Good times and bum times, David Cromer's seen 'em. The theater director followed his record-breaking production of Our Town off-Broadway with the total flop that was Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway and a perfectly fine Edie Falco/Ben Stiller House of Blue Leaves revival. Now the Chicago-based Cromer is back at the Barrow Street Theater, where Town used to live, for his next act: Nina Raine's Tribes, a surprising, entertaining and emotionally charged look at how one "conventionally unconventional" family of British intellectuals deal with the fact that the family's youngest member, who is deaf, has come back from school a grown man who wants to learn to sign. It is far more exciting than it sounds, trust us. As Cromer prepared for opening night, we caught up with him to talk about everything from supertitles in the round to exercise balls to saying "tits" on Gothamist.
Director David Cromer On Sign Language, Picking Props And "Genius" Money
MacArthur "Genius" Fellows Get Life-Changing Phone Calls
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced 23 new winners of the so-called "genius awards." The recipients were notified yesterday through a phone call "out of the blue" from the Foundation; all will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. The winners include David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme; writer Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History; jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran; and theater director David Cromer, whose terrific Off-Broadway revival of Our Town won a slew of awards. "It robs me of my greatest excuse for everything—I’m broke," Cromer tells the Times.
David Cromer, Our Town
Thornton Wilder's groundbreaking 1938 play Our Town has been almost irreparably scarred by unbearably earnest high school drama club productions over the years. So it came as a bit of a surprise that Chicago director David Cromer—who won an OBIE for his rather sensational adaptation of The Adding Machine last season—would be reviving this old relic here in New York. But since opening Off Broadway all the way back in March, the production, night after night, has been eradicating any misconceptions that Our Town is just a hokey, Norman Rockwell Hallmark card to small town America.
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