By Mark Guiducci
Copyright vanityfair
Certainly, Chess director Michael Mayer took into consideration the drama of current Russo-American relations when he decided to restage the cult-classic musical. Set to a score by ABBA, Chess pitches a Bobby Fischer–inspired character against a Russian grand master at the height of the Cold War and will this month return to Broadway with a new book for the first time since its notorious New York opening in 1988. Intensifying everything that happens onstage is the real-world context of ongoing Ukrainian peace deal negotiations: a precedent-exploding summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, quickly followed by a redux of the Oval Office beratement of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was this time phalanxed by more than a half dozen world leaders (and a suit). Let’s not look to ABBA to forecast where things are headed for the Donbas, but “the fear and emotion and unpredictability,” as Chess writer Danny Strong says of the Cold War, all resonate.
When I arrived at Vanity Fair, staff writer Chris Murphy was underway reporting another tale from the theater world, this month’s profile of multihyphenate iconoclast Jeremy O. Harris. I first met Harris in November 2018 when I attended Slave Play, still off Broadway but already a cause célèbre. By curtain call, I decided to meet him. Who had these twisted ideas? (All of us, he might say.) I tracked him down in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel, where we sat for hours that night, and he’s been a friend ever since. “Jeremy has this gift of venturing into the shadows on our behalf,” actor Kaia Gerber told Chris. “He says the things out loud that most of us are too ashamed to even think.” Harris has a wave of new projects unfurling, including another run of Prince Faggot, a Harris-produced play that upholds his preternatural tendency for controversy. In Slave Play, the second act delivers. I hope for the sake of culture that Harris’s own next act is just as strong.
Neither Trump nor Harris would appreciate this comparison, but they both know the power of provocation. Governor Gavin Newsom too. Other Democrats, take note.
