Laura Collins-Hughes

NEW YORK — The clown incursion began as a stealth operation, first with one and then another peering tentatively out at us from the wings. Intermission music was still playing, and the audience still milling, as the clowns assembled, until gradually a whole pack of them (a gaggle? a murder? a herd?) stood at the lip of the stage, gazing quizzically at us.

They looked so shy, so endearingly perplexed in their green overcoats and silly moth-eaten caps, the long earflaps out at an angle, as if the air had lofted them midflight. Surely these are harmless creatures, no? Surely if one of the clowns in “Slava’s Snowshow” should appear silently at your side, wanting to climb into the crowd and surf the seat backs, the decent thing to do is offer a hand?

That’s what I did, and others also did, and soon clowns were everywhere, agents of a joyous anarchy. In their innocence, the clowns were like small children, and we responded to them with fond indulgence. They clambered over the audience, they sprayed us with water — and we rooted for their triumph.

A note to the clown-averse, who are legion, and to those who shudder at the thought of an interactive experience like “Slava’s Snowshow,” which opened Thursday night at the Stephen Sondheim Theater: I did not expect to like it, let alone love it, as I did. Eons ago, when I saw “Slava’s Snowshow” off-Broadway at the Union Square Theater, I bristled all the way through. I even hated the famous blizzard at the end.

Now I don’t know what I could have been thinking. By the finish of Wednesday night’s preview performance, I was as relaxed as if I’d just had a massage — though a massage doesn’t, generally speaking, blast paper-confetti snow down your top that you’ll have to scoop out later. (Wardrobe tip: A turtleneck might be a good choice.)

Created and staged by Russian clown and performance artist Slava Polunin, “Snowshow” has been around since 1993. This is its second trip to Broadway, where it touched down for a holiday run at the more intimate Helen Hayes Theater 11 years ago — at another stressful time in this country, shortly after the economy tanked.

The show’s reappearance now, just as impeachment hearings are getting underway, is the kind of serendipity that we might not have known we needed.

It offers a respite from our fraught present, a portal into a dreamscape where the only dialogue is nonsense talk; where a clown shark swims by, barking at a boat made from a bed frame; where colored fog billows thickly and soap bubbles float in a cloud. (Long after that cloud dissipated, I spied a minuscule bubble floating alone through the dark in front of me and felt, briefly, stoned.)

“Snowshow” excels at the sort of giddy physical humor that tickles belly laughter from children. A clown with a torso pierced by arrows dies extravagantly and bloodlessly; the clown culprit, bow in hand, is darling anyway. But this piece isn’t only for kids, and it’s not all frivolity. There’s a forlornness to some of these clowns and a loneliness. Sometimes they’re scared, too, though they give us no cause to be.

The cast shifts performance by performance, but at the one I saw, it was Polunin who brought the finest touches of existential angst to the comedy. In a baggy yellow clown suit with big red shoes, his face framed by puffs of white hair, he looks like an artisanal Ronald McDonald, but he has such an easy grace and range that you glimpse in it some of the lineage of clowning: Charlie Chaplin in one moment; George Carlin, oddly, in another.

That night’s principal green-coated clown, the lovely Robert Saralp, evoked for an instant Robin Williams in “Waiting for Godot” mode.

These ghosts flickering through are a reminder that we tend to call a lot of our greatest clowns by other names (actor, comedian), while using the word clown — and the phrase “clown show” — to denigrate. The masterfully crafted “Snowshow,” with its benevolent mischief, is evidence of the wrongness of that.

One caveat about the performance space: The Sondheim is a big, tall house, and I sat in the orchestra. Is it as much fun upstairs? I don’t know. Is it safer from clowns and the water they spray so cavalierly? Definitely. The blinding snowstorm that finishes the show, blanketing the aisles with tiny strips of white tissue paper, can’t be as intense up there.

After the storm, and after the bows, the mammoth beach balls come out, rolled into the orchestra section, where the audience keeps them aloft. From the stage, the clowns watch us play.

It’s still a dreamscape, but it’s our dream now.

Production Notes:

Through Jan. 5 at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, slavaonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Created and staged by Slava Polunin; scenography by Slava Polunin and Viktor Plotnikov; production management, Tinc Productions; production stage manager, Lee Micklin; company manager, Joel Glassman; general management, KGM Theatrical. Presented by David Carpenter and John Arthur Pinckard, Hunter Arnold, Carl Daikeler, Curt Cronin, John Joseph, Gary Nelson, Van Kaplan/Jeff Wald, EMK International, David and Susan Buchanan/Michael T. Cohen/Gerry Ohrstrom and Mark and Alison Law/John Paterakis/Kayla Greenspan.

