Streep Donates $1 Million for Public Theater Renovation - NYTimes.com OCTOBER 4, 2012, 8:00 PM Streep Donates $1 Million for Public Theater Renovation By ALLAN KOZINN At a reception on Thursday night to mark the completion of the Public Theater's $40 million renovation of its Astor Place home, the theater was scheduled to announce another reason to celebrate: the actress Meryl Streep has donated $1 million to be put toward the cost of the reconfiguration. "I give this gift, " Ms. Streep said in a statement, "in honor of the founder of the Public Theater, my friend and mentor Joseph Papp, and in remembrance of one of the theater's Board members and greatest supporters, my friend Nora Ephron." (Papp died in 1991; Ephron died in June.) Ms. Streep's association with the company goes back to her 1975 Broadway debut in Papp's staging of "Trelawny of the Wells" (the cast also included Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow). She has also appeared in Shakespeare in the Park productions of "Henry V" and "Measure for Measure," and more recently, "The Seagull" and "Mother Courage and Her Children." The Public Theater's renovation includes an expanded lobby, a new mezzanine-level cocktail lounge called the Library, a lobby snack bar meant to encourage theatergoers to congregate, a new entrance to Joe's Pub and an expanded box office. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/...4/streep-donates-1-million-for-public-theater-renovation/?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[10/5/2012 9:51:31 AM] Faith, Doubt and All Sorts of Scars - The New York Times October 4, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Faith, Doubt and All Sorts of Scars By BEN BRANTLEY Even standing stock still, this guy vibrates with discomfort. It’s as if he’s paralyzed by cramps, not so much in his body but in his mind. Sam, who’s been scarred all over by life, has come to mistrust the world. And because Sam is played by Michael Shannon, we trust in his mistrust so deeply that it hurts. By the way, his instincts aren’t wrong. Anyone doubting that Mr. Shannon is our reigning champion in embodying uneasy American manhood (well, him and Joaquin Phoenix) need only check out his portrait of the doomed Sam in Craig Wright’s “Grace,” which opened on Thursday night at the Cort Theater. This cool, strangulated little essay of a play, which also stars the very able Paul Rudd, deals with really big subjects seldom addressed onstage these days. (Its title refers not to a woman’s name but the theological concept.) But if “Grace” is remembered in years to come — and I can’t promise it will be — it will most likely be as the production that brought Mr. Shannon’s electrically anxious acting to Broadway. Having played all-consuming paranoia to a fare-thee-well in the Off Broadway and film versions of Tracy Letts’s “Bug” and the movie “Take Shelter,” Mr. Shannon is allowed to be the sane man in “Grace.” But that doesn’t mean his character is any more at ease in his skin. Uneasiness, on many levels, dominates “Grace,” which was first produced at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington in 2004 and has since been seen around the country. Staged by Dexter Bullard (who directed Mr. Shannon in “Bug” and in Mr. Wright’s “Mistakes Were Made”), this current production exists in a sustained tremor of apprehension. As lighted by David Weiner, with hushed nerve-scraping sound design by Darron L. West, “Grace” exudes the clinical, creepy brightness of a morgue. The slowly revolving set by the industrious Beowulf Boritt (“Chaplin,” “If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet”) does include an otherworldly vista of cerulean heavens. But the sum effect is of those very worldly post-mortems so beloved by true-crime television series. Like many such shows “Grace” starts with a murder — or three murders, to be exact, and one suicide. (See, I wasn’t spoiling a thing by telling you that Sam was doomed.) The play opens on several corpses, who then rise and act out the last moments of their lives in reverse order, as if a tape were being rewound. That scene, restored to conventional sequence, will be repeated at the end, 90 airless minutes later. In other words, this is not a whodunit but a why-dunit. And the whys are those asked by theologians and philosophers as well as homicide detectives. (Mr. Wright, for the record, was once a seminary student.) Well, to a degree. “Grace” isn’t as intellectually probing or unsettling as it means to be. It tidily stacks the deck of its central thesis, which concerns the nature of grace as it is visited on inhabitants of this earth. In Mr. Wright’s version the evangelical Christian doesn’t stand a chance. http://theater.nytimes.com/...grace-with-paul-rudd-and-michael-shannon-at-cort-theater.