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    Review: In ‘Snow in Midsummer,’ It’s Not Just the Forecast That’s Amiss

    Adapted from a 13th-century drama, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play is part ghost story, murder mystery and family melodrama.In the Chinese town of New Harmony, a three-year drought has ravaged the landscape. The lake has evaporated. Ash falls from the sky. Nothing grows. While some characters blame global warming, these natural disasters have a supernatural explanation. A young widow has been executed for a crime she did not commit. Before she dies, she curses New Harmony: Until she is avenged and buried, the town will suffer.In these broad, climactic strokes, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “Snow in Midsummer,” at Classic Stage Company, resembles the 13th-century Yuan dynasty drama from which it is adapted, “The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth.” A commission of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese Classics Translations Project, the play updates a classical tragedy. But in this Classic Stage production, with hectic, erratic direction by Zi Alikhan, the translation appears garbled, stranding the play among genres and tones. A ghost story, a murder mystery, a family melodrama, and a tale of greed both corporate and personal, it has been staged in ways that confuse place, time and intention.After a prologue set three years in the past, before the execution, the play proper begins with the arrival of Tianyun (Teresa Avia Lim), a self-made woman intent on buying a local factory, and her adopted daughter, Fei-Fei (Fin Moulding). Tianyun makes and distributes synthetic flowers, as no real ones can grow in this drought-stricken town. Selling the factory is Handsome Zhang (John Yi), who will use the money to relocate with his fiancé, Rocket Wu (Tommy Bo). But the hungry ghost of the widow, Dou Yi (Dorcas Leung), threatens these transactions.The script exists on multiple planes — reality, surreality, memory — which the production collapses. There’s fog everywhere, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s evocative lighting is ghostly throughout. The set, by the design collective dots, is an undistinguished wooden platform, sometimes adorned with posters or flags or blood. The stage’s loft is at first a love nest. And then it is the afterlife. This offers little sense of place. I couldn’t possibly tell you how remote New Harmony is, how prosperous, how contingent on an actual China. The period seems confused as well, which does not feel like a deliberate choice. One character speaks of the Cultural Revolution as if it were fairly recent. But then how to explain the cellphones?Cowhig’s heightened language (“Heaven mistakes the wise man and the fool/Both leave me nothing but two streams of tears”) clarifies little. Queering a central relationship and applying the lens of climate change refreshes a classical drama. But in rendering the play as a mystery, Cowhig delays solutions until the middle of the second act, which means the audience will spend more than an hour watching characters without remotely understanding the reasons for their behavior, rendering the psychology somewhat flat.There are gestures toward implicating the audience in Dou Yi’s fate, but these are incomplete. In an early scene, Dou Yi offers her wares to several spectators. Each person seemed keen to buy one. In keeping with the script, the actress had to pretend otherwise.Chinese theater is so little seen here and in a time in which threats to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities feel more pronounced than ever, representation seems critical. But this play feels inchoate and its cast of Asian American actors underserved. At the performance I attended, several of the actors seemed under-rehearsed, others had vocal difficulties. Leung, in her bloodstained shroud (Johanna Pan designed the costumes), was made to scream and scream and scream.The play’s themes — a classical riff on no justice, no peace, a reckoning with the human impact on the environment — should reverberate. Instead only the screams echo. “Snow in Midsummer” may haunt you. But not in the ways that a ghost story should.Snow in MidsummerThrough July 9 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Jodie Comer to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Prima Facie’ Next Spring

