THE MORNING LINE

DATE: Tuesday, April 28, 2015

FROM: Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Faith Maciolek, Eliza Ranieri

PAGES: 13, including this page.

April 26, 2015

Tennessee Williams Plays Coming to 59E59 Theaters Next Season

By Andrew R. Chow

59E59 Theaters announced its next season’s lineup, which includes six new short plays adapted from Tennessee Williams short stories. Pulitzer Prize-winner Beth Henley, PEN/Laura Pels Award-winner Marcus Gardley, and other playwrights have signed on to adapt Williams’s works for productions starting in August.

Among the stories being adapted are “The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin” (Henley), “Oriflamme” (David Grimm), and “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (John Guare), which Williams reworked into “The Glass Menagerie.”

Three other plays were announced, including Yussef El Guindi’s “Threesome,” which will arrive in July after a run at Portland Center Stage in Oregon, and Lauren Gunderson’s “I and You,” which comes from Massachusetts’ Merrimack Repertory Theater and will begin in January 2016.

Additional information can be found at 59e59.org.

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April 28, 2015 Review: ‘Nirbhaya,’ a Lamentation and a Rallying Cry for Indian Women

By Ben Brantley

They become a multitude, the members of this small cast, moving inexorably toward collision. Pacing, circling, brushing up against one another in the opening sequences of Yael Farber’s “Nirbhaya” — the harrowing documentary drama that opened on Sunday night at the Lynn Redgrave Theater — a mere half-dozen performers evoke the explosive contingency of life in an overpopulated city.

There’s a chafing sexual friction among these bodies in motion, hovering on the edge of violence. We are, we are told, in bloated, heaving New Delhi. And it is a place where simply riding a bus, for a woman, is to be “passed from one pair of groping hands to another,” to feel that “you’re everyone’s, every day.”

Within this restless traffic, a single, slight figure moves across the stage with processional calm. She sings softly to herself, though she never speaks a word. Her name is Jyoti Singh Pandey, and she has been dead for over two years.

“Nirbhaya,” Hindi for fearless, is the name by which Ms. Pandey is best known. In this play, that name is spoken as both a lamentation and a rallying cry, and Ms. Pandey’s presence is that of both a ghost and a strength-giving deity.

Embodied with unearthly serenity by Japjit Kaur, Ms. Pandey was a 23-year-old physiotherapy student who was gang-raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012, dying two weeks later. Her story became international news and inspired mass demonstrations throughout India.

The culture that gave birth to this crime is the subject of “Nirbhaya,” in which five Indian women describe their experiences of abuse in unstinting detail. Although most of them are professional actresses, they are not pretending to be other people. It is their own pasts they are talking about, but pasts is perhaps the wrong word for events that seem to never have left them.

“Nirbhaya” is not, I hasten to add, a confessional public forum, or not only that. Ms. Farber has woven these women’s stories into patterns of recurring, reflective images: of dirt and water, defilement and cleansing, darkness and light, burial and resurrection.

Above all, there is the idea of a rupture, which carries a double edge. All the women describe the holes left in their lives by violence, gaps into which they feel they can still fall at any moment. But with Ms. Pandey’s death, they say, a society’s imprisoning silence has been torn open for them. “The whole world now knows what I could not speak of before,” one of them says.

Ms. Farber, the South African director whose work includes intensely visceral reimaginings of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” has a profound gift for physical poetry. And “Nirbhaya,” which was first shown in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, turns what might have been a worthy work of political journalism into an intensely theatrical experience.

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Designed by Paul Lim (lighting), Oroon Das (set and costumes) and Abhijeet Tambe (sound), the production has the look and feel of a sacred ritual. Acrid clouds drift across the stage, while the smoke of incense and the crematory, and the movements and speech of the performers, have a stylized symmetry seldom found in everyday life. Garments — a girl’s yellow dress, a boy’s blue shirt, a woman’s cream slip — take on talismanic significance, symbols of lives interrupted.

