Scott Heller

“Linda Vista,” Letts’ look at midlife malaise, will begin performances at the Hayes Theater on Sept. 19. The Steppenwolf Theater Company production, presented in association with Center Theater Group, will be directed by Dexter Bullard. It will be Letts’ third play on Broadway, following his Pulitzer Prize-winning “August: Osage County” and “Superior Donuts.” (As an actor, he is about to star in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” next month.)

Wohl’s “Grand Horizons,” which will have its world premiere at the Williamstown Theater Festival this summer, will begin performances at the Hayes in December, with Leigh Silverman directing. Wohl, best known for the silent-retreat comedy “Small Mouth Sounds,” is making her Broadway debut with the play, about a long marriage coming apart.

“Take Me Out,” which imagined the repercussions of a major-league baseball player coming out of the closet, will return to Broadway in the spring for the first time since its 2003 premiere. Scott Ellis will direct.

While Mary Steenburgen and Jesse Tyler Ferguson have committed to “Grand Horizons” at Williamstown, and Jussie Smollett and Zachary Quinto participated in a recent reading of “Take Me Out,” no casting for the Broadway productions has been announced, a Second Stage spokesman said.

The theater also announced two productions in its off-Broadway spaces: Will Eno’s “The Underlying Chris” and Alexis Scheer’s “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” a co-production with the WP Theater.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/theater/tracy-letts-second-stage-broadway.html" id="de1b1d2c-c52e-32b6-ad97-bc82c2769d1d">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Second Stage Theater will present new plays by Tracy Letts and Bess Wohl and a revival of Richard Greenberg’s baseball comedy “Take Me Out” on Broadway in the 2019-20 season.

Plays by Tracy Letts and Bess Wohl Headed to Broadway

<h1>NEW YORK — “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune,” Terrence McNally’s two-hander about wounded romantics in a one-night stand, will close July 28, producers announced on Monday.</h1>

Despite featuring six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald and two-time Oscar nominee Michael Shannon in the title roles, the show will close nearly a month earlier than planned. After opening May 30 as the first show of the 2019-20 season, it will have played 70 performances and 26 previews.

“Time has been good to ‘Frankie and Johnny,’ ” Jesse Green wrote in his New York Times Critic’s Pick review. “Its sentimentality hasn’t curdled the way it has in some of Mr. McNally’s many other plays.”

The box office wasn’t as good. For the week ending July 7, the show was the lowest grossing on Broadway, earning $231,745.

While its run will be brief, “Frankie and Johnny” has made Broadway history as the first show to use an “intimacy director” to help stage sex scenes and nudity.

Claire Warden handled that task, working with the actors and director Arin Arbus, making her own Broadway debut.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/theater/frankie-and-johnny-broadway-closing.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

'Frankie and Johnny' will close at the end of July

The box office wasn’t as good. For the week ending July 7, the show was the lowest grossing on Broadway, earning $231,745.

<h1>The creators of “Hamlet 360” describe the project as the rare instance where an entire play has been adapted to take advantage of the immersive possibilities of virtual reality.</h1>

But plenty of other theater artists — from the experimental to the commercial — have been making use of new technologies. Sometimes their work is seen, or heard, on a traditional stage; in other cases the boundaries between stage and screen are blurred. Here are several recent examples.

Don’t Put Away Your Phone

The Builders Association, which has incorporated cutting-edge technology into its work for decades, encouraged cellphone use for its 2015 augmented-reality-aided production, “Elements of Oz.” After downloading an app, audience members could watch the action onstage, along with nifty extras: Point the phone at Dorothy’s house, for example, and images of a tornado appeared on screen.

Smartphones played a key supporting role in James Graham’s “Privacy,” at the Public Theater, too, demonstrating — sometimes uncomfortably — how much could be gleaned about a randomly gathered group of theater fans by the devices they carried in their pockets.

Digital Wizardry in ‘The Tempest’

Working with Intel and a motion-capture company founded by Andy Serkis (Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” trilogy), the Royal Shakespeare Company featured an unusually shape-shifting Ariel in its 2017 production of “The Tempest.”

Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel, appeared both onstage and, at moments when his character referred to magic, as a digitally created avatar, filmed live and projected onto screens moving over fellow actors.

More ‘Object’ Lessons

Sensorium, the company that oversaw the technical direction on “Hamlet 360,” also helped to develop “objects in mirror AR closer than they appear,” an extension of Geoff Sobelle’s acclaimed one-man show “The Object Lesson.”

Presented at New York Theater Workshop and at the Tribeca Film Festival, the piece gave viewers the chance to wander through sections of Sobelle’s clutter-filled set and, using smartphone technology, watch and learn more about what was inside the many boxes and drawers — further fleshing out, visually and aurally, what Ben Brantley in The New York Times called the “connective poetry in the seeming randomness of what we hoard.”

Musical Videos in Surround

Musicals like “The Lion King,” “Hamilton” and “School of Rock” have made videos that allow viewers to experience what it is like onstage during a big number. You can circle your way through “Circle of Life,” or, in the case of “School of Rock,” use a mouse to explore a classroom where the school-age musicians headbang under the “guidance” of their teacher.

Playing With Sound

“No production on Broadway has ever thrown the doors of perception open as widely as ‘The Encounter,'” Ben Brantley wrote of the 2016 show, courtesy of the London-based Complicite, which piped binaural sound through headsets to capture the journey of a Western explorer lost in the Amazon rainforest.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e6a34297-d623-40a9-8f48-467dbf7bcaf3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/theater/theater-technology.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Builders Association, which has incorporated cutting-edge technology into its work for decades, encouraged cellphone use for its 2015 augmented-reality-aided production, “Elements of Oz.”

Extending the stage with technology

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Scott Heller

Articles written by the author

Plays by Tracy Letts and Bess Wohl Headed to Broadway

'Frankie and Johnny' will close at the end of July

Extending the stage with technology