    The “Killing Eve” star will reprise her role in Suzie Miller’s solo show, which is wrapping up a run in London.Jodie Comer, known for playing the charismatic assassin Villanelle on “Killing Eve,” has received glowing reviews for her West End stage debut in the one-woman play “Prima Facie.” Now she’s setting her sights on Broadway.Next spring, Comer will reprise her role, as a lawyer named Tessa who discovers the limitations of the law after being sexually assaulted, when the show arrives on Broadway at a yet-to-be-announced Shubert theater. This will be her Broadway debut.The play, written by Suzie Miller, is currently in the final weeks of its run in London’s West End. Critics praised Comer for her breakneck performance in an emotionally demanding role that, under Justin Martin’s busy staging, is quite physical. It calls for her to leap onto furniture, endure a brief onstage rainstorm and more as she tells the story of working her way up from working-class origins and later being assaulted by a colleague whom she brings to trial.“There’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro,” Matt Wolf wrote in his review for The New York Times.The play originally premiered in 2019 in Miller’s native Australia. The playwright is a former human rights and children’s rights lawyer.No dates have been announced for the Broadway production, which will be directed by Martin. The lead producer is Empire Street Productions, led by James Bierman. More

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    A Homecoming, of Sorts, for Viennese Plays

    Two recent British dramas with Austrian roots made it to Vienna this season: “Leopoldstadt,” by Tom Stoppard, and Robert Icke’s “The Doctor.”VIENNA — Leopoldstadt is the name of a central Viennese district with a large Jewish population. It is also the title of Tom Stoppard’s 2020 Olivier Award-winning play, which opened on the West End shortly before the start of the pandemic.Two and a half years after its London premiere, “Leopoldstadt,” a multigenerational saga of an Austrian Jewish family’s triumphs and tragedies in the first half of the 20th century, has made it to Vienna, where it received its German-language premiere this spring at the Theater in der Josefstadt in a handsome and effectively traditional staging by Janusz Kica. (It will return to the repertoire in December. The London production will transfer in the fall to Broadway, where it will run at the Longacre Theater.)It is a fitting irony that none of “Leopoldstadt” actually takes place in Leopoldstadt, since many of its characters try — and fail — to escape the perceived stigma of being Jewish by reinventing themselves as Austrians.When I saw “Leopoldstadt” in London, I wondered how Viennese audiences would react to Stoppard’s fictional exploration of their history and culture. In particular, I was curious whether his re-creation of culturally oversaturated fin de siècle Vienna, a vanished world that continues to fascinate, would convince an audience more familiar with that glittering epoch. Especially in the first half, set around 1900, Stoppard wears his learning and erudition on his sleeve; at times, the amount of historical and cultural detail that peppers the dialogue threatens to derail the play, with its nearly 30 characters and unusually knotty structure.The closest thing Stoppard gives us to a conventional protagonist is Hermann Merz, an affluent textile manufacturer who has largely shed the traditions of his rag-peddling forebears and entered high society. The Merz clan is a motley bunch who celebrate Christmas and Passover with both relish and irreverence. Baptized and married to a Catholic woman, Hermann nonetheless boasts of the Jews’ colossal contribution to culture, without which “Austria would be the Patagonia of banking, science, the law, the arts, literature, journalism,” he says.Listening to Adrian Scarborough, who played Hermann in the London production, recite Hermann’s triumphalist speeches with bluster, I winced a little. Yet the lines sounded considerably less forced in the mouth of Herbert Föttinger, who played the character in Vienna, and in a faithful and fluid translation by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It’s largely a question of temperament. Scarborough played Hermann as a nouveau riche climber who is both haughty and insecure, while Föttinger portrayed him as suave and self-possessed. We believe him when he observed approvingly that Vienna’s middle-class Jews “literally worship culture.” Föttinger’s elegance and poise at the start of the play helped make Hermann’s subsequent humiliations and his ultimate downfall all the more tragic. When an Austrian officer who had a fling with Hermann’s wife, Gretl, refused a duel with Hermann on