Stories

“I love Jermyn Street. It’s my third play here and I love the intimacy,” shares the legendary Scottish actor and writer Forbes Masson, who is currently playing there in Orphans. The play, written by the American playwright Lyle Kessler, is set in the North Philadelphia home of orphaned brothers Treat and Phillip – who have kidnapped a very drunk man called Harold (played by Forbes.)

Catch Orphans through January 24th.

Problematic fave Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Turandot has been in repertory at the Met Opera on and off for nearly four decades, well after most of the Western world in theatre, cinema, and other arts had decided that race play — both literally and in a broader aesthetic sense — was gauche. Springing partly from a melody Puccini found in a music box from the late 19th century, according to the New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot premiered in Italy at La Scala in Milan in 1926, its score completed posthumously by Franco Alfano. The show transports the fairy tale of a strong-willed princess and the treacherous tasks she sends her suitor to complete, codified in Carlo Gozzi’s 18th century play of the same name, borrowed from an allegedly Persian myth (found in Les Mille et un jours) and subsequently adapted by Frederich Schiller in 1801 (which served as Puccini’s jumping off point). So: from the world of Commedia dell’arte to the Romantic style, and from Italy to a (very) imaginary Peking. While all other suitors have failed, leading to the Princess’s demands for their execution, Prince Calaf’s love for Princess Turandot transcends the many challenges before him: her iciness and guillotine-happy glare, her three tests for him, and the bloodlust of the crowd. True as ever, audiences love a bit of danger. 

Keenan Tyler Oliphant is a theatre-maker and director from Cape Town, South Africa. Melodrama’s Kate Purdum recently spoke to Oliphant over the phone about his work on Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, a buzzy and polarizing new play (which will conclude its wildly popular run at Playwrights Horizons in New York later this month) depicting the euphoric highs and traumatic lows of a group of actors in the thrall of a magnetic and megalomaniacal director. “I often say as a director, I am operating as a jazz musician. [There’s] an internal feeling, a pulse,” says Oliphant, who draws on an extensive jazz background in his directorial process. He is also informed by his artistic upbringing in South Africa’s non-hierarchical theatre-making culture. All of this and more has shaped his approach to Hassan’s intensely metatheatrical play, which  features characters who are actors, directors, and designers themselves. Below, Oliphant and Purdum discuss the play he admits is one of his favorites he’s gotten to direct, as well as his collaboration with Hassan, his musical sensibilities, and his feelings about power dynamics in theater — on and off stage.