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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, October 11, 2016 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh PAGES: 26, including this page C3 October 8, 2016 ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ to Open on Broadway By Joshua Barrone One of Henrik Ibsen’s most famous heroines, Nora Helmer, is returning to Broadway — but not in “A Doll’s House.” At the end of Ibsen’s drama, Nora leaves her husband and children with the slam of a door. Lucas Hnath, a playwright with a rising reputation Off Broadway (“The Christians” and “Red Speedo”), picks up where Ibsen left off with his Broadway debut, “A Doll’s House, Part 2.” The cast includes Laurie Metcalf (HBO’s “Getting On” and “Misery” on Broadway); Chris Cooper (an Oscar winner for “Adaptation”); Condola Rashad (Showtime’s “Billions”); and Jayne Houdyshell, who won a Tony Award this year for her performance in “The Humans.” The ever-busy Sam Gold, who won a Tony for “Fun Home” in 2015, has signed on to direct. It’s his third scheduled gig this season, along with “Othello” Off Broadway and “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway. This won’t be the first “Doll’s House” sequel to reach Broadway. In 1982 Harold Prince directed the Broadway flop “A Doll’s Life,” a musical about Nora’s love life after leaving her husband, Torvald. Performances for “A Doll’s House, Part 2” begin April 1 at the John Golden Theater, with opening night set for April 27 — just under the wire for Tony Awards eligibility. (Another, previously scheduled production will run at South Coast Repertory from April 9 through April 30.) Scott Rudin will produce; he picked up the play for Broadway based on its script alone, according to Vulture, which first reported the news. C3 October 8, 2016 Kennedy Center Taps Broadway Producer to Lead Theater Programming By Michael Paulson The Broadway producer Jeffrey Finn has been named to oversee theater programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The center announced the appointment on Thursday, saying that Mr. Finn would begin work Friday with the title of vice president of theater producing and programming. The job is a new position. Mr. Finn was the lead producer of “An Act of God,” a comedy that ran on Broadway each of the last two summers, and he has been a producer on a dozen other Broadway productions since 2005. He plans to continue producing on Broadway — he is currently working on a musical adaptation of “The Honeymooners” television series. At the Kennedy Center, Mr. Finn will be charged with “commissioning, curating, producing and presenting work,” according to a statement from the institution. C1 October 10, 2016 Review: ‘Miles for Mary,’ a Sendup of the Interminable Meeting From Hell By Ben Brantley Though Dante cataloged many forms of diabolical torture in his “Inferno,” a guided tour of hell, he somehow missed out on what could well be the most excruciating eternal punishment of all. I mean (ominous organ chords, please) the staff meeting that never, ever ends. You’ve surely been a part of such sessions. They’re those gatherings in which people waste time by talking about how to be more productive, with algebraic visual aids and a corporate jargon of uplift that turns sensitive souls suicidal. Still, it is a fundamental law of art and entertainment that other people’s discomfort can make for deeply satisfying comedy. The meeting from hell has been deliciously dissected on television satires like “The Office” and“W1A,” BBC Two’s blissful fictional portrait of life at the BBC. Now “Miles for Mary,” which opened on Saturday night at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, asserts its claim to belong among such painfully pleasurable company. It also goes one agonizing step further than such small-screen fare in that it never for a second leaves the meeting room and only rarely abandons the artificial and often inane language of such encounters. Running at an uninterrupted hour and 45 minutes, this meticulous creation from the Mad Ones theater troupe would send you bolting for the exit, screaming, if it weren’t so funny and unexpectedly touching. The Mad Ones, which devises and scripts its plays as a group, is an ensemble company in the fullest sense. Surely, such cluster creativity, with its inevitable clash of perspectives and ideas, must give rise to its own set of tensions in rehearsals. In any case, “Miles for Mary,” which is set in an Ohio high school office where a group of teachers conduct a series of preparatory meetings for a charity television marathon, provides an ideal showcase for this company’s strengths. As directed by Lila Neugebauer, with a precision-tuned six-member cast, the production cannily uses interactive acting to plumb the dysfunction in group dynamics. The Mad Ones describes itself as specializing in American nostalgia. And it usually sets its