Alexis Soloski

“It’s been a long time coming, for real,” said Lileana Blain-Cruz, the director. She fell for the play a decade ago, in graduate school, attracted by its humor, its mystery, its beauty. She spent years wondering, “Why is nobody doing this?” she said.

Set in 1935, at a well-appointed country house peopled with well-appointed women, the play seems, on its gleaming surface, to be straightforward. The set, with its sofa, coffee table and upstage piano is gallingly simple. Superficially, so is the plot: Stephany, nicknamed Fefu, has gathered seven friends together to plan a school fundraiser. From noon until dusk they gossip and drink, dance and rehearse, eat chocolates and aim a double-barreled shotgun.

The shotgun is loaded with blanks. Probably.

But after the first act, the audience divides into four groups, each assigned to a different location — a study, a kitchen, a bedroom, a lawn. The groups watch four scenes in different order, an act of immersive theater, or promenade theater, dreamed up decades before those before those styles became popular.

And the fundraiser plot is simply cover for vital, unanswerable questions about desire and fear and trauma, about how to be a person, especially a female person, about how to survive. It is a play about what happens when women talk to each other.

Marc Robinson, a professor of theater studies at Yale University and the author of “The Theater of Maria Irene Fornés,” called it “an incredible work. Its challenges are still formidable in the best, most stimulating way.”

On Halloween morning, I slipped into a dance studio in Midtown West to watch a rehearsal for the show, which is now in previews and opens Nov. 24. (Like a lot of “Fefu” devotees, I discovered the play in college. I’ve never seen it either.) Under overbright lights, the cast and some of the creative team made a circle for a warm-up — bending, arcing, sticking their tongues out like statues of Kali while an Olga Guillot bolero poured from the speakers and Blain-Cruz, in a cropped blouse and paradise pink lipstick, shouted encouragement.

Once warm, the actors arranged themselves on and around a rehearsal sofa, clutching empty cocktail glasses and nibbling the vegan macaroons an assistant stage manager had baked. Nearly everyone was a woman, nearly everyone was a person of color. Off-Broadway, that’s still unusual. So was the mood that day, a giddy mix of excitement, risk and dedication to a shared endeavor.

I had spent a lot of that week speaking to playwrights and professors, people like me who love the play, often obsessively, but have never seen it performed professionally. “Fefu” remains a campus favorite and regional productions turn up, like a well-received production this past summer at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theater, but they’re rare.

Jeremy O. Harris, the author of “Slave Play,” saw a college production as an undergraduate at DePaul University. “I remember being so enthralled by the language and the sense of motion inside of the piece,” he said by telephone. Recently, he and the playwright Will Arbery (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning”) bonded over their “Fefu” fandom.

“This play is stapled to my soul and it hurts,” Arbery wrote in an email, “I don’t have to understand it: I believe it.”

When the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury adopted a cat, she named her “Fefu.” (The cat has since had kittens — the friends.) She read the play in college “and was immediately completely obsessed with it,” she said. “It’s the first play I had read that was about women in a very deep and considered way.”

The structure of “Fefu” informs — unconsciously, Drury said — her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” a play that also emphasizes subjective experience by asking audiences to move within the theater.

If “Fefu” can inspire this reverence, why do so few theaters stage it? Yes, Fornés, like her peer Adrienne Kennedy, has a reputation, not always deserved, for difficulty. (This never stopped Beckett or Pinter.) The language can skew arch or formal — Fefu opens the play saying, “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” Some moments tilt toward surrealism. And like ice or a fish or a rain-slicked path, “Fefu” is slippery, its gist ever sliding away.

Fornés herself said that she was dealing less with story or plot than with “the mechanics of the mind, some kind of spiritual survival, a process of thought.” Which exasperated critics like Walter Kerr. “If I lasted as long as I did,” he wrote in his 1978 Times review, “it was because I kept hoping during my constant journeyings that I might find a play in the very next room.”

But that slipperiness is also a strength, an acknowledgment that the person across the aisle might see the play differently than I do (if we’re lucky enough to see it at all), that we might approach it with discrete values, experiences and concerns. “What I love about María Irene Fornés, her plays don’t dictate to you what they’re about,” Harris told me. The meaning is up to us.

Inscrutability doesn’t rattle Blain-Cruz, who has always been drawn, she said, to “dense, weird, fun, strange worlds.” (She’s also directed plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice Birch and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, so that checks out.) Besides, worrying too much about the enigmas of “Fefu” risks ignoring the elements that make it so pleasurable — its charm, its humor, its sense of play.

“Once you hear it in conversation, all of a sudden it becomes alive and understandable,” Blain-Cruz said. That was true in the rehearsal room, even as the women were working through a dense passage drawn from a 1917 handbook on theater in education.

For Blain-Cruz, the play is “about discovering the many worlds that exist within eight different women and what happens when they orbit and bounce against each other.” Fornés went back and forth about whether she considered the play feminist, but she did say, unequivocally, “The play is about women.”

I had begun to wonder if that was what made the play so subversive, so apparently unstageable. Not its five separate sets, not its ethical inquiry, but the fact that it invites these women over and encourages them to speak to each other.

Two days after I visited rehearsal, I called Jeffrey Horowitz, founder of Theater for a New Audience, the producers of this revival, and I asked him why the play was so rarely performed. “I don’t know,” he said. A few minutes after our call ended, my phone rang. Horowitz again. He had an answer. “I think it’s because she writes about women,” he said.

Robinson had told me something similar. “It’s important not to overlook questions of bias,” he said.

That day in rehearsal, thinking about how good and weird it felt to see so many women onstage, I asked Blain-Cruz if that aspect of the play still felt radical.

“Deeply,” she said, laughing the way you laugh when you could just as easily scream or cry. “Deeply. Oh, look — eight women in a room. Explosive!”