the grounds that a Jew is born without honor and hence can’t demand satisfaction for an insult, we understood that this offense wounded Hermann more than his wife’s infidelity.Another ensemble scene in “Leopoldstadt,” which takes place in Vienna.Moritz Schell Hermann Metz epitomizes the worldview of a confident minority who had found acceptance and success in a culture that was an artistic, intellectual, scientific and political hotbed. (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Arthur Schnitzler are all name-checked.) The way Stoppard conjures the milieu of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire owes much to writers of the period, including Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, whose posthumously published memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” is perhaps the most evocative and nostalgia-drenched chronicle of the era.“Leopoldstadt” leaps from the early 1900s to the years after World War I and from there to Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that the Nazis orchestrated throughout the Third Reich on Nov. 9, 1938. The pinging around is meant to be disorienting as we visit characters we last saw decades earlier — as well as some new arrivals — in radically changed historical contexts. In its latter half, “Leopoldstadt” finds itself on unsure footing only once. In a scene set in 1924, the family members discuss the Great War, the carving up of Austria in its aftermath, and the messy politics and competing ideologies of the interwar period. In London, I felt that the scene merely struggled to dramatize its themes; here it felt more awkward, and even redundant, as if Stoppard were lecturing the Viennese about their own history.Stoppard’s masterful final scene, in which the three remaining members of the Merz family reunite in 1950s Vienna, was sensitively directed and acted, but many of its revelations were less persuasive in German than in English. One of the family members, Leo, has been raised in England and, crucially, has no memory of his early life in Vienna. (Thus it’s a strain to imagine that he would speak perfect German without an accent.) Now a young man, he is a writer of some renown. In a painful reunion with his cousins — a New York psychoanalyst and a mathematician who survived the Holocaust — long-suppressed memories are dredged up and the past superimposes itself on the present in unexpected and haunting ways.Remarkably, “Leopoldstadt” isn’t the only recent British play with Austrian roots that made it to Vienna this season. Earlier in the year, the Burgtheater mounted the German-language premiere of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s 2019 rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” which was first seen at the Almeida, the London playhouse that Icke used to run.Sophie von Kessel, seated at right, as the title character defending herself before a panel on television in “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” at the Burgtheater.Marcella Ruiz CruzSchnitzler’s play, first performed in 1912, is an indictment of the Austrian antisemitism that Hermann Merz naïvely takes to be a thing of the past. The most conspicuous change that Icke, who also directed the production, makes in his version is a gender switch central to his reimagining and updating of the piece.Like Schnitzler’s prickly male protagonist, “The Doctor’s” lead character, Dr. Ruth Wolff (Sophie von Kessel in a tour de force performance), finds herself under attack for refusing to let a priest administer last rights to a delirious patient who is unaware that her end is near. In the original, Professor Bernhardi becomes the target of an antisemitic media campaign. In Icke’s retelling, Dr. Wolff becomes the victim of virulent social media attacks that smack more of misogyny. She defends herself against the anonymous online mob by appearing on television to debate a sanctimoniously woke panel. All this gives Icke ample opportunity to skewer cancel culture, identity politics and political correctness, although the satirical and the sincere often coexist uneasily, especially when his supporting characters moralize tediously. At the same time, the colorblind and “gender blind” casting challenges the audience to look past race and sex and reflect on the play’s moral conundrums impartially.As with Stoppard and “Leopoldstadt,” “The Doctor” feels like something of a homecoming: a Viennese return for a contemporary play rooted in the world of yesterday.Leopoldstadt. Directed by Janusz Kica. Theater in der Josefstadt.Die Ärztin. Directed by Robert Icke. Burgtheater Wien, through June 13. More

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    Are Jan. 6 Hearings Flashy Enough for Prime Time? Late Night Isn’t Sure.

