Who is this Anita Gates you speak of?

A.G.’s journalistic triumphs over 25 years at The New York Times include drinking with Bea Arthur (at a Trump hotel), Wendy Wasserstein (at an Italian restaurant) and Peter O’Toole (in his trailer on a mini-series set near Dublin). It is sheer coincidence that these people are now dead.

At The New York Times, she has been Arts & Leisure television editor and co-film editor, a theater reviewer on WQXR Radio, a film columnist for the Times TV Book and an editor in the Culture, Book Review, Travel, National, Foreign and Metro sections. Her first theater review for The Times appeared in 1997, assessing “Mrs. Cage,” a one-act about a housewife suspected of shooting her favorite supermarket box boy. The review was mixed.

Outside The Times, A.G. has been the author of four nonfiction books; a longtime writer for travel magazines, women's magazines and travel guidebooks; a lecturer at universities and for women’s groups; and a moderator for theater, book, film and television panels at the 92nd Street Y and the Paley Center for Media.

If she were a character on “Mad Men,” she’d be Peggy.

In Love With the Set: 'In the Body of the World'

In Love With the Set: 'In the Body of the World'

Anita Gates
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How It Begins...

Eve Ensler onstage at City Center in her solo show "In the Body of the World." Scenic design is by Myung Hee Cho. 

NOTHING REALLY UNUSUAL THERE onstage with Eve Ensler in "In the Body of the World,"  her newest solo show, you say? While Ensler, who emerged as a feminist icon with "The Vagina Monologues" two decades ago, talks about her battle with uterine cancer, her work with very young rape victims in Africa and her relationship with her self-involved mother, she stands on City Center’s Stage I surrounded by a handsome Chinese cabinet, a slightly oversize Chippendale dining chair and a red chaise longue that doubles as a hospital bed. From the scenic designer Myung Hee Cho, it's good-looking and gently color-coordinated but fairly typical minimalist one-person-show stuff.

Just wait.

Of course you don't need much more than that when Ensler, 64, is in action. But then the projections begin (video design by Finn Ross). It's easy to forget that projection design is a relatively recent addition to the New York stage equation ("The Screen's Now Setting Many a Stage," March 7, 2010).  It's impossible not to notice that it has evolved into an art form, at least in some cases -- and Mr. Ross's work here is one of them.

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A Tree Grows in City Center

Ensler in a scene from "In the Body of the World." Projection design is by Finn Ross. 

Sometimes Mr. Ross's images are literal, sometimes fanciful. Sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative. At all times, it is in complete sync with the elements of Ms. Cho's set design. We can't show you the transformation of the set at the end of Ensler's powerful performance; that would ruin the surprise for those who still have the chance to see its "big reveal," as the home-makeover shows call it. Although, after the Sunday matinee that I attended, plenty of audience members were photographing it (with the producers' blessing).

The "new set" reminded me of the last act of David Cromer's "Our Town" at the Barrow Street Theater (2009), an effect that Charles Isherwood, writing in The New York Times, called "an overwhelming sensory immediacy." The surprise in "In the Body of the World" is completely different in style and tone but very similar in impact.

Both the designers work in opera and ballet as well as theater. Ms. Cho, whose only visit to Broadway was as an associate designer on "High Society" (1998), started out at Yale Rep, her grad-school alma mater, and is a professor of stage design at U.C.L.A.  Mr. Ross, an Aberdeen-born Scotsman, is best known for his Tony Award-winning work on "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" (2014). Up next:  "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," which opens in April.

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