This article originally appeared in

'A Long Time Coming' for Masterwork No One Has Seen

NEW YORK — When Cuban-American director and playwright María Irene Fornés died last fall, the New York Times obituary referred to her as “an underrecognized genius.” Now, what is perhaps her finest work, “Fefu and Her Friends,” can be seen at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Revolutionary in its form and daring in its philosophy, “Fefu,” from 1977, hasn’t played off-Broadway since its debut. Think of it as the masterpiece no one has seen.

“I passionately believe that a show can be touching and funny and sad and mysterious and dramatic,” she said, speaking from her home in London recently. “You don’t have to choose one thing.”

A natural clown with a hypermobile face and a nervy, high-amplitude energy, Haggard had, until very recently, made a career of cameos, one-offs and character bits. People sometimes recognized her from the British TV series “Episodes,” in which she played Myra Licht, the bilious head of comedy at an American network. She also had a role in the Harry Potter franchise — as the voice of an elevator.

But like that elevator, Haggard is moving up. Her six-episode comedy “Back to Life,” about a 30-something woman who has just finished serving an 18-year prison sentence, had a successful run in Britain this spring, lauded in the press as the next “Fleabag.” A new FX series starring Haggard is in production. And Sunday, “Back to Life” makes its American debut on Showtime, with all episodes available to binge at midnight.

“Back to Life” resists some of the easy “Fleabag” comparisons drawn in the media. It’s a comedy and a drama, a mystery and a fish-out-of-water yarn, a piece of small-town sociology and probably a romance. It’s the story of Miri Matteson, who must adjust to a life in a coastal community that no longer trusts her. But it’s also the story of a 41-year-old actress who is finally attacking a role as big and weird and rich as she could dream it.

“Your time comes when it comes if you’re lucky enough for it to come,” she said. “All I can say is, I’m so glad that things are happening for me now, you know, at 40 rather than at 21, when I wouldn’t have known what to do.”

The youngest child of a director father, Piers Haggard, and an artist mother, Anna Sklovsky, Haggard always knew she wanted to act. She spent her London childhood making up dance routines to Whitney Houston songs and staging multiday productions like “The Mystery of the Scratched Boob,” a parody of her father’s horror films like “The Blood on Satan’s Claw.” Her father discouraged her ambitions, but at 15 he reluctantly gave her a part as a teen murderess in an episode of “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries.”

Rejected by drama schools the first time she applied, she eventually enrolled in a two-year course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Once, she stumbled upon some faculty notes she almost certainly wasn’t meant to see: “Collapsed thoracic, multiple speech impediments, and terrible legs.”

“I remember reading that, thinking, ‘I’m never going to work,’ ” Haggard said.

For about eight years, she didn’t — or at least not enough that she could stop working as a gym receptionist, as a nanny, or in the Christmas decorations department at Harrods. “I would get what I thought was a break, say goodbye to everybody and then be like, ‘Hello again,’ ” she said.

Better acting work arrived: decent theater roles; a spot on the sketch show “Man Stroke Woman,” where she met writer Laura Solon; and supporting or ensemble parts in dark British television comedies like “Psychoville” and “The Persuasionists.” But little of it showed her range.

Then in 2012, she voiced a role in an animated series called “Full English,” created in part by the brothers Harry and Jack Williams, who went on to become executive producers on “Fleabag.” “Full English” was quickly canceled, but the three became friends. A few years later, over too many glasses of rosé, she sold them on “Back to Life,” based on her interest in how society treats female offenders and a hunch that Miri and the series would flutter free of any pigeonhole.

“It had a dark heart,” Harry Williams said by phone of their decision to take it on. “It was a tragedy at the center of a comedy.”

The producers found a director, Chris Sweeney, and filmed a 10-minute taster designed to capture the show’s tone. Two years ago the BBC commissioned the series — when Haggard was nine months pregnant with her second daughter. (Her husband is musician Joe Wilson.)

Solon, who now lives in Los Angeles, came on as a co-writer, and the two women hashed out the six episodes on harried trans-Atlantic Skype calls.

“We were basically doing 5 a.m. calls,” Solon said, “just talking at each other as quickly as possible until one of our children came back or woke up.”

Haggard typed scripts with the baby on her lap or between sessions with the breast pump. Her baby had a tongue tie; her older daughter had recurrent chest infections. Still, she said the added constraints “probably helped in some way.”

“There’s this myth that you have kids and your brain doesn’t work and you can’t do anything, and actually that’s just rubbish because it completely focused me,” she said. “I could have written a million shows to myself in my 20s and 30s, but I was too busy sitting around in my pants complaining about all the time I had. I had too much time.”

From domestic chaos, a show emerged that pits Miri’s wide-eyed innocence against bleaker themes. The neighbors hate her; her old boyfriend has moved on; her mother (Geraldine James) hides the knives. Even the walls of her old bedroom — decorated with posters of Prince, Michael Jackson, George Michael — have become grim.

Before “Fleabag” cleaned up at this year’s Emmy Awards, networks and streaming services had already showed increasing interest in dark comedies centered on troubled, troublesome women, like “Russian Doll,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” or Showtime’s own “SMILF” — shows often created or cocreated by their female leads. But comparisons to “Fleabag,” especially given the several producers it shares (executive producer Sarah Hammond is a third), seemed inevitable.

Gary Levine, Showtime’s president of entertainment, said he wasn’t looking to replicate the success of “Fleabag.” “With successful shows on our competitors, we try to stay away from them,” he said. “None of us were sitting here saying, ‘Wow, this is the next ‘Fleabag.’ ”

Haggard said she loved “Fleabag,” but she insisted that tonally, the shows differed.

“To be mentioned in the same breath is definitely a huge honor,” she said. But “Back to Life” is less worldly and a lot less sexy. Arguably it’s sadder. If people come expecting the cheek and lust of “Fleabag,” “they’ll be disappointed,” Haggard said. “It’s not that. It’s something else.”