    “Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Are You Still Watching?The Jan. 6 committee hearings will be televised beginning Thursday night, but late night hosts wondered if Americans would pay proper attention.“Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday.“Yeah, it doesn’t have to look like ‘Top Gun,’ but just in case, they’re going to have Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin play hot shirtless volleyball.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“What they need to do, you want people to watch in America, is you have to spice things up. You know, have a kiss cam going for the witnesses. Yeah, get Shakira to do a halftime show.” — TREVOR NOAH“Americans like entertainment; Congress wants Americans to pay attention to politics. Those two don’t mix. But there is one person who can make political machinations interesting for the masses; there is only one man: Lin-Manuel Miranda.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know who is going to be torn about the coverage of this? Donald Trump. Yeah, ’cuz think about it: On the one hand, he doesn’t want anyone to know what he did on Jan. 6, but on the other hand, you know he would love his hearings to get the highest ratings of all time. You know it. He’s going to be out there like [imitating Trump] ‘Don’t watch the hearings, folks. The fake news is saying I overthrew the government, which I didn’t do. But it was the biggest overthrow of all time, but I didn’t do it.’” — TREVOR NOAH“In other political news, tomorrow night, the Jan. 6 committee will hold a special prime time hearing, which will air live on all the broadcast networks, and it’s being produced by a former ABC executive. And even more exciting, the halftime show will be performed by Imagine Dragons featuring Congresswoman Liz Cheney.” — JAMES CORDEN“The hearing is being produced by a former ABC executive, which is why it’s being marketed as, ‘Extreme Takeover: Capitol Building Edition.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fox News Stays on Brand Edition)“Fox News announced this week that it will not air carry live coverage of Congress’s prime time hearings over the Capitol attack. To focus on more important news like, ‘Would it kill Mulan to wear a dress?’” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, they’re going to be spending all night talking about the real culprit: [imitating Tucker Carlson] ‘Why is nobody talking about how Congress has too many doors? If there was only one door in and out, this never would have happened. The crowd would have peacefully dispersed after hanging Mike Pence, huh?’ ” — TREVOR NOAH“Fox, by the way, has decided not to carry the hearings about Jan. 6 on their news network tomorrow night. Instead, they will show their new special, ‘Tucker Carlson presents: A Racist Cat Meows Confederate Battle Hymns.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It doesn’t surprise me that Fox isn’t airing the hearings. Fox is news the same way ‘The Kardashians’ is reality. Just once, I’d love to see an actual reality TV show, something called, I don’t know, ‘A Man Quietly Eating a Cinnabon Because He Missed His Connection at LaGuardia.’” — SETH MEYERS“It’s not a surprise, because Fox constantly says the opposite of what the hearings will say. The committee will lay out the truth of what happened, and Fox will lie. It’s that simple. The hearings will say Jan. 6 was a violent insurrection fomented by an outgoing president who nearly pulled off a detailed plan for an attempted coup to unlawfully cling to power that would have installed him as an unelected autocrat and destroyed American democracy. And Fox will say it was just a pro-freedom, patriot party where everyone peacefully toured the Capitol like they were on a school field trip, having to find items their teachers gave them on a worksheet.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingPresident Biden sat down with Jimmy Kimmel for a lengthy conversation about the modern Republican Party, gas prices and gun violence, among other things.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightDemi Lovato will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutJuancho Hernangómez, left, and Adam Sandler in “Hustle.”Scott Yamano/NetflixAdam Sandler and Juancho Hernangómez, a Utah Jazz player, star in “Hustle,” a crowd-pleaser about the N.B.A. draft. More

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    ‘Come From Away’ to Close, the Latest Broadway Show to End Run

