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From Todd Haimes

From the Artistic Director: Bobbie Clearly

 

When I first saw a reading of Bobbie Clearly in the Roundabout Underground Reading Series over a year ago, I was entranced. Swept away to Alex Lubischer’s fictional town of Milton, Nebraska, I felt the same pangs of nostalgia and longing that I recalled from the first time I had ever seen Our Town. But Bobbie Clearly goes one step further, combining the hidden complexities of small-town America with a pointed reminder that even our tightest, quaintest communities can experience the worst of humanity. I ended the show with my heart in my throat; I needed to talk about what I had seen. But when trying to explain the play to anyone else, my descriptions always failed me. Not for a lack of subject matter, but because the matrix of personalities, perspectives, and philosophies that Alex so tightly weaves into his play’s two short hours generates something that, really, can only be experienced firsthand: a feeling of deep, complicated communitas with the fictional town before us.

In a conceptual sense, Milton, Nebraska, serves as a battleground of clashing opposites. It’s a quintessential Midwestern farm town, quiet and almost inconceivably small. When a brutal crime leaves one of their number dead, the citizens of Milton are left to contend with something almost mythically large: an unspeakable offense committed by an unpardonable murderer. As a crew of filmmakers arrive to document the aftermath, the citizens of Milton must, through a series of ever-awkward on-camera interviews, reconcile their new reality with the community that they once knew. What happens when the mundane meets the monstrous? When the urge to forgive meets the unforgivable? The result is not, as our morality tales might have us believe, as simple as heroes vanquishing villains and restoring balance to the world. It’s about untangling good from evil when the two collide with brute, terrifying force – which can be at once frightening, confusing, and even, yes, hilarious. This is what Alex’s play captures so deftly: the grieving process as a series of battles between those whose approaches to “making things right” take wildly different forms. It’s only fitting, then, that Bobbie Clearly is simultaneously earnest and outrageous, ruthless and compassionate, uproarious and heart-stopping.

And as the Roundabout Underground’s 14th production, it’s in good company. Now in its eleventh year of producing emerging playwrights in the Black Box, the Roundabout Underground program has achieved a stunning degree of success since we mounted Stephen Karam’s Speech and Debate as the inaugural Underground production in 2007. In the years since their Underground productions, all thirteen of our Underground alumni have gone on to fruitful writing careers, whether for the stage or for the screen. Over the past two seasons alone, three of these alumni have made their Broadway debuts: Stephen Karam (The Humans, 2016 Tony Award® for Best Play and Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize); Joshua Harmon (Significant Other); and Steven Levenson (Dear Evan Hansen, 2017 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical). Both The Humans and Significant Other began in our Laura Pels Theatre, just upstairs of the Black Box at the Steinberg Center. In addition, Underground alumna Lindsey Ferrentino made her debut at the National Theatre in London this past spring with her play Ugly Lies the Bone, which premiered here in the Underground in 2015. Both Lindsey and Joshua Harmon, in fact, are returning to Roundabout this season with new plays, both of which we commissioned: Lindsey’s Amy and the Orphans, currently running at the Laura Pels Theatre, and Joshua’s Skintight, which will follow it there in May. I am so thrilled to watch as our relationships with the Underground writers have grown over the years and given rise to these and other magnificent successes at Roundabout and beyond.

I am so excited for you to experience Alex Lubischer’s thrilling play with this exceptional cast and under the direction of the phenomenal Will Davis. As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts on our season, so please continue to email me at ArtisticOffice@roundabouttheatre.org with your reactions. I can’t tell you how greatly I value your feedback.

I look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

Sincerely,

Todd Haimes
Artistic Director/CEO


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2017-2018 Season, Bobbie Clearly, From Todd Haimes


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From the Artistic Director: Amy and the Orphans

 

I knew even before I read the first page that there would be something dangerous about Amy and the Orphans. In the perhaps innocuous-sounding title itself lies an undercurrent of tragedy: Orphans. The sadness behind this word might soon be forgotten as Lindsey Ferrentino’s relentless, trademark humor jump-starts the play’s opening scenes. But Lindsey has let us know from the very beginning that beyond all the comedy of these first moments awaits a danger for us to grapple with in this play – but not, of course, without her leading the way.

There is danger for Lindsey herself in the pages of this script. Amy and the Orphans draws from the real-life experiences of Lindsey’s actual family members (including her Aunt Amy, who, like the Amy of this piece, had Down syndrome) and the decisions that would change their lives forever. This is a very personal play for Lindsey, and I am so inspired by her courage and talent in bringing it to life. It’s a frightening thing to reckon with such intimate ghosts on so public a platform as a New York stage, but it is this kind of risk, in my opinion, that makes way for true insight and makes possible real triumph.