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[10/5/2012 9:58:18 AM] Faith, Doubt and All Sorts of Scars - The New York Times The play’s born-again protagonist is Steve (Mr. Rudd), a Minnesotan who has moved to Florida with his wife, Sara (Kate Arrington), with the goal of creating a chain of gospel-theme hotels. (His slogan: “Where would Jesus stay?”) This is a man for whom capitalism and Christianity have been conflated into a single ideology of achievement. Mr. Rudd, whose screen performances have often been edged with a piquant skepticism, plays the part with a committed straightforwardness and no hint of condescension. Steve has a way of zealously, even manically, bringing up God with everyone he encounters. That includes his reclusive neighbor Sam, a NASA scientist who lost his fiancée (and much of his skin) in a car accident, and Karl (an avuncular, bluff Ed Asner, in a welcome return to the stage), a German-born exterminator whose wife is dying of cancer and who lost his family as a child in Nazi Germany. Sam and Karl, understandably, don’t have much patience with Steve’s ideas of a beneficent providence. When pressed, Sam reluctantly says he sees Jesus as a mythical figure exploited for profit by churchly corporations. But as the play continues, both these doubters — along with Sara, who has never been as doctrinaire a Christian as her husband — come to think that some sort of spiritual grace may indeed operate in this world. The paradox of the financially beleaguered Steve losing his religion while everybody else finds theirs is laid out as tidily as a PowerPoint presentation. And while all the performances are solid, I often had difficulty in believing these characters as something other than figures in a parable. There are a couple of lovely monologues of self-revelation for Sara (played with a serene clarity by Ms. Arrington) and Sam. But there are also instances of glib, shortcut exposition you associate with sitcom pilots. (An exultant Steve to Sara when he thinks his financing has come through: “Do you what this means?” Sara: “That we can have a baby?”) If “Grace” winds up haunting you, it will be because of Mr. Shannon’s performance. And give credit to those who cast him, against obvious type, as the passive Sam instead of the increasingly crazy Steve. From his tight- muscled posture to his pinched, effortful voice, Mr. Shannon here suggests someone for whom continuing to live is a painful act of labor. It’s when Sam is allowed, briefly, to imagine things might be otherwise that the dialectic of “Grace” acquires achingly human impact. Grace By Craig Wright; directed by Dexter Bullard; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Tif Bullard; lighting by David Weiner; sound by Darron L.West; fight director, J. David Brimmer; makeup by Nan Zabriskie; technical supervisor, Neil A. Mazzella; production stage manager, James Harker; associate producers, Roberta Pereira and Judy Page; general manager, 101 Productions Ltd. Presented by Debbie Bisno, Fox Theatricals, Paula Wagner, Jed Bernstein and Jessica Genick, in association with Christian Chadd Taylor, Miles Marek/Peter May, Bruce Bendel/Scott Prisand, William Berlind/Amanda DuBois and Alex DiClaudio/LaRue-Noy. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Through Jan. 6. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. WITH: Paul Rudd (Steve), Michael Shannon (Sam), Kate Arrington (Sara) and Ed Asner (Karl). http://theater.nytimes.com/...grace-with-paul-rudd-and-michael-shannon-at-cort-theater.html?ref=theater&pagewanted=print[10/5/2012 9:58:18 AM] Occupying Paris With Revolutionary Zest, Amplified by the Cancan - The New York Times October 4, 2012 THEATER REVIEW Occupying Paris With Revolutionary Zest, Amplified by the Cancan By BEN BRANTLEY Have you ever wondered what it’s like, really like, to be part of a state-toppling revolution? If so, might I suggest you try dancing the cancan? It would need to be an especially vigorous cancan, with skyscraping kicks and twirls upon twirls, and you would have to keep dancing until you felt like falling down. But in the end you might experience some of the dizzy exhilaration, liberation and exhaustion known by the Parisians who took over their city in the heady spring of 1871. That, in any case, is the formula devised by the Civilians, an investigative theater troupe celebrated for its imaginative reach of empathy. That dance that once shook (and shocked) the world is performed, at length and in high gear, twice during “Paris Commune,” the spirited, 90-minute re-creation of a 10-week revolution, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space.