Theater

“WAITING FOR GODOT IS A RUBBISH PLAY.” So declared Keith McNally in an Instagram post that caught my eye. “I urge you not to see Waiting for Godot.” Accompanying the statement was an image of the two stars who headlined this fall’s production at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. The play is the latest in what regular theatergoers and visiting tourists may have started to recognize as a recurring theme in New York’s theater scene: an overwhelming number of big-name Hollywood screen actors dotting their playbills. These players are here to make their bones and increase their prestige as “true” thespians, often by attaching themselves to tired and familiar productions. This has certainly not been lost on McNally.

Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study at home when the phone rang and a voice said, “This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me onto you.” David was the professor of Latin at Newcastle University and it emerged that Tom used him when he had queries about Latin, but now had a question about the ancient Greeks. When he couldn’t answer it, David suggested that Tom should call me. I felt a vast chasm of ignorance opening in front of me and have no memory of what the question was – but my reply must have satisfied him because he continued to throw the odd leg-break my way. To give some idea of his range of interests, on one occasion he became interested in the Greek perfect tense. Don’t ask me why, but that was at least something I could do.

Around midway through Masquerade – the new immersive adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, which sees a small audience whirled through a labyrinth of rooms and sets – I feel a hand on my shoulder. Smiling, I turn, expecting to see my friend – and immediately recoil. A tiny circus freak grins at me, revealing teeth like sharpened screwdrivers and a painted face lifted straight from Día de los Muertos. Later, in a carnival scene, that same freak hammers three nails into her face and an ice-pick up her nose. The carnival sequence is not in the original Phantom. It is one of the largest and perhaps most important of Masquerade’s additions.

What is theater? For most people it’s live performance, whether solo or in a troupe. Punchdrunk, the immersive theater company led by Felix Barrett, is not most people. Take its latest iteration now on at the Shed: Viola’s Room features no real-time actors. There is no stage and no seated audience. In this creepy gothic fairy tale, the story is narrated through headphones; the audience moves (sometimes walking, sometimes crawling) through a maze of spaces and the senses – including touch, smell, sight and sound – are as central as the script. Viola’s Room is intimate, small and contained. Every detail, every sound, every object feels intentional. Indeed, much of what makes Viola’s Room so beguiling is the rare sensation of giving up control.

There is a euphoric moment in Heathers: The Musical, based on the cult 1989 film of the same name, when anything seems possible. It happens when 17-year-old Veronica – facing ostracism from the popular clique for barfing on the group’s tyrannical leader, Heather Chandler – climbs through the bedroom window of her crush, J.D. He’s in bed, asleep. As she mounts him, she sings the sassy, come-hither “Dead Girl Walking.” She’ll be toast come Monday morning, she’s “hot and pissed and on the pill,” and J.D. is her “last meal on death row.” Cue the boldest sex scene I’ve ever seen on stage. Veronica straddles J.D. and takes charge, ripping open her shirt to reveal her bra.

In 1976, the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man arrived to shoot at an amusement park in California. A central attraction was the funhouse ride, where screaming thrillseekers hurtled past a red mannequin hanging garishly from a noose. It was only when a crew member touched the body – and an arm fell off, revealing bone – that they realized the mannequin was, in fact, a corpse. Painted in phosphorus and slathered in wax, it had been suspended, unnoticed, for years. So began a frenzied investigation into who this mystery cadaver was. An autopsy revealed that the man had died from a bullet wound. His jaw was wired shut; inside his mouth were ticket stubs to a crime museum and a penny dating back to 1924. He had been preserved using arsenic.

The Picture of Dorian Gray begins on an unadorned note. Sarah Snook sits alone on an otherwise empty stage, facing a camera which projects her image on to a giant vertical screen. Chameleon-like, she switches instantaneously between two characters: the awkward but sincere painter Basil and his more debonair – and dastardly – friend Lord Henry. Snook may be Australian and a woman, but borne on her considerable gifts we are transported to Victorian England. With no props save a paintbrush for Basil and a cigarette for Lord Henry, Snook chops and changes between the two men: she contorts her face into nervy, painful subservience for Basil and her voice into a high, febrile whine.

I wrote my play Doomers partly because, the night Sam Altman was fired, I was performing in a play called Zoomers. Someone — I forget who — suggested the idea of Doomers as a joke, and I thought it was a good one. My method for some, if not all, of my plays over the past few years has been to take some kind of mimetic material — downtown, Gen Z, polyamory — and to find what is surprising or human inside the meme. I try to locate a universal story in what might otherwise seem like a surface-level idea that feels niche, obnoxious or both. Sam Altman and the autistic tech world, in particular, represent opaque surfaces that I believe conceal something deeper.

When The Wiz first graced Broadway in 1975 it positioned itself as a gutsy ode to black culture. The adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with a book by William F. Brown and music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls, not only featured songs infused with R&B, gospel and soul but a fully black cast.It became a long-running hit, won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and inspired a 1978 movie of the same name, starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. The Wiz’s storied beginning and genre-busting premise only makes this revival feel more deficient. Directed by Schele Williams, with updated writing by comedian Amber Ruffin, The Wiz comes to the money-spinning Marquis Theatre following a national tour which visited thirteen cities.

As I entered the lobby of Circle in the Square Theatre, now showing Broadway’s hottest ticket, An Enemy of the People, staff were upselling booze. “Do you want to buy a shot?” offered one enthusiastic barman, waving a bottle of bracing Linie aquavit. He added, grinning: “It’s what the actors drink on stage.” Sam Gold’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s didactic and stuffy morality play aims to draw direct comparisons between past and present, including what alcohol we consume (more on that later). In late nineteenth-century Norway, a town finds itself prosperous by selling access to the local spa baths, which supposedly have curative properties. When Dr.