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. Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 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. Total Daily Circulation – 1,897,890 Total Sunday Circulation – 2,391,986 Monthly Online Readership – 30,000,000 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.