‘Fortress of Solitude’ Musical Among Highlights of Ne › ml_pdf › 966_Morning Line 4.23.14.pdf“The Fortress of Solitude,” one of three new musicals at the Public next season,

Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247

April 23, 2014

‘Fortress of Solitude’ Musical Among Highlights of New

Public Theater Lineup By Patrick Healy A new musical based on Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel “The Fortress of Solitude,” as well as another new musical by the creators of the Tony Award-winning show “Passing Strange,” are among the productions in the Public Theater’s 2014-15 season line-up that the theater announced on Monday. The season will begin in early September with 200 actors, musicians and average New Yorkers taking part in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where the director Lear deBessonet and the composer Todd Almond are teaming up again after their similarly conceived production of “The Tempest” ran there to critical praise last September. “The Fortress of Solitude,” one of three new musicals at the Public next season, will begin performances Sept. 30, following a run this spring at Dallas Theater Center (which is a co-producer with the Public). The show, a coming-of-age story about two teenage friends fascinated by super-heroes in 1970s Brooklyn, is directed by Daniel Aukin (“4000 Miles”) and features music and lyrics by Michael Friedman (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”) and a book by Itamar Moses (“Nobody Loves You”). A new play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, “Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3),” an epic set during the Civil War, will start Oct. 14; Jo Bonney will direct. Another new play, “Straight White Men,” written and directed by Young Jean Lee, will begin in November. Ms. Lee is best known for experimental works like “We’re Gonna Die” and “The Shipment” but here “defies expectations,” according to the Public’s announcement, with a conventionally structured drama about a father and his three adult sons. A third new play, “Toast,” by Lemon Andersen, about a group of inmates during the 1971 riots at Attica Prison, will run next April. The two other new musicals at the Public will be the previously announced “Hamilton,” written by Tony winner Lin-Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights”), who will star as Alexander Hamilton, and “The Total Bent,” which features music by Heidi Rodewald and Stew and text by Stew (who won a Tony in 2008 for his script for “Passing Strange”). “The Total Bent,” about a young black songwriter looking to break out on his own after helping catapult his father to fame, will start performances in March 2015.

Total Daily Circulation–1,586,757 Sunday Circulation– 2,003,247

April 23, 2014

Watch Out: The Ex-Wife Has Arrived, and She’s Got Lots of Baggage

Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman Star in ‘Annapurna’ By Charles Isherwood Plays with just two characters usually move in one of two directions: from animosity to comity, or vice versa. “Annapurna,” a new play by Sharr White starring Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, is definitely the kind that begins in full battle. As the play opens, Ms. Mullally’s Emma barges into the grungy trailer where her ex-husband, Mr. Offerman’s Ulysses, has long been living off the grid, or rather above it, in a speck of a town high in the mountains of Colorado. Ulysses’ grunting, grudging welcome suggests that he’d rather receive a drop-in visit from a black bear. Such a creature would not object to the squalor in which Ulysses has been happily living, as Emma vociferously does. And from the size of the luggage she hauls into Ulysses’ trailer, it seems pretty clear that Emma hasn’t come by just to do a quick check-in. She seems to have brought more possessions with her than Ulysses even owns, and soon sets about stuffing piles of garbage into bags and wielding a bottle of Formula 409 as if it were an Uzi. The unpacking and repackaging of the tangled history between them is the subject of Mr. White’s drama, which runs about 90 minutes and often feels like a scruffier version of a Lifetime television movie about love gone wrong. Emma and Ulysses haven’t seen each other or even been in communication for 20 years, after Emma fled their house one night with their 5-year-old son, Sam, and disappeared. Ulysses’ letters to Sam, sent to Emma’s mother, went unanswered. And, oh, the dog ate Ulysses’ phone. After a fair amount of comical bickering about Emma’s unwanted presence and Ulysses’ grim life — he’s dying of emphysema and uses a breathing apparatus stuffed in a backpack — we learn the reason for Emma’s arrival. Sam recently discovered that trove of letters and blames his mother for keeping them from him (although she didn’t know of them, either). He hired a detective to track down his father, and Emma believes he’s on his way to see him. She has decided to steal a march and smooth the way. Mr. White, the author of “The Other Place” and “The Snow Geese,” both seen on Broadway, writes crisp, sometimes darkly funny, naturalistic dialogue. His two characters, the grizzled poet Ulysses and the former book editor Emma, who gave up her career to raise her son, offer some talent-stretching rewards to Ms. Mullally and Mr. Offerman. A married couple, both are best known for their turns on popular sitcoms: Ms. Mullally as the bitchy dipso Karen on “Will & Grace,” and Mr. Offerman as the cranky-nerdy parks director Ron on the current “Parks and Recreation.” First seen attired only in a dirty apron and that life-sustaining backpack, Mr. Offerman’s Ulysses combines the gonzo spirit of a natural-born rebel with the faded machismo of a poet vaguely in the Robert Bly mold. Watching in unruly dismay as Emma sets about excavating the disorder from his man cave, he slowly