But like that show, it stars a gifted actress in a role purpose-built to showcase her charm and abilities. As Miri, Haggard screams, she sings, she scowls, she flirts. She cuts her own hair and uses novelty balloons as a weapon and somehow makes it all seem natural.

“She’s got a very sort of rubber, versatile face,” said her co-star Geraldine James. “And she has a spontaneity that’s very unusual, so you can throw anything at her, and she will respond to it very originally and very wittily, immediately and completely truthfully.”

If Miri borrows Haggard’s sunniness and charm, the circumstances of their lives are obviously different. “Breeders,” a new comedy coming to FX next year, resembles her own life more closely. Alongside Martin Freeman, she stars as Ally, a frazzled North London woman juggling marriage, career and young children. It’s one of those juggling acts where the balls keep dropping.

“‘Back to Life’ didn’t need any of what I was going through,” Haggard said. “‘Breeders’ did. I got to play an exhausted mother of two, which is what I am.”

If “Back to Life” is renewed (Levine said he was optimistic), the exhaustion should continue. Probably it would have been easier to achieve all this decades ago, in the pre-child years, sitting around in her underwear. But Haggard, who cited “relentless optimism” as her defining quality, prefers to look at her journey differently: “I think I’ve just had a varied career,” she said.

James, who first worked with Haggard onstage 15 years ago and has now played her mother three times, had her own interpretation.

“All the talent that she’s always had, it has come right into fruition,” James said. “She had to write that for herself, in order to let to let the world see her full potential. I hope that she inspires a lot of young women to write pieces for themselves.”

Before English actress Daisy Haggard knew what story she wanted to tell, she knew how she wanted that story to feel.

The Next 'Fleabag'? Not Exactly

The whole audience? “The women,” he clarified. “The men are usually pretty quiet.”

Barford, 53, was chatting about his role as the main character in “Linda Vista” by Tracy Letts, a Broadway play about a toxic man in midlife who may or may not achieve decontamination. He had picked a favorite lunch spot, a bistro in Chelsea, and crammed his gangling legs under a corner table, hunching his shoulders as he pushed some eggs around a plate, making himself as small as he could, which wasn’t very.

Graying at the temples, with pouches under his eyes that push his face toward woebegone, he looked handsome, shambolic, exhausted — a lion left out in the rain.

In “Linda Vista,” which Ben Brantley called an “inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy,” he plays Wheeler, a San Diego camera-shop employee who has torpedoed his marriage and moved to a down-market apartment complex to escape the wreckage. A walking conjugation, Wheeler sleeps, has slept, or is likely to sleep, with every woman in the play, as long as his bum hip holds out.

An aggressor, he likes to portray himself as a victim. (“And he was humiliated” is the punch line to all his anecdotes, he tells a co-worker.) The play’s second act pummels Wheeler with body blows, mostly self-inflicted, that shove him toward personal responsibility. Or not. The final scene has a teasing, troubling ambiguity.

The play, Barford’s fourth collaboration with Letts, doesn’t work if audiences loathe Wheeler from the get-go or if they cheer him on too long. Barford has to perform, with ruthlessness and charm, a high-wire act of empathy that allows Wheeler to sway from protagonist to antagonist and maybe back again. “I just try to not shy away from any of it,” he said. “I try to just let him be as nasty as he is and also let him be as wounded as he is.”

He walked a similar tightrope in his other recent Broadway outing, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Divorced dads of questionable sympathy seem to be his brand.

Barford began acting in the mid-’80s at Illinois State, the college that many founding members of the Steppenwolf Theater Company attended. A tennis player — his 6-foot-3 height was an advantage until it wasn’t — with little academic direction, he stumbled into a master class with the legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen. After his scene, she stubbed out her cigarette, kissed him on each cheek and announced, as Barford tells it, “Now this is what I’ve been talking about!”

After graduation, he joined Steppenwolf as an acting apprentice and except for a stint in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, he has stayed in and around there since, mostly in supporting roles. But when it came to “Linda Vista,” Letts recognized that the play would benefit from Barford’s unforced charisma and his Everyman quality. (Letts, also 6-foot-3, apparently likes his Everymen tall.)

“It felt really right to give Ian the ball and say this is yours,” Letts said by phone as he wheeled his baby son around Battery Park.

During rehearsals for the Chicago premiere and a subsequent production in Los Angeles, Wheeler was made to measure, incorporating Barford’s gruff, musical cadences, not to mention his bad hip. Letts didn’t like how spry he looked, Barford said. “He wanted to degrade me a little more.”

Letts agreed. “If I had any issue with Ian and the role, it’s that he’s so hale,” he said. But not so hale that an intimacy coordinator didn’t have to alter a raunchy sex scene to give that hip some protection.

Audiences will sometimes confuse Barford and his role, like the woman who waited at the stage door just to say, “I hated you.” But as Dexter Bullard, the play’s director, put it, “Ian is so nice. Wheeler is not.”

Wheeler can’t be bothered with civility. “I’m too old to pretend to be something I’m not, and a lot of the things I am are not attractive,” he says. But Barford can. The day after our lunch, Letts let me know I’d been mangling Barford’s first name. (It’s pronounced Yan, not Ee-an.) Barford never mentioned it.

Still, the actor had his Wheeler years, in Los Angeles, in his 30s, recovering from what he calls a “horrendous” early marriage and bedding everyone in driving distance before settling down again. His signature move was to look deep into the eyes of a woman, a gesture his wife, Steppenwolf’s artistic director, Anna D. Shapiro, described as “Clintonian.” It usually worked. At the cafe table, he provided a brief demonstration. And … yes.

None of his behavior was horrible, he said, “not like, horrible horrible,” but he noticed that the sex ultimately made him feel worse. So he went to therapy, he moved back to Chicago, he started dating Shapiro. He figured it out.

