biting 'Sally & Tom,' staged at the Public last year, reimagines the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in the context of creative and cultural clashes between the director of a play about the couple (he's also playing Tom) and his romantic partner, the author (she's also playing Sally). One of the shows their fictional company produces, 'Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It's All Your Fault,' felt like a wink at any one of a half-dozen recent plays on New York stages. Shows like these, and pointed revivals of Alice Childress's 'Trouble in Mind' (a 1955 play about the hypocrisies of then-progressive antiracist theater) and David Henry Hwang's 2007 'Yellow Face' (which sprang out of a real-life white-person-playing-Asian casting controversy) all but demanded a surrender of neutrality from any theatergoer attempting to hold on to it: In different ways, the plays told their audiences, 'Like it or not, you're in this too.' WHAT DO AUDIENCES want from political plays? Lately, the question seems to have been turned around: More often, it's, 'What does political theater want to do to its audience?' Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanize us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us? For the creators of theater, big-picture goals can sometimes come down to decisions as micro as how quickly to cut off a laugh or whether to hold for clapping after a line or steamroll over it. In writing 'Suffs,' 'I tried to avoid lines that ask for politically self-satisfied applause,' says Taub, 36, who also starred in the show as the suffragist Alice Paul. 'I didn't want this to be a show that liberals could sit and watch and then use to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side' … but I also didn't want them to leave [feeling] shamed or indicted.' In November, Taub took a working vacation from 'Suffs' to play Emma Goldman in 'Ragtime,' the director of which, Lear deBessonet, was frequently in attendance, watching from the back. DeBessonet, 44, had talked with her cast before performances began about steeling themselves for 'whatever happens [in the election], whether people are coming to it in a state of grief or unknowing or elation. We took the stance that deeply committing to the stakes of the story and letting an audience parse it for themselves was the way to go,' she says. 'We didn't need to be trying to add contemporary commentary.' Nevertheless, deBessonet could sense the ground shift in the 2,257-seat City Center when Levy sang 'Back to Before' the night after the election had been called. 'I never saw so many shoulders shaking,' she says. 'To me, this points back to, What is theater as an art form uniquely good at? It's the ability to feel feelings with other people, in real time, as a community. It's a space that contemporary life doesn't offer us that frequently.' In adversarial times, that space inevitably starts to seem more essential. DeBessonet's production was received so positively that there was instant talk of 'Ragtime' transferring to Broadway; if that happens, as is rumored, during the 2025-26 season, it's a safe bet that the words 'political theater' won't be at the top of the ads. It's not exactly considered a selling point for any show and, even for the people who create such work, the term is fraught. Toossi, who wrote 'English' while in grad school, feels some ambivalence about the label 'political play' — 'it can be easier for audiences to think of Middle Easterners as an issue than as people,' she says, adding that 'for me, what makes a play political is if its agenda is to make a certain group of people's lives better, and I fully cop to that.' But in previews, Toossi, 33, still found herself negotiating, and sometimes resisting, the reaction of her audience. In one scene, Elham, a young, fiercely intelligent aspiring medical student, struggles with an oral presentation and splutters to her classmates, in halting English, 'I want everyone to know I am not idiot.' The instructor corrects her, and Elham's next line, 'I am not an idiot,' gets a reliably huge laugh. 'Then she starts crying, and everyone's stomach drops,' says Toossi, who began to weep herself when she first heard the Broadway audience roar at the line. 'The intention is to implicate the audience in that laughter because the desire to get an audience to interrogate its privilege sounds to me like what a political play is or can be,' she says. On paper, 'English' can read as a deeply observed group character study. But when it's performed in front of a mostly white, mostly affluent crowd, it becomes something else as well. 'Because of who we're talking to — and that's who I wanted to talk to,' she says, 'yes, I think it's a political play, and I've made my peace with that.' She's not alone right now. This spring, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Tony winner last season for the political-meets-personal Southern drama 'Appropriate,' jumps back into the fray with 'Purpose,' a satire about a Black family dynasty in Chicago that bears some resemblance to Jesse Jackson's. It will be joined on Broadway by at least three plays that, though they weren't planned in anticipation of this political era, may be defined in the public conversation by the degree to which they do or don't feel right for it. Aside from a big-ticket revival of Shakespeare's 'Othello' in which Denzel Washington faces off against Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney will star in a stage adaptation of 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' his 2005 movie about the mainstream media and McCarthyism; and a revival of David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1984) with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk will test New York's appetite for a conservative playwright's signature work about remorseless hustlers. Political shows, whether new work or revivals, always vie for relevance but don't want to be seen as pouncing on a particular issue in a way that could be mocked as too on-the-nose; there's no greater praise for a play than saying it speaks to the moment without straining to do so. It will be a spring of auspicious timing (or not) and unplanned and/or fortuitous resonance, since we're not likely to get our first look at work directly inspired by the 2024 election or what has followed it until the fall of 2026 at the earliest. That will arrive in a world we can only pretend to be able to predict, and that lag may be the steepest hurdle political theater faces during the second Trump term. Breakneck speed is, in theater, not generally achievable. And at a time when many people feel we tumble over the edge of a new cliff every day, it's almost impossible to imagine what a timely artistic response might look or sound like. Will it offer catharsis, or solidarity, or pushback, or hope or outrage? Or will it just feel like a hand to hold on to while in free fall?
