Tom Hanks, Playwright, Part 2

 

[Below are three reposts that constitute Part 2 of “Tom Hanks, Playwright.”  The first piece is excerpts from the interview of well-known film star Hanks by Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s Late Show, on 3 November 2025.  Following on that posting are two reviews of the Off-Broadway production, the première of This World of Tomorrow, the play cowritten by Hanks with James Glossman, which ran at The Shed from 18 November to 21 December 2025.

[In Part 1, which I recommend reading before the insFtallment below, I posted three articles from the New York Times announcing the coming production, covering the opening night, and presenting Hanks’s own discussion of his inaugural venture as a dramatist.  Those articles contain information that will be referenced below and explanations and commentary from me, including the background and details of the play, that I have not repeated in the second part.]

STEPHEN COLBERT INTERVIEWS TOM HANKS
3 November 2025
(Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Season 11, Episode 31)

[Below are excerpts from the guest appearance of Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS-TV; Channel 2 in New York City) of 3 November 2025.  Hanks talks extensively about This World of Tomorrow, which was in previews at the time of the broadcast, but he talked also about a number of other, unrelated subjects as well.  I have, therefore lifted only the passages concerning the Off-Broadway play for this posting. (Omitted sections of the show are marked with ellipses.)

[There is no video of this LSSC episode that’s in one take, so this post is taken from YouTube, which posted the show in segments, four of which are devoted to the Hanks interview.  (When the show was broadcast. Colbert did his customary opening, including a monologue, before the first break and after the Hanks interview, he had a musical guest, Mavis Staples, a rhythm and blues and gospel singer and civil rights activist, who performed the last segment of the show.)

[The YouTube videos are broken into separate posts at each point in the show when Colbert takes a commercial break.  (The link above, for those who want to view the whole interview, is the first segment (“It’s ‘Tom Hanks Riding The Subway’ Season In New York City”); the following three segments are at: #2 – “‘They Are Gonna Have A Real Hard Time Firing Me’ - Tom Hanks On His Play ‘This World of Tomorrow’"; #3 – “If You Could Spend 12 Hours In The Past, Where And When Would You Go? - Tom Hanks”; #4 – “Why The Original ‘Toy Story’ Movie Had To Be Thrown Out - Tom Hanks.”  I didn’t look for videos of the opening or closing segments, Colbert’s monologue and Staples’s performance.)

[The transcript published on Rick On Theater is based on the verbatim transcript from YouTube, which is computer-generated.  It’s full of inaccuracies, omissions, and mistranscriptions, so I emended it myself from the audio of the recordings, creating a hybrid.  It’s more accurate and complete than the ones accompanying the YouTube videos online.]

Stephen Colbert: Hey, welcome back, everybody! Give it up for Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, everybody!

Ladies and gentlemen, my friends – you know my first guest tonight, because he is Tom Hanks!

[cheers and applause]

Tom Hanks: Thank you, thank you!

. . . .

Hanks: I’m doing a play right now called – down at . . . uhh –

Colbert: I’m doing it right here [takes out playbill for this world of tomorrow].

You’re in town – you’ve cowritten and starred in a new play, This World of Tomorrow.

There you are – there it is. It’s at The Shed –

Hanks: It’s at The Shed. Directed by Kenny Leon and cowritten by James Glossman. I can’t tell you how much we love the cast.

But – you say you’re on Broadway and everybody knows where Broadway is. We are on Broadway right now. 

[The Ed Sullivan Theatre, where The Late Show is recorded, is a 1927 theater at 1697 Broadway at West 53rd Street, formerly a legitimate Broadway house first named Hammerstein’s Theatre (and then under various names). The Columbia Broadcasting System leased it in 1937 as a radio studio; it was converted for television use in 1949. The theater housed The Ed Sullivan Show from 1953 to 1971, as well as other CBS shows; it was renamed after Sullivan (1901-74) in 1967. The Sullivan was purchased by CBS in 1993 and has housed The Late Show since that year, first under David Letterman, then under Colbert since 2015.]

Colbert: You’re literally on Broadway.

Hanks: Anybody in the world can come to New York and say, ‘Take me to Broadway.’ Or they can walk to Broadway themselves if they know where it is.

You come to New York and say, ‘Come to The Shed,’ and they’re like, ‘What? For discount garden tools?’

It’s an art installation – it’s a space for art and it’s downtown in Hudson Yards. But letting everyone know where The Shed is, is a bit of a challenge. So if I could have a slight shuffle beat.

[scats a beat for the band. the band joins in.]

Yeah, okay.

Ready?

[rhythmic chant. hanks, seated, keeps time with hand and arm gestures as he shifts his upper body and makes animated facial expressions.]

It’s The Shed
Off the High Line
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the Highline
In Hudson Yards.
Wanta see
A show
At The Shed?
Well, just head down
To Hudson Yards.
It’s The Shed
Off the Highline
By the Vessel
In Hudson Yards.

There you go.  So, come on down!

[The High Line is an elevated public park and greenway in New York City, built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. It extends from Gansevoort Street at Washington Street in Greenwich Village to West 34th Street and 12th Avenue near Hudson Yards.

[The Vessel is an interactive public landmark and art installation in Hudson Yards. The structure is 150 feet tall (equivalent to about 12-15 stories) and consists of 154 interconnected flights of stairs, nearly 2,500 steps, and 80 landings, forming a massive, climbable, honeycomb.

[Hudson Yards is a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan, built over a functioning rail yard, a storage yard for Long Island Rail Road trains. The 28-acre site includes, aside from The Shed and the Vessel, a landscaped public plaza, high-rises with both residential apartments and corporate offices, and a seven-story mall with shops and restaurants. Most of the offerings are strictly high-end.]

Colbert: We have to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody. Stick around.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody, we are back with the star of This World of Tomorrow at The Shed, Mr. Tom Hanks.

Tell the people what it’s about, if you don’t mind.

Hanks: it’s from a collection of short stories. Jim Glossman – I published some short stories. And Jim Glossman said we could string these together under the theme of – let’s just say time travel.

It’s about a guy who decides to – a franchise out of what is now the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Renamed the Row NYC in 2014, the Milford Plaza Hotel (at 700 Eighth Avenue, between 44th and 45th Streets, in Midtown Manhattan) opened in 1928 as the Hotel Lincoln. It changed hands many times, and was renamed by each new owner. In 1956, it became the Hotel Manhattan; in 1969, it operated as the Royal Manhattan; and it reopened in 1980 as the Milford Plaza Hotel.

[Somewhat typical of the reviews the hotel received over its lifetime, New York magazine said in 2022 that “the reason most people stay here is location; its proximity to the city’s brightest [Broadway theater] marquees ensures theatergoers can be in bed shortly after the curtain drops. Otherwise, the 1,300 rooms are slightly antiquated."]

You may not know this. The Milford Plaza Hotel used to be the Lincoln Hotel and it’s at Eighth Avenue and West 45th Street, and Room 1114 has what is called volume authenticity to allow access to a 12-hour time-bond echo to June 8th, 1939.

[I tried to decipher what Hanks is saying here, thinking he’s using standard or recognized mainstream science fiction terms. According to one source, he isn’t. He’s using terms like “volume authenticity” and “time-bond echo” as technobabble—invented scientific language—to explain the mechanics of his character’s time travel.

[“Volume authenticity” is a fictional scientific requirement in the play. It refers to the idea that for a “time jump” to work, the physical space (i.e., Room 1114 of the Milford Plaza) must perfectly match the historical details of the destination date. The more “authentic” the room’s physical “volume” (decor, smell, newspapers, and atmosphere) is to 1939, the easier it is to “tether” to that time.