“He’s not Wheeler anymore,” Shapiro said, speaking by telephone from their home in Chicago.

Characters like Wheeler aren’t exactly rare. From Agamemnon and Oedipus on out, the stage is strewn with middle-aged men who are the smartest guys in the room except when it comes to self-knowledge — think of Hamlet, Othello, Faust, Peer Gynt, Arthur Miller’s heroes. Women are the collateral damage.

If “Linda Vista” has been recalibrated since Chicago — the women’s parts have thickened, Wheeler’s monologues have thinned — it still participates, enthusiastically, in this tradition. Is another Broadway play intently focused on male frustrations and anxieties a solution or part of the problem? Is this a story we need?

“I think we need all the stories,” Letts told me. “I don’t think there’s any story we don’t need.” Middle-aged men come to the show, he said, “and they are laid low by it. They come out at the end and they are weeping because it speaks to things that are going on in their lives — malaise, depression, deep sadness.” The play models how toxic masculinity hurts men, too, and how change is possible.

Barford doesn’t want to tell anyone — man, woman, child (well, not his 10-year-old twins, who are barred from seeing the show, as is his mother) — what to think about the play or how to feel about Wheeler.

But he hopes that people will see the character as human, as hurting, as capable of redemption. Barford changed; he thinks Wheeler can, too. Hate him, hiss him, throw a program, but don’t give up on him.

“The play doesn’t abandon the guy,” he said. And he won’t either. “That’s just doing my job,” he said. “That’s just what’s on the page.”

Think He's a Jerk? Then He's Doing His Job

NEW YORK — Ian Barford can tell when the audience turns against him. It begins with a kiss, and escalates during a breakup scene. By the time he hobbles through a door, desperate to reconcile, “they’re just hissing at me, practically throwing things at me,” Barford said.

Roundabout Underground, a new venue for young writers, had chosen Gwon’s “Ordinary Days,” a four-character chamber piece about adrift New Yorkers, as its first musical. The New York Times called him “a promising newcomer to our talent-hungry musical theater.” Goodbye chrysalis, hello butterfly.

Professional and amateur companies clamored for the rights, Audra McDonald added the musical’s song “I’ll Be Here” to her repertory, saying that it had “grabbed my heart, ripped it out and showed it to me bleeding in front of my face.” Commissions kept coming. New York’s talent-hungry musical theater slavered for a follow-up. No follow-up came.

Gwon, 39, who lives with his boyfriend, actor John Wascavage, in an apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, never went anywhere. Or to put it another way, he went everywhere. He wrote half a dozen new musicals (“The Boy Detective Fails,” “Cloudlands,” and “Cake Off,” among others) and saw most of them staged at regional theaters, though they didn’t attract many subsequent productions. Former colleagues made it to Broadway or near enough. He didn’t. He was pretty sure he didn’t mind.

“All of those people illustrate that it’s possible,” he said.

That seemed so healthy. I asked him if he went to therapy. He tried it, he said. But he didn’t like it. “Writing is my therapy,” he explained.

Gwon was speaking on a recent weekday afternoon in a lounge at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater. His drab shirt and crinkled jeans matched the tattered couch. Like his songs, he is funny, urbane, with a sweetness that doesn’t cloy. He has a fizzy, artless laugh and a maximal smile that makes him look like a kid who has somehow grown a beard.

He was in previews for “Scotland, PA,” a bleak and lusty musical comedy about the perils of ambition, which opens at the Pels on Oct. 23. It’s the most ambitious show of his career.

Raised in Baltimore, he started writing musicals almost accidentally, when an acting teacher at New York University heard him messing around at the piano and suggested that his talents might lie there. After college, he spent a few years working as an assistant in Roundabout’s development office (his first day of work: Sept. 11, 2001) and won a Dramatists Guild Fellowship that allowed him to study with “Ragtime” writers Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty.

Ahrens was impressed, she wrote in an email, with “his incredible melodic gift and his great technique. It was coupled with some of the most honest, droll and touching lyrics I had heard in a long time.”

During that fellowship he began “Ordinary Days,” the show that set a template for his next several projects. He sometimes thought about trying something grander, something that would get him back to New York. (It’s not the only place to make a career as a musical theater composer, but if you’re hoping to make a living on rights and royalties, it helps.)

But commissions kept him afloat and “every month that went by that I could pay my rent because I was writing musicals was exciting to me,” he said, apologizing for how “incredibly cheesy” that sounded.

Five years ago, Gwon decided that he should fulfill his Roundabout commission, which he had accepted during “Ordinary Days.” He speed-dated potential book writers, including the playwright Michael Mitnick, who pitched him an adaptation of the 2001 cult film “Scotland, PA.” A black comedy riff on “Macbeth,” with a side of fries, it tells the story of Mac, a 1970s fast-food worker, and his ruthless wife, Pat.

After a decade mired at minimum wage, Mac meets three stoners who predict a glorious future for him. He and Pat murder their boss and take over his burger joint. Success? He’s lovin’ it. Until tragedy places an order.

Something in Gwon’s gut insisted that this was a story he needed to tell. The premise was clever, the plot juicy, the ’70s setting inviting to a classic rock fan like him. But that wasn’t it. A week ago, watching a preview, he finally figured out the pull. “Oh my gosh,” he realized, “this is about characters who are stuck in one place and how are they going to climb up to the next level.” That is his story, too.

“I’ve been very happy and felt very successful,” he said. “At the same time, there might be three stoner voices in my head saying, ‘Hey, you’re doing great, but Broadway’s right there. What are you going to do about it?’ And I think it is a question, and a struggle that I don’t necessarily have an answer to, other than to write a rock musical about it.”