New York Times
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a Meeting About Vaccines Devolves, Hilariously, on Broadway
The third scene of the new Broadway production of 'Eureka Day' could be titled The Way We Discourse Now. As written by the playwright Jonathan Spector, the scene reliably has audiences laughing so loudly that the actors are drowned out. The situation is this: It is 2018. The principal of the progressive private school Eureka Day in Berkeley, Calif., and the four members of its executive committee must inform the other parents that a student has mumps, and therefore by law any students who have not been vaccinated must stay home to avoid exposure. (Vaccine skepticism was not uncommon in this milieu, particularly pre-pandemic.) The school leaders, an optimistic bunch dedicated to diversity and inclusion, hold a town hall-style meeting 'to see,' says the principal, Don, 'how we can come together as a community and exchange ideas around a difficult issue.' At the meeting, which is being held remotely, Don speaks while sitting in front of a laptop in the school library, addressing parents on a Zoom-like video app. The executive committee members are behind him. The rest of the school's parents weigh in on a chat-like function. Their messages — 144 of them — are projected above the actors for the audience to read. The online conversation quickly descends into vicious attacks. 'Typical behavior from the Executive Committee of FASCISM.' 'Sorry, chiropractors are not doctors.' 'That's child abuse!!!' 'The scroll of their projected comments ('Were you dropped on your head as a child?') is the exposed id of a community that professes perfect consideration of differing opinions but is actually a hotbed of intolerance,' Jesse Green, chief theater critic for The New York Times, wrote in his review of the play. Each comment is assigned to one of dozens of parents — each with their own names and avatars — and cued to specific moments in the script. The audience's attention is invariably drawn to the projected comments. The result is something quite unusual — and uproariously funny. In interviews, several artists involved in the play's current Manhattan Theater Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater and the first staging at Aurora Theater Company explained how this scene is staged, what makes it work and why a panicked Don (who is reading the comments) observes, 'Iiiiiii am feeling like this format is not facilitating us all bringing our best selves to this conversation.' These are edited excerpts from our conversations. 'Eureka Day' debuted in 2018 in Berkeley, Calif., as an Aurora Theater Company commission. JOSH COSTELLO (artistic director, Aurora Theater Company) This was pre-Covid. There were measles outbreaks happening because parents weren't vaccinating their kids. BILL IRWIN (Don, the principal) The play is set in, and in some ways the play is about, Berkeley, Calif. I used to do mime on Sproul Plaza. I know Berkeley and love Berkeley, in its foibles and deep integrity at the same time. And there is a kind of — I'm afraid to be condescending here, but with a cold eye — ethos there that the play is a portrait of. JONATHAN SPECTOR (playwright) When I was researching the play, I spent a lot of time in the depths of these internet message boards where people would argue about vaccines. And they're just so nasty. Because so much of the way that we live our lives — certainly around an issue like that — is online, I felt like not to bring that element into the play would be leaving out a really important part of how we interact. IRWIN These characters just love the notion of community and consensus. One of my favorite things lately in the show is anticipating, in Scene 2, the excitement about how great Scene 3 is going to be. This is pride going before a fall. The production's stage manager clicks into each chat message, posting each one at exact moments that the script cues to onstage lines. The messages appear above the actors, for the audience, and on the laptop screen that only the actor playing Don can read. SPECTOR There's no way to do it if that actor [playing Don] doesn't have [the messages] in front of him, because at moments he's a surrogate for the audience — his reaction to what's happening is a big part of that scene. NICKI HUNTER (associate artistic director, Manhattan Theater Club) For the first couple previews, we had to make sure we were amplifying Bill Irwin's voice appropriately — the laughter was so robust backstage, they couldn't hear the cues. CHARLES M. TURNER III (production stage manager) I call the show off stage right. I have a speaker