Without such formal structures, “Nirbhaya” would be close to unbearable for both the performers and their audience. In addition to delivering their individual testimonies, the five female speakers — along with Ms. Kaur and a single male performer, Ankur Vikal — re-enact what happened to Ms. Pandey (and the young man who was with her) on that night in New Delhi, in sequences that suggest a nightmare ballet, happening forever in some eternal purgatory.

It is in such a realm that these women, too, seem to live as they recount their own stories. Poorna Jagannathan invokes her seduction as a child by “a man we called uncle” in language that recalls the nihilistic cadences of the apocalyptic playwright Sarah Kane: “I am being fingered. Probed. Eaten. Devoured. Disappeared.”

Priyanka Bose describes her childhood as an unlit road “along which the signage was clear: I could be beaten by those who loved me; touched by those who moved through our house.” Rukhsar Kabir, now a Bollywood star, remembers a father who tried to cut off her lips with a broken bottle after she first kissed an actor on a film set, when she was 14.

Then there is Sneha Jawale, a dowry bride whose husband drenched her in kerosene and set her on fire in the presence of her young son. (She is the only performer who does not speak in English; the translation of her account by the others takes on its own affectingly theatrical dimension.) Her husband and his family later fled their home, taking her son with them. Years later, she says, she quietly calls the boy’s name on the streets, thinking he must be somewhere in the crowd.

Pamela Sinha, whose family immigrated to Canada when she was a child, tells of being raped as a young woman in her student apartment in Montreal. “Nobody died that night,” she says. “But where I was supposed to be, there is a hole in the world.”

The feeling of having being erased keeps coming up as these women speak. In “Nirbhaya,” it would seem, they are restoring themselves — and the woman of the play’s title — into visibility.

Ms. Jawale, whose face remains irreparably scarred, speaks of covering all the mirrors in her rooms. “I wept when I saw my reflection in a spoon,” she says. “I could not find myself, could not see myself.” She pauses. “But I am here.”

Nirbhaya

Written and directed by Yael Farber; lighting by Paul Lim; sets and costumes by Oroon Das; soundscape by Abhijeet Tambe; stage manager, Triona Humphries; assistant director, Robert Jansen; produced by Margaret Moll. An Assembly, Riverside Studios, William Burdett-Coutts, artistic director; and Poorna Jagannathan production, presented by Culture Project, Allan Buchman, artistic director; and Shivhans Pictures, with Shivani Rawat, Julio DePietro, Cornelia Ravenal, the Embrey Foundation and Abigail E. Disney. At the Culture Project, 45 Bleecker Street, near Lafayette Street, East Village; 866-811-4111, cultureproject.org. Through May 17. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

WITH: Priyanka Bose, Poorna Jagannathan, Sneha Jawale, Rukhsar Kabir, Japjit Kaur, Pamela Sinha and Ankur Vikal (Ensemble).

April 28, 2015 Review: ‘Carousel,’ a Broadway Turn at Lyric Opera of Chicago By Charles Isherwood

CHICAGO — In the past few years, Lyric Opera of Chicago has embraced the Broadway musical, producing revivals of classic shows at its splendidly grand house after the company’s official subscription season has drawn to a close — as a dessert, you might say, after all the woe, betrayal and murder so richly represented in opera.

This year’s production, “Carousel,” has been acclaimed here as the finest so far. And of course this darkest of the major musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II fits quite snugly into even the most doom- ridden opera season. The story of the misbegotten romance between the innocent young New England millworker Julie Jordan and the scapegrace carnival barker Billy Bigelow concludes not as most Broadway musicals do, with beaming smiles and a happy finale, but with the tragic death of Billy — albeit followed by a small measure of posthumous redemption.

The company has imported established Broadway talents, with Steven Pasquale (“The Bridges of Madison County”) and Laura Osnes (“Cinderella”) portraying Billy and Julie, under the direction of Rob Ashford, responsible for staging and choreographing the recent Broadway revivals of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Promises, Promises.”