[“Time-Bond Echo” is the play’s term for the actual window or “link” between two points in time. It describes a temporary connection (a bond) that allows someone from 2089, the play’s “present,” to interact with the “echo” of 8 June 1939.

[In the play, there is also a 12-hour limit for Bert Allenberry’s (Hanks) technology to allow him to access this “echo” before he is pulled back to his own time, which is why he must keep returning “again and again” to the same day to see the woman he loves (Kelli O’Hara).]

So you can go back to the World’s Fair on June 8th, 1939. And I play a fellow who does that again and again and again, because he just cannot get enough of the World’s Fair.

Now – this is a game around the dinner table. I’m gonna tell you right now, okay – here’s the rules of the game. You get to go to any time in the past you want to for 12 hours. Name the place, name the event. However, homicide is not allowed. You can’t go back and – you know.

Colbert: April 1865, Ford’s Theatre and I prevent a homicide. Is that legal?

[laughter and applause from the audience.]

[President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-1865) was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-65) on 14 April 1865 as he and the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), were attending a performance of Our American Cousin, an 1852 farce by English playwright Tom Taylor, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

[Ford’s Theatre ceased presenting plays for 103 years after Lincoln’s death. It became a museum dedicated to Lincoln until 1968, when it was restored and reopened. The presidential box remains as it was in the 1860s, but is never occupied. Since its reopening, the theater has not restaged Our American Cousin, and has said that it never will out of respect for the assassination.

[(This vow is attributed to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (1920-2010; in office: 1961-69), whose department includes the National Park Service, which is responsible for the physical stewardship, preservation, and historical interpretation of the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which includes the government-owned theater building. The non-profit Ford’s Theatre Society oversees the site’s artistic programming and educational initiatives.)]

Hanks: Here’s the problem with that. I believe that show was sold out.

Colbert: So I cannot get a ticket.

Hanks: And those laws [are] adhered to. You don’t just get to appear magically. You have to eat the food and go to the bathroom and take a shower – and if you break a leg, you’ll have a broken leg.

So those are the rules. But the fellow I play cannot stop from going back to 1939, for reasons that are evident once you come see the play.

Colbert: That is the World’s Fair, 1939. Did you have a particular fascination with the World’s Fair?

Hanks: Something about the World’s Fair.

Here’s a question. There was a line from the “Futurama,” which was the most attended attraction at the fair, run by our good friends at General Motors.

Colbert: Cars of the future.

Hanks: It was 1939, showing you what 1960 was going to be like and it had this fabulous line that said: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” And if you think about it, that’s a great theme that Jim Glossman and I’d been working on.

[The General Motors exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair was titled “Highways and Horizons.” The core attraction and most popular attraction at the fair was a massive, immersive diorama and ride called “Futurama.” Designed by theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), the exhibit presented an idealized model of the world 20 years into the future (around 1960), characterized by vast suburbs and extensive, automated highway systems.

[Visitors sat in moving, sound-equipped chairs that conveyed them over a massive, 35,000 square-foot scale model of the American countryside and cities. The Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair’s overall theme of “The World of Tomorrow” and is credited with popularizing the concept of modern interstate highways.]

You cannot do anything about our infinite past. That’s gone, baby, gone, right? And the future’s going down the pike. Who knows what’s gonna go happen [sic]?

But the present, we have a little bit of control over that, don’t we? And we also know what you’re hurrying future’s going to be, don’t we [a reference to Paramount’s cancellation of The Late Show after May 2026]. And you can’t do nothin’ ’bout the things that got you in trouble, my friend.

So you’re just going to have to make hay right here, right now.

Colbert: Exactly.

Hanks: That’s right.

. . . .

Colbert: We have to take another break here, but stick around. We will be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody! We’re back with the star of This World of Tomorrow, Mr. Thomas Hanks.

You’ve done lots of theater.

Hanks: I’ve done just enough, sir, to call myself a professional actor.

Colbert: And last time you were live on stage here in New York, it was 2013.

Hanks: Yes, we did Nora Ephron’s Lucky Guy at the Broadhurst Theatre – yes.

Colbert: Now you’re back at The Shed, and we know where that is.

Hanks: Where’s The Shed again? Well, I’ll tell you where it is. It’s –

[chants as the band comes in.]

By the Vessel
And the High Line.

Colbert: Is it different to go on stage knowing that you wrote it?

Hanks: Yes, it is. Number one, because they are going to have a real hard time firing me. If I screw up.

Colbert: Have you gone up on your own line?

[In theater, ‘to go up’ means to forget one’s lines on stage during a performance or rehearsal.]

Hanks: Oh, God, yeah, year. I disappeared the other night, as a matter of fact. And when it happens, Kelli O’Hara on stage, or Ruben Santiago-Hudson – they all just kind of look at me and go, ‘Come on, Man.’

Colbert: If you don’t know it –

Hanks: ‘If I learn my lines – You haven’t – [why] haven’t you learned yours?’

The huge difference between film and stage is, in film, the director is the governor of the story. He can change it, not say it, don’t say that, don’t say this.

On the stage, if it’s not on the page, it is not on the stage. The writers are the definitive arbiters of what is being said.

So, on one hand, you have a discussion. ‘What – what sounds better: “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a problem,” or, “Hey, guys, we better get going because we have a situation”’?

We had some previews the other night. Kenny Leon said when we’re in rehearsal, the play is ours; when we are performing, the play is theirs. Meaning, that audience gives you something that is just undeniable. And we were out there and we had a difference between blah-blah-blah-blah problem – and the audience was like hmm [making a hand gesture indicating “flat”] – blah-blah-blah-blah situation, and they go, ‘Oh, a situation?’ And this is where you start playing around with it. It’s a very, very malleable, exciting thing.

And being one of the cowriters is just a pleasure and a joy, but it is also as terrifying an experience as I have ever had.

Colbert: Why terrifying?

Hanks: Well, because you just wake up and – ‘problem,’ ‘situation,’ ‘problem,’ ‘situation’ [making hand gesture of weighing two alternatives].

And will they know how to find us. You know how they find us – well,

[chants and snaps his fingers.]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: We’re gonna take another break here.

Hanks: I think we should.

Colbert: We’ll be right back with more Tom Hanks, everybody.

. . . .

Colbert: Hey, everybody.  You know who that is, that’s Tom Hanks.

. . . .

Colbert: So, Tom – wonderful to see you, as always.

Hanks: Thank you so much.

This World of Tomorrow is currently in previews at The Shed [30 October-18 November 2025]. And where’s The Shed?

Hanks: I will tell you right now, The Shed is . . .

[chants]

By the Vessel
Off the High Line
Is The Shed
In Hudson Yards.
By the Vessel
In the High Line

Colbert: Officially opens November 18th.

Hanks:

[continues]

This World of Tomorrow
Is a play you all can see
Where? At The Shed
By the Vessel
Off the High Line
In Hudson Yards.

Colbert: Tom Hanks, everybody.

We’ll be right back with a performance by Mavis Staples.

*  *  *  *
TWO REVIEWS OF THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW

“THE WORLD OF TOMORROW REVIEW –
TOM HANKS RETURNS TO THE STAGE 
FOR TIME TRAVEL CHARMER”
by Benjamin Lee

[Of the two reviews of This World of Tomorrow I selected to repost, the one from The Guardian of 18 November 2025 was the more positive.  The critical reception of the play was mixed, most giving some form of praise for the performances accompanied, but less enthusiasm, as you’ll read in the second example, for the production (that is, directing and design) and the script.]