Cast: Slava Polunin, Francesco Bifano, Spencer Chandler, Georgiy Deliyev, Alexandre Frish, Vanya Polunin, Robert Saralp, Nikolai Terentiev, Elena Ushakova, Aelita West, Bradford West and Artem Zhimo.

This article originally appeared in

Review: 'Slava's Snowshow' Delivers Flurries of Joy

(Critic’s Pick)

Ronald Reagan had just been reelected, and Kushner, political to the core, channeled his alarm into the play. When his theater company, Heat &amp; Light, staged it in 1985, Oskar Eustis — now the artistic director of the Public Theater — was there. That’s how they met.

“There’s a scene where the characters sing ‘The Internationale,’” Kushner said the other day, “and someone in the audience started singing along with them. And that was Oskar.”

Eustis, who gave Kushner his professional debut two years later when he staged “Bright Room” at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco, is now directing a revival at the Public.

And Kushner, whose published script includes an appendix of alternate text that he wrote for the 1991 run at the Public, is taking yet another crack at the play, which is in previews for a Nov. 19 opening. This time, the modern character who’s always troubled him is joined by a character from 2019.

Kushner and some other well-known playwrights mixed insight with affection for their younger selves when they spoke recently about their first professionally produced works, and whether they rewrite old scripts. These are edited and condensed excerpts.

Known for: “Angels in America,” “Caroline, or Change”

Professional debut: “A Bright Room Called Day,” 1987, Eureka Theater, San Francisco. Age: 31.

Plot: In early 1930s Berlin, a group of artists reacts to rising fascism, their narrative occasionally interrupted by a modern-day New Yorker named Zillah.

Looking back: “The modern character was intended to suggest that successful projects of the political right are on a continuum. But the character, in a certain sense, never worked. I felt a degree of ambivalence — I still feel it — about plays and theater and whether or not it’s a good way to address political concerns, because it’s indirect. She was there to make sure that I made my point.”

Critical response: “An early front-runner for the most infuriating play of 1991.” (Frank Rich, reviewing its New York debut in The New York Times)

Rewrites?: “I rewrite everything. ‘Caroline, or Change,’ I haven’t changed a word. I listen to it, and I feel very happy with it.”

Afterlife: The published text suggests updating Zillah as needed, with Kushner’s approval. “I didn’t realize I was setting myself up for 30 years of college directors calling me up and saying, ‘Would you like to read my Zillah thing?’”

Known for: “The Mountaintop,” “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”

Professional debut: “Hoodoo Love,” 2007, Cherry Lane Theater, New York. Age: 26.

Plot: A play with music about a young black woman in Depression-era Memphis who longs to sing the blues.

Looking back: “Even though ‘Tina’ is my first musical, the reason it didn’t scare me to take on such a gargantuan project is because I have an instinct for music, and it started with my first play. As an artist, you want validation, and my first play wasn’t a critical darling. But it really taught me that it was OK to be me.”

Critical response: A “right-minded but ambling opus,” a flawed but “creditable early effort.” (Anne Midgette, in The Times)

Rewrites?: “That last draft is the snapshot of who I was as an artist at that time. I’m not ashamed about any mistakes.”

Afterlife: A new production opened this month in Chicago.

Known for: “M. Butterfly,” “Soft Power”

Professional debut: “F.O.B.,” 1980, Public Theater, New York. Age: 22.

Plot: Two young Chinese Americans spend an evening with an immigrant “fresh off the boat” in a comedy about heritage, assimilation and shame.

Looking back: “I had gone to the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. I saw an ad in The L.A. Times that said, ‘Study playwriting with Sam Shepard.’ At Padua, I studied with Sam and María Irene Fornés and Murray Mednick. I started learning to write more from my subconscious. And as I did that, I found that these themes started appearing on the page. I wasn’t aware that I had an interest in Asian and Asian American stories and identity issues.”

Critical response: “If West and East don’t precisely meet in ‘F.O.B.,’ they certainly fight each other to a fascinating standoff.” (Frank Rich in The Times)

Rewrites?: “I’m an inveterate rewriter. But I don’t feel like I want to rewrite ‘F.O.B.’ I wouldn’t know how to make it better, or fix it.”

Afterlife: “For a play that has references to the Bee Gees and John Travolta, I’m sort of amazed that it continues to be as alive as it is.”

Known for: “August: Osage County,” “Linda Vista”

Professional debut: “Killer Joe,” 1993, Next Lab, Evanston, Illinois. Age: 28.

Plot: In a squalid Texas trailer home, a drug dealer, his virginal sister and their father hire a contract killer to dispatch the siblings’ mother.

Looking back: “‘Killer Joe’ was written, some of it, in an alcoholic haze. I was reading a lot of pulp fiction: David Goodis and Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I got sober three weeks after it premiered. It wasn’t in any way the impetus for why I got sober, but I was going through a time in my life where I was, let’s just say, learning a lot about myself.”

