“CQ/CX” mines the metaphors in Jayson Blair’s story

In his incendiary interview with The New York Observer, Jayson Blair is quoted as saying: “So Jayson Blair the human being could live, Jayson Blair the journalist had to die.”

For Gabe McKinley, a similar scenario was true as he wrote CQ/CX, now playing at the Peter Norton Space in a production from the Atlantic Theater Company. In order to dramatize the Blair scandal, McKinley had to distance himself from facts about the former New York Times journalist who plagiarized and fabricated stories. Instead, he focused on telling a larger tale about a media disaster that rocked the world’s trust in a top newspaper.

“It’s important to remember that as a playwright, sometimes getting away from the facts, you actually get closer to the truth,” McKinley says. “I definitely took the step of moving some of the characters away from real people. The show became something of its own. It’s not a historical document; it’s a play.”

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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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The actress fights her impulses in The New Group’s latest play

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles
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She’s a character you want to shake some sense into. As she moves through Russian Transport, Erika Sheffer’s world premiere play at the New Group, Diana behaves like someone who’s in control of her life and her family. A Russian immigrant who helps her husband run a car service, she’s gruffly charming as she barrels over everything, insisting that it’s Chinese food for dinner and threatening to kill her children if they don’t sit down right now.

Still, Diana can’t see that her family’s imploding. Her brother Boris, fresh off the boat from Russia, arrives with dark plans for his time in America. He changes everyone’s lives, and even though Diana’s partially aware of what he’s doing, she misses the most important details.

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“Chimera” suggests many worlds on one stage

Chimera only needs a minute to make you question your grasp on reality. The multimedia show—which was developed by HERE, where it is now being presented in conjunction with the Under the Radar Festival—opens with a pleasant-looking woman in a sparkling white outfit and green sneakers. She’s got a cup of coffee and a cute Midwestern accent, and she’s awfully friendly as she takes a seat in the audience to tell us a story about the kitchen we see on stage.

Only the kitchen she describes doesn’t look like the kitchen in front of us. We see a completely white room with standard-issue equipment: a sink, countertops, a generic refrigerator. But our narrator, Coffee Lady, talks about lovely floors, a nice table, and a fancy fridge. It’s disorienting. Does this woman exist in a different world?

Yes. Kind of.

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Director Gordon Edelstein discover new facets of Athol Fugard’s play

Reading scripts can be incredibly rewarding, but it’s like smelling your food instead of tasting it. For all that you learn from the page, you can’t fully comprehend a play until you see it on stage, in the place it was intended to live.

And if you’re a director, even seeing a play can only take you so far. It’s not until you’ve directed it yourself, seen its parts moving from the inside, that you really grasp what it’s doing.
Gordon Edelstein, for instance, saw Athol Fugard’s drama The Road to Mecca when it premiered in the 80s, but now that he’s directing the Roundabout’s current Broadway revival, he’s learning new things.

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