New York
13 Off Broadway Shows to See in September
‘The Wild Duck’
Henrik Ibsen’s searing dissections of bourgeois hypocrisies appear to be in sync with our angry times. The Norwegian playwright is even getting high-profile movie adaptations, with the Tessa Thompson-starring “Hedda” dropping in October. In New York, Simon Godwin’s production of this semi-obscure effort from 1884, about a family’s secrets coming to light, follows recent revivals of “An Enemy of the People,” “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts.” (Through Sept. 28, Theater for a New Audience)
‘Mexodus’
In their hip-hop musical, Nygel D. Robinson and Brian Quijada portray an enslaved man and the sharecropper-turned-soldier he meets at the Rio Grande. The story looks at a different kind of Underground Railroad while also connecting to our current turbulence with an era-transcending message of solidarity. David Mendizábal directs the two-man show, which is part of Audible Theater’s series. (Sept. 9-Oct. 11, Minetta Lane Theater)
The Small Rooms Where It Happens
Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee’s lovely “The Voices in Your Head” was staged for about 20 people at a time in a storefront church last year. McEntee’s “Slanted Floors” goes even smaller: The actors Kyle Beltran and Adam Chanler-Berat portray a couple living out their domesticity under the watch of five audience members in a Brooklyn apartment. (Sept. 9-Oct. 10, Slanted Floors Play).
A collaboration between Hansol Jung (“Wolf Play”) and the collective The Pack, co-directed by Jung and Dustin Wills, “Last Call, a Play with Cocktails” takes place in various New York City apartments, so the audience size varies depending on where the show lands on any given day. One constant: There will be drinks. (Sept. 19-Oct. 13, En Garde Arts)
‘Family’
Alec Duffy’s original staging of “Family,” an early work by the playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song, took place in a Brooklyn apartment for audiences of about 30. The production — outré, operatically gothic, near-feral at times — is returning for an encore run, but in a more traditional theatrical space. Let’s see how Duffy recalibrates the show. (Sept. 12-28, La MaMa)
‘The Essentialisn’t’
“Can you be Black and not perform?” Such is the question driving Eisa Davis’s new piece, in which she leads a cast of four. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her haunting play “Bulrusher” and the co-creator of the concept album “Warriors” with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Davis remains a frustratingly underrecognized writer and performer with a lyrical, fiercely poetic voice all her own. Here is an opportunity to watch her confront and subvert the expectations placed on Black artists. (Sept. 10-28; Here Arts Center)
‘The Other Americans’
John Leguizamo’s stage career is paved with solo shows, sometimes autobiographical, in which he brings to life a gallery of characters. At first glance it looks as if his latest piece might be more of the same since it involves a Colombian American New Yorker, like the writer-performer himself. But while Leguizamo does play that central character, Nelson, he is far from alone onstage: “The Other Americans,” directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, is a family drama with an actual cast — it’ll be exciting to watch Leguizamo jostle with costars. (Sept. 11-Oct. 19, Public Theater)
‘Caroline’
Chloë Grace Moretz was only 17 when she starred in Scott Z. Burns’s “The Library” at the Public Theater, in 2014, but her screen career was already buzzing. Still, few expected that it would take over a decade for Moretz to return to the New York stage. At long last here she is again, under the direction of the ever-reliable David Cromer (whose recent credits include “Dead Outlaw” and “Good Night, and Good Luck”). The three characters in Preston Max Allen’s new play are all members of one family, with Moretz in the middle as the daughter of the character played by Amy Landecker (“Transparent”) and the mother of young Caroline (River Lipe-Smith). (Sept. 12-Oct. 19, MCC Theater)
‘Are the Bennet Girls OK?’