Critical response: “If you can stomach its ugly nudity, flagrant violence, foul language and blatant sleaze, you’re in for one tense, gut-twisting thriller ride.” (Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune)

Rewrites?: “The whole process was eight years, from the time I first wrote it until we did it in New York. Once it’s published, I’m done with it.”

Afterlife: Matthew McConaughey played Killer Joe in the 2012 film. Orlando Bloom played him last year in London.

Known for: “Cambodian Rock Band,” “The Great Leap”

Professional debut: “Ching Chong Chinaman,” 2009, Theater Mu, Minneapolis. Age: 23.

Plot: A satire in which an indentured servant from China goes to work for a Chinese American family living a comfortable California life.

Looking back: “I wrote it as my college thesis without really understanding how to write a play or create a body of work. It was an amalgamation of all these things that I had known and felt over the past however many years. Once I wrote it, then came the much harder task of ‘Now it seems like I’m a playwright. How do I keep on writing?’ Because I was like, ‘Well, it seems like I just used up my one good idea.’”

Critical response: “Charming, amusing and entirely overcrammed.” (Dominic P. Papatola for Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.)

Rewrites?: “There’s almost a time limit on how long you have before the play is set. I really can’t go back to it as a writer because I’m a different person with different interests. I’d be rewriting someone else’s work.”

Afterlife: “It got done in a lot of different cities, and I think that began my career as a playwright who’s worked in a lot of different regions.”

Known for: “The Beard of Avon,” “Freedomland”

Professional debut: “The Psychic Life of Savages,” 1995, Woolly Mammoth Theater, Washington, D.C. Age: 37.

Plot: A hallucinatory riff on the tormented lives of the poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell.

Looking back: “I spent three years on it. It was like I was going to war to project myself onto the stage. I look back on it now and it’s almost painful to see it. And I’m amazed in a good way to see it. I was fighting for my right to be an artist.”

Critical response: An “exultantly mean, painfully affecting comedy.” (Lloyd Rose, The Washington Post)

Rewrites?: “I think they need to happen with every production. The only thing I ever want to be in my whole life is in a rehearsal room with one of my plays, just doing anything that makes it stronger, clearer, better, freer.”

Afterlife: Productions at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven.

Known for: “Milk Like Sugar,” “Luck of the Irish”

Professional debut: “Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land,” 2004, Humana Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville. Age: 29.

Plot: In a white suburb, the daughter of an upwardly mobile black family wants to be Snow White.

Looking back: “The end of the play, the stage direction is that the forest grows and a new world begins. It’s like, ‘Let’s overthrow the world. We just need a whole new world, and then we’ll be OK.’ That says ‘early play’ to me.”

Critical response: “A surreal fable” showing “colossal” imagination but dissolving “into a welter of confusing language and imagery.” (Bruce Weber in The Times)

Rewrites?: Not for “Sans-Culottes.” But “my play that’s up at Repertory Theater of St. Louis, ‘Feeding Beatrice,’ was my thesis in graduate school. In the last few months, I reworked it. It has been wild, going back.”

Afterlife: “It had one or two productions. They were small.”

My First Produced Play? Ah, I Remember It Well.

Tony Kushner was in his 20s when he wrote “A Bright Room Called Day,” on the graveyard shift at his job as a hotel switchboard operator.

They tussle. She stabs him and wins. Then she offers to suture the wound. If, that is, he has 5 euros to pay her for it.

Classic meet-cute, right? In Sylvia Khoury’s insidiously sharp new play “Power Strip,” on Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 stage, Yasmin and the would-be thief, Khaled, do get together. Just don’t expect a rom-com resolution.

Set on the outskirts of a chaotically overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island Lesbos, where Yasmin and Khaled are part of the exodus from Syria’s brutal civil war, “Power Strip” is about displacement, desperation and dreams of acculturation.

But for all the timeliness of Tyne Rafaeli’s production, arriving as the 8-year-old conflict is making fresh headlines in the United States, “Power Strip” isn’t the sort of theatrical experience — like “The Jungle,” say, or “Flight” — in which the audience feels, viscerally, the urgency of refugee life. A certain stiffness, in the performance and the script, keeps it at a regrettable remove.

If “Power Strip” is more striking intellectually and politically than dramatically, though, it is striking nonetheless.

At 20, Yasmin (Dina Shihabi) has only recently awakened to the forces that have shaped her life — men fighting over land, men making pawns of girls and women, men deciding what makes a woman a treasure and what makes her trash.

Back in Damascus, before the war rendered life there untenable, Yasmin dutifully saved herself for marriage to her fiancé, Peter (Ali Lopez-Sohaili), who seems like an arrogant jerk, even in her gauzy memories.

