Press Nights offers summaries of recent theater articles from The New York Times. And links, so you can read the whole things.
GETTING NAKED Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald, the stars of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” at the Broadhurst Theater, got expert advice from an intimacy coach, as Laura Collins-Hughes’s feature explained.
“STAGING SEX SCENES IN THE #ME TOO ERA,” by Laura Collins-Hughes. Web headline: “How Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon Got Intimate.” Arts & Leisure section, June 30, 2019.
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“Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune” is an award-winning work of theater about a diner waitress and a short-order cook who have a one-night stand and then debate whether it could be more. The play, by Terrence McNally, delves into a lot more than casual sex, but it does open with a couple in bed having an orgasm — and the two actors do spend some of their time onstage nude.
Collins-Hughes, a frequent Times contributor, looked into what happened when the director of the play’s current Broadway revival (it first appeared Off Broadway in New York in 1987) decided to hire an intimacy consultant for its stars, Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.
Meeting with her — a typical question is “Where do you not want to be touched?” — was “kind of like going to confession,” said Shannon 44, who had appeared nude onstage once before, in Tracy Letts’s “Bug” (2004), and had had a sex scene, with Kim Basinger, in the film “Eight Mile” (2002).
McDonald, who is best known for having won six — yes, six! — Tony Awards by the age of 48 — had not done a nude scene before, and it came at what felt like an odd time for her. She is still breast-feeding her daughter, Sally James McDonald-Swenson. “It’s been a very wild sort of experience to be literally teetering on menopause, naked onstage and still nursing my child through the night most nights,” she said.
Everyone’s conclusion, including the writer and the consultant herself (Claire Warden of Intimacy Directors International): Doing a sex scene onstage is all about trust.
Shannon’s conclusion: “What I always say about sex scenes, my dumb joke about them, is that they really are like sex. They have all the confusion and loneliness and anxiety and despair, just none of the pleasure.”
McDonald’s thoughts on nudity: “Maybe strippers get real used to it.”
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“DANIELLE BROOKS, READY TO BE A LOVE INTEREST,” by Kathryn Shattuck. Web headline: Same. Arts & Leisure section, June 16, 2019.
Shattuck, a longtime Times writer, did a Q&A with Brooks, who just starred in Shakespeare in the Park’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” for the “A Word With” column.
What we learned:
(1) Brooks went to Juilliard.
(2) She gave up a movie role (she doesn’t mention which one) to do Shakespeare in the Park. Why? “Being the lead in Shakespeare … being myself, not commenting on who I am — that I don’t know will come again.”
(3) She loved being in “Orange Is the New Black” (which starts its final season on July 26), playing the inmate Taystee Jefferson. She says she believes that it “helped me with discovering my place in the industry.”
(4) She’s an executive producer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” the current Temptations jukebox musical.
(5) One of her fondest wishes: “Can we branch out and stop telling the same five black-women-type stories?”
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“FROM SECOND BASE TO CENTER STAGE,” by Sopan Deb. Web headline: “Big League Baseball’s First Woman, on a Stage of Her Own.” Arts & Leisure section, June 16, 2019.
Pegged to a new Off Broadway play, “Toni Stone,” Deb’s article introduces readers to its subject, Marcenia Lyle Stone, whose baseball-history first was taking the field as second baseman for the Indianapolis Clowns (part of the Negro Leagues) in 1953.
Pretty much everyone quoted agrees that Stone deserved to be much more than a footnote in sports history. A few interesting facts from the article:
Stone was taking the place of another Clowns player, who had just moved to the Milwaukee Braves. His name was Hank Aaron.
Stone once got a hit off Satchel Paige, which was no small feat.
Stone died in 1996 at the age of 75.
Stone is played by April Matthis, but the role originally had gone to Uzo Aduba, who plays the character nicknamed Crazy Eyes on “Orange Is the New Black.” There was a scheduling problem.
Lydia R. Diamond, the playwright, based her script on a biography.
Diamond summed up her feelings about being able to tell Stone’s story and how different their lives were: “I have the privilege of being able to try to unpack and deconstruct the way I move through the world as a person of color,” she said. “She didn’t have the time to sit down and pull apart the politics of her existence. She had a thing to do. And she did that thing.”
“Toni Stone” is at the Laura Pels Theater through Aug. 11.