After its successful country musical “Music City” last year, the Bedlam company returns to one of its foundational authors: Jane Austen (Kate Hamill’s adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” was an early Bedlam hit in 2014). Now Emily Breeze’s new take on “Pride and Prejudice” looks like it’s going to have fun with the Regency superstar’s best-seller: “I haven’t reread the source material since I skimmed it in high school,” Breeze claims. (Sept. 14-Oct. 19, West End Theater)
‘When the Hurlyburly’s Done’
After dedicating a decade to his “Rhinebeck Panorama” project, which includes the Apple, Gabriel and Michael family cycles, the writer-director Richard Nelson set out for war-torn Kyiv to work with the local Theater on Podil on a staging of his 2008 play “Conversations in Tusculum.” So inspired was he by the experience that he wrote the company this piece, about Ukrainian actors performing “Macbeth” in 1920. The resulting production (in Ukrainian with English supertitles) settles at Nelson’s frequent artistic home, the Public Theater, for a short run. (Sept. 16-21, Public Theater)
‘Weather Girl’
These days weather reporters like Stacey (Julia McDermott) are called upon to deliver apocalyptic accounts of a world either drowning in floods or bursting into flames along with their forecasts. Written by Brian Watkins (the creator of the time-travel Western series “Outer Range”), this solo play straddles satire and warning. (Sept. 16-Oct. 12, St. Ann’s Warehouse)
‘And Then We Were No More’
The most intriguing pairing this month may well be that of Elizabeth Marvel and Tim Blake Nelson. They are not onstage together, though: Marvel stars in this new play by Nelson, who somehow finds time to write (he also has a novel, “Superhero,” coming out in December) in between gigs as an ur-character actor (next up: the film “Bang Bang” and the series “The Lowdown”). Marvel plays a lawyer in a near-future society where the justice system is even more out of whack than our current one. (Sept. 19-Nov. 2, La MaMa)
‘Torera’
The title character of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s play is a young Mexican woman, portrayed by Jacqueline Guillén, who yearns to make a space for herself in bullfighting — which the WP Theater’s site noncommittally refers to as “a controversial practice that we neither condemn nor condone.” Tatiana Pandiani choreographs and directs. (Sept. 20-Oct. 19, WP Theater)
‘Crooked Cross’
Sally Carson’s play premiered in Britain in 1935 and takes place just a couple of years earlier, in Germany — you can guess what the title refers to. The show, based on Carson’s own novel, presciently tracks the rise of Nazism through the prism of a divided Bavarian family. (Sept. 20-Nov. 1, Mint Theater)
‘All Right. Good Night.’
N.Y.U. Skirball plays a vital role in the New York cultural ecosystem by programming radical theatermakers from around the world, albeit for blink-and-you’ll-miss-them runs. Such is the case with this piece by the experimental German company Rimini Protokoll (“Remote New York”) in which Helgard Haug intertwines the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight in 2014 with her father’s slide into dementia. Bonus: a live score by the exquisite Berlin-based musician Barbara Morgenstern and Zafraan Ensemble. (Sept. 25-27, N.Y.U. Skirball)
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
It has never really occurred to Marian or Charles Wade to live anywhere but the city where they were born and where they raised their children.
New York is in their bones. “We have our roots here, and our families enjoyed life here before us,” Ms. Wade said.
And they feel lucky. Between Mr. Wade’s pension, earned after more than 40 years as an analyst at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and his Social Security benefits, along with Ms. Wade’s work as a physical therapist at a psychiatric center, they bring in about $208,000 a year.
Still, it’s hard for the couple not to notice how much the city has changed as it has become wealthier.
About 10 years ago, Ms. Wade, 65, and Mr. Wade, 69, sold the Morningside Heights apartment they had lived in for decades. The Manhattan neighborhood had become more affluent, and tensions over how their building should be managed and how much residents should be expected to pay for upkeep boiled over between people who had lived there for years and newer neighbors.
They found a new home in Harlem, large enough to fit their two children, who are now adults struggling to afford the city’s housing market.
All in the Family
Ms. Wade knew it was time to leave Morningside Heights when she spotted her husband hiding behind a bush outside their building, hoping to avoid an unpleasant new neighbor. They had bought their apartment in 1994 for $206,000, using some money they had inherited from their families, and sold it in 2015 for $1.13 million.
The couple found a new apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem for $811,000, and put most of the money down upfront. They took out a loan with a good rate for the remaining cost, and had a $947 monthly payment. They recently finished paying off the mortgage, but they have monthly maintenance payments of $1,555, as well as two temporary assessments to help improve the building, totaling $415 a month.
Their two children each moved home shortly after graduating from college.
The couple’s son, Jacob Wade, 28, split an apartment with three roommates nearby for a while, but spent down his savings and moved back in with his parents. He is searching for an affordable one bedroom nearby and plans to move out later in the year. Their daughter, Elka Wade, 27, came home after college but recently moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, with roommates.