Now she is saving herself in a different, more heroic sense. Like Darja, the tenacious Polish immigrant in Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound,” Yasmin is on a gritty, grueling quest for survival. She will allow nothing to get in the way of her self-rescue.

Up on her bleak little patch of rocky hillside, just outside the walls of the rat-infested camp, she has rigged up a power strip where she can plug in her space heater and charge her phone. (The set is by Arnulfo Maldonado, the mistily moody lighting by Jen Schriever.) Yasmin arrived at the camp with her father, a once-joyful man now drunken and depressed, and she looks out for him, to a point. Her plans for the future don’t include him.

Munich is where she sees herself, and so she practices her German and squirrels away all the money she can to pay a fixer to take her there. When Khaled (Darius Homayoun) asks if she knows where he might buy a space heater — a decent guy, he wants it for his ailing mother — the unsentimental Yasmin charges him for the answer.

“Two euros and I’ll tell you where to get one,” she says.

She and Khaled are soon hanging out anyway, helping each other endure and navigate the limbo of their present while dreaming of a future that, just maybe, it’s possible for them to share.

Yet the past has a hold on them both — and while she’s trying to slough it off like an old skin, he values it: not just the Islamic traditions they grew up with, but also famous stories from English history and Greek mythology.

To us, this may be touching proof of his affinity for Western culture even as Europe pulls up the drawbridge against refugees like him. To Yasmin, it has a different resonance.

“I guess I like the idea of a world,” Khaled says, “where there are gods sitting around on Mount Olympus making sense of things.”

“A world where women turn into trees?” she replies, thinking of the nymph Daphne, who was transformed into a laurel bush to evade Apollo’s sexual attentions.

“Why did women turn into trees again?” Khaled asks.

“To keep their bodies pure, remember?” Yasmin says.

The notion of female moral and sexual purity — and the way male pride and predation are bound up in that — is a central theme of “Power Strip,” and it’s to Rafaeli’s credit that it becomes apparent only gradually. Where the playwright gives too much away on the page, the director cleverly fosters ambiguity in service of a more potent reveal.

Yasmin, on her lonely hillside, understands that in both the culture she’s leaving and the one she’s determined to enter, traditional ideas about women and their agency are stubborn things, deeply and often subtly embedded in the stories we’ve repeated for millenniums.

What she’s after is a template of her own making — and the kind of happy ending that’s only possible if she has the freedom and courage to find it, and define it, for herself.

‘Power Strip’Through Nov. 17 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Review: In 'Power Strip,' a Syrian Story Both Bleak and Striking

NEW YORK — Yasmin is asleep outdoors, bathed in the orange glow of her space heater, when a man sneaks up to steal her source of warmth. A young woman alone, she appears defenseless to this stranger, an easy target — until she snaps to alertness and springs on him with a violence that’s almost feral.

“Tell me,” she said. “What is a nation?”

On a late-summer afternoon in the bowels of the Baruch Performing Arts Center, on the edge of Manhattan’s Flatiron district, the queen posed that question again and again. It was a rehearsal of a new play, Barbara Hammond’s “Terra Firma,” and Andrus Nichols was playing the queen.

Best known as a founder of the theater troupe Bedlam, which she helped make into a critical darling, Nichols is now the artistic director of the Coop, a new company that she formed with a group who includes Kate Hamill, another Bedlam alumna, as resident playwright.

Like the queen in “Terra Firma,” the Coop’s inaugural production, Nichols has been thinking a lot about the beliefs she holds dear and the kind of society that she wants to nurture.

For fans of her and Hamill, who played two of the Dashwood sisters in Hamill’s breakthrough Jane Austen adaptation, “Sense &amp; Sensibility” — a long-legged downtown hit for Bedlam — the emergence of the Coop is exciting news.

The joy is tempered, though, if you’d been hoping to see them team up again with Eric Tucker, the artistic director of Bedlam, who founded that company with Nichols.

It has been a while, she said, since she has been in touch with Tucker, a much-multitasking actor-director whose pared-back aesthetic has become synonymous with Bedlam.

“We haven’t really spoken since the split, which is —” She paused a moment. “Which is OK with me. That was last year.”

On a September morning before rehearsal of “Terra Firma,” she and Hamill were sitting side by side in a corner booth of a Greenwich Village hotel cafe, each with a bowl of yogurt. The two are so close that they finish each other’s sentences.

