Category — Awards

Director Lynne Meadow juggles laughter and tears in a play about cancer, life, and death

In retrospect, it’s a very strange place for a laugh.

Near the end of Margaret Edson’s Wit, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play now making its Broadway debut with Manhattan Theater Club, Vivian Bearing is just a few heartbeats from death. We’ve known this was coming from the very first scene, when she strolls on in a hospital gown, bald from chemotherapy, and tell us she has terminal cancer. But somehow, even as she takes us through her arduous hospital routine, it’s easy to overlook that Vivian’s dying. She’s just so forceful, wryly commenting on the silliness of medical bureaucracy and reflecting on her passion for the poetry of John Donne. Yes, her reveries are interrupted by tests and examinations, but still, she seems bigger than that. (This is partly due to the gusto of Cynthia Nixon’s performance.)

Eventually, though, just like Vivian promised, death slides into the room. The walls of her intellect and humor crack open, and her pain is laid bare. But just when she’s at her weakest, she’s visited by another character. For a few moments, they have a tender scene that’s dotted with intellectual curiosity. There’s even a clever observation about a children’s book that pulls a giant laugh from the audience.

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Inside the acrobatic magic of the award-winning show

Even if it delivered nothing but acrobatics, Leo would be a striking piece of theatre. The show, which won the Best of Edinburgh Award at the Edinburgh Fringe and is now being presented at Theatre Row, exists to make our jaws drop, to make us question our own eyes.

The “tricks” are even more alluring because we see exactly how they’re done. On the right side of the stage, we find Leo (played by German acrobat Tobias Wegner) standing in a colorful room with nothing but a suitcase.  Lounging around, he lies on the floor and puts his feet on a bright red wall. Later, he balances on one leg and slowly bends down to touch the floor with one hand, letting his other arm and leg jut into the air. By the time the show’s over, he’s contorted himself into all sorts of exotic shapes.

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Once again, Phillip Boykin stars in “Porgy and Bess”

At the curtain call of a recent preview of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, actor Phillip Boykin gave a dainty curtsy. The crowd was delighted, since they’d just seen him play the burly, brutal Crown. “I want to let the audience know that I’m not really that bad,” says the actor, who describes himself as someone who loves to laugh, give, and cook.

So how does this nice guy play a villain eight times a week? For one, he doesn’t consider Crown a villain: “[He's] a regular person just like everybody else.”

Crown, Bess’ lover, sets this classic story in motion when he murders a man and goes into hiding. Bess must find a new home in Catfish Row, a rundown tenement in South Carolina, so she turns to Porgy, a disabled beggar. They fall in love, and there are violent consequences when Crown returns.

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The Tony-winning actor plays a spy in “Blood and Gifts”

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about how actors create their roles

The first time we meet Simon Craig, the dissolute British spy played by Jefferson Mays in Blood and Gifts, he is muttering to himself as he spills pocket change all over the floor. The second time, he’s about to be shot by an ostensible ally.

By the end of J.T. Rogers’ sprawling look at Western involvement in the 1980s war between Russia and Afghanistan, Simon’s CIA counterpart—a square-jawed Texan named James Warnock—has received a brutal crash course in the consequences of realpolitik. But so, in odd and tragic ways, has Simon, who after 14 years in Afghanistan knows the lay of the land but is still capable of crippling disappointment.

“We started referring to Simon as Cassandra during rehearsals,” says Mays. “He sees what’s coming down the pike before anyone else.” That’s not to say, however, that Simon is ready to face what’s coming. “I learned a couple interesting things about MI6,” Mays says of the British intelligence service. “They generally leave their fellows out in the branch for a fairly long time, so they tend to go native. Or to seed. Or both.”

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The playwright makes her Broadway debut with “The Mountaintop”

Note: TDF members can purchase discount tickets to The Mountaintop through December 24.

Playwright Katori Hall has the best kind of laugh—a loud explosion that almost forces you to laugh along. During a recent phone interview, she was so buoyant and effusive, laughing at herself and her own good fortune, that it was easy to imagine her slapping five with passers-by.

She’s got plenty of reasons to be in a good mood. The Signature Theatre just announced she’s one of five playwrights to receive a five-year residency award, meaning Signature will produce three of her plays in the next five years while offering health insurance and other support.

More immediately, Hall’s debuting on Broadway with The Mountaintop, now playing at the Bernard Jacobs. The play imagines a meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. (Samuel L. Jackson) and a mysterious hotel maid (Angela Bassett), and when it premiered on London’s West End, it won the 2010 Olivier Award for Best Play—the equivalent of a Tony.

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