Until their daughter moved out a few weeks ago, she and her brother each took a bedroom, and Mr. and Ms. Wade slept in the dining room, which they had converted into their bedroom with the help of a Murphy bed and a new set of curtains for privacy.
There is very little storage space. A piano occupies an entire closet in their son’s bedroom, because the family has no other place to fit it.
The setup is cramped, but close quarters have their benefits: When their daughter, a classically trained cellist, was living there, she often practiced at home in the evenings. “I love listening to her play,” Ms. Wade said.
Three Foodtowns and a Thrift Shop
The Wades do what they can to keep their costs low. They’ve decided against installing new, better insulated windows in their drafty apartment. They don’t go on vacations, instead visiting their small weekend home in rural upstate New York. And they’ve pulled back on takeout food and retail shopping.
Instead, Mr. Wade surveys the three Foodtown supermarkets near their home for the best deals, preferring one for produce and another for meat. The weekly grocery bill has been around $500 with both kids living at home, and the family usually orders delivery twice a week, rotating between Chinese and Indian food, which typically costs $70, including leftovers.
For an occasional splurge, they love Pisticci, a nearby restaurant where the penne with homemade mozzarella costs $21.
The couple owns a car, which they park on the street for free. But they often use public transportation to avoid paying the $9 congestion pricing fee to drive downtown, or when they have a good parking spot they don’t want to give up. They have a senior discount for their transit cards, which allows them to pay $1.50 per subway or bus ride, rather than $3.
Ms. Wade stopped shopping at the stores she used to frequent, like Eileen Fisher and Banana Republic, years ago. Instead, she visits a thrift store called Unique Boutique on the Upper West Side. She was browsing the aisles a few months ago, before a big Thanksgiving dinner, and spotted the perfect dress for the occasion for just $20.
But she has one nonnegotiable weekly expense: a private yoga lesson in an instructor’s apartment nearby, for $150 a session.
Swapping Mortgage Payments for Singing Lessons
For every member of the Wade family, life in New York is all about the arts.
The children each attended the Special Music School, a public school focused on the arts. Their son, an actor, teacher and director, works part time at the Metropolitan Opera and the Kaufman Music Center, a performing arts complex in Manhattan. His sister works in administration at the Kaufman Center.
Mr. Wade is still close with friends from high school who are now professional musicians, and the couple often goes to see them play at venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where shows typically have a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum.
The couple has cut back on going to expensive concerts — they used to try to see Elvis Costello every time he came to New York, for example — but have timeworn strategies for getting affordable theater tickets.
They recently splurged on tickets to “Oedipus” on Broadway for themselves and their daughter, who they treated to a ticket as a birthday gift. The seats were in the nosebleed section, but still cost $80 apiece.
The couple has a $75 annual membership to the Film Forum, which gives them reduced price tickets to movies. They occasionally get discounted tickets to the opera through their son’s work, and when they don’t, they pay for family circle passes, which are usually $47 a head, plus a $10 fee.
Ms. Wade, who grew up commuting from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan to take dance lessons, sometimes takes $20 drop-in ballet classes during the week at the Dance Theater of Harlem, just a few blocks away from the apartment.
Recently, when the couple paid off their mortgage, Ms. Wade celebrated by giving herself a treat: weekly private singing lessons, for $125 a session.
The technology industry is obsessed with the future.
Many of our modern marvels are rooted in the legacy of Bell Labs, an innovation powerhouse in suburban New Jersey.
Bell Labs, the once-famed research arm of AT&T, celebrated the centennial of its founding last year.
In its heyday, starting in the 1940s, the lab created a cascade of inventions, including the transistor, information theory and an enduring computer software language. The labs’ digital DNA is in our smartphones, social media and chatbot conversations.
“Every hour of your day has a bit of Bell Labs in it,” observed Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory,” a history of the storied research center.
Bell Labs’ most far-reaching idea — information theory — forms the bedrock of computing. The mathematical framework, known as the “Magna Carta of the information age,” provided a blueprint for sending and receiving information with precision and reliability. It was the brainchild of Claude Shannon, a brilliant eccentric whom the A.I. start-up Anthropic named its chatbot after.
Last month, Nvidia announced a new A.I. chip packed with more than 300 billion transistors — the tiny on-off electrical switches invented in the lab.