“You can be so rigorous in the work,” Hamill was saying, “if the rehearsal room is —“

This, they said, is the kind of warm, fun, respectful atmosphere that they want to create with the Coop, which counts among its dozens of artist members many Bedlam veterans. (Working with one company does not preclude working with the other.) Actor Jason O’Connell, Hamill’s fiancé, is on the Coop’s artistic advisory board. Tom O’Keefe, who was in the original cast of Bedlam’s “Saint Joan,” is in “Terra Firma,” which is now in previews and opens Oct. 10 at Baruch.

Directed by Shana Cooper, the play is set in a micronation so tiny you could count its population on one hand, and so precarious that its so-called terra firma is actually an old naval defense platform surrounded by ocean. Grappling as it does with questions of sovereignty and social cohesion, it’s a philosophical fit for the fledgling Coop, which intends to be both a roost for its members to return to and a kind of artistic co-op. (Feel free, its founders said, to pronounce the name either way.)

Nichols and Hamill, friends since they met in an acting class about a dozen years ago, used to be roommates on the Lower East Side. It was in their kitchen, pre-Bedlam, that Hamill wrote “Sense &amp; Sensibility.”

“I bet Andrus $100,” she said, “that I could write a feminist adaptation of a Jane Austen classic, because I was so frustrated that everything was through the male gaze, constantly.” (Her wearing a #TIMESUP T-shirt to pose for the portrait with this article is in keeping with her feminist outlook, though she said she wanted “to let the shirt speak for itself.”)

Nichols met Tucker in 2009, in a monthlong acting intensive at Shakespeare &amp; Company in Massachusetts. Success greeted Bedlam from the time it arrived on the New York theater scene in 2012 with George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” lauded for Tucker’s shoestring staging and Nichols’ powerhouse performance in the title role. But the company’s oxygenated alchemy reached a new level in 2014 with the premiere of “Sense &amp; Sensibility,” directed by Tucker, who acted in it alongside Hamill and Nichols.

Hamill, whose new play “The Piper” is in development at the Coop, recently landed, for the third year in a row, on American Theater magazine’s list of the season’s most-produced playwrights. She now has a considerable body of work. But that frolicking “Sense,” which has remained in Bedlam’s repertoire, was her first production — a hit then and in 2016, when it came back for a 10-month encore off-Broadway.

It was during that second run, when Bedlam at last hired a managing director, that Nichols quietly stepped down from her position as Bedlam’s producing director, for which she had earned a part-time salary, while Tucker earned a full-time salary as artistic director. The company’s slender budget hovers around $1 million.

Asked whether the disparity in compensation had been a warning sign, she acknowledged that “there was an imbalance” in their partnership. Still, after she acted in her last Bedlam shows in February 2017 (her choice; Tucker asked her a couple of times after that to reprise roles out of town, and she declined), she remained on the board of the company for another year or so.

“It was my child,” she said. “I built it.”

And when she left, there was so little drama to it — no angry fight, nothing like that — that Tucker didn’t realize the break was for good.

Over the phone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is appearing in Bedlam’s off-Broadway-bound production of “The Crucible,” he said he thought that Nichols (who was still with the company when she joined the touring production of Ivo van Hove’s “A View From the Bridge” in 2016) stepped back from Bedlam to concentrate on building her acting career.

In that fundamental misreading of events there is a poignancy: two people with a shared taste who clicked artistically but didn’t know each other well when, at Tucker’s urging, they started a company together. He said that Nichols came to feel like a sister to him and that it made sense, given how close she and Hamill are, that they would start their own troupe.

The Coop’s written vision statement, which outlines its commitment to “a culture of collaboration, experimentation and trust,” makes one eye-catching exception to its belief in radical inclusion — an exception that allows the rule.

“There are no auteurs here,” it says. “Everyone speaks with authority.”

And when Tucker mentions that he has always thought of Bedlam as “a place to have a little laboratory and be able to do my process” in tandem with an ensemble, while Nichols speaks of the Coop as the kind of artistic home and community that she thought she was building with Bedlam, you get the sense that they may have been operating under conflicting assumptions all along.

Bedlam “wasn’t my home,” she said. “That wasn’t what it ended up being.”

“So,” she added, a swell of optimism in her voice. “Let’s try again.”

Flourishing in Bedlam, but Flying to the Coop

NEW YORK — A clipboard in her hand, a tiara on her head, the queen was drafting her country’s constitution, the sort of idealistic undertaking that requires the mulling of common values. So she sought out a citizen and bounced a question off him.

NEW YORK — I didn’t go back to the Broadway double bill “Sea Wall/A Life” to rereview it. I went back, twice, to try to figure out what was real.

That’s not the usual task with theater, a species of choreographed make-believe. But when a moment in Simon Stephens’ “Sea Wall” morphed into a tiny, persistent mystery, it sent me cartwheeling through questions of art and truth, trust and deception. Weeks later, it still makes me squirm a bit.