I asked Gwon, whom several colleagues described as the nicest man they have ever met, if he had ever considered murdering his rivals as an option. He laughed. He didn’t say no.

He conceived “Scotland, PA,” he said, as an opportunity to “show the New York theater community that I could do something on a bigger scale.” But during previews he worried that maybe he went too far.

“There’s a fear that I put something bigger and bolder out there, and everyone goes, ‘Why don’t you keep writing the quiet little musicals in the basement?’ ” he said. He was afraid enough that throughout our conversation, he would only refer to “Macbeth” as the Scottish play.

The “Scotland, PA” songs are mostly ’70s pastiche, groovier, rootsier, more rockish tunes than the American-songbook-inspired numbers of “Ordinary Days.” Which makes Gwon’s style difficult to pin down.

The director Lonny Price, who helped to develop “Scotland, PA,” put it this way: “When you listen to an Adam song in a score, you think, ‘Oh, that’s a lovely song,’ but you don’t think, ‘God what a genius.’ He’s serving the piece. He gets out of the way, he gives it to you and he allows the performer to shine.”

Price called his music “catchy in a good way.” Todd Haimes, the artistic director of the Roundabout, described it as commercial, then walked that back. “His music is just enjoyable,” he said.

“He knows what he does best, and he’s doing it,” Ahrens told me. “The world will catch up.”

Gwon isn’t sure it when. It might take another 10 years. Or more. He hopes not, but he can imagine it, his hair a little grayer, his eyes a little worse, probably still drinking his usual skinny vanilla latte. For now, his ambitions are modest, not homicidal.

“I plan to just keep myself busy writing musicals,” he said. “That seems to be the thing that gets me through.”

Ten Years Later, Adam Gwon Is Looking to Kill

Ten years ago, composer Adam Gwon emerged.

NEW YORK — On Sunday night, Bradley Dean lost his virginity for what is likely the last time.

For the past six weeks, Dean, a longtime Broadway ensemble member, understudy and replacement-cast mainstay, has played Falco, the real estate tycoon who thwarts the motor-crossed lovers in Jim Steinman’s extravagant, apocalyptic “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical.”

In the first act, Dean’s Falco and Lena Hall’s Sloane tear off their clothes, hop atop a burnished Dodge convertible and belt “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” a paean to teenage sex. “I love that song so much,” said Dean, who lost his offstage virginity in a car parked at a Pennsylvania community pool and can relate.

He performs that song and others — “What Part of My Body Hurts the Most,” “Who Needs the Young,” “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” — with a throaty baritone and an affectionate, chest-hair-flashing nod to the show’s absurdities.

Dean, 49, participated in a 2015 workshop of “Bat Out of Hell,” which retells the Peter Pan story with more sex and guns and flaming motorcycles. In 2018, he joined the Toronto cast, signing on for a North American tour, which producers then canceled, apart from the New York City Center run that ended Sunday. This past month, he spent his off hours rehearsing the role of Monsieur André in “The Phantom of the Opera.” He joins that production Wednesday.

Just before the final “Bat Out of Hell,” performance, Dean, who had traded his character’s skinny jeans for his own, returned to his dressing room, mostly emptied, to discuss his rock ’n’ roll dreams and postshow despair. These are excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What can you tell me about Falco?

A: He’s very misunderstood. He doesn’t really do anything too terrible. I mean, he does drug his daughter and he does kill Tink (a teenage character in the show), but it’s an accident. We are in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and he’s the only adult around. He is in charge of protecting his family. At his heart, he’s a really good dad. With rage issues.

Q: When the North American tour was canceled, you vented your frustration on Facebook.

A: I had broken my hand in the show the night that they canceled us. And so I was in pain and in shock. I don’t even remember writing that Facebook post. It got plastered everywhere, and I was like, “Oh no, I called my producers fools.”

Q: How has the New York audience been?

A: Amazing. The people that this show is right for, they’re my kind of people. I grew up in a little town, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a depressed, impoverished area. Something about the panoramic scope of this music, it was an escape. So I think it’s for people with that story, with that heart that wants to expand and bloom. Romantics, dreamers, common men. I go to the stage door, and I just commune.

Q: How do you feel about your costumes? Some of them are pretty minimal.

A: They didn’t tell me that I would be basically naked until the first day of rehearsal. I was like, “Damn it, you got to tell a brother that, you want to give a brother a month on that so I can stop eating and hit the gym real hard.”

Q: Is it fun to lose your virginity every night?

A: “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” was one of the first music videos I remember, the first time I saw something that was a little titillating. So it has a very specific place in my history, and it’s literally the most fun I’ve ever had on the stage. And Lena Hall is about the most fun person I could hope to work with. Her voice is just always so dead center in the middle of the pitch.

Q: How sweaty are you by the end of the show?

A: Extremely sweaty. It’s theater as athletic event. In the moment, you don’t feel that way. And then you get offstage and you’re like: “Oh no! I’m broken!”

Q: How have you kept yourself healthy?

A: I go to physical therapy. For my host of injuries. My shoulder has been jacked this whole time. And it’s the vocal Olympics.

Q: So when you’re singing “What Part of My Body Hurts the Most” you’re taking inventory.

Q: What’s it like to unleash your rock voice?

It’s the greatest feeling ever. It took a while to figure out how to navigate it, because it’s extraordinarily high and the keys just keep modulating and the songs are 10 minutes long and we’re sprinting around stage and tearing off our clothes. But I figured it out.

Q: Has anyone exciting come backstage?

A: Meat Loaf. My kids were here the night he came. Meat Loaf actually came up to my son and sang “Who Needs the Young,” like a whole verse of it.

Q: You’ve had a solid career, though most of your roles have been understudy parts and replacements. What’s it like coming second?

A: I don’t think of it that way in any way. I remind myself all the time how fortunate I am. I’ve gotten really close to a lot of things, to originating a great role, and each time it’s fallen through. That’s the difference between a star and not. I just keep showing up, singing my face off and tearing off my clothes.