Bell Labs became so powerful and renowned that it is entrenched in pop culture. The 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” drew inspiration from Bell Labs, and the father of the titular character in the period dramedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” worked there. Most recently, characters in the show “Severance” report to a former Bell Labs building.
Here are some of the labs’ most prominent inventions.
Bell Labs described itself as a wide-ranging “institute of creative technology.” And it was a well-funded one, thanks to the monopoly held by AT&T — with incentive to expand Ma Bell’s phone business.
One invention was Telstar, the first powerful communications satellite, which could receive radio signals, then amplify them (10 billion times) and retransmit them. This allowed for real-time phone conversations across oceans, high-speed data communications and global television broadcasts.
1960
In 1960, Bell Labs launched an earlier orbital communications satellite in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — a passive balloon satellite called Echo that could reflect signals one way.
1962
The lab again teamed up with NASA to launch the smaller Telstar, which was about three feet in diameter and weighed 170 pounds.
1962
Bell Labs also developed some of the rocket technology that launched the satellite, a byproduct of an antiballistic missile project.
1962
Lyndon B. Johnson, vice president at the time, spoke on the first phone conversation bounced off a satellite. “You’re coming through nicely,” he assured Frederick Kappel, the phone company’s chairman.
PRESENT
In the decades since, those groundbreaking inventions from Bell Labs have become ubiquitous and affordable. International phone calls and television broadcasts are part of daily life. Today, more than 11,000 satellites provide internet, surveillance and navigation services, and are crucial for driverless cars and drone warfare.
While developing mobile-phone service, Bell Labs scientists drove around in a van to check transmission quality.
The labs submitted its plan for a working cellular network to the government in 1971, and AT&T opened the first commercial cellular service in Chicago more than a decade later.
1968
An early, simple version of mobile service was essentially a conventional phone on wheels — the car phone. Through radio technology, it connected to the landline network for calls.
1972
Smaller, more powerful chips, radios and batteries made a truly mobile phone possible. It still weighed nearly two pounds.
PRESENT
The technology continued to improve, as cellphones grew smaller and more sophisticated. Smartphones, which gained popularity with the iPhone’s launch in 2007, helped cement the devices as everywhere, ever-present and the dominant device for communication, information and entertainment — for better or worse.
The Picturephone allowed you to see the person you were talking to on a small screen.
1968
And it was heavily promoted. An ad for the Picturephone said it amounted to “crossing a telephone with a TV set.” Its tagline: “Someday you’ll be a star!”
1964
The Picturephone was introduced to great fanfare at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
1964
Even the White House was enlisted for a publicized demo. Lady Bird Johnson spoke via Picturephone to a Bell Labs scientist, Elizabeth Wood.
1968
But at the cost of $16 for a three-minute call (more than $165 today), the novelty soon wore off. Though a market failure, the Picturephone had a star turn in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
PRESENT
Decades later, tech giants ran with the vision of talking with people on video. Similar technology is now incorporated in every smartphone, allowing families to chat in real time. Video calls have also transformed the way we work — connecting people around the world for meetings.
The light-sensitive electronic sensor, called a charge-coupled device, opened the door to digital imaging. It captured images by converting photons of light into electrons, breaking images into pixels.
1978
Efforts to use the imaging sensors in cameras and camcorders began in the 1970s, and the products steadily improved. The cameras got smaller and the images sharper. Willard Boyle and George E. Smith earned a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.
1978
The science is complicated, but the sensor converts light to electrical charges, stores them and then shifts them across the chip to be measured.
PRESENT
By the early 2000s, a smaller, cheaper technology, CMOS, had won out in mass markets like camera phones. But charge-coupled sensors remained the choice for tasks requiring very high resolution, like mapping the Milky Way.
The silicon solar cell was a Bell Labs triumph of material physics.
The solar cell performs a special kind of photon-to-electron conversion — sunlight to energy.
1956
But while a scientific success, the early solar cell technology was a market flop — prohibitively expensive for mainstream adoption. By one estimate at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million for the solar cells needed to meet the electricity needs of the average American house in 1956.
PRESENT
The solar industry would take off decades later, riding the revolution in semiconductor technology, with prices falling and performance soaring. Government subsidies in many countries, eager to nurture clean energy development, helped as well. Today, light-catching panels stretch across fields and deserts.