Not the show itself, mind you — tragicomic monologues of fathers and children, love and grief, starring Tom Sturridge in “Sea Wall” and Jake Gyllenhaal in Nick Payne’s “A Life.” Sturridge, in particular, is so comfortably natural that he might convince you of anything.

It was his performance that staggered me the first time I went to the Hudson Theater this month to see Carrie Cracknell’s production. A seemingly spontaneous moment was so striking that I opened my review with it.

An electronic voice, apparently emanating from a device somewhere in the orchestra section, intruded into the wordless last moments of “Sea Wall.” This is the sort of mood-shatterer that routinely outrages audiences, but Sturridge refused to let that happen. “It’s OK,” he soothed, and somehow the way he said it made it so. Down went our ire; on went the show.

The next morning, though, after I filed my take on the production, suspicion crept in. My editor told me that a colleague who’d seen a different performance had witnessed a moment similar (but maybe not identical; hard to say) to the one I’d described. Alarmed, I emailed the show’s publicist, who responded that it had been real — an Amber Alert and an improvised response. Uneasy, I asked again; he assured me more emphatically. So we went with it.

Then, about 24 hours later, came a tweet from an unfamiliar Twitter account. Whoever sent it, the tone was benign: “Hi Laura, the cell phone going off is part of the show ... when he says it’s okay. It happened in the two times I saw the show.”

Uh-oh. Had the moment I’d found so masterful been contrived? It wasn’t in the copy of the script the press had been given, and I didn’t remember it from the production’s run earlier this year, downtown at the Public Theater.

Back I went to the publicist. Maybe it was just my eroding sense of certainty, but his replies to my freaked-out queries seemed both narrower (there are “no phone sounds in the show like this”) and squishier.

Because this was early August. Only one night before, a backfiring motorcycle had caused a panic in Times Square, with pedestrians seeking shelter in theaters from what they thought was gunfire. A few weeks earlier, shows were disrupted by a flash flood warning coming over multiple audience members’ phones. So was this was just the Hudson staff taking extra care to insulate the performance from the anxiety outside?

“Sea Wall/A Life” is somewhat unconventional anyway. Sturridge is onstage, in character, well before the play begins. Even earlier, Gyllenhaal spends a while up there. With actors already in the room, a recorded turn-your-phones-off reminder would disrupt the atmosphere.

Could it be that the show, consequently, was more likely to be riddled with interruptions by noise-making devices, and that “It’s OK” was Sturridge’s smart go-to response? If so, that wouldn’t make his gentle skill at keeping the audience with him, phones notwithstanding, any less extraordinary.

But if it was fabricated, this precarious moment so close to the finish of such a delicate monologue, it would be sheer recklessness — like building a fragile castle from the finest beach sand, then threatening to kick it over just as the tide approaches, about to lap it away.

If the Amber Alert was fake, too, that would be worst of all, amping our sense of real-world danger in service of a play that in no way needs that kind of aid.

The more I thought about it, the more tangled I got. I trusted nothing — which, granted, might just be a sign that I’m a journalist. But underneath the skepticism, something else nagged at me: the sense that my incertitude was a metastasis of our jittery, gaslit world, where baseline reality is increasingly in dispute.

To settle my own mind, I went into reporter mode. Returning to the Hudson the next evening, I watched “Sea Wall” in a state of heightened tension. Would there be cellphone interruptions? Amber Alerts? Would Sturridge say, “It’s OK”?

The following Monday night, I went again: same thing. Maybe because, phonewise, the ushers had grown even more vigilant? Still, it felt inconclusive.

So, knowing from red-carpet photos that Tom Hiddleston had been at opening night, and since I was interviewing him about “Betrayal,” the Broadway show he’s starring in, I asked him about the performance he saw.

He hadn’t heard an electronic device go off. “But I remember ‘It’s OK,’” he said, unsure what had prompted the phrase.

“Is it in the text?” he asked.

No, I said. But might I have been given an outdated version of the play?

It occurred to me that I had Stephens’ email address, from a story I wrote a few years ago about a protégé of his. I sent a message, explaining my puzzlement.

Eighty minutes later, Stephens’ unequivocal response arrived.

“It’s absolutely not a scripted moment,” he wrote. “I think both Tom and Jake have been directed by Carrie Cracknell to perform as though they are in the actual room that they are, well, performing, in.” (Look at those commas. Playwrights! Even their emails tell you where to pause.) Moments like the one I described are “a consequence of bold direction and brave acting,” he said.

Two minutes after that, a second message from Stephens: “The more I consider this the more central it seems to the whole show. We wanted to make a piece that acknowledged a shared humanity with the audience.

“Shared humanity,” he added, “seems a politically urgent thing to acknowledge nowadays.”