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reveals the poet’s sensitivity beneath the crusty he-man exterior when he discerns that Emma hasn’t just come back to harass him into the grave, but is also in flight from her own troubled life.

Ms. Mullally, her hair dyed a distracting magenta, lets her acidic comic instincts loose as necessary, with Emma’s daintily disgusted observations about her ex’s repulsive lifestyle: “You bought meat at the dollar store?” When the real meat of the play arrives — the tale of the traumatic night Emma fled — Ms. Mullally evinces the right amount of armored hurt. The wounds from the marriage become raw again, and Emma finds herself fighting an emotional battle she’d long since put behind her.

This climactic confrontation feels somewhat artificially delayed to stoke suspense. Emma keeps hinting portentously about the horror of that night and refuses to believe Ulysses when he denies all knowledge of what happened. Given that he was descending into a boozy oblivion during the years of their marriage, Emma would surely have been familiar with the concept of an alcoholic blackout. But Mr. White obviously wants to keep us guessing until the final “reveal” — although it’s pretty easy to predict.

The production, first presented by Odyssey Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles, and here by the New Group, has been efficiently directed by Bart DeLorenzo. The title refers both to the mountain in the Himalayas and to the epic poem Ulysses has been writing in the years since his marriage ended. It’s symbolic, of course, as he hints to Emma when their cantankerous give-and-take begins to soften. A famous climber who wrote a book about his experience nearly lost toes and fingers when, on the descent, he made the seemingly small mistake of dropping his gloves. Thus, in an instant, can a promising life unravel.

Correction: April 22, 2014

An earlier version of this review misstated where “Annapurna” was first presented in Los Angeles. Odyssey Theater Ensemble produced it, not the Evidence Room.

Annapurna

By Sharr White; directed by Bart DeLorenzo; sets by Thomas A. Walsh; costumes by Ann Closs-Farley; lighting by Michael Gend; sound by John Ballinger; production supervisor, PRF Productions; production stage manager, Valerie A. Peterson; general manager, DR Theatrical Management. Presented by the New Group, Scott Elliott, artistic director; Adam Bernstein, executive director; Jamie Lehrer, development director. At the Acorn Theater, the New Group @ Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, Clinton, 212-239-6200, telecharge.com. Through June 1. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Megan Mullally (Emma) and Nick Offerman (Ulysses).

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April 23, 2014

Phillip Hayes Dean, the Playwright of Divisive ‘Paul Robeson,’ Dies at 83

By Bruce Weber Phillip Hayes Dean, a playwright whose stage portrait of the actor and social crusader Paul Robeson aroused one of the theater’s more unusual controversies and derailed his own promising career, died on April 14 in Los Angeles, shortly after a revival of the play opened at the Ebony Repertory Theater there. He was 83. The cause was an aortic aneurysm, said Wren T. Brown, the theater’s founder and producer. The public dispute over “Paul Robeson,” which starred James Earl Jones and opened on Broadway in January 1978, involved a welter of issues: artistic license, freedom of expression, accuracy in character portrayal and black pride. But it boiled down to the dissatisfaction of a group of prominent black intellectuals with Mr. Dean’s representation of Robeson, which they felt was insufficiently complex, insufficiently thorny and too easily digestible by a mass audience. By then Mr. Dean had explored his own experience as a black man and the sociology of black communities in a number of well-received plays, including “The Sty of the Blind Pig,” set in Chicago as the dawn of the civil rights movement begins to unsettle the settled ways of the play’s characters; “Freeman,” about the diverse paths of two young black men in a small Michigan city much like Pontiac, where Mr. Dean came of age; and “Every Night When the Sun Goes Down,” which focuses on black-on-black exploitation and violence. All three were performed Off Broadway, and “Sty,” starring Mary Alice, and “Freeman,” with Louis Gossett Jr., were produced on television. But none achieved the notoriety of “Paul Robeson,” a play with songs, in which the story of Robeson’s remarkable life as an athlete, scholar, actor, singer, civil rights activist and left-wing lightning rod unfolds in a monologue. The play was initially intended as a television drama starring Mr. Jones, who brought Mr. Dean to the project. After it proved untenable for television, it evolved into a stage production and began touring the country in the fall of 1977 on a circuitous journey to New York that was fraught with artistic disagreements. Mr. Dean wrote several drafts of the script, and the original director, Charles Nelson Reilly, was replaced by Lloyd Richards. Then just before opening night on Broadway, a letter signed by 56 writers, artists and politicians — among them Alvin Ailey, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Charles Rangel, Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond and Robeson’s son, Paul Jr., who was said to have initiated the protest — appeared as a paid advertisement in Variety.