works — which include the highly praised 1950s-themed“Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War” — in decades defined by both photorealist detail and warping touches of surrealism. “Miles for Mary” takes place in the 1980s, and its conscientious design team anchors the play in time with the appropriate clothing and technological accessories, which include audiocassette tapes, VCR players and, most memorably, a tinny speaker phone by which a housebound teacher on pain killers participates woozily in the meetings. But the Mad Ones avoids its usual fantastical accents. True, there is one fleeting surreal apparition of a character dressed as an undefinable animal, presumably a school mascot. But as in an Alan Ayckbourn farce, the play’s increasing absurdity arises from natural causes. Or as natural as is possible within the stiff and elaborate workplace protocol by which these characters govern their encounters. They assemble to discuss the 1989 edition of their big annual charity project, a 24-hour (more or less, everything is exasperatingly open to discussion) homemade television show to raise money for a scholarship named for a student track star killed in a car crash. The theme, the acts, the scheduling and proper use of phones are all subject to seemingly infinite parsing. So is the very way in which the teachers address one another, a psychobabble presumably born of workshops on treating students with sensitivity. (“I want to apologize if I got into game mode when it wasn’t game time,” says a burly health teacher.) If feelings are hurt as opinions collide, everyone knows that “a real-time check-in” is called for. Such psychological devices defuse potential explosions until, inevitably, they start to feed them. When the blowup comes, from the seemingly meekest of the group, it’s because he feels that this kind of talk is patronizing to him. And as a depiction of earnest amateurs’ being creative (the marathon’s proposed themes include a Genesis concept album), “Miles for Mary” flirts with the condescension that occasionally surfaces in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries about small-time theater troupes and dog shows. But the show is expert in deploying the slogan-driven speech of self-help as a tool of passive aggression. And while there is little in the way of direct exposition — we don’t even realize that two of the characters are married to each other for the first 15 or 20 minutes — we come to infer a very specific set of personalities, with private kinks and woes behind the workplace personas. The cast is made up of Marc Bovino, Joe Curnutte, Michael Dalto, Amy Staats, Stephanie Wright Thompson and Stacey Yen, and their performances are so indivisibly linked that it would be an injustice to single one out. Ms. Neugebauer, who is fast establishing herself as one of the finest ensemble directors in New York, has this season already given us the smashing production of Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” another vivid group portrait. That play, too, is set in a high school, though its focus is students instead of teachers. “Miles for Mary” might be profitably seen as a companion piece to“The Wolves,” though anyone searching for assurances that life gets better and people grow up as they become older is unlikely to find comfort here. On the other hand, if people ever really grew up, what would we do for comedy? C1 October 11, 2016 Review: Taylor Mac’s 24-Hour Concert Was One of the Great Experiences of My Life I’ve slept on it, and I’m sure. “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is sublime. By Wesley Morris So after almost 21½ hours and two centuries’ worth of singing, dancing, and jiggling; after all 650 of us had been asked to re-enact everything from the Civil War and the Oklahoma land rush to white flight to the suburbs; after a narcotically swampy rendition of “Amazing Grace” and a production of “The Mikado” that glowed in the dark because its minstrelsy might make sense if it was set on Mars; after visionary drag-queen costumes that called to mind descriptions like geisha Andrews Sister and Tiki apocalypse; after we’d stood in lines for small portions of bread and split pea soup at 3 a.m. and not many people took the bread (because even during a poignant Depression homage some people will still refuse to eat a carb); after we’d batted around an enormous stars-and-stripes penis balloon whose design really did look more like the flag of Puerto Rico and then made a funeral procession for Judy Garland’s corpse; after a mash-up of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”; after Taylor Mac, the performance artist who dreamed this whole thing up, had cavorted onstage and in the laps and arms of strangers; after all of this — the delirium, the mania, the possibly simulated sex — it might have been the balloon that broke us.

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