It moved me, this argument; I felt myself actually exhale. Because I agree with him, not only about the urgency but also about what Sturridge and Gyllenhaal achieve, there in the room with us.

I’d like to think that Stephens neatly resolved the mystery. But really? I can’t quite reconcile the recurrence of “It’s OK.”

I was tempted, of course, to put the question to Sturridge. But having asked the publicist four times already, I knew the show’s official answer. I also worried slightly about getting inside an actor’s head.

And in the grand scheme, I realize, it doesn’t matter: beautiful performance, crystalline play.

It’s just that I prefer to know where, beneath the make-believe, the solid ground lies. Lose your footing there, and you’re in for a perilous fall.

The Cell, the Spell and the Mystery of 'Sea Wall/A Life'

(Critic's Notebook)

NEW YORK — On the vast spectrum of playmaking, the New York Musical Festival hews much closer to candy-colored convention than to gritty, gray outré. It’s a Manhattan institution with a Middle American cautiousness about it — a place hospitable to new work that doesn’t push boundaries or ruffle feathers.

Yet “Till,” by far the best of four shows I saw at this year’s festival, may unsettle your very soul. It’s the story of Emmett Till, and its run, which ends Sunday, is timed to coincide with what would have been his 78th birthday, had he not been brutally murdered in the summer of 1955. A black teenager from Chicago who had just turned 14, he was visiting relatives in the Jim Crow South when some white men snatched his future away from him.

With a book by Leo Schwartz and D.C. Cathro, and music and lyrics by Schwartz, “Till” is the story of that summer — of sweet, funny, rambunctious Emmett (Taylor A. Blackman); his mother, Mamie (Denielle Marie Gray), who’s trying so hard to bring her son up right and keep him safe; and his teasing grandmother, Alma (Judith Franklin), who cheers Emmett and Mamie on.

In a smart and inventive production, beautifully cast and sensitively directed by N.J. Agwuna at the Pershing Square Signature Center, this musical achieves something difficult and rare. It blows the dust of history off a tragedy and brings a martyr to exuberant, mischievous, complicated life. Emmett’s not a saint here, nor is he the corpse in the infamous photo that his mother wanted the world to see. He’s a regular kid — a little cocky, a little dreamy. And like Mamie, we wish the world for him.

With an excellent cast of six lending their rich voices to a score that’s part gospel, part old-fashioned musical (music direction and arrangements are by Lena Gabrielle, choreography is by Kenny Ingram), “Till” cuts between Chicago and Money, Mississippi, where the white characters are sinister in half-masks and gloves. (Costumes are by Andy Jean.) Emmett, for all his self-assurance, and all the efforts of his family to prepare him, doesn’t truly understand the danger there.

“Till” is not a perfect musical; it's a show still en route to its final form. For now, a couple of Mamie’s songs seem awkwardly placed, disrupting the action and emotion, while the event that incites Emmett’s murderers needs to be depicted with greater clarity so the audience isn’t left puzzled at a crucial moment.

There’s also an unintended tonal danger in the script, which this production skirts but others might fall into: the perception that Emmett, by failing to fathom the perils of a racist society, might in any way share the blame for his death that belongs to his killers alone. As one character reassures another, speaking about something else entirely: “Their actions could never be your fault.”

“Till,” which in its final moments projects that chilling photo, is an inherently political work. So, in a different way, is “Leaving Eden,” a show that feels like half of a very promising musical. With a book and lyrics by Jenny Waxman, and music by Ben Page, it opens with captivating harmonies sung by three women who straddle two eras: the current day and the dawn of humanity.

The contemporary strand of the show doesn’t work. But the half set in the Garden of Eden, where Lilith is the curious, playful, courageous first woman and Adam is her fearful, controlling, dim bulb of a mate, is great fun.

Adam (Ian Ward) is in some ways a nice enough guy — and, hey, he is the only guy around — but he makes a lot of secondhand pronouncements cloaked in God’s word, as a way of getting Lilith (Sarah-Anne Martinez) to behave. She’s hard to control, and control is Adam’s whole game. Eve (Gabrielle McClinton), the second woman, turns out to be easier to manipulate.

The show’s latter-day plot is about Lily (Janet Krupin) and Adam (Azudi Onyejekwe), whose tiresome relationship gets predictably tangled up with a modern-day Eve (McClinton). But it struggles to mold itself to the biblical parallels.

The best thing about the show, directed by Susanna Wolk with music direction by Nathan Dame, was Martinez’s New York debut. Comic and poignant, delicate and bold, it was a terrific performance, and I wish I could tell you to see it. But “Leaving Eden,” alas, has ended its festival run.

“Flying Lessons,” a poppy, madly overstuffed show that continues through Sunday, also boasts a standout performance from an actress I’d never seen before. Her name is Michelle Coben, she has perfect comic pitch, and if I tell you that her voice is part squeaky toy and part foghorn, I want you to understand that she’s somehow a delight to listen to.