The results are impressive: The production is as beautifully sung — and beautifully played, by the Lyric orchestra under the conductor David Chase — as anything on Broadway right now, with Mr. Pasquale in particular standing out for his moving Billy. He brings the first act to an electrifying climax with his powerful rendering of “Soliloquy,” in which Billy dreams of the future life of the child he has just learned Julie is expecting. Exultation and pride vie with a new sense of responsibility — and anxiety — as Billy envisions a future that will erase or at least ennoble his sorry past.

Mr. Pasquale’s riveting performance of the song — since we’re at the opera, let’s call it an aria — is unfortunately interrupted by the distracting entrance of a huge set piece sliding in from the wings, a stone jetty Mr. Pasquale then climbs atop to deliver the ringing final notes. This might be considered a rookie mistake from the set designer, the Italian artist Paolo Ventura, making his debut as a designer for the theater here with somber-hued, often minimalist settings. But what was Mr. Ashford thinking?

I have other qualms about the staging — Billy’s final exit is also fumbled, and the opening waltz is a bit of a jumble — but over all the production, smoothly moved from the late 19th century to the Depression, does justice to this beloved and too rarely seen musical and its treasure of unforgettable songs. (The last Broadway revival, Nicholas Hytner’s justly celebrated production, opened in 1994.)

Some of the minor flaws in the staging probably derive from the challenge of presenting a musical on an expansive opera house stage. When Julie and Billy first meet, for instance, and sing that most ambiguously beautiful of duets, “If I Loved You,” at times they are so far apart you wonder how they can see each other as the evening closes in.

But I have no complaints about the performances (once I grew used to the amplification in such a large house). Along with Mr. Pasquale and Ms. Osnes, both of whom possess excellent voices, the cast includes Jenn Gambatese (who appeared last season here as Maria in “The Sound of Music”) as a delightful Carrie Pipperidge, Julie’s friend whose life takes a wholly different, wholesome path.

Ms. Gambatese brings both a pure, bright soprano and a peppery humor to her performance. The love of Carrie’s life, Enoch Snow, is played with a similarly wry comic sense by Matthew Hydzik (Buddy Foster in the recent “Side Show”), who nicely expresses the character’s shyness and his upstanding nature. As the seedy sailor Jigger Craigin, the villain who talks Billy into committing the crime that will ultimately cause his death, Jarrod Emick leads the rousing chorus on “Blow High, Blow Low” with rousing gusto, and makes a convincingly seductive flirt when he puts the moves on the naïve Carrie in one of the musical’s few moments of pure (or pure-ish) comedy.

As has been the tradition since the original production in 1945, the role of Nettie Fowler, Julie’s cousin, who takes Billy and Julie in when Billy loses his job, is portrayed by an opera singer, the distinguished mezzo- soprano Denyce Graves. Tradition was, of course, born of necessity, since a classically trained voice is virtually required to bring the full spiritual force to the show’s most famous song, the hymnlike “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Ms. Graves sings it with the requisite hallowed feeling, although as a performer best known in the opera house for sultry roles like Carmen and Delilah, she sometimes seems a bit stiff as the maternal Nettie.

Also among the first-class supporting cast are Tony Roberts, the venerable comic actor and veteran of several long-ago Woody Allen movies, who makes a charmingly offbeat Starkeeper — the mysterious (Godlike) fellow in heaven’s waiting room, who sends Billy back to earth for a day to atone for his hapless life by expressing his love for his troubled daughter, the teenage Louise. Before Billy’s return comes the second-act ballet, danced with gusto by Abigail Simon opposite a commandingly sexy Martin Harvey (formerly of the Royal Ballet).

Mr. Ashford’s choreography for the ballet, and for the opening waltz, can be blurry and overly busy. The presence in the ballet of Charlotte d’Amboise, who makes the most of her small role as the carnival owner Mrs. Mullin, becomes a little distracting as she draws the focus away from the internal conflicts of young Louise. (Still, it’s great to see those astonishing legs in sensual motion.) At other times, the upbeat numbers take a while to gain steam, leaving you waiting impatiently for the energy to rise or take interesting shape.