that gives me the feed through the stage mics. But the laughter overtakes that. So sometimes I am following along in the script to see, 'Yes, Bill said that word,' or I'm waiting for a gesture from him. It's never the same way twice — in a beautiful way. I know that's probably scary for a director to hear. ANNA D. SHAPIRO (director) What you're trying to do is make sure the audience can relax into what they can't hear, understand they're not supposed to hear certain things, make them believe that they alone have grabbed certain other things — 'Oh, did you hear that?' The goal is to make it joyful, accessible and true all at the same time. TURNER Usually Bill will come off that scene and he'll give me a salute or a thumbs up, or we'll look at each other funny, or we'll be like, 'Wow, that audience.' There's always a little check-in. Pretty much we check in about that scene every day. As new actors and crew members come to the play, they are surprised by how the audience responds to the scene. SPECTOR That first performance, I had comments basically running constantly through the scene with no breaks, and you couldn't hear a word onstage because there was just so much laughter. COSTELLO He had to go back and rewrite, and work on the timing of when each thing pops up, so that a few really important lines of dialogue could still be heard. He built in pauses. He made it less funny. It made it flow better and allowed a couple key lines of dialogue to land, so you could follow what was happening. JESSICA HECHT (Suzanne, a parent on the executive committee) When we were in rehearsal, no one laughed. And I said, 'The audience is going to feel like I have such a flimsy argument.' And Jonathan said: 'No, I don't think they are. I think they're going to be laughing at the Zoom feed.' And I kept thinking, 'God, he's kind of full of himself!' Cut to the first preview, they're screaming with laughter. The four actors playing the parents act out an entire scene, with dialogue, knowing the audience is largely not hearing or paying much attention to them. 'EUREKA DAY' SCRIPT It is crucial that the actors do not hold for laughs coming from the Live Stream comments. The scene is built to allow many of the lines to be lost. HECHT I have to stay in my lane. I am not the agent of that scene. Bill and Chuck [the production stage manager] have a dance worked out, and there's very, very little left up to chance. I'd equate it to certain television shows where they have such a high level of comedy, and you wonder if there's some brilliant improvisatory spirit among the actors, and the answer is: No, it's being written and directed and acted within an inch of its life. IRWIN Sometimes you have to think of yourself as foreground — an important part of the story, but an almost pantomimic scene of people talking, and thinking that what they're talking about is the most important thing. Among those who produce the scene, theories abound about just what exactly makes it tick. SPECTOR Early on in Covid, I was constantly getting texted screenshots from friends on a Zoom for their kids' school, like, 'Oh my God, I'm in your play.' IRWIN It's Jonathan's shrewd writing. He's sort of a Berkeley Chekhov. Our illusions about where we sit and how important we are in the world. SPECTOR If we're actually in the room with another human being, there's a limit to how nasty we will be. But when you're online, that just goes away. SHAPIRO The scene makes people feel seen, acknowledging at every level our experiences of the last couple years. It's just been a horror show of no decorum. And whether that plays out on the larger scale — which it does — it plays out in a domestic scale as well, which is what happens when an essentially homogeneous group of people realizes that they don't share every belief and thought. SPECTOR [The audience's following the chat] probably says an unfortunate amount about how our attention works with technology. But that is also the thematic idea of the scene: that whatever attempt at thoughtful discussion and collaboration that maybe can be productive in real life, once you put it online, it just becomes impossible. COSTELLO The play feels more relevant than it did before the pandemic in some ways. When the right decided that there was political capital in denying the science of vaccinations, it changed that dynamic. The play is still about people on the left, but ultimately the play is not about vaccinations. The play is about, 'How do you get along with people when you can't agree on the facts?' IRWIN I'm very wary — I would almost use the word loathe to talk about the scene, because of its delicate mystery.