The actor indulges his love of the past in a breezily enjoyable play about a man falling for a woman from the 1930s, played by a standout Kelli O’Hara

Tom Hanks [b. 1956] is a star who’s always had one foot squarely in the past. As an actor he’s forever been likened to James Stewart [1908-97; years active: 1932-91], a reincarnation of the charming, essentially good American everyman, a from-another-era lead who’s increasingly been more comfortable in period fare (in the last decade, he’s appeared in just four present-day films [see note below]). As a producer, he’s gravitated toward historical shows such as Band of Brothers [2001; HBO], John Adams [2008; HBO] and The Pacific [2010; HBO] his directorial debut was 60s-set music comedy That Thing You Do! [1996; Twentieth Century Fox] and his undying obsession, outside of acting, is the typewriter, collecting and writing about its throwback appeal.

[Between 2015 and 2025, Hanks’s “present-day” films (out of 19 productions, including the animated Toy Story 4) have been A Hologram for the King (made in 2016, set in 2010; Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions, Saban Films), Sully (made in 2016, set in 2009; Warner Bros. Pictures), Inferno (made and set in 2016; Sony Pictures Releasing), and A Man Called Otto (made in 2020, set in 2020 – with flashbacks to 1960s and mid-2010s; Sony Pictures Releasing).]

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow [sic], his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

[Several press outlets mislabel the play by substituting ‘The’ for ‘This.’  As I note in Part 1, the play’s title, This World of Tomorrow, is distinct from the official motto and theme of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was “The World of Tomorrow.”  The choice by Hanks and Glossman was deliberate to distinguish their creative work from the historical event it depicts and to shift the focus from a broad, corporate vision of the future to a specific, personal reality experienced by the characters.]

The gimmick here is that while time travel might be possible in the future, it comes with hard restrictions. Firstly, it’s prohibitively expensive, leaving it up to the select few to take advantage (asides about the state of the world in 60 years time are . . . not optimistic). Secondly, it’s only possible to go back to specific places at specific times, reliant on certain spaces remaining the same and certain “echoes” allowing for movement. Hanks plays Bert, a scientist whose trips to the 1939 world fair in New York become more frequent after he meets Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), a local woman treating herself to a day off with her precocious niece (Kayli Carter, a 32-year-old actor fighting a losing, and increasingly grating, battle playing an 11-year-old).

It’s not just love at first sight that keeps him going back, it’s also his fetish for nostalgia (Newspapers! Lower prices! People saying “swell”!) and the alluring promise of a future that never really came. Each time he returns to the present, after a strict cutoff of 11pm [sic], he regales his skeptical colleagues with ideas of how to forge ahead differently. While whimsy is mostly prioritized [sic – British spelling], the dark shadow of reality often threatens to intrude. Bert’s fawning over the past is briefly interrupted when Black colleague and longtime friend M-Dash (played by the wonderful Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who tries hard to add weight to a lightly written dynamic) tells him that the idea of travelling back is less appealing for him, a sharp reminder that the good old days weren’t that good for many people (as he predicts, almost all of the service jobs during Bert’s visits are taken on by Black workers). It’s also the summer of 1939, just weeks away from the second world war [German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, marking the start of World War II in Europe], and Nazism has already started to appear in the US, the dreaded swastika showing up on pin badges.

But Hanks, as ever, chooses light over dark and his focus, with co-writer James Glossman, is the thrill of an impossible romance, a choice that takes a little time to convince (the setup, like in his classic romcoms Sleepless in Seattle [1993; TriStar Pictures] and You’ve Got Mail [1998; Warner Bros.], could have easily warped into a creepy thriller). Before intermission, it’s hard to fully understand why Bert would make the expensive, and increasingly dangerous, choice to keep going back for Carmen, as effervescent as O’Hara might be (like many an adaptation, the writing often suffers without the gap-filling depth of a narrator).

Yet in a far superior second half, after she’s gifted with a piercing monologue, we’re whisked along with them. Visually, the journey is smooth throughout thanks to Tony-winning director Kenny Leon guiding the way. While his recent take on Othello [2025; Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway; see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1” (27 March 2025)] might have underwhelmed on many levels, his decisions here are far more astute, working with what seems like another blockbuster budget but this time allowed to spend it on more than just A-list casting. The stage is filled with rectangular pillars switching between various video-screened backgrounds, from a futuristic conference room to a pokey Bronx apartment, and despite one hiccup (a prop that wouldn’t budge that Hanks himself helped to save), it felt as sleekly transporting as something the actor would have made for the big screen. Its commerciality does also make it an easy fit for a Hollywood transfer, perhaps one that could easily tighten the script, excising the scene-sinking niece and some extraneous diner and home scenes (it’s over two hours and could benefit from being under).

Hanks, who was last on the New York stage in Nora Ephron’s 80s-set newsroom drama Lucky Guy, develops real last-act chemistry with O’Hara, who manages to perfect period intonation without becoming schtick-y. He’s comfortably in his wheelhouse here (also nailing the delivery as expected), but there’s none of the autopilot laziness we often get from actors known for sticking to certain character types. He might be stuck in the past, but it’s hard not to get stuck there with him.

[Benjamin Lee is the east coast arts editor at Guardian US, based in New York.  He was previously deputy editor of the style and culture website ShortList.com.]

*  *  *  *
“DAWN OF A DULL DAY:
TOM HANKS IN THIS WORLD OF TOMORROW”
by Jackson McHenry 

[The review on Vulture (the online platform of New York magazine) that was posted on 18 November 2025 was a largely negative assessment of the Hanks-Glossman play.  As you’ll read, reviewer Jackson McHenry had numerous objections to This World of Tomorrow, both to the script and Kenny Leon’s production.]

Whatever is happening at the Shed right now, it’s not really a play. It’s play-shaped, and actors put on costumes and wander around onstage for a couple of hours, repeating words they’ve memorized. But I’d be more comfortable calling the staging of This World of Tomorrow — starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and his collaborator James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and based off elements of Hanks’s short-story collection, Uncommon Type — something more along the lines of “a flight of fancy,” “a doodle on a napkin,” or “a college-drama-club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

This World of Tomorrow is not malicious in its intent. Tom Hanks, the moral nice-guy mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing the film industry has to a Jimmy Stewart, and I’m happy to believe that his forays into writing have developed out of genuine artistic interest in good-hearted Americana. (Inevitably, a character speaks admiringly about a typewriter.) Whether a theater company should spend its time and resources developing and staging what he has written is another question. (No.) This World of Tomorrow, largely based on the Hanks story “The Past Is Important to Us,” has him playing Bert Allenberry, a rich tech titan from around the year 2100 who keeps taking expensive daylong trips to the 1939 New York World’s Fair via a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the cost by telling his colleagues that he’s enthralled by the way the past imagined a better future than the one we got, but it becomes clear very quickly that he’s really doing it because he’s infatuated with a winsome divorcée named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen is visiting the fair with her spunky niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, fumbling for any texture to play and landing on “loud”), and Hanks runs into her by accident, then comes back again and again. In each time loop, Carmen doesn’t remember Bert, he so [sic] keeps reseducing her, using a little more information each time, an unsettling dynamic that’s a blend between Groundhog Day [1993; directed by Harold Ramis; Columbia Pictures], Midnight in Paris [2011; directed by Woody Allen; Sony Pictures Classics], and maybe even the deranged sci-fi drama Passengers [2016; directed by Morten Tyldum; Sony Pictures Releasing], all films that aren’t known for their sensitivity toward women’s agency.