Q: Do you think you’ve learned anything about rock ’n’ roll?

A: Just how much I love it. I’ve never felt as full of life as I feel singing this music. I want to do it over and over again. I hope this show has another life. Tonight, that’s the end of my time with this character and I have to tell myself, “Maybe it will happen again.” Or the heartbreak is too much to endure.

Q: Will you tear it up at the party tonight?

A: I have rehearsal at noon, so no. But I’ll definitely have some tears and some beers and bid adieu for now.

Singing Meat Loaf in His Underwear? He'd Do Anything for That.

(Exit Interview Bradley Dean)

“Are you just too young for me?” she seethed.

A third voice broke in, a man’s: “We should save this for when the GoPros are running. Otherwise we’re going to miss all the good stuff.”

America — American women between ages 25 and 54 in particular — will meet Tania and Syngin in November, when the seventh season of “90 Day Fiancé” begins. A flagship show for the TLC network and a social media miracle, the show and its endless spinoffs pull in water-cooler-worthy ratings. Lady Gaga and Mindy Kaling are fans. The “Vanderpump Rules” gang holds watch parties.

“90 Day Fiancé,” which premiered in 2014, follows couples as they navigate the K-1 visa process, in which an American citizen petitions for a foreign beneficiary to enter the United States. Once that beneficiary touches down, the couple has 90 days to marry. Otherwise, the foreign national must leave.

Unlike most reality shows, which rely on artificial constructs or manufactured theatrics, the stakes here — marriage or potential deportation — are inherent and existentially huge. It’s a social experiment show, like “Love Island” or “Survivor.” But these couples run the experiment on themselves.

The appeal, according to TLC producers, lies in the way the show fuses cultural difference and romance. “We’re always looking for love stories to tell,” Alon Orstein, a senior vice president at TLC, said at a rooftop party at an upscale New York hotel to kick off what the network calls the “Summer of Love.”

But if TLC promotes the show as a love story, fans take it in as a cringe comedy and a true-crime drama and a catastrophe that keeps on giving. Spend a little time on social media and you will see people debating, often via GIF, who or what is more deceitful, the show’s participants or the show itself. The semi-grammatical header on the Reddit board: “come to learn about the K1 visa process, stay to be frauded by TLC.”

From what I observed, visiting the production offices and shadowing a field crew, “90 Day Fiancé” isn’t any more misleading than your average reality series. It doesn’t manufacture events, as in the “Real Housewives” franchise, or create artificial contests, as in “The Bachelor.” Its stars mostly lack glamour, wealth, a discernible skill set. They can’t sing, they can’t dance, they can’t bake.

So how to explain the fascination? Think of “90 Day Fiancé” as the right show for a wrong time, a guilty pleasure that invites viewers to offload their confusion, mistrust and guilt around immigration onto the sometimes shirtless backs of a few messy foreign nationals and the Americans who debatably love them.

IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES, as currently practiced, depends on narrative. If you are not from one of the 30-odd countries that receive visa waivers and you want to come here, legally, you will have to tell a story about what you do or whom you love or what you are running from. And you will have to make some judge or consular official or case officer believe it.

The “90 Day Fiancé” franchise depends on narrative, too. Every season, TLC and Sharp Entertainment, the show’s producers, select six or seven couples who have already applied for a K-1 and then tell their stories. Those stories need to keep fans watching past the commercial break, so episodes — each a commercial-heavy, lavishly underscored, two-hour event — emphasize conflict, some of it funny, like disagreements over wedding venues, some of it not, like accusations of cheating and allegations of domestic abuse. That’s “the good stuff.”

That formula has created a hit for TLC, where it is often the top-rated ad-supported cable show in its time slot, especially among women 25-54, a demographic coveted by advertisers. Unlike “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” or competition shows, “90 Day Fiancé” is an anti-fantasy, with a cast it is impossible to envy. Sitting on your couch, posting the occasional meme, it is easy to believe that you would never be so stupid, so deluded, so dishonest. It is easy to believe that a green card is something the rest of the world desires.

“90 Day Fiancé” has plenty of success stories, but commenters gravitate toward the messier couples. So does the network, casting them in spinoff series, like “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?”; the web exclusive “90 Day Fiancé: What Now?”; and “90 Day Fiancé: Pillow Talk,” in which stars from past seasons loll in bed while watching current seasons. Put it this way: During the second season of “90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?” a brawl broke out at a family dinner. That scuffle earned its participants their own spinoff, “The Family Chantel,” which premiered in July to strong ratings. (All told, the original series has spawned six spinoffs — five cable, one digital — giving the network fresh programming for its franchise nearly year-round.)

On Twitter, on the Reddit forums (particularly the uncensored one), even on the show’s own Facebook site, fans portray the foreign partners as scammers and gold diggers. (The Americans? Dupes and sex tourists.) Some Redditors take it upon themselves to investigate the foreign partners, delving into online histories, which looks a lot like nativism.

A K-1 Visa, according to Lenni Benson, a professor at New York Law School and an expert on immigration, is popularly associated with marriage fraud. “It is not true in the majority of cases,” she wrote in an email.

Each year, 30,000 to 40,000 people apply for the visa and the vast majority are approved. The application process can take six to eight months, longer under the current administration, and costs around $2,000. A couple has to stay married for two years before conditions on the foreign partner’s green card are removed, and the American petitioner has to support his or her partner until a work permit is approved. Which is to say that if a K-1 marriage is a scam, it’s an involved, expensive multiyear one.

Maybe the fans tweeting fraud memes are deeply attuned to other valences of American immigration. Maybe not. The series, according to its producers, is avowedly apolitical. But in emphasizing cultural difference, in editing for drama (a producer had shared a personal motto: “If someone’s gonna tweet about it, include it”), in celebrating conflict, “90 Day Fiancé” has its own politics.

