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    in Theater

    Robert Macbeth, Founder of Harlem’s New Lafayette Theater, Dies at 89

    He created a vibrant space for actors and playwrights that became a seedbed for the emerging Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.Robert Macbeth, a rising Black actor in the New York theater scene, was sitting in a Greenwich Village bar in September 1963, getting a drink before going onstage for an Off Broadway improv show. The evening news played in the background.“I happened to look up and there was a flash, and the flash was about the four little girls getting killed in Birmingham,” he said in a 1967 interview, recalling the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “And there I was, sitting in a Village bar, with a Scotch in my hand.”He went onstage that night, and, rather than following the show’s loose routine, he began shouting, walking up and down the aisles, getting in the faces of the mostly white crowd.“I must have scared the audience half to death,” he recalled in the interview. But rather than absorb his message, they seemed to take it as entertainment: “They loved it, but that wasn’t the idea.”Mr. Macbeth, distraught over his inability to convey his anger and sadness, stopped acting after that night in 1963 and, in his words, went into “exile” from the stage. He worked in a bookstore, taught acting classes and tried to process the violent changes rippling through Black America in the 1960s.Slowly, an idea took form: Black actors and playwrights could never be fully effective in white-dominated spaces. They needed their own. So, in 1967, he gathered together a troupe of more than 30 actors and artists to open the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Ally,’ a Play About Israel and Free Speech, Tackles Big Issues

    Itamar Moses wrote a drama of ideas about Israel and antisemitism. Then Oct. 7 happened.Before his audition for “The Ally,” a new play by Itamar Moses, the actor Michael Khalid Karadsheh printed out the monologue that his character, Farid, a Palestinian student at an American university, would give in the second act.The speech cites both the Mideast conflict’s specific history and Farid’s personal testimony of, he says, “the experience of moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate.” Karadsheh — who booked the part — was bowled over.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Karadsheh, whose parents are from Jordan and who has ancestors who were from Birzeit in the West Bank.Farid’s speech sits alongside others, though, in Moses’s play: one delivered by an observant Jew branding much criticism of Israel as antisemitic; another by a Black lawyer connecting Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to police brutality in the United States; another by a Korean American bemoaning the mainstream’s overlooking of East Asians. These speeches are invariably answered by rebuttals, which are answered by their own counter-rebuttals, all by characters who feel they have skin in the game.In other words, “The Ally,” which opens Tuesday at the Public Theater in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer and starring Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues: Israelis and Palestinians, racism and antisemitism, free speech and campus politics, housing and gentrification, the excesses of progressivism — even the tenuous employment of adjunct professors.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Michael Khalid Karadsheh, who plays Farid.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Amy Herzog on Adapting Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy of the People’ for Broadway

    At a rehearsal for “An Enemy of the People,” a Broadway revival of the 1882 play, the actor Jeremy Strong paced around an auditorium, wearing pants that were damp from kneeling in ice.As Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who tries in vain to warn his Norwegian coastal community about contamination in the town’s springs, Strong looked shaken, but hopeful. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” said Strong, known for playing the fragile yet ruthless media executive Kendall Roy on four seasons of “Succession.” “We just have to imagine.”To anyone intimately familiar with “An Enemy of the People,” written by Henrik Ibsen, those lines might sound slightly off key. Ibsen ended the play on a more defiant note, with the doctor boasting that he is the strongest man in the world, because the strongest are those who stand alone.“That didn’t resonate with me at all,” said Amy Herzog, who wrote the new adaptation, which is scheduled to begin performances on Tuesday.Herzog watches a rehearsal of “An Enemy of the People,” which stars Jeremy Strong, right, opposite Michael Imperioli, left.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesInstead of ending with Ibsen’s image of a lonely, heroic truth-teller, she changed it. And it isn’t the first time she’s boldly revamped his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    On the Road With ‘The Outsiders,’ Where the Greasers and Socs Rumbled

    In denim and leather and newly acquired vintage snakeskin boots, the cast and creative team bringing “The Outsiders” to Broadway went on a trip across Tulsa, Okla., last month — a granular, history-flecked tour of the place where, about 60 years earlier, S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age story was written and set. Hinton, 75 and still a beloved local, was a star attraction; the visit was a way of mapping out how the new musical version might fit into, or even build on, the durable legacy of “The Outsiders.”Bouncing along together in a van, singing bits of the show’s score, the company members let out a collective gasp as they caught sight of the enormous Admiral Twin Drive-In. Hinton watched double features there as a kid, and it figured prominently in her 1967 novel. The theater, whose midcentury-style signage remains, also served as a location for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie adaptation, whose stars included Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze.Sky Lakota-Lynch (Johnny Cade), Jason Schmidt (Sodapop Curtis), Brent Comer (Darrel Curtis) and Daryl Tofa (Two-Bit Mathews) hang outside the Admiral Twin Drive-In.Joshua Boone (Dallas Winston), Lakota-Lynch and Schmidt. “‘Outsiders’ is the first novel I read, front to back,” Boone said. Brody Grant (Ponyboy Curtis), Kevin William Paul (Bob Sheldon) and Emma Pittman (Cherry Valance). “Yo, there’s a plaque back here,” someone shouted, and seven guys plus one young woman raced across the muddy off-season field to giddily read about when Greasers and Socials ruled that very spot. Then they popped behind the concessions stand and pretended to pull sodas at the counter. “The Outsiders” still sells out weekends at the Admiral, with more than 1,200 cars lining up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    At Jeremiah Brent’s Book Party Pondering: What Makes a Home?

