At Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in downtown Manhattan on a recent afternoon, theatrical mega-producer Sonia Friedman sinks into a seat. “This is my oxygen,” she whispers in the dark.
With rapt attention, she is absorbing every stop and start of the tech rehearsal for Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a gripping two-hander starring Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty that begins performances on Monday. Jackman, dressed in a cozy blue chore jacket and olive chinos, is at the edge of the bare stage, working out a lighting cue for his opening monologue with director Ian Rickson.
“I want to see their eyes,” Jackman says. He plays Jon, a tortured college professor and author; Beatty is his young student and object of fascination. Both actor and director want his first address to have the feel of a university lecture, the audience as students.
Breaking down the wall between performer and viewer is also at the heart of a new theater company that Jackman and Friedman launched this spring. Simply called Together, it was formed with an aim to make live theater more accessible with low-cost (or sometimes free) tickets and to generally strip away the trappings of big-budget shows—elaborate sets, expensive stars—to bring theatergoing back down to earth.
“That feeling in the rehearsal room, with 40 or so chairs, where something special happens” is how Jackman describes what he wants to create with Together. “The intimacy you get, where there is no falling candelabra or whatever. Where you can be engrossed by the immediacy.”
Together’s opening salvo is two plays in a refreshingly minimal style: Sexual Misconduct by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, which explores #MeToo power dynamics with a disarming twist ending, and an adaption of August Strindberg’s 1888 play Creditors, adapted by Jen Silverman and starring Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, and Justice Smith. Both pieces are directed by Rickson and will run in repertory at Minetta Lane through June 18, with Creditors beginning on May 10. In a break with standard theater practice, there is no preview period or dedicated opening night after which a performance is more or less fixed.
At each performance, a quarter of the 391-seat theater will be earmarked for day-of ticket sales (at $35 each), while another quarter will be free to select organizations in partnership with the nonprofit Theatre Development Fund. To make this happen, Together partnered with Audible, the audiobook and podcast platform that has produced performances and events at the Minetta Lane since 2018. In a season when a ticket to watch big stars on Broadway is close to $1,000, it is a welcome antidote.
Rickson, who last worked with Jackman and Friedman on a Broadway production of Jez Butterworth’s The River in 2014, sums up Together’s mission in almost religious terms: “bringing [theater] back to the body and the word.” He likens what the company is attempting to the ensemble-driven work of the Actors Studio in its 1950s and ’60s heyday, when it spawned Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, or to the Federal Theater Project, which funded live theatre in the 1930s during the Depression. “These ensemble-driven initiatives were eventually wiped out,” Rickson goes on, but “actors long to be in community. This can be like a playful laboratory.”
Earlier that morning, Friedman and Rickson had been in a sun-drenched rehearsal room on West 37th Street with Schreiber, Siff, and Smith, working on Silverman’s Strindberg. Creditors is a suspenseful love triangle that weaves love, sex, and revenge into a tantalizing Nordic knot. Rickson was leading a taut improv between Siff and Schreiber, who play exes, their tension velvet thick.
“It’s already playing like a thriller!” Friedman raves during a break.
The Creditors team would head down to Minetta Lane later that evening to see Jackman and Beatty run through their piece—exactly the kind of cross-pollination among actors that Together’s founders imagined on a fateful stroll in London’s Hyde Park in December 2020.
“We all talked about what we wanted from our lives,” Friedman recalls of their meet-up at the peak of the pandemic. “That period provoked these very big questions about…what are we doing? We wanted to get back to something that we were all missing. And what we were missing was how we started.” They then agreed to form a new company shared equally between Jackman and Friedman, with Rickson directing.
“My name’s not above the title, and I bloody love that,” Friedman says with a laugh. “It’s so liberating.”
This back-to-basics approach may be unexpected coming from Friedman, whose theatrical juggernauts include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway and the recently opened Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Her shows have won a total of 48 Tony Awards, most recently for 2024’s revival of Merrily We Roll Along, directed by her sister, Maria. But perhaps there is no one better suited to pose a counterpoint to Broadway’s bloat than someone who has been minding its bottom line for as long, and as winningly, as she has. “On Broadway, plays cost $8 million and musicals cost $25 to $30 million, so ticket prices are hiked up,” Friedman explains. “We felt New York was the right place to kick this off.”
Back at Minetta Lane, discussion has turned to choosing the red coat that Beatty’s character, Annie, enters in. They ultimately decide on a bright crimson overcoat they’ve been using from rehearsal, shocking and direct. Between scenes, Beatty, who is fresh off Lincoln Center Theater’s Ghosts and FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans last year, runs lines with Jackman, their legs dangling from the stage.
“We’ve really had to grind,” says Beatty, who graduated from Juilliard in 2022. “Hugh and I would show up an hour early to rehearsal to run lines, just so that by the time we were playing, we could be really free.”
She has also been brushing up on lines with her mother, actor Annette Bening. (Her father is actor Warren Beatty.) “Getting to watch her reaction reading the play for the first time was really fun. She was laughing so much. And she knows good material.”
Beatty describes working with Rickson and Jackman on the show as “playful but also rigorous. Hugh’s presence is so big, but he is also so specific.”
For his part, Jackman just wrapped filming on Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, out next year, and is in the middle of his run of From New York With Love at Radio City, which lasts until October. “This is a balm,” he says of the work with Together so far. “It reminds me of drama school, the size of the theater. I haven’t been in a theater this size in my professional career. Everything is so lo-fi, I love it.” When not on stage, he’s been reading Miranda July’s All Fours and Intermezzo, the latest Sally Rooney novel, recommended to him by Rickson.
What the future holds for Together, its creators are blissfully unsure. “We have no idea where this is going to take us,” says Friedman. “We have no business plan. We don’t know what we should or should not be doing. We just did it.”