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“We, the undersigned members of the black community,” the letter declared in part, “having seen the production or read versions of it in progress, regretfully feel compelled to take the extraordinary step of alerting all concerned citizens to what we believe to be, however unintended, a pernicious perversion of the essence of Paul Robeson.” The letter’s implication was that the play had softened Mr. Robeson’s positions as a political dissident, a black activist and an avowed socialist. Subsequent public statements by some of the signers underscored this. “What this country needs is a hero who is black and a socialist,” the actor Ossie Davis said. Baldwin said the play depicted Robeson as “a chocolate John Wayne.” Though no one called for a boycott, picketers demonstrated at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. (Several weeks later, the play moved to a smaller house, the Booth.) News reports, including one by the newscaster Carl Stokes, formerly the first black mayor of a major city, Cleveland, determined that some of the signers had not read or seen the play but had acted in deference to the Robeson family. An outraged Mr. Dean said the protest was a McCarthy-like attempt to squelch freedom of speech and freedom of thought — he referred to the signers as the “House Un-Black Activities Committee” — precisely the kind of treatment Robeson had encountered in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Thirty-three writers — including Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Jules Feiffer, John Guare, Paddy Chayefsky, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim and at least one black playwright, Ed Bullins — rose to Mr. Dean’s defense, condemning the protest in a statement as a lamentable attempt “to influence critics and audiences against a play.” The Broadway show closed after just 77 performances. But in a vindication of sorts, Mr. Jones appeared as Robeson in a public television production of the play, and “Paul Robeson” was briefly revived on Broadway twice — in 1988 and 1995, both times starring Avery Brooks — without a peep of dissent. Nonetheless, Mr. Dean was set back by the protest, and though he continued writing, he never published or produced another play. “He was very, very deeply injured by those events, and it impeded the progress of what had been a significant theatrical voice,” Mr. Brown said in an interview on Tuesday. Mr. Dean was born in Chicago on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert, died when Phillip was very young, and his mother, Leatha, a nurse, married Dewey Matthews, an autoworker. After the family moved to Pontiac, Mich., Mr. Dean attended Wayne State University in Detroit, though he did not graduate. He wrote from an early age, but his first theatrical training was as an actor, at the Will-O-Way Apprentice and Repertory Theater in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He served in the Army and moved to New York in the early 1950s to audition for the Broadway drama “Take a Giant Step,” by Louis Peterson. (The role went to Mr. Gossett.) He had a small part in “The Wisteria Trees,” a play by Joshua Logan based on “The Cherry Orchard,” and he was the stage manager for an all-black production of “Waiting for Godot,” with Geoffrey Holder and Earle Hyman.

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Mr. Dean, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by his wife of 41 years, Patricia O’Toole; a brother, Howard; two daughters, Wendy Hutson and Karen Dean; and four grandchildren. In 1988, at the time of the first Broadway revival of “Paul Robeson,” Mr. Robeson Jr. was asked by The New York Times why he no longer opposed the play. He said he thought that Mr. Brooks was better in the part than Mr. Jones had been and that the production was better, “though I repeat, I still feel the character as written is a counterfeit.” On the same occasion, Mr. Dean said to The Times: “What I remember most was that I was writing the play about a man I admired and my mother was then dying and I was being attacked by well-known and highly respected black people for something that no one could quite pin down. They seemed to feel that my characterization of Robeson did not conform to their vision of the man. Well, obviously my vision was not the only one, and I never said it was or that it should be.” The current Ebony Repertory Theater production of “Paul Robeson,” which was directed by Mr. Dean and stars Keith David, concludes on Sunday.