There’s where you might expect a play to develop some dramatic friction, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or on one extremely rich man’s sense of entitlement. Any such turn might be a current, if obvious, direction for a play like this. But one thing you can say about This World of Tomorrow is that it doesn’t do much of what you might expect. There’s little tension anywhere or really any significant attempt to undercut Bert’s rosy gaze on the past. Hanks and Glossman have written a few throwaway lines that acknowledge the racism of the 1930s — Black members of the ensemble are often called upon to roll their eyes at Bert’s cheeriness about 1939 — and in the play’s announcement, Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, told the New York Times [see Part 1] that “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there is a line about how Bert should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

I wouldn’t say that This World of Tomorrow embraces Bert’s nostalgia, either, so much as it just lets his quest for Carmen happen. The script is too rudderless to navigate toward any specific theme, and Leon, who has become the go-to director for soggy celebrity-driven drama, hasn’t pushed his cast toward any specific idea. (According to a conversation in your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept an actor can’t play, and the other is something no one is convincingly playing.) Somehow, despite what must have been a substantial budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane’s design resembles a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Bert’s so enamored with the innovations of the World’s Fair, couldn’t we see re-creations of a few of them onstage? Why not show us the famous robot or the celebrity cow?

Instead, in the space of where it could allow for wonder and enthusiasm, This World of Tomorrow tends toward overexplanation. The script is remarkably heavy on the technobabble and the scenes in which Hanks’s colleagues from the future throw nonsense time-travel-related nouns around while wearing Star Trek outfits. I couldn’t care less about the acids that supposedly accumulate when you go back and forth in time. The script’s most engaging indulgence is a series of scenes that occur in the second act as Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner, which is run by a grumbly Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you’re watching a real play about a real man, commanding the stage with a gruff bark and mining humor from his character’s insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary as he picks up some English. I’m not sure how his presence is supposed to relate to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt it was necessary to include it — perhaps his wife, the Greek American actress and producer Rita Wilson, had his ear — but at least it’s an interestingly idiosyncratic gesture.

Yet the audience isn’t at the Shed for idiosyncrasies. Hanks is the be-all and end-all of This World of Tomorrow, and, sure, when you’re sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away from him, it’s hard to deny his loping movie-star magnetism. He has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog, padding up to you to lay his paws on your lap. It’s hard to judge Hanks’s strengths as a stage actor given that this script gives him so few challenges, but when he delivers several jokes about Bert’s discovery that they have real milk at the World’s Fair — presumably, an unspoken environmental collapse has eliminated dairy — he is deeply charming. In those moments, the audience lets out a sigh of relief, as if to say, Ah, yes, the celebrity we’re here to see is giving us the performance we wanted. It’s his own persona he’s performing, not a character. We come to see plenty of stage actors for a taste of their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth to Laurie Metcalf, but perhaps putting a movie star onstage and asking them to actually perform in a play is an extra hurdle we needn’t ask them to clear. Why not just revert to something more direct, more medieval and churchy? Do away with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Have them stand there, in pristine and golden-lit silence for two hours at the center of the stage, and bask in the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to visit a holy relic — or its own act of sacramental theater. He’s not performing, after all. You are.

[Jackson McHenry is a Vulture critic covering theater, film, and TV.  He’s been covering theater, film, and television since 2015, with a focus on arts and entertainment, pop culture, and cultural movements.  In addition to Vulture, Jackson’s work has been featured in Variety, Magzter, and Entertainment Weekly.]

Tom Hanks, Playwright, Part 1

 

[In 2013, Academy Award-winning film actor Tom Hanks (1994, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Philadelphia; 1995, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Forrest Gump) made his Broadway début in the limited run of the Broadway show Lucky Guy, Nora Ephron’s last play.  (Ephron died on 26 June 2012; rehearsals for the production began on 14 January 2013, 6½ months later.  Hanks had also starred in two films written by Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and You’ve Got Mail from 1998; Hanks costarred in 2017’s The Post, which director Steven Spielberg dedicated to Ephron’s memory.)

[Lucky Guy ran at the Broadhurst Theatre from 1 April to 3 July 2013 (with two extensions from 16 June and 30 June), a total of 33 previews and 104 regular performances.  It was Hanks’s last New York stage appearance (though his last stage performance was as Falstaff in Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’s 2018 Henry IV).  Hanks (b. 1956) took home a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Debut Performance for Lucky Guy. 

[In May 2023, the renowned actor published a novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (Alfred A. Knopf).  It’s “about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film . . . and the humble comic books that inspired it.”  It became a New York Times Bestseller and was recognized by National Public Radio as one of the “Best Books of the Year” for 2023.  The Library Journal put the book on its “Lead Holds” list, indicating significant reader demand.  (See “Tom Hanks, Novelist“ [22 May 2023].)

[Before the novel, Hanks published Uncommon Type (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), a collection of short stories inspired by his vintage typewriter collection. The stories are linked by a common theme: each involves a typewriter in some way.  They aren’t about the typewriters themselves, but about something that might have been written on them.  Uncommon Type was a national bestseller and included in USA Today’s 10 Best Books, NPR Best Books of 2017, and Barnes & Noble Best Fiction of 2017. 

[Now, based on the stories from Uncommon Type, Hanks has written a play (in which he also stars).  This World of Tomorrow was coauthored by Hanks and playwright, adapter, director, and theater teacher James Glossman and directed by Tony Award-winner Kenny Leon (Best Direction of a Play for A Raisin in the Sun, 2014, and multiple nominations).  The play had a limited Off-Broadway run in the Kenneth C. Griffin Theater at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a real estate development on the far West Side of Midtown Manhattan (ov-er a functioning rail yard); it started previews on 30 October 2025, and opened on 18 November with a closing date of 21 December.

[The story of This World follows Bert Allenberry (Hanks), a scientist from the year 2089.  Disenchanted with his high-tech future, he uses a portal to travel back repeatedly, on a quest for true love, to 8 June 1939, to the site of the New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where he falls in love with a bookkeeper named Carmen (Kelli O’Hara). (The fairgrounds were revived 24 years later for the 1964 World's Fair, for which it was redesignated Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the name it bears today.)

[If anyone thinks that it’s no coincidence that Hanks and Glossman’s play is entitled This World of Tomorrow and is plotted around repeated visits to the 1939 World’s Fair, whose official theme and motto was “The World of the Tomorrow,” you’d be absolutely right!  Here’s what Hanks, himself, said in Vogue that makes this clear:

“I’ve always had a fascination for the 1939 World’s Fair because it was so blatant for its optimism,” Hanks reflected. “It was called The World of Tomorrow, and it was viewed that all humans would have a common future—a shared one of opportunity, growth, and possibility powered by the four freedoms that everybody in the world was entitled to” (Paul Chi, “Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, and More Helped to Fête Tom Hanks’s Return to the Stage in This World of Tomorrow,” Vogue 19 November 2025).

[(Sidebar: The “Four Freedoms” invoked by Hanks may refer to the celebrated set of fundamental human objectives articulated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt [1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45] in his 6 January 1941 State of the Union address, but the 1939 World’s Fair celebrated a slightly different set of Four Freedoms: Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Assembly.

[[Conceived by the Fair’s Board of Design, the idea to promote the liberties enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was prompted by the United States Constitution Sesquicentennial, a nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the creation, ratification, and implementation of the United States Constitution, 1937-39. The notion was championed by New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [1882-1947; 99th Mayor of New York City: 1934-46].).