Lindsey’s willingness to take such risks in her plays is one of my favorite things about her writing. As she proved with her play Ugly Lies the Bone, which premiered in the 2015 Roundabout Underground season to much acclaim and went on to be produced at the National Theatre in London last spring, she’s not afraid to tackle some of our culture’s greatest personal, social, and political ills and leave her audience with questions that they might never have otherwise asked themselves. She provides a platform for those who are often denied one, giving voice to individuals whose communities might all too often dismiss them as “less than” and taking on beasts as enormous as bias, tradition, and alienation. But for all the heaviness of her subject matter, she is anything but heavy-handed. She knows how to dramatize the massive, inconceivable forces of ostracism and isolation in a form that is both hilariously relatable and frighteningly true to life: the generations-old, rarely-discussed norms and patterns of the everyday that are all too often shrugged off as “just the way things are.”

It’s in just such a rut that we meet the titular trio of Amy and the Orphans, three adult siblings who reunite for the first time in years in the wake of their father’s death. True to her style, Lindsey has us fall in love with her characters before all else. She lets the comedy do the work of building the relationship between her audience and those who populate her stories, and she allows conflict to bubble organically out of clashing eccentricities and small disagreements that run amok. And then, just as effortlessly, she exposes what lies behind all the squabbling. As her characters one by one unearth grudges, resentments, and secrets that span decades, they must ask themselves what it really means to know and love those who share their blood, especially when one of their number has been disregarded and “othered” for decades. Is all of this really “just the way things are”?

Herein lies the danger that Lindsey warned us about from the outset: the danger in fighting years of unchallenged convention; the danger in owning up to complacency; and the danger in speaking up for yourself when even your own family members can’t seem to hear you. In amplifying the voice of a member of the Down syndrome community with integrity and compassion, Amy and the Orphans ultimately asks just how little we might know about those who make up our families – and just how deeply they can surprise us.

I am so excited for you to see this phenomenal production under the direction of Roundabout’s magnificent Associate Artistic Director Scott Ellis, who has worked with us steadily for well over 20 years. (It recently occurred to me that Amy and the Orphans is Scott’s 23rd production with the company – a remarkable achievement!) As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts on the show, so please continue to email me at ArtisticOffice@roundabouttheatre.org with your feedback.

I hope you enjoy Amy and the Orphans!


Related Categories:
2017-2018 Season, Amy and the Orphans, From Todd Haimes


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From the Artistic Director, John Lithgow: Stories By Heart

 

I could not be more thrilled to bring John Lithgow’s extraordinary solo show to a Broadway stage for the first time ever. Stories By Heart originated about ten years ago as a series of storytelling events that John performed in repertory. Since then, John has toured the show around the country, growing and revising his performance along the way, and he has crafted a theatrical event that is just as hilarious as it is moving. As an original presentation of stories that are over 70 years old, Stories By Heart touches on all parts of Roundabout’s mission to both foster new works and revive timeless texts. I am so honored to have John bring his unique performance to our stage under the direction of beloved Tony Award® winner and frequent Roundabout collaborator Daniel Sullivan.

One of the most versatile performers of his time, John Lithgow brings two distinct short stories, over a dozen characters, and decades of his family history to life in a single night of theatre with nothing more than his own transformative abilities as an actor. In a Broadway house literally surrounded by gigantic movie theatre complexes, multistory billboards, and some of the most technologically involved stage performances the world has ever seen, it is important to remember that a single storyteller, equipped with little more than their own instrument, can be just as formidable a dramatic force as the latest big-budget blockbuster. John’s enactment of stories by Ring Lardner and PG Wodehouse is a reminder of the enduring ability of our earliest storytelling traditions to captivate us with their powerful simplicity, as they have throughout history.

John goes even one step further, though, demonstrating how stories, in captivating us, have the capacity to do so much more than entertain. Chronicling his relationship to the two stories he tells from his first memories of them to the very performance you’ll be watching this week, John explores the ways in which stories have accompanied himself and his family in some of their brightest moments together, as well as helped them through some of their darkest. In capturing our imaginations, stories can be agents of both mental and physical healing in ways we might never have thought possible. As Stories By Heart begins, then, I challenge you to embrace that sense of wonder and awe that you once felt at your childhood storybooks – which, as John so masterfully proves, is never lost to time.

I have wanted to collaborate with John since before I even worked in the theatre industry at all. As chance would have it, at the age of 16, my mother took me to the Opening of a Broadway play her friend had produced called The Changing Room on March 6, 1973. It was my first Broadway Opening, and I would not attend another one for fifteen years. All I remember from that night was that the play starred an extraordinary young actor whom I had never heard of named John Lithgow, and that he went on to win the Tony Award for his performance in the play. In the decades since, the stars never quite aligned to allow John to work on a full production here at Roundabout – until now, over 44 years after I first saw him onstage. Having admired John and his work from afar for such a long time, it brings me so much joy to see him now make our stage his own with this incredible evening of theatre.

I am so excited for you to experience John’s virtuosic solo show and the incredible work that Daniel and our design team have done on it. As always, I am eager to hear your reactions to the production, so please continue to email me at ArtisticOffice@roundabouttheatre.org with your thoughts. I can’t tell you how greatly I value your feedback.

I look forward to seeing you at the theatre!

Sincerely,

Todd Haimes
Artistic Director/CEO


Related Categories:
2017-2018 Season, From Todd Haimes, John Lithgow: Stories by Heart


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