    “Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about a remote Canadian community that rallied to support thousands of stranded air travelers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will end its run on Broadway in October.The musical, which has been a hit on Broadway and has been successfully staged around the world, is the third show to announce a plan to close in the last two days, as it becomes clear that with New York City still attracting fewer tourists than it did before the pandemic, there are not enough patrons to support all the productions now running.On Tuesday “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two musicals that had been selling strongly before the pandemic, both announced that they would close late this summer.“Come From Away” will close on Oct. 2. It began performances Feb. 18, 2017, and opened March 12, 2017; at the time of its closing it will have had 25 preview performances and 1,670 regular performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.The musical continues to tour in North America and Australia and to run in London. A filmed version of the stage production is streaming on Apple TV+.The show was an unlikely hit — before it arrived in New York, the conventional wisdom was that locals would never embrace a musical about Sept. 11 because the subject was too potentially upsetting. The producers, seeking to build word-of-mouth first, took a roundabout path to Broadway, staging it in San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Toronto before coming to New York.But the show, arriving early in the Trump administration, quickly became a success, seen as a parable about welcoming strangers and building community.The musical, which won a Tony Award for Christopher Ashley’s direction, is based on true events that took place in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 commercial planes were diverted. The musical’s writers, a married couple named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went to Gander a decade after Sept. 11 to interview locals, and created the musical based on those interviews; the show was first staged at Sheridan College in Ontario, where a school dean, Michael Rubinoff, had been trying to persuade someone that the subject would make a good musical.The show’s original star, Jenn Colella, who portrayed an airline pilot, will rejoin the cast from June 21 to Aug. 7.“Come From Away” is produced by Junkyard Dog Productions, which is led by Randy Adams, Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff, and Sue Frost, who spotted an early workshop of the show at a festival held by the National Alliance for Musical Theater.The show’s grosses have dropped significantly since the pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week it grossed $461,760; during a comparable early June week in 2019 it grossed $897,186.On Tuesday, “Tina” said it would close Aug. 14, and “Dear Evan Hansen” said it would close Sept. 18. More

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    ‘Mr. Parker’ Review: Starting Over

    The protagonist of this new play by Michael McKeever steps gingerly out of grief’s stasis and into the unknown.Being a famous artist’s spouse is not easy. Being a famous person’s surviving spouse might be even tougher. That is the plight of Terry, whose husband, Jeffrey, an artist, died as a result of a car crash. Terry, a novelist who put his own creative aspirations on hold when Jeffrey made it big, is confronting an issue many women in straight relationships have long endured: “I was defined by the man I married,” Terry says. “And now, suddenly, for the first time, I’m just … Mr. Parker. And I don’t know how to do that.”Michael McKeever’s “Mr. Parker,” which just opened on Theater Row, begins seven months after Jeffrey’s death, and Terry (Derek Smith) is still trying to find himself. A good start will be to date again, or at least to pick up a stranger — baby steps.That’s how Terry finds himself in his husband’s work studio — which feels less emotionally fraught than their apartment — on a hung-over postcoital morning. He can’t quite remember the guy’s name: Kevin, maybe? Actually, it’s Justin (Davi Santos), an easygoing, doe-eyed bartender-slash-Uber driver who is 28 to Terry’s 54.All in all, it looks like Terry was lucky with his rebound. Justin seems sweet and considerate, if overly chatty. “I am a walking encyclopedia of worthless Manhattan trivia,” he informs Terry, adding, “People either love it or hate it,” as if the ability to spout factoids were a highly contentious trait.McKeever’s previous Off Broadway shows, “After” and “Daniel’s Husband,” bore in on large societal subjects (gun violence, gay marriage) with a fairly heavy hand. That touch is in evidence here, too: As if losing a husband weren’t awful enough, Terry was at the wheel at the time of the accident. And then a few days later he had to agree to let the doctors turn off the machines keeping Jeffrey alive.Perhaps this is why the show, a Penguin Rep Theater production directed by Joe Brancato, is at its best in the lighter-toned scenes depicting Terry and Justin’s getting-to-know-you phase. McKeever and Brancato stick with a naturalistic, matter-of-fact plainness that does not shy from the benefits each man derives from the relationship: Justin has found a wealthy guy who pays for everything, while Terry gets to spend quality time with a hunky youth. Still, one wishes that the age difference were evoked in less simplistic brushstrokes. Justin has to explain to Terry that vinyl is cool but CDs are not. Terry complains that Justin spends too much time on his phone. You’d think Terry was a 90-year-old relic who had spent decades under a rock, not a man in his early 50s who used to be married to a hotshot artist and must have been exposed to technological and sociological changes.In any case, Terry has a living, breathing reminder of his inadequacies in Jeffrey’s sister, the brittle Cassandra (Mia Matthews), who is casually dismissive of Justin and tries to get the distraught Terry to be more proactive in his management of the imposing estate he now oversees.But Terry has spent decades in a famous man’s shadow and has forgotten how to make decisions for himself. Grief only compounds his stasis: He holds onto his old answering machine because it contains a saved message from Jeffrey, and endlessly postpones talking to a Whitney Museum curator who wants to organize a retrospective.“Mr. Parker” is not the kind of play that springs surprises on the audience, so its denouement is entirely predictable. And that is perhaps the show’s biggest asset: Real life can be ho-hum, too. One day you can’t move on, and the next, you can.Mr. ParkerThrough June 25 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Ken Bode, Erudite ‘Washington Week’ Host on PBS, Dies at 83