[(The fair opened on 30 April 1939, the 150th anniversary of the first inauguration—in New York City, then the nation’s capital—of George Washington [1732/O.S.: 1731-1799; President of the United States: 1789-97], the first chief executive under the newly-ratified Constitution. President Roosevelt gave the opening address that day, noting in his speech the First Amendment’s freedoms, clearly having taken notice of the Four Freedoms sculptures by Leo Friedlander [1888-1966], which La Guardia had dubbed “the heart of the fair,” across the Court of Peace from the speaker’s rostrum.

[(Roosevelt surely saw the Fair’s successful use of the Four Freedoms terminology and was doubtlessly inspired to repurpose the phrase to transform the Fair’s celebration of domestic American democratic values into a global manifesto of universal rights for people “everywhere in the world.”

[(Two years later, in what became known as the “Four Freedoms speech,” the Four Freedoms FDR enumerated, symbolizing America’s ideals, became: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

[(Delivered 11 months before the United States entered World War II, the speech provided a moral justification for American intervention and a vision for a post-war world order. The Four Freedoms became a foundational cornerstone for the United Nations (established in 1945) and were enshrined in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948.)

[This first installment of the two-part post primarily consists of articles, all from the New York Times, about Hanks’s composition of the script (as described by himself) and his participation in the production, but in Part 2, to be published on Saturday, 3 January 2026, I will post excerpts from Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Hanks on The Late Show of 3 November and a selection of reviews of the performance.]

“TOM HANKS PLANS TO STAR 
IN A NEW PLAY THAT HE WROTE”
by Michael Paulson

[This short notice in the New York Times on 22 May 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]) was an early announcement of Hanks’s plans to mount a play he’d written on a New York stage.  It was posted on the paper’s website as “Tom Hanks Wrote a Play, and Will Star in It Off Broadway This Fall“ on 21 May.]

The work is scheduled to run for eight weeks at the Shed in Manhattan.

Tom Hanks, the acclaimed film actor, has written a new play about love, longing and time-travel, and is planning to star in an Off Broadway production of it this fall.

The play, This World of Tomorrow, will be staged in a 550-seat theater at the Shed, a performing arts venue on Manhattan’s Far West Side that has been helping Hanks develop the work over the last year. The play is scheduled to run for just eight weeks, from Oct. 30 to Dec. 21.

This World of Tomorrow is about a scientist from the future who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — searching for love. It is based on elements of Hanks’s “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories published in 2017.

Hanks, who will play the scientist, will lead a cast of 10 to 12 performers [it turned out to be 11], some of whom will take on multiple roles. A two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received [a] Tony Award nomination.

Hanks wrote the new play with James Glossman, a playwright and director with whom he has collaborated on other projects, including “Safe Home,” which had a production in 2022 at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (It was also based on “Uncommon Type” stories.) The director of the new play will be Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, said Hanks’s team approached him last year when they were looking for a place to develop the show. Poots leapt at the opportunity, he said, thinking “he’s one of the most beloved and trusted storytellers of our time.” Poots called the play “a classic love story,” but also noted that, because parts of it take place in 1939, “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism.”

[Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce (‘leader’) of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer (‘leader’) of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor (prime minister) of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo (‘leader’) of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936.

[Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) officially became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922 and de facto leader of the USSR by 1929 by consolidating power after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924. He held the post of Premier from 1941, ruling as a dictator until his death.

[In Japan, a powerful military faction, of which Hideki Tojo (1884-1948), then a colonel, was a founder and central figure, gained control as early as 1931, promoting aggressive expansionism in Asia. The military seized control of foreign policy, leading to the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937. Tojo, by then a general, was Vice Minister of the Army from 1938 to 1940 and then Minister until 1944 and was a leading advocate for the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  As Prime Minister (1941-44), Tojo consolidated immense power, at times holding multiple ministry positions, creating a virtual military dictatorship. He was responsible for the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II.

[Tojo’s leadership was characterized by a commitment to aggressive territorial expansion to secure vital resources for the Japanese Empire. As PM, he created a one-party system, ending democratic political processes, and through his control over the levers of state power, he suppressed dissent and oversaw the indoctrination of Japanese youth with extreme militaristic and ultranationalist values.]

This World of Tomorrow is one of three upcoming theater pieces to be staged at the Shed. It will present, in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” starring André Holland, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 28. And from June 17 to Oct. 19 it will present “Viola’s Room,” an immersive audio production narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It was created by Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”

[Sleep No More ran at the McKittrick Hotel in New York from 7 March 2011 to 29 September 2024. It was an immersive theater work created by the British troupe Punchdrunk. It was based primarily on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (from which the title is drawn), with additional inspiration taken from noir films (especially those of Alfred Hitchcock) and the 1697 Paisley witch trials, an incident in Britain that resembles the Salem, Massachusetts, occurrence of 1693.

[(The six-story McKittrick was a performance venue themed as a 1930s hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, built in 1939 and used as an industrial warehouse (which also occasionally housed popular nightclubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s). The building was given a fictional name (taken from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo) and past as a hotel that was shut down six weeks before it was scheduled to open. It was transformed into the immersive theater space for Sleep No More and reopened in 2011 and closed in 2025, a week after Sleep No More closed.

[(The former “McKittrick Hotel” has hosted several major events and creative takeovers throughout the year since it closed as a performance and nightclub space, including hosting a limited engagement for a new immersive production from Artemis is Burning titled The Death of Rasputin [Governors Island: 17 April-29 June 2025; former McKittrick Hotel: 31 October-1 November 2025]; the building is also scheduled to host a major New Year’s Eve celebration on 31 December.)

[The audience for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which can be categorized as immersive theater, promenade theater, and environmental theater wandered at their own pace throughout a set populated by actors. It was not interactive theater because the presence of the audience rarely had any bearing on the story or the performers. The production won the 2011 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience and special citations at the 2011 Obie Awards for design and choreography.]

[Since April 2015, Michael Paulson has been the theater reporter of the New York Times.  From 2000 to 2010, Paulson covered religion for the Boston Globe, where he was part of the Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  Since 2010, he’s worked at the New York Times, where he initially continued his religion coverage.  His work at the Times reflected his early politics roots and continued to tie religion to national issues.   Paulson has covered theater at the New York Times.]

*  *  *  *
“DAZZLING OPENING NIGHT WITH TOM HANKS”
by Sarah Bahr

[The second New York Times report on Tom Hanks and James Glossman’s play covered the night of the play’s official opening performance.  It ran in the print edition of 23 November 2025 in the “Sunday Styles” section, but online, as “A New York Night Out With Tom Hanks,” it was posted on 19 November, the day after the opening.]

Stars flocked to celebrate the actor’s Off Broadway show, ‘This World of Tomorrow.’

On Tuesday evening [18 November], more than 400 actors, directors and designers circulated under soft purple lighting inside the Shed, a performing arts center in Midtown Manhattan, to toast Tom Hanks and his new Off Broadway show, This World of Tomorrow.

“It’s the greatest thrill of my life,” Mr. Hanks, the 69-year-old veteran film star, said of performing in the play, which tells the story of a scientist from the future (played by Mr. Hanks) who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — in search of love.

It was opening night for the production, based on Mr. Hanks’s 2017 short story collection, “Uncommon Type,” which was adapted for the stage with the playwright and director James Glossman. It is directed by Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”

And fellow stars, who entered alongside enormous projections of Mr. Hanks’s likeness, turned out. The illustrious crowd included the actors Meryl Streep, Martin Short and Steve Martin as well as the recently retired [on 22 October 2025] ballerina Misty Copeland.