Written by Donald Rupe, who also directs (additional music is by Cesar De La Rosa, music direction by Jason M. Bailey), “Flying Lessons” is about Isabella (Esmeralda Nazario), an eighth-grader seeking to discover the formula for greatness in her research for a paper on Amelia Earhart (Megan Valle) and Frederick Douglass (Brandon Martin). A smart kid sinking under the weight of too much responsibility at home, she has no sympathy for her beleaguered, financially stretched mother, Lydia (Desiree Montes), but she will by the end of this lesson-teaching show.

What pleasure there is comes from the school scenes, where Isabella’s classmates (including Coben as the shallow, Kardashian-loving Cynthia) are awkwardly darling — although it strains credulity, and sets up yet another teachable moment, when the “Phantom”-loving Billy (Erick Perafan) sends Madison (Deanna Quintero) into mad-crush mode. Bonus: David Lowe, as their vice principal, is an excellent king dork.

There are geeks aplenty, too, in “Black Hole Wedding,” whose run has ended. Directed by Craig J. George, with book and lyrics by Katherine Brann Fredricks, music by Paul Nelson and music direction by Nevada Lozano, this is a frantic, messy, hit-you-over-the-head satire that pits an evil chief executive (Sean McDermott) against an idealistic clean-energy engineer named Raymond (Jonathan Miller).

Thank goodness for the soothing presence of Mimi Robinson as Summer, a corporate masseuse who becomes Raymond’s girlfriend — a relationship that’s not terribly believable as romance and might be more entertaining if they were just really close pals. It also might be more interesting if getting kidnapped by the bad guys didn’t turn her into a damsel in distress for Raymond to rescue.

As she tells him, early on, “Relaxed alertness has survival value.” And if she knows that, I bet she can take care of herself.

Event Information:

New York Musical Festival Through Aug. 4 at various locations; 866-811-4111, nymf.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/theater/new-york-musical-theater-festival-review.html" id="9237a553-6329-3c1d-acd2-afcfabaf0a68">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

'Till' Brings a Tragedy to Life

This roll call of violence is the climax of Isaac Gomez’s one-woman play “the way she spoke,” at the Minetta Lane Theater, but he doesn’t require the performer to read it all the way through.

“She should stop when she needs to stop,” he writes in a merciful author’s note, and when Kate del Castillo reached that point the other night, her cheeks were wet with tears.

Directed by Jo Bonney, “the way she spoke” is an aching, outraged work of vigil, protest and inquiry — albeit one whose human drama remains at a strange remove in this frustrating Audible Theater production.

An act of bearing witness, the play is the story of Gomez’s quest to understand the epidemic of murders and disappearances of women that raged for years in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and that he says has not stopped. He grew up just across the border, in El Paso, Texas.

As Gomez did, the playwright-narrator in “the way she spoke” travels to Juárez to interview locals for their stories — a mother whose daughter disappeared, a man convicted of multiple murders, the driver of a bus that took women to work in the area factories. The narrator’s trip — to a city he discovers to be more dangerous and fearful than he grasped as a boy — forms the spine of this structurally ambitious play.

But the dominant voice doesn’t belong to any of the people of Juárez. It belongs to the playwright-narrator.

The performance opens with an actress arriving in an empty theater to read a script, from start to finish, for its author, her old friend. His play demands that she embody him and the various people he encounters in Juárez. The actress character is meant sometimes to be herself, sometimes to be only haltingly familiar with the script and sometimes to disappear into its roles.

This is immensely challenging, and possibly not as sensible as using at least one more actor would be. Del Castillo, an accomplished screen actress and a Telemundo star, seems miscast here, unable to slip into the skin of her many characters.

Drawing from too narrow a range of physical mannerisms, she alters her accent but doesn’t do much else vocally to distinguish among roles, which can make it hard to follow along. That’s especially unfortunate because Audible plans to record this production for release as an audio play.

At least the live audiences have the advantage of visual cues — though this production makes some baffling use of Aaron Rhyne’s projections, which would convey more potent atmosphere if they didn’t blend into the stage’s bare brick walls.

Because the characters never feel fully inhabited, it’s difficult to believe in them, and that’s a particular problem when the play is an act of testimony.

In an interview with the playwright, a tormented mother implores him to pass along a message, which she intends for anyone who knows who has taken her city’s many missing daughters.

“Have pity on the families suffering,” she says. “Give them back.”

NEW YORK — In the script, the list of murdered girls and women goes on for more than eight pages, in gruesome detail — so many rapes and shootings and stranglings, so many body parts chopped off.

Laura Collins-Hughes

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