To explore the difference between the stories that most potential immigrants want to tell — stories of compatibility and benefit — and the stories “90 Day Fiancé” tells — of incongruity and discord — I visited the production offices, sat in on casting sessions and then, last April, drove to Kennedy International Airport in a caravan of black Suburbans as Tania — plus producers, camera and sound operators, and assistants — prepared to meet Syngin and begin their 90 days.

TANIA IS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. Syngin is from South Africa. They are both attractive, both charismatic, both 29, and neither has much more money than the other. They met at a Cape Town bar in 2017 — she was there with another guy, Syngin was the bartender — and spent eight months living and traveling together. In the shambolic, schadenfreude-baiting world of “90 Day Fiancé,” they looked like a best-case scenario.

They were, as Orstein would describe them at the rooftop party, “a love couple.” I asked him what the opposite of a love couple was: A drama couple? A comedy couple? A disaster couple? They are all love couples, he responded.

Tania had applied for the K-1 Visa a year ago, providing an affidavit of financial support. Syngin had undergone a thorough background check and submitted to a consular interview. They received approval at the beginning of April and Syngin booked a flight.

On the day of Syngin’s arrival, crew members crowded into a room at the Time New York Hotel, while Tania scattered rose petals on the bed, “like a scene from a movie,” she said, and created a “sex shrine” — condoms, lingerie, some toys the crew had already filmed her purchasing — on a chair in the corner. She dressed in the shower stall, concealing her mic pack under a body-con mini. Then she and two girlfriends left for the airport. In the arrivals hall, they scattered more petals (a custodian tried to sweep them up, a producer had the custodian sign a release form) and took photos and Jägermeister shots.

In the terminal, over wireless mics, the field crew could hear Syngin speaking excitedly to a producer. “It’s gonna be a banger right now when I see her,” he said. “Is this my cue?”

Tania had told me that she wouldn’t notice the cameras, that they wouldn’t change anything she said or did, and I wasn’t sure I believed her, but then Syngin was at the other end of the hall, calling, “My sugar! My sexy sugar!” and dropping his bags and cantering toward her like some roan stallion and she was laughing and sobbing and Terminal 2 filled with their pheromones as they kissed and clutched and I believed her absolutely.

Flushed, giggling, they went back for his unattended bags and exited through the main door. Outside Tania turned to a producer. “Do you want us to redo that?” she asked.

EVEN A LOVE COUPLE needs a story. “If everything was smooth sailing, and everything was happiness and perfect and there was no opposition, I don’t know if that would make for a powerful story,” Howard Lee, TLC’s president, said at the network’s Midtown Manhattan offices in October. In April — at the airport and afterward at the hotel, where the cameramen filmed Syngin chucking Tania onto a bed, twice, and in Times Square, where Tania unveiled a banner she had made for him — and during a second set visit two months later, I watched producers try to craft one.

During the casting process, Sharp Entertainment prepares a cheat sheet for every couple, detailing who they are and how they met, plus possible story lines and points of tension. One paragraph wondered how Syngin, the product of South Africa’s macho culture, would react to living in a shed — small and very purple — behind Tania’s mother’s house in a suburb of Groton, Connecticut, and following her rules. Another paragraph targeted his possessiveness. Tania has close relationships with her female friends and is in touch with an ex or two. How would that affect him? In April, as Tania prepared to leave for the airport to greet Syngin, producers drove that narrative, soliciting answers from Tania like, “I could never be with someone who doesn’t like my best friends.”

“That’s stuff we’re constantly looking out for, those relationship dynamics,” Joanne Azern, an executive producer, said, as we drove back from the airport. “But we’re never pushing things that don’t seem real.”

In fairness, I rarely saw the producers fake anything. Yet reality was often massaged — sometimes lightly, sometimes more deep-tissue — with leading questions and retakes.

By June, with Tania about to return from studying herbal medicine in Costa Rica, the dynamics had shifted. Syngin, it turned out, liked her best friends fine. The shed hadn’t been much of a problem, either. But Tania, quick and birdlike, with a high-pitched nervous laugh, and Syngin, blithe and unhurried, with a signature hair flip that will probably inspire drinking games, had different plans for their shared future. Well, Tania had plans; Syngin did not.

While Syngin tidied his hotel room, David Bresenham, a co-executive producer, gave me an update. Tania had said that she wanted a baby and a prenup. Syngin wasn’t sure about either. “It hasn’t been cats and dogs, life and death and stuff, but it’s definitely something,” he said.

The producers fanned that something, encouraging Syngin to revisit a heated phone conversation. On the drive, after Tania had pulled into a parking lot and Syngin had loped off in search of tea and crew members had adjusted the fritzing GoPro batteries, the couple delivered. In the two following cars, the field crew listened, unembarrassed, as the fight grew increasingly heated. Finally the couple stopped speaking and I started wondering about potential hashtags.

Tania had been wondering the same. “I’m like, wow, I probably sound so crazy,” she said later, holding Syngin’s hand at an Italian restaurant with a maritime theme. The drive, which should have taken about two hours, had taken nearly five, and the crew had detoured for a meal before further shooting. “I just imagine what they’re going to pull,” she said.

From the first days of filming, with Syngin asking for his cue, with Tania checking in on retakes, they had been savvy about what the show would ask of them. In two months, they had grown even savvier, answering on-camera questions in complete sentences, preparing responses in advance, satisfying the producers as quickly as possible. They signed onto the show, Tania said, because they wanted to share their story. But they didn’t know how that story would be edited. They have dreams, Tania said, of living off the land, of practicing permaculture and natural medicine. “Will those parts show through or are we just going to look like a party couple?” she asked.