But these problems may also derive from the necessity of filling out the sizable stage. “Carousel” is a great musical — one of the greatest, actually — but a grand opera it isn’t, and at times this staging falls into a murky gap in between, with the chorus moving in rote formation as if clustering around random Egyptians in “Aida.”

But with the superb singing on display, I am beginning to feel like a churl for citing any flaws. A chance to hear this cherished score delivered with such ample vocal and musical resources should not be missed by anyone who remains entranced by the unique appeal of the great Broadway musicals.

Music by Richard Rodgers; book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Ferenc Molnár’s play “Liliom,” as adapted by Benjamin F. Glazer; original orchestrations by Don Walker; original dances by Agnes de Mille; original dance arrangements by Trude Rittmann; conducted by David Chase; directed by Rob Ashford; choreography by Mr. Ashford; sets by Paolo Ventura; costumes by Catherine Zuber; lighting by Neil Austin; sound by Mark Grey; chorus master, Michael Black; wigmaster/makeup design by Sarah Hatten; associate set designer, Lee Newby; associate choreographer, Chris Bailey; assistant director, Matthew Ozawa; stage manager, John W. Coleman; musical preparation by William C. Billingham and Jerad Mosbey; fight director, Nicolas Sandys. Presented by Lyric Opera of Chicago, Anthony Freud, general director; Dick Kiphart,

chairman. At the Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago; 312-827-5600; lyricopera.org/carousel. Through Sunday. Running time: 2 hours 57 minutes.

WITH: Jenn Gambatese (Carrie Pipperidge), Laura Osnes (Julie Jordan), Charlotte d’Amboise (Mrs. Mullin), Steven Pasquale (Billy Bigelow), J. Michael Finley (First Policeman), David Lively (David Bascombe), Pamela Williams (Mrs. Bascombe), Denyce Graves (Nettie Fowler), Matthew Hydzik (Enoch Snow), Jarrod Emick (Jigger Craigin), Emily Rohn (Arminy), Rob Hunt (Second Policeman), Ronald Watkins (Captain), George Andrew Wolff (First Heavenly Friend/Brother Joshua), McKinley Carter (Second Heavenly Friend), Tony Roberts (Starkeeper/Dr. Seldon), Abigail Simon (Louise), Martin Harvey (Carnival Boy), Robby Kipferl (Enoch Snow Jr.), Eliza Palasz (Margaret Snow), Rosie Jo Neddy (Baby Snow), Spencer Curnutt, Betsey Farrar, Laura Savage and James Romney (Other Snow Children) and Jessye Wright (Principal).

April 28, 2015

Jayne Meadows, Actress and Steve Allen’s Wife and Co-Star, Dies at 95 By Michael Pollak

Jayne Meadows, a glamorous redheaded actress who starred on Broadway, in the movies and on television, but who was probably best known for her 46-year role as Steve Allen’s wife, business partner and frequent co-star, died on Sunday at her home in Encino, Calif. She was 95.

Her son, Bill Allen, confirmed her death on Monday.

Ms. Meadows was never as well known as her younger sister, Audrey, who played Alice Kramden on the now- classic Jackie Gleason sitcom “The Honeymooners.” But she was a versatile and accomplished actress in her own right and a familiar presence on television for years, in dramatic productions, prime-time series and game shows.

She was born Jayne Meadows Cotter on Sept. 27, 1919, in Wuchang, China, where her father, Francis James Meadows Cotter, and her mother, the former Ida Miller Taylor, were Episcopal missionaries. The family moved back to the United States in 1927, and her father eventually became rector of Christ Church in Sharon, Conn. After attending a girls’ boarding school with her sister, she went to New York to be an actress.

Ms. Meadows made her Broadway debut in 1941 in the comedy “Spring Again.” Her other Broadway appearances included “Another Love Story” (1943); “Many Happy Returns” (1945), with Mary Astor; and “Kiss Them for Me” (1945), in which she was featured with Richard Widmark.

She was originally billed as Jayne Cotter, but she and her sister both changed their professional name to Meadows. According to her website (jaynemeadows.com), Louis B. Mayer of MGM “ordered her to change the Cotter since they had a contract player named Audrey Totter (whose real surname, incidentally, wasn’t Totter).”