“I’m a huge ‘Toy Story’ fan, so I’m excited to see him,” Ms. Copeland said of Mr. Hanks, who voiced the cowboy Woody in the “Toy Story” films and who is a two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”). Mr. Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received a Tony Award nomination.

[Hanks was in four Toy Story films, all produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures: 1995, 1999, 2010, and 2019.  Toy Story 5 is due to be released on 19 June 2026, also produced by Pixar and Disney.]

The evening, which doubled as the Shed’s annual fund-raising gala and raised $2.1 million for the organization, honored one of its founding board members, Lew Frankfort, a former chief executive of Coach [Coach New York; American company specializing in luxury accessories such as handbags].

It began with a cocktail reception, where guests — who included Ms. Copeland, a board member of the organization, and Mr. Hanks’s wife, Rita Wilson — munched on chips and nuts before sitting down to a dinner of curated small plates like quail eggs, sweet potatoes and cocoa-braised short ribs.

Around 8 p.m., guests filtered into the Griffin Theater for the evening’s performance. For about the next two hours, Mr. Hanks and his co-star, the Tony Award-winning stage actress Kelli O’Hara, who plays his love interest, gallivanted around a World’s Fair set that included projections of the fair’s General Motors Futurama exhibit and the illuminated water fountains in the Lagoon of Nations.

After the show, attendees were welcomed back to the world of today with hot dogs and ice cream bars, featuring some decidedly 21st-century trappings, including cilantro and an apple cider sorbet.

[Sarah Bahr is an editor on the New York Times’s Flexible Editing desk and covers culture and style for the paper, writing about theater, film, TV, music, visual art, pop culture, parties, and nightlife.  She earned a master’s degree in English from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.  She worked for the Times as a multiplatform editing intern in Summer 2019, and has contributed to USA Today, Forbes Travel Guide, The Indianapolis Star, and Indianapolis Monthly.  She’s thrilled to return to New York, where in 2019 she saw 30 shows on and off Broadway in just 10 weeks.]

*  *  *  *
“WRITING A PLAY IS ELECTRIFYING (AND TERRIFYING)”
by Tom Hanks 

[Hanks’s own account of his first experience as a dramatist was published in the New York Times of 15 December 2025 (Section C [“Arts”]).  Online, the article was posted as “Tom Hanks on the Electrifying (and Terrifying) Experience of Writing a Play“ on 14 December.]

Tom Hanks looks back on the process of creating This World of Tomorrow with James Glossman.

At the very first rehearsal of the new Off Broadway play This World of Tomorrow our director, Kenny Leon, stopped us after two minutes — two minutes. “I don’t want to hear how you are saying the lines,” he told us actors. “I want to hear what you are saying.”

We may have been focused on our dialects, but he was listening for the language of the play. And that language? It had evolved from prose on the page, my prose.

The play was based on a collection of short stories I’d written, and now my words were being spoken by the members of our all-star cast, including Kelli O’Hara, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Jay O. Sanders. I was not only acting along side them, but I was also responsible for what was coming out of their mouths. Would my words inspire them? Would they help my castmates convey the language Kenny was listening for?

In our rehearsal room, the rewriting never ended. The script that my collaborator, the playwright James Glossman, and I had pored over for months now sounded completely different coming from the cast. It was a little surreal to hear Ruben as a tech genius from the future explaining the perils of time travel or Kelli as a bookkeeper from the Bronx telling the story of her magical day at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Both sounded just as we had imagined but also completely different as we went from table reads to rewrites to rehearsals and more rewrites before finally freezing the script.

These words have been with me for over a decade. My stories were published in 2017 in a collection titled “Uncommon Type.” Then, over the past three-and-a half years, in the form of a script adapted from two of these stories. I’m no stranger to commitment. I’ve devoted months of my life to working on films and, back in 2013, the Broadway play “Lucky Guy.” But this would be different; this was years.

After quieting some internal doubts, I embarked on this endeavor, partly fueled by a desire to bring to life onstage a sense of lives caught between the certainties of the past and the unknowable future. I wanted theatergoers to ponder the possibilities of each present moment.

It all started during the Covid shutdown, when Jim presented a staged reading of my work at a fund-raiser for Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (Though we had never met, Jim and I had traveled in concentric theater circles in the 1970s and ‘80s.) His reading combined two stories from my book: “The Past Is Important to Us,” about a tech titan of the future who takes a sort of time travel vacation to 1939, and “Go See Costas,” inspired by my father-in-law’s escape from the Communists in postwar Bulgaria and his arrival in New York City.

[Though regions varied with respect to the imposition and withdrawal of closures due to the COVID pandemic, most areas of the U.S. issued shutdown orders in March 2020. In New York, the most restrictive closures began on 22 March. The order was lifted statewide on 15 June 2021.]

Jim thought the stories could work as pieces of theater: Two men leaving their pasts behind them, starting new lives in a new world and being changed by what they find in pre- and post-World War II America. I saw no reason to deny Jim that challenge.

What he called “Safe Home” evolved from a one-time reading into a full production at Shadowland. Opening night was in July 2022 [15 July-7 August], and I was rather thrilled by the production — though the play was crammed to the rafters with ideas and plot, and burdened with dialogue, monologues and explanations.

Still, given our overlapping pasts and affection for the prose of the short stories, we felt a desire to revisit the work. But where to begin — again? Jim and I exchanged pages for two years, rewriting each other, struggling to produce coherent dialogue, debating phrases and scenes. This is a science fiction story, but even we realized we were really pushing the logic of the science, the reasoning, the physics.

Then at an invaluable weeklong workshop in 2024 at Portland Stage in Maine, it became clear that James and I needed to work together in person in order to wrestle the play into shape. We settled on my agent’s offices in the Chrysler Building in Manhattan. Would it be the crucible of creativity we needed?

[The Portland Stage workshop was part of the troupe’s annual Little Festival of the Unexpected (21 May-6 June 2024). Performances of See You Tomorrow, the new title of the play that would become This World of Tomorrow, were offered on 12 and 14 June.]

We revisited our research about the 1939 World’s Fair, and kept landing on a didactic bit of narration: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future . . . [.]” This came from the designer Norman Bel Geddes’s “Futurama,” a vast design for a future world, presented by General Motors in what was the fair’s most popular attraction.

We forged ahead, developing back stories for each character, figuring out which speeches resonated, and testing the number of jokes audiences would tolerate. We wanted to get the era right. One character played by Sanders owns a Greek diner just off Sheridan Square [heart of Greenwich Village]; another, Carmen Perry (O’Hara), works at a handbag factory, and lives with her brother’s family in the Bronx. Virginia, Carmen’s niece (Kayli Carter), is the president of her school’s radio club and obsessed with the advent of television. I portray a wealthy tech entrepreneur from 2089 who meets these characters when he travels back in time.

Sometime in the summer of 2024, we let some trusted minds read the latest rendering of our work. Debating innocuous wording was slightly excruciating (Do audiences respond better to “we have a situation” or “we have a problem”?), but the reactions landed like a gut punch: “Interesting!” “Huh?” “You might have something here.” Translation: There is more work to be done.

Somehow the manuscript made its way to Alex Poots and Laura Aswad at the Shed, who offered an official workshop — a staged reading. Jim and I gulped at the reality of what this deep throw would mean, then thought ‘Well, yeah, why not?’ We slapped the date on our calendars and rushed headlong into more revisions.

Now, how is this for timing? The reading of This World of Tomorrow was held at the Shed the day after the 2024 presidential election [5 November]. Just as we were taking an audience back to 1939 — which held its own uncertainty around war and the financial rebound from the Great Depression [1929-39] — there was a looming uncertainty, in 2024, of what the next four years would mean for the United States. Then came the realities of our endeavor: constructive criticism of what remained cloudy in the play’s narrative, theme and language.

