Hilton Als
Staff writer
It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost twenty years since I first saw the great director David Cromer’s work. You don’t notice time passing when you’re in the presence of a bona-fide theatrical genius: you long for what’s next while pondering what you’ve just seen. “Orson’s Shadow” was the first piece that I saw Cromer shape. That was in 2005. Up until then, I had only seen more or less conventional narratives conventionally directed; Richard Foreman and Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group were the only auteurs around, but they didn’t stage standard narrative plays. But here, on that afternoon in 2005, was an artist who had taken a character-driven piece and made it an atmosphere. The actors were lit dimly; it was like watching figures edge their way through fog to get at your dreams. After that, I kept my eyes peeled for what the director, who is now sixty, put on.
His early masterpiece was his 2009 interpretation of “Our Town,” in which he appeared as the Stage Manager. Whoever saw that production wasn’t likely to forget it. He took Thornton Wilder’s homespun tale about loss and created an elegy that made you mourn for all the living you’d eventually lose, including yourself. A year later, there was “When the Rain Stops Falling,” and there it was again, Cromer’s auteurlike influence on a spectacle that was only enhanced by his love of the lost. His dark lighting and his tendency to make a stage smaller promoted a degree of intimacy that made a version of “Rent” he did in 2012 the only version that felt true to the poverty and the poetry of those characters’ lives.
With “The Counter” (at the Laura Pels, through Nov. 17), Cromer’s gift for intimacy is in full flower. It’s fascinating to see how he makes the already small stage feel even smaller, by building it out toward the audience, so we’re sitting with the characters in that diner while they choose life over what’s been lost—and over the possibility of death. Now Cromer is slated to direct George Clooney in the stage adaptation of the 2005 movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” (beginning previews at the Winter Garden on March 12). Who better to show us the devastating effects of McCarthyism in a grim world than this true auteur of the stage, whose work is like an extra text on top of the script: gentle but probing, magical and real.
Another standout of the theatre right now is the actress Zoë Winters, who appears in Second Stage’s production of “Walden” (at the Tony Kiser, through Nov. 24). Winters grew up in Santa Cruz, and graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2007. She is one of the great acting alumni from that school—Edie Falco is another—who are so astonishing in their natural gifts and command of the stage that you can’t help but give yourself over to their reality, even when they are unreal, demanding, entirely too strange. Despite Winters’s distinctive look—that long black hair and fringe, the generous mouth—when I covered theatre for this magazine, I often wrote about her as if I’d never seen her before. That’s because I hadn’t—not in this or that character, certainly. She was always different, and so fully immersed in each character’s inner life, that she would perforce look different. And it made a certain amount of sense for her to be in shows like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon” (2014), or Lucas Hnath’s “Red Speedo” (2016).
Because her acting was closely linked with these then emerging playwrights’ work, she was an emerging voice in acting, too: bold and intellectual but intuitive and incredibly smart about scripts, and how to play a character. Just as Maureen Stapleton and Geraldine Page helped Tennessee Williams find his way as a playwright in the nineteen-fifties, so, too, I felt, did Winters help the playwrights she worked with. And when she was in a show by an older artist, such as “White Noise” (2019), by Suzan-Lori Parks, she became the thing that you watched and listened to because she could find a reality even as the author searched for it herself. In “Succession,” I didn’t recognize Winters at first—she played the patriarch’s side piece—because, again, she was bringing another reality to the story, one in which mean common sense got mixed up with grief. In “Walden,” Winters plays a woman who is estranged from her twin sister; imagine what she’ll do in a role about familial alienation. She’ll turn the theatre inside out with rage, no doubt, but not without that emotion’s frequent underpinnings: longing, and grief, and understanding.
Spotlight
Photograph by Taylor Hill / Getty
Country
By the time the singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves won Album of the Year at the Grammys—for “Golden Hour,” from 2018—she had already established herself as a progressive force in country music. But, with that record, Musgraves, a native Texan turned offbeat pageant princess of Nashville, solidified her shift toward disco-bejewelled pop, with prismatic songs meditating on love in all its forms. In recent years, she has balanced the personal with the universal: her electro-laden album from 2021, “Star-Crossed,” reckoned with the ache of divorce; “Deeper Well,” the folk-tinged record she released this year, considered more cosmic truths with a warmer palette of sounds. In any mode, Musgraves’s sweet voice and charming, infectious disposition are anchored by an open mind, an unshowy wit, and a steadfast curiosity.—Sheldon Pearce (Barclays Center; Nov. 15-16.)
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