One late-January day, the director Lila Neugebauer was at a gun-range or an antiseptic, fluorescent white version of one-tucked inside the Specialists, Ltd., a theatrical-props behemoth in Ridgewood, Queens. Neugebauer, accompanied by two members of her team, had come to discuss a gun for her upcoming production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," at Lincoln Center Theatre. The production is a starry one, with Steve Carell in the title role, alongside Alfred Molina, Alison Pill, Anika Noni Rose, and William Jackson Harper. With a new translation by the playwright Heidi Schreckwho was nominated for a Tony for her women's-rights jeremiad "What the Constitution Means to Me"-this is the first Broadway staging of Chekhov's masterpiece in more than twenty years.
Neugebauer is small and quick, with flyaway black hair, straight black brows crossing a narrow face, and intent gray-green-golden eyes, like a fox's. She is a rarity among New York theatrical directors, both for her relative youth-she's thirty-eight, with the career of someone a generation older-and for her recent move into film. According to Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in Neugebauer's 2022 movie début, "Causeway," about a soldier recovering from a brain injury, she is a "tiny genius with a boom in one hand and a sword in the other." The director was having a breakneck season. In December, she had opened a blockbuster Broadway revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's "Appropriate"-a knockdown, drag-out inheritance drama set in a decaying plantation house, starring Sarah Paulson-and she was now negotiating its transfer to a larger venue. At the same time, she was in rehearsals at the Public for Itamar Moses's "The Ally," a weighty, campus-set play about a Jewish professor being urged to denounce Israeli policies, and she was deep into preparation for "Vanya," finessing the script with Schreck.
This story is from the April 01, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the April 01, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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