As Jim and I dove back into the script, we were guided by notes from Alex and Todd Kreidler, the dramaturg and associate director; the reactions of the folks who attended the workshops; and friends who had read (and reread) it. Despite the work to be done, the Shed offered this fall for a production. Jim and I agreed to take the leap.

As rehearsals began at Gibney Center downtown [a dance venue with two facilities: Lower Manhattan and Union Square], missing beats were revealed. More revisions were made. The writing felt endless. New pages greeted the team each morning. Oftentimes the actors’ work the day before informed these new passages, their stone-cold authority illuminating moments that needed adjustments. Kenny kept stopping us, wanting to hear what the play was saying, in the language of the theater.

Previews arrived, and I eventually surrendered all but my actor hat. Jim and I handed over the final script to the cast to perform.

It’s electrifying to be a playwright — as terrifying a creative experience as I’ve ever had. It has also been a pleasure and an honor to join a cast and crew with such dedication, joy and brass. Some days, amid the rush of performing for a live audience, I feel as if our reality is forcing us to engage with the play’s themes: Staying present by embracing the moment, while also hurrying toward our inevitable future — the play’s final performance on Dec. 21.

[These three articles on This World of Tomorrow by Tom Hanks and James Glossman cover the announcement of the play’s arrival in New York City, the opening performance, and coauthor Hanks’s discussion of his inaugural experience as a writer of plays. 

[The second installment of “Tom Hanks, Playwright” will include excerpts from the transcript of Hanks’s 3 November 2025 guest shot on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  It’ll be posted on Sunday, 4 January, and I hope all ROTters will come back to read it.  Hanks is always an affable and amusing talk show guest, and this was no exception (though I have excerpted only the parts of the show in which the celebrity talks about the play).

[Part 2 will also include reviews of the Off-Broadway première of This World of Tomorrow.]

"How the character and traditions of Santa Claus evolved over centuries"

by Stephanie Sy and Mary Fecteau

[This bit of American Christmas lore aired on PBS News Hour on Christmas Day, 25 December 2025.  I’ve occasionally posted some sort of seasonal offering on or near holidays, such as Christmas or Hanukkah, even one on Valentine’s Day, so here’s a conversation about how Santa Claus came to be the “jolly old elf” we traditionally see in the U.S. whenever he’s mentioned or seen (say, around a mall or department store at this time of year).

[Speaking of Santa, earlier this year—I was late for Yuletide ’24—I posted a piece on NORAD Tracks Santa, the defense alliance’s official Santa site, called “Here Comes Santa Claus” (3 January 2025).  Other Christmas-related posts have been “‘Is There a Santa Claus?’” (25 December 2009), “‘It's a Wonderful Life Was Based on a “Christmas Card” Short Story by Philip Van Doren Stern’” by Daven Hiskey (26 December 2016), and “Spirit of 1907 Christmas, Recovered in 1999, Completed in 2016” (21 December 2022).  I even did a Hanukkah post last year, “Dreidel” (6 January 2024); the holiday in 2023 was 7-15 December, so I was a little late with the post.]

William Brangham [substitute anchor for the “PBS News Hour”]: So, for this next story, we need to warn you. If you have small kids in the room, you may want to mute this and come back a bit later, because we’re talking about that visitor from the North Pole, OK?

This Christmas Day, many good boys and girls welcomed that familiar visitor last night, the jolly man in the red suit with a sleigh full of gifts. But that white bearded figure that we all recognize as Santa Claus, he is a relatively modern creation shaped over centuries.

Stephanie Sy recently talked with an author who unwraps the surprising history of Old Saint Nick.

Stephanie Sy: That author is Gerry Bowler.

And his book “Santa Claus: A Biography” [McClelland & Stewart, 2005] traces how the legend of our favorite bearded gift-giver evolved over centuries.

[Gerry (G. Q.) Bowler (b. 1948) is a Canadian historian whose research focuses on the intersection of religion and popular culture, especially Christmas. He has taught at a number of universities in western Canada and spent 25 years with the University of Manitoba as a Professor of History.]

Gerry, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the “News Hour.”

So I want to hop right into it.

Is Santa Claus – and – I quote from the book – a figure of mythology or a creature of literature or a tool of a clever capitalist?

Gerry Bowler, Author, “Santa Claus: A Biography”: He is a wonderful myth, about 1,700 years old, American in renovation and largely a conspiracy by families.

So it changes over time.

Stephanie Sy: Saint Nicholas was an actual fourth-century bishop [traditionally 15 March 270-6 December 343, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey)]. What was he most known for?

Gerry Bowler: At the time of his life, he was known for generosity.

But when he died, a cult grew up around him inside Christianity that made him the most influential, popular male saint on the Christian calendar. He was the patron saint of so many things, but probably his most famous miracle in the Middle Ages was his resurrection of three murdered boys who had been chopped up and put in a pickle barrel.

He discovered this and put them all together again. So he becomes the patron saint of children. And thus around maybe the 12th century, he was someone who parents and the church said came on December 6 [his feast day] to bring presents for good little girls and boys to leave something in their shoe.

[The tradition of leaving something in children’s shoes in celebration of St. Nicholas (on 6 December, St, Nicholas Day, or its eve, the night of the 5th) stems from legends associated with the historical figure Saint Nicholas of Myra. In the most famous story, St. Nicholas tossed bags of gold coins through an open window or down the chimney of the house of a poor man with three daughters but no dowry for them.  One bag landed inside a stocking or shoe left by the fireplace to dry.

[These acts of secret generosity formed the basis of the tradition of children in many cultures, particularly in Europe, leaving their shoes or stockings out on the eve of St. Nicholas Day. Adoption of the tradition spread among the German, Polish, Belgian, and Dutch communities throughout the United States. Americans who celebrate St. Nicholas Day generally also celebrate Christmas Day as a separate holiday and some of the traditions and rituals of St. Nicholas Day, such as leaving out a stocking to be filled, have become traditions of Christmas here.]

Stephanie Sy: So, Gerry, it sounds like there’s this darker side of the Santa Claus legend to talk about here that a lot of people are unaware of.

Gerry Bowler: Well, in the 1500s, when Protestants abolished the cult of saints, parents had to have some kind of magical gift-bringer. They still wanted that aspect.

In many places, they turned to the Christ child. In French, you call it Le petit Jésus. In German, it’d be Das Christkindl. The Christ child is certainly a great Christian symbol, but he lacked two things that Saint Nicholas had had. One, the baby is obviously not going to carry a big sack. And, two, he’s not scary.

And Saint Nicholas could scare kids into good behavior. So what happened in Germany and in the Northern Europe was that the Christ child started becoming accompanied by scary helpers. They carried a whip or switches or a chain.

In Austria, of course, we have Krampus, which looks exactly like the devil. So he’s one of those scary helpers.

Stephanie Sy: So this goes back to your first answer, which is there was this conspiracy of families. Are they basically at the root of the Santa Claus that we know today?

Gerry Bowler: Well, a number of New York poets and thinkers and rich landowners wanted to make Saint Nicholas the bearer of good things and also a bit of a threat to bad kids.

The first poem that takes Saint Nicholas out of his Catholic bishop’s uniform and puts him in a fur-trimmed red robe is called “A Children’s Friend” in the 1820s. It’s a poem that describes this Christmas Eve midnight gift-bringer who comes equipped with a reindeer-powered sleigh.

