Rupert Murdoch’s Grande Scandale Sparks Back to Life

During the past week, J.T. Rogers, Tony-winning playwright, was intently trying to straighten out the remaining kinks in “Corruption,” his new production about the News Corp phone-hacking scandal of a decade ago, through daytime rehearsals and nightly preview performances at New York’s Lincoln Center. He still wanted to perfect how the characters’ tweets would appear onstage, and he also worked on a scene involving U.K. parliamentary mechanics with lead star Toby Stephens, the surly hero of various streaming series (Netflix’s “Lost in Space,” Starz’s “Black Sails”) and former Bond villain (“Die Another Day”).

When the play opens next month, Rogers hopes audiences find “Corruption,” which dramatizes a web of events that extended across British society and business news in the U.S. in the years between 2011 and 2014, as a “sweeping, entertaining, intellectual thriller, not homework,” he said on a break between rehearsal and an evening preview. “And I don’t want to paint a picture of just heroes and villains, because there can be that sense of oversimplifying it.”