Like a lot of franchise participants, they had other reasons for signing on. Syngin makes necklaces — that day, he was wearing, for the camera, a banded jasper pendant. Tania makes soaps. Soon they will have tens of thousands of Instagram followers. “For me, it’s getting exposed,” he said, with an optimism and hustle that felt very American. Someone might even see the show and offer them a camper van or some land, he suggested. “Like, I put a lot of hope on that,” he said. “That’s kind of my end goal, what I want from the show.”

The couple living off the land — the obstacles, the livestock — sounded like surefire spinoff material.

“That’s what I say,” Tania said.

WHAT THIS STORY — party couple or permaculturalists — will mean in the larger conversation around immigration often worried Tania. The daughter of Venezuelan immigrants and a social justice advocate (she recently worked with Democracy Spring), she recognizes her own story — indeed any K-1 story — as a privileged one. “I know a lot of undocumented people who are like struggling for themselves and their families right now, literally fighting for their lives, fighting for their rights,” she said.

“It’s just a whole messed-up system,” she concluded.

A waiter took their plates away. They picked food out of one another’s teeth. They were a “love couple” again. But even a “love couple” can signify in troubling ways.

Just before they left for the shed, Tania spoke about a night, a month or so ago, when a field crew had filmed her at her bartending job. A patron, hearing her story, had described Syngin as a good immigrant, someone who wanted to come here and work hard. “And I’m like, all immigrants want to come here and work hard,” Tania recalled. “It’s just like, no, there’s no such thing as like a bad immigrant.”

Back in October, I asked Howard Lee, the TLC president, if the show, which began in the Obama administration, had changed in the last couple of years. “We don’t get into the politics of all of that in the series,” he said.

In July, after months of news stories about family separations and detention centers and inflammatory rhetoric, I asked him if the show ever would become political. If he and the producers truly believed that these were love stories and not instances of immigration fraud, shouldn’t they show that?

“The stories are what they are,” he said.

The subject of immigration has polarized Americans, on and off, for centuries. Now and as the 2020 elections near, it is polarizing us again. And the incredible popularity of “90 Day Fiancé” suggests that stories that signal immigration as a joke, as a crime, as a dubious privilege, are the stories that some Americans want to hear.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/television/90-day-fiance-immigration.html" id="8ec3f928-6451-37ea-aaca-2fb53449f522">The New York Times</a>.

'90 Day Fiancé': An Anti-Fantasy for Troubled Times

Tania and Syngin were fighting. It was mid-June and sultry, with the afternoon temperature snaking toward 80 degrees. They hadn’t slept much the night before — blame work, blame sex — and now, in the front seats of a lumbering Chevy Suburban, having already missed a couple of turnoffs along a New York highway, they began to argue about the future. Did Syngin have a plan? Could Tania stop yelling?

NEW YORK — The road of excess, William Blake believed, leads to the palace of wisdom. Or possibly to a plate of CBD-infused doughnuts with a chocolate dipping sauce, then an aerial pas de deux.

This summer I visited two high-end dinner theater productions, “The Devouring: A Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “Midsummer: A Banquet.” Dinner and theater don’t necessarily go together: Fine dining is already performative, and good theater is satiating. Why complicate either? The idea of a “culinary theater,” an art that feeds our baser senses and fails to engage our intellect, made Bertolt Brecht apoplectic. Then again, he probably never tried the welcome cocktail at “The Devouring.”

In “Midsummer,” Third Rail Projects, an immersive theater outfit, and Food of Love Productions, a company that makes a picnic of pentameter, want you to follow Shakespeare’s young lovers into the Athenian woods. But they don’t want you to go in hungry. Or do they?

When you arrive at Café Fae, in an art nouveau space I remember as having been a brunch spot and a clothing store, a cast member clad in jodhpurs leads you to your table and presents you with various appetizers — crudités, spreads, a few cold cuts, a bag of bread rolls. (The plating leans toward Mason jars and gingham. Athens: so homespun.)

Then the comedy begins, with awkward stops for more snacks, like the Forest Picnic, a peculiar riff on a grain bowl, and the Love Bundle, a few cherries and a peach so hard I struggled to slice it. Which shrewd and knavish sprites devised the Faerie Kebabs, each one a toothpick jammed into an olive, a mushroom and a dried apricot? Are they sorry?

If this is an improvement over the feast “Midsummer” character Bottom requests — oats, hay, dried peas (does this explain the grain bowl?) — the repast isn’t especially delicious. And, as the old joke goes, there was so little of it. Especially when a ticket will run you $150. The food mostly distracts from the experience rather than enhancing it. It’s difficult to have your Shakespeare and eat it, too.

About that Shakespeare. Directed and choreographed by Zach Morris, with more attention to movement than words, this “Midsummer” makes nifty use of the space. The eight energetic actors — double- and triple-cast, while also serving your Love Bundles and refilling your water — deserve more. Tip Puck on your way out.

Swankier, sexier, altogether more succulent, “The Devouring” is inspired — in a manner as loose and flimsy as a negligee — by one of Blake’s illuminated books, an allegorical exploration of good and evil. It occupies the Paradise Club, a purpose-built lounge on the seventh floor of a Times Square hotel. Twin murals, in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, adorn the room, while a scarlet sunburst sparkles overhead. Because why not contemplate eschatology while you enjoy oysters on a bed of chilled rock salt and seared duck breast with an apricot foie gras coulis?

After the savories, angels and demons descend in a nightclub act created by Anya Sapozhnikova, creative director of the hot spot House of Yes in Brooklyn, and Matthew Dailey. The show, hosted by a serpentine Nik Alexander, includes sword-swallowing, break dancing, umbrella-juggling and libidinal aerial acts, mostly expert. The performers break for dessert, then they writhe some more and repurpose Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” as a lullaby. When the show ends, the dance party begins.

Call it sinner theater. Or, if you want to mix and match theologies, a bacchanal.

Alexis Soloski

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