[A Children’s Friend (whose full title is The Children’s Friend: A New-Year's Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve) is an 1821 booklet published in New York City by William B. Gilley, a well-known bookseller and a neighbor of Clement Clarke Moore (see below).

[The poem, called by its first line, “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” which has been adopted as its title, was published anonymously. While some have historically attributed it to Clement Clarke Moore, modern scholars often credit the publisher William B. Gilley (ca. 1785-1830) or the illustrator Arthur J. Stansbury (1781-1865) with its authorship.

[A Children’s Friend was intended to be a small series of children’s booklets published by Gilley in the early 1820s, offering moral lessons and engaging stories to foster positive behavior. (“Old Santeclaus with Much Delight” was Number III in the series. The title of Number I was “Infant Thoughts,” intended as a moral and educational tool for young children. The titles or themes for Number II are not well-documented.) The series was intended to be ongoing; however, there’s no evidence the series extended significantly beyond the initial installments.

[The original is a small, 6-inch paperback containing eight hand-colored lithographic engravings (considered the first in a book in America). It sold for 25 cents for colored copies and 18¾ cents for plain ones ($7.10 and $5.40 in 2025, respectively).

The next year [1823], Clement Clarke Moore [1779-1863; resident of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood] takes that sleigh, multiplies the reindeer, and writes a poem for his family.

Stephanie Sy: And the poem you’re referring to there is “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Gerry Bowler: “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a “Visit from St. Nicholas.” And it goes viral, as it were.

[The poem’s formal title is “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (actually, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”), but it’s more commonly known by its first line: “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The poem was first published anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on 23 December 1823, having been sent to the paper by a friend of Moore.]

It’s adopted by families first in the Northeastern United States. Then it spreads to Canada and throughout the rest of America.

Stephanie Sy: So, in other words, there’s sort of this amalgamation of traditions that are folded in and layered on.

Gerry Bowler: That’s the nature of Christmas. Christmas is very adaptive. By 1900, Santa is pretty much set, though, except with the addition of Rudolph in 1939.

(SINGING [“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the 1949 song written by Johnny Marks (1909-85) and first recorded by Gene Autry (1907-98), based on the 1939 story Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer published by the Montgomery Ward Company.])

Gerry Bowler: And despite all kinds of efforts by Hollywood and commerce to make him in their image, he’s remained pretty stable since then.

Stephanie Sy: Why do you think the legend of Santa Claus has endured for centuries?

Gerry Bowler: Because it is so valuable to families.

Saint Nicholas is this embodiment of generosity, of unmerited favor, to which you add a fantasy, a midnight gift-bringer from some place enormously exotic, powered by reindeer, for crying out loud. It serves to give kids an idea of fantasy, of generosity.

So, as long as families continue to love Santa Claus, it doesn’t matter what Wall Street or any particular denomination happens to be for or against him.

Stephanie Sy: That is Gerry Bowler, the author of “Santa Claus: A Biography.”

Thank you so much for joining us. Happy holidays.

Gerry Bowler: My pleasure, and merry Christmas.

In the 1860s, renowned political cartoonist Thomas Nast [1840-1902] created the distinctly American image of Santa Claus we recognize today: a jolly, plump, grandfatherly figure.

[Thomas Nast’s first depiction of Santa Claus was an illustration titled "Santa Claus in Camp," published on the cover of the 3 January 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly. This initial rendition, from the middle of the Civil War, differed significantly from the modern, non-partisan figure he later became.

[Santa was depicted as a staunch Union supporter during the American Civil War. He is shown sitting in a sleigh distributing gifts—such as warm clothing and Bibles—to Union soldiers in a military camp. Instead of his now-standard red suit, Santa wore a jacket patterned with white stars and trousers with stripes, mimicking the American flag. Santa is shown holding a “jumping jack” toy that is a caricature of Confederate President Jefferson Davis with a noose around his neck. (Nast was a Republican, the party led by Union President Abraham Lincoln.)

[Influenced by his German heritage (Nast was born in Germany) and Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Nast drew Santa as a small, plump, elflike figure with a full white beard.

[While this was his first direct depiction, Nast also included a secondary illustration in the same issue titled “A Christmas Furlough,” which featured a smaller Santa delivering presents through a chimney in the background of a domestic scene.]

[Stephanie Sy is a PBS News Hour correspondent and serves as anchor of PBS News Hour West.  Throughout her career, she served in anchor and correspondent capacities for ABC News, Al Jazeera America, CBSN, CNN International, and PBS News Hour Weekend.  Prior to joining News Hour, she was with Yahoo News where she anchored coverage of the 2018 Midterm Elections and reported from Donald Trump’s victory party on Election Day 2016.

[Mary Fecteau is an Emmy Award-winning Producer at PBS NewsHour. Her work has aired nationally on PBS.

[I’m not Christian, so Christmas has no significance to me as a religious holiday.  I do share in the cultural festivities—we had a tree in our home and we exchanged gifts—but in my family the significance of 25 December is that it’s my birthday.  Last Thursday was my 79th.

[Over the years, I’ve spent Christmas in some far-off places.  I’m not even counting the places where I was living when 25 December came around—Washington, D.C.; Koblenz, Germany; Berlin; New York City.  On this continent, I’ve marked the holiday in Chicago; New Orleans; Williamsburg, Virginia (for an 18th-century celebration); Mexico City; and Quebec City.

[On the way to New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1985, my parents and I stopped to watch Washington Crossing the Delaware at Washington Crossing.  In 1976, I had performed the role of Hessian Colonel Johann Rall, the mercenary defender of Trenton who was defeated by Washington’s Continentals on Christmas night 1776, in William Mastrosimone’s Devil Take the Hindmost (see my post “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009).  The play was presented in the bicentennial year; the historical reenactment we saw was staged on the 209th anniversary of the crossing.

[Abroad, I saw Christmas in Paris on my 16th birthday in 1962 and London the next year.  Zermatt, Switzerland, home of the Matterhorn, was the site of three holidays after that, and one in Gstaad.  Zermatt’s on the side of a mountain and climbs up the slope toward the ski areas.  You get there by a special, small-gauge rail line and one stop up the mountain is a village called St. Niklaus.  Of course, we called it “Santa Claus Town.”  At night, the village of Zermatt looks like a giant Christmas tree because of the lit-up chalets and hotels climbing up the mountainside.

[I observed one memorable holiday at the 700-year-old home of a family of friends in the tiny French town of Villefranche-de-Lauragais in 1971.  On Christmas morning, I cooked French toast for my hosts, which was a great astonishment for the Humiliens on two counts: first, the idea that I would (or, I suppose, could) cook for them was a surprise; second . . . well, French toast isn’t French!  They’d never heard of such a thing.  They were so thrilled, they talked about this event for years to come.   

[I was in Shanghai on Christmas 1980, followed by Cairo in 1982.  Christmas, of course, isn’t a holiday in China, but they mark it for us tourists.  Christmas Eve dinner was a special banquet at a hotel in Shanghai.  Marvelous and exquisite! Shanghai, because of its history as a European enclave, is proud of its reputation for European cuisine.  I still have the menu from this Christmas Eve meal (see “Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2” [27 December 2021]).

[In Cairo on 25 December, also not a holiday in Egypt, we went to Giza to see the sound and light show at the pyramids.  Now, I’m not a big fan of sound and light shows; I find them hokey and enervating.  The most interesting thing about the performance at Giza was that it was the same show that Roger Moore’s James Bond was at in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me—when he first encounters Jaws (see “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 9” [11 August 2021]).