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we all know how this ends

Hillary & Clinton, starring the one and only Laurie Metcalf, by Lucas Hnath.

This play feels like it’s running on a parallel path to Doll’s House Part 2, Hnath’s other recent Broadway show. This play premiered in Chicago before Doll’s House hit Broadway, and it feels maybe like an attempt at what he succeeds magnificently there.

Again, it’s a play about a woman. And this woman’s reunion with her husband. Her husband who has made some mistakes but at heart is perhaps more of a buffoon than malicious figure.

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“Access doesn’t just mean structural access; it means programmatic and economic accessibility,” [Gregg] Mozgala said. “What is the responsibility of artists and institutions to make sure that when people go looking, they don’t say, ‘We couldn’t find anyone’? Who is welcoming and training the next generation of Ali Strokers, and how does the larger culture need to change?””

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Ali Stroker’s Tony Win Is a Huge Step for Performers With Disabilities

Let’s also not forget that Ali was able to accept her award because she was backstage after the Oklahoma! number, but not able to get onstage for their Best Revival win because there was no ramp.

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Plano is everything I hope a play is going to be when I sit down in a theater and more. A sexy, fluid romp through the past and future. Looking familiar trauma in the face.

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This feels like a story about women’s sexuality and men’s societal posturing within the strict binary gender roles of musical theatre’s “golden age.”

Daniel Fish’s production left me with an incurable yearning.

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How These Black Playwrights Are Challenging American Theater

Jackie Sibblies Drury, 37, is the author of “Fairview,” a comedy-turned-confrontation that challenges the white gaze through which black art is often filtered. Jeremy O. Harris, 29, wrote “Slave Play,” examining fraught race relations by following interracial couples through “antebellum sexual performance therapy.” Antoinette Nwandu, 39, is the author of “Pass Over,” about two black men trapped on a stretch of pavement because they are worried about running afoul of the police. And Jordan E. Cooper, 24, wrote “Ain’t No Mo’, ” about a collective exodus of African-Americans from the United States after the promise of the Obama era is followed by the Trump administration. [NYTimes]

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“The Black Lives Matter movement definitely changed the making of black plays. We are the first generation who have had to watch our deaths on loop. Seeing a singular black body dying on loop changed the way black people thought about themselves in this country, changed the way they thought about this country, in a way that I don’t think it changed the way white people thought about themselves in this country or the way that white people thought about the country.”

— Jeremy O. Harris, “How These Black Playwrights are Challenging American Theater”

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danger knows full well that caesar is more dangerous than he

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

Theatre for a New Audience

dir. Shana Cooper

Shakespeare’s Caesar is a great script with timely circumstances. This production, coming to Theatre for a New Audience after a run at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, rides in on the heels of a number of recent Julius Caesar revivals. Most notably, perhaps, being the Public’s infamous production at The Delacorte two summers back. Shana Cooper’s Caesar takes perhaps the opposite approach. Instead of outfitting the characters in a very specific place in a very specific time (The Presidency of 2017), the Rome of TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center seems to live in an unspecified luminal space.

As a society currently very familiar with the story of Julius Caesar, this production couldn’t seem to decide what it wanted to add to the conversation. I found myself yearning for the logic behind the process. Why this version of this play at this specific moment in history?

The Calpurnia/Portia scenes are tricky. These women have 5 minutes to justify their presence in this play; to reach the same level of gravitas and intimacy as the men. The women feel stifled all across in this production. Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, brilliant in this summer’s Sugar In Our Wounds, has been given a few extra moments in an attempt, I suspect, to imbue meaning upon women who don’t have much meaning in the original text.

The production needs to decide if it is making a comment on masculinity and commit to its choice either way. Throwing two extra women in small ensemble roles is both not enough and too much.

An emotional wash spiked by moments of sharp, poignant, powerful clarity. The murder of Cinna the poet, a thrilling artistic move! Yet the murder of the titular character (spoilers, oops), decidedly less so. The physical language of the world was inconsistent, but occasionally absolutely brilliant. At one point Caska kissed another soldier on the head, exploring tenderness in the riled-up masculinity of war. The final fight combat sequence has stuck in my head for days afterward.

Important moments felt rushed (The introduction of Mark Antony) while other moments lacked the spark to stay engaging (Calpurnia’s scene, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t feel the women in the cast were set up for success). Perhaps later into their run the pace will iron out. Or perhaps the pace set at OSF doesn’t translate here. 

Matthew Amendt’s Cassius, a standout in my opinion, was fierce and motivated. Brutus (Brandon J Dirden) and Mark Antony (Jordan Barbour) were sometimes surface-level brooding. Stephen Michael Spencer as Caska brought a series of unexpected choices and exciting physicality. The set design by Sibyl Wickersheimer was effective without being focus-stealing, and vaguely evoked last season’s Winter’s Tale environment. The costumes (Raquel Barreto) were similarly utilitarian-chic, with the exception of the odd outfits worn at the top of play.

This production has a very strong foundation, things are bubbling beneath the surface and these ideals echoing in our minds endlessly in 2019.

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saying goodbye post-immersion

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Hamlet in pictures

The Globe Ensemble ask ‘who’s there?’ in the first production of our summer season. Hamlet runs until 26 August 2018. Find out more about the production.

All images by Tristram Kenton.

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Othello in rehearsal.

Claire van Kampen directs Shakespeare’s all too human story tale of jealousy and betrayal. The wasteland of death may be both Iago’s goal and his harvest, but the stage belongs to Othello, a man who loved perhaps unwisely and too well.

Othello opens 20 July 2018.

Photography by Simon Annand

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Emilia in production.

Our new play has been a hit with critics and audiences alike. Written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Nicole Charles, and designed by Jo Scotcher, this incredible production is not one you want to miss. 

See the story of Emilia Bassano brought to life in the Globe Theatre until 1 September 2018.

Photography by Helen Murray

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“Othello” by William Shakespeare

The Globe, 2018 

Starring Sheila Atim, Catherine Bailey, William Chubb, Steffan Donnelly, André Holland, Micah Loubon, Ira Mandela Siobhan, Aaron Pierre, Mark Rylance, Clemmie Sveaas, Badria Timimi, & Jessica Warbeck

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André Holland as Othello, Globe Theatre 2018