Her first movie was “Undercurrent” (1946), starring Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum. She recalled on her website that George Cukor, who had directed her screen test, asked Ms. Hepburn’s opinion of the newcomer, and that she replied, “Considering I’m old enough to be her mother and she’s playing my rival, I think she’s a genius.”

Her next few years in Hollywood were busy. She made three movies in 1947 alone: “Dark Delusion,” with Lionel Barrymore; “Lady in the Lake,” with Robert Montgomery, in which she played a psychopathic murderer; and “Song of the Thin Man,” with William Powell and Myrna Loy. Her work in “Enchantment” (1948), with David Niven, led one reviewer to call her “violently sinister.” She was also in the biblical epic “David and Bathsheba” (1951), with Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward.

She married Milton Krims, a screenwriter, in 1948; they later divorced.

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Ms. Meadows returned to Broadway in the 1958 production of “The Gazebo,” with Walter Slezak. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote, “Miss Meadows gives an animated, sardonic performance that pulls the play up taut when it threatens to amble off.”

But by then she had become more of a television fixture than a stage or film actress. Game shows were a specialty: She was a regular panel member on “I’ve Got a Secret” from 1952 to 1959 and a frequent guest on “What’s My Line?,” “Password” and other shows. She also acted in many of television’s classic drama programs: “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” “Studio One” and “General Electric Theater,” among others. From 1969 to 1972 she was a cast member on the hospital drama “Medical Center” with Chad Everett.

Ms. Meadows was best known for her work with Mr. Allen, the comedian, songwriter and talk-show host, whom she married in 1954. Beginning with the original “Tonight” show, which he created, Mr. Allen was the host of several shows in the 1950s and ’60s, and she appeared on all of them.

In 1960 the two were in the movie “College Confidential.” In 1985 she played the Queen of Hearts in a television movie of “Alice in Wonderland,” for which Mr. Allen wrote the music and lyrics. The couple also made joint appearances on several series, including “Love, American Style” in 1970 and “Homicide: Life on the Street” in 1998. Mr. Allen died in 2000.

From 1977 to 1981 Ms. Meadows performed in, and wrote for, Mr. Allen’s PBS series “Meeting of Minds,” in which he assembled historical figures for a time-warped, what-if conversation. Among the women she played were Cleopatra, Margaret Sanger, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Florence Nightingale. For her portrayal of Susan B. Anthony, she won the first Women’s Equality Day award from the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1979.

She and her sister made several records as the Meadows Sisters for RCA Victor. When Audrey Meadows died in 1996, her last word was reportedly “Jayne,” after her sister had rushed to her bedside.

Besides her son, who is president and chief executive of the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, Ms. Meadows is survived by three stepsons, Steve Jr., Brian and David; three grandchildren; eight step-grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.)

Ms. Meadows returned to the New York stage in 1978 after a 20-year absence. Billing herself as Jayne Meadows Allen, she appeared in a revival of Kaufman and Hart’s “Once in a Lifetime,” playing an over-the-top Hollywood gossip columnist. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, commented, “Miss Allen floats in like fresh green seaweed borne shoreward by her own tidal wave of chatter, silver slippers and gloves flashing signals like the RKO tower, whooping with laughter that would do credit to an unstrung hyena.”

For the part she wore a bright red wig, a green dress, and rhinestone shoes and tiara — an ensemble inspired, she said, by memories of how the real-life gossip columnist Hedda Hopper dressed.

She had been so believable during a previous run of the play, in Los Angeles, she said in 1978, that The Hollywood Reporter offered her a job as a syndicated gossip columnist.

“I told them thanks but no thanks,” she said. “I’m too insecure to have people hate me. I didn’t want to write gossip about my friends. And besides, I make more money acting.”

Correction: April 27, 2015

A headline and summary with an earlier version of this obituary incorrectly identified Ms. Meadows. Her sister, Audrey Meadows, played Alice Kramden on the sitcom “The Honeymooners”; Jayne Meadows did not.