All computer technology stems from the transistor, the seemingly infinitely scalable nugget of hardware that is essentially an on-off electrical switch that powers digital technology. It was invented at Bell Labs, which licensed the technology to others, paving the way for today’s tech industry.
The versatile transistor can also boost signals by gating electrons and then releasing them.
1956
These transistors — seen on the face of a dime — were the tiniest in their day. The smaller the transistors, the more that can be packed on a chip, using less electricity and enabling faster, more powerful computers.
1950s
Improvements in transistor design led to mass production in the 1950s, helping inspire new products like the portable transistor radio.
1956
The transistor’s inventors — John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley — shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their creation.
1979
The technology continued to improve as a “computer on a chip” in the late 1970s. It was smaller than a fingernail and a few hundredths of an inch thick.
PRESENT
Today’s microscopic transistors animate the chips that go into our phones, computers and cars. The artificial intelligence boom is powered by chips of almost unimaginable scale. Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, recently showed off the company’s new Rubin A.I. chip, with 336 billion transistors.
The first primaries for the 2026 midterm elections are scheduled for early March. For Republican and Democratic state lawmakers still trying to redraw district maps for the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans have a razor-thin margin, there is not much time left.
While legal challenges remain — including a potentially seismic Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act — here is a breakdown of states where maps affecting November’s election have already been redone, or states have taken action to make changes.
These states have changed their maps
Texas could add 5 Republican seats in the midterms
The first group to heed President Trump’s call last year to reshape Congress was the Republican majority in Texas.
Democrats staged a two-week walkout, arguing that the new districts would illegally dilute Black and Hispanic representation. But Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the measure into law in August, and the Supreme Court upheld the map in December.
California could add 5 Democratic seats
In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, persuaded the legislature in August, and voters in November, to counterpunch.
The Supreme Court, echoing its Texas order, upheld California’s new map in February, dismissing Republican claims that it illegally favored Latino voters.
Missouri could add 1 Republican seat
Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, in late September signed into law a new map that would split Kansas City, a Democratic stronghold, into rural and largely Republican districts.
Republicans hope to oust the longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, who was the first Black mayor of Kansas City. But lawsuits are in progress.
North Carolina could add 1 Republican seat
The Republican-controlled legislature approved a new map in October that imperils the re-election chances of Representative Don Davis, a Democrat, who represents the northeastern corner of the state.
Under the state Constitution, Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, cannot veto the new map.
Ohio could add 1 to 2 Republican seats
Even before Mr. Trump’s push, Ohio was required, under its state Constitution, to redraw its congressional maps. So in October, a state commission approved plans to dilute Democratic-held districts near Toledo and Cincinnati.
Utah could add 1 Democratic seat
A state judge in November tossed out a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature as being unfairly tilted against Democrats. The judge then adopted an alternative proposed by a centrist group that preserved a Democratic-leaning district surrounding Salt Lake City.
The Utah legislature has appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, while two of state’s congressional Republicans have filed a federal lawsuit to void the map.
These states are trying to change their maps
Florida could add 2 to 4 Republican seats in the midterms
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has proposed that a special legislative session be convened in late April on redistricting. Republicans, who control most of the state’s congressional seats, are eyeing a gain of two to four more in central and South Florida.
Virginia could add 2 to 4 Democratic seats
The Democratic legislature has passed a constitutional amendment allowing lawmakers to redraw congressional districts before the midterms. If voters say yes to a referendum on April 21, the Democrats could net between two and four seats under a proposed new map.
A state judge initially blocked the effort to change the map. But the Virginia Supreme Court has allowed the referendum to proceed, and says that it will rule afterward on whether the plan is legal.
New York could add 1 Democratic seat
A state judge has ruled that a district represented by Nicole Malliotakis, New York City’s only Republican member of Congress, disenfranchises Black and Latino voters. The judge has ordered an independent redistricting commission to come up with new maps for the district, which includes Staten Island and part of Brooklyn. Republicans are appealing.
Maryland could add 1 Democratic seat
In Maryland, a latecomer, the House of Delegates has approved a plan that would ask voters to ratify new congressional boundaries in November — while also choosing the candidates to represent those districts.
The State Senate appears reluctant, so far. But if the plan proceeds, Democrats could turn what is now a 7-1 advantage into 8-0.
Reporting contributed by Nick Corasaniti.
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