    Beginning in 1994, he brought to the moderator’s role credentials as a political activist, an academic and a national correspondent for NBC News.Ken Bode, a bearded, bearish former political operative and television correspondent who, armed with a Ph.D. in politics, moderated the popular PBS program “Washington Week in Review” in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 83.His death, in a care center, was confirmed by his daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, who said the cause had not been identified.Beginning in 1994, Mr. Bode (pronounced BO-dee) coupled congeniality and knowledgeability in steering a Friday night discussion among a rotating panel of reporters about the issues of the day coming out of Washington. His role, as he saw it, was to “bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other,” he told The Washington Post in 1999.As host of the program, now called “Washington Week,” he succeeded Paul Duke, who had helmed that roundtable of polite talking heads for two decades, and preceded Gwen Ifill, a former NBC News correspondent who died in 2016 at 61. The program, which debuted in 1967, is billed as TV’s longest-running prime time news and public affairs program. The current host is Yamiche Alcindor.The program’s loyal and generally older viewers were so brass-bound in the 1990s that when Mr. Bode took over, even his beard proved controversial. He proceeded to introduce videotaped segments and remote interviews with correspondents and bring more diversity to his panel of reporters.He also took more liberties with language than his predecessor.Mr. Bode moderating an episode of “Washington Week in Review.” He hosted the program from 1994 to 1999 while teaching politics at DePauw University in Indiana. PBSEnding an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post about President Bill Clinton’s economic policies, Mr. Bode quoted a British newspaper’s snarky prediction that the president’s impending visit to Oxford, England, would present people with an opportunity to “focus on one of the president’s less well-publicized organs: his brain.” He described a vacancy on the Supreme Court as constituting “one-ninth of one-third of the government.”Still, Dalton Delan, then the newly-minted executive vice president of WETA in Washington, which continues to produce the program, wanted to invigorate the format. He proposed including college journalists, surprise guests and people-on-the-street interviews and replacing Mr. Bode with Ms. Ifill (she said she initially turned down the offer) — changes that prompted Mr. Bode to jump, or to be not so gently pushed, from the host’s chair in 1999.Kenneth Adlam Bode was born on March 30, 1939, in Chicago and raised in Hawarden, Iowa. His father, George, owned a dairy farm and then a dry cleaning business. His mother, June (Adlam) Bode, kept the books.Mr. Bode in his office in 1972, when he was involved in Democratic politics.George Tames/The New York TimesThe first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Bode majored in philosophy and government at the University of South Dakota, graduating in 1961. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was active in the civil rights movement.He taught briefly at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then gravitated toward liberal politics.In 1968, Mr. Bode worked in the presidential campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and George S. McGovern. He became research director for a Democratic Party commission, led by Mr. McGovern and Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, that advocated for reforms in the selection process for delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He later headed a liberal-leaning organization called the Center for Political Reform.His marriage to Linda Yarrow ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Margo Hauff, a high school social studies teacher who wrote and designed educational materials for learning-disabled children. He is survived by her, in addition to their daughters, as well as by a brother and two grandsons.After working in politics, Mr. Bode began writing for The New Republic in the early 1970s and became its politics editor. He moved to NBC News in 1979, encouraged by the network’s newsman Tom Brokaw