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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Inside the new musical’s daring projection design

The Blue Flower is not just a musical—it’s a collage.

“The music and the words and the images and the stage movement are all operating at once,” says Ruth Bauer, who developed the show with her husband Jim Bauer. Now at Second Stage, the formally daring production follows a group of artists and thinkers across both World Wars, tracing the rise and fall of their romantic and intellectual lives. (The story is loosely inspired by the painters Max Beckmann and Franz Marc, the scientist Marie Curie, and the Dada artist Hannah Hoch.)

From the very first moments, it’s clear that projections will be as integral to the storytelling as actors and music. The show begins with Max, a painter, sitting on a park bench in modern day New York. He speaks in a made-up language, and translations are projected behind him. In another scene, Hannah gives a performance dressed in fairy wings and horns, and she uses a flyswatter to squash images of giant bugs. After she whacks them, we see projections of splattered bug parts.

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Provocative playwright Thomas Bradshaw makes his Off-Broadway debut

Thomas Bradshaw’s plays always get a reaction. He doesn’t shy away from taboo subjects like incest, rape, racism, pedophilia, and prostitution, and the downtown theatre community has embraced him as a rebel hero. But even though his work is frequently produced off-Off-Broadway, it has never graduated to an Off Broadway venue. Until now.

Scott Elliott—the founding artistic director of the New Group—sees emotion and heart under the provocative surface of Bradshaw’s writing, and that’s partly why the company is presenting his new play Burning.

“I always made a promise with myself personally that when the New Group got in a place where I could really take the risks that I wanted, then I would bring voices that I was fond of—that were maybe more on the fringe—to a larger audience,” Elliott says.

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A new production honors the late Lanford Wilson

When Carl Forsman, artistic director of Keen Company, was about 11 years old, his parents took him to see his first Broadway show— Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. “I’m not sure I got all of it, but it was a momentous experience for me,” he says. It launched a lifelong love of Wilson’s writing.

Since founding Keen in 2000, Forsman has wanted to produce a Wilson play. He introduced Lemon Sky to resident director Jonathan Silverstein several years ago, and as Silverstein recalls, “I just fell in love with this plays instantly, and for years I’ve been talking to Carl and saying we have to do Lemon Sky.” But the play is challenging, and Forsman didn’t want to rush into it before they were ready as individual artists or as a company.

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How director Lisa Peterson molds the pieces of “Motherhood Out Loud”

Motherhood Out Loud sounds simple enough: It’s a series of vignettes about the highs and lows of being a mom. But the show involves four actors, 14 playwrights, and close to 50 characters. How do you transform those elements into a coherent show?

That was the challenge for director Lisa Peterson. “What drew me to it was the idea of trying to help figure out how to make one thing out of so many pieces,” she says

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