    What makes a house a home?On Tuesday night, that question floated in the delicately candle-scented air of a three-story penthouse apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where the interior designer Jeremiah Brent lives with his husband and fellow designer, Nate Berkus, and their two children.An intimate gathering of about 30 guests had assembled to celebrate the publication of Mr. Brent’s first book, “The Space That Keeps You,” a collection of photos and stories of interesting people and their enviable houses.For Mr. Brent, who along with Mr. Berkus is a mainstay on HGTV with shows like “The Nate & Jeremiah Home Project,” a home is a “weird blend of space and place.”Brooke Cundiff and Michael Hainey thought long and hard about what they wanted from a home. Their apartment is featured in Mr. Brent’s book.Mr. Brent’s book is a collection of photos and stories of interesting people and their enviable houses.Mr. Brent lives in Manhattan with his husband, Nate Berkus, and their two children.Mr. Brent’s party had a wide array of guests, including the stylist Ashley Avignone and the TV star Antoni Porowski.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Sunset Baby’ Review: Don’t Let Nina Be Misunderstood

    Moses Ingram makes her New York stage debut in Dominique Morisseau’s love poem to Nina Simone.Dominique Morisseau’s characters are, as the post-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon once described himself, often paralyzed “at the crossroads between nothingness and infinity.” Her plays craft realistic depictions of marginalized people inextricably caught in the tide of history.In her 2013 piece “Sunset Baby,” receiving a potent revival at Signature Theater, Morisseau lays bare both a romantic relationship and a father-daughter drama while also exploring the effects of revolution, the deferment of dreams and the bind of being a Black woman in America.The play’s complexities find their avatar in its hardened protagonist, Nina (Moses Ingram, making a strong New York stage debut). As a drug dealer and (as conjured by the costume designer Emilio Sosa’s tiny dress and thigh-high boots) a honey pot eking out a living in Brooklyn, Nina’s life is a far cry from the dreams envisioned by her Black revolutionary parents, who named her after the singer-activist Nina Simone.After the death of her mother, Ashanti X, from a slow, ugly slide into addiction, Nina’s estranged father, Kenyatta Shakur (Russell Hornsby), reappears to collect a stash of letters her mother had written to him while he was a political prisoner.Kenyatta seems earnest in his attempt to reconnect. But having prioritized the good fight over his family — and Nina’s poverty being the very thing he’d set out to combat — he is seen by Nina only as an absentee father, and she refuses to budge. (She had already rebuffed cushy offers from universities and publishers wanting to purchase the correspondences between her parents, adding to the list of forces — family, history, the government — seeking to take from her.)Damon (J. Alphonse Nicholson), Nina’s devoted partner in love and crime, who thinks of the two as a righteous Bonnie and Clyde, adds relationships to that list. He finds in Kenyatta a kindred sense of anti-establishment disruption and, knowing some cash could take them out of the projects, tries to change her mind.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Danielle Brooks Has an Oscar Nomination. So Why Is She in Mourning?

    Was it an interview or an unburdening? As she wiped away tears, Danielle Brooks confessed she couldn’t tell the difference.“New York Times therapy session, you got me going!” she said, chuckling as she cried.It was Valentine’s Day, and we had met on a video call to discuss the 34-year-old actress’s first Oscar nomination, for playing the indomitable Sofia in Blitz Bazawule’s big-screen musical, “The Color Purple.” Though she had been too busy filming the “Minecraft” movie in New Zealand to fly to that week’s Oscar nominees luncheon in Beverly Hills, Brooks said she had spent the last few days wrapping her head around the kind of company she now kept.“It’s been really emotional,” the supporting actress contender said. “There are five African Americans nominated in actor categories this year and only two Black women, and to be one of them means a lot to me.”This is also the culmination of a long arc that Brooks has experienced alongside “The Color Purple”: As a teenager, she was so blown away by the Broadway musical that it inspired her to pursue acting; later, after shooting to fame as Taystee on the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” she won the role of Sofia in the 2015 stage revival of “The Color Purple.”Tony-nominated for that turn, Brooks nevertheless auditioned for six months to play the same part in Bazawule’s film. She’s proud of everything she was able to bring to her robust performance, which finds Sofia singing the anthemic “Hell No!” before going through the emotional wringer, imprisoned for refusing to be a white woman’s maid.“It really did deplete me — physically, mentally, spiritually,” Brooks said. “I was drained at the end of doing this part.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Ewen MacIntosh, Comedian on British Sitcom ‘The Office,’ Dies at 50

    Mr. MacIntosh was known for his role as Keith Bishop, a dry, blunt accountant on the original version of “The Office.”Ewen MacIntosh, a British actor and comedian known for his dry portrayal of Keith Bishop, a lackluster accountant in the acclaimed British sitcom, “The Office,” has died. He was 50.He died on Monday, his management company, Just Right Management, said, but it did not give a cause of death. The company said in a social media post that Mr. MacIntosh received support from a care home before he died.Mr. MacIntosh had parts in several comedic series, including the British sitcom “Miranda” and the sketch series “Little Britain.” But it was “The Office” that would be his most famous role, as a socially inept accountant working at a boring branch of a paper company.Created by the comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the mockumentary series began airing in 2001 and focused on the horrors and trivial lives of office workers. It included two series and a Christmas special, and its comedic approach was praised by critics and audiences alike.The show later inspired an Emmy-winning American counterpart that ran for nine seasons and also attracted an avid audience.Referring to Mr. MacIntosh as “Big Keith,” one of his nicknames on “The Office,” Mr. Gervais called him “an absolute original” in a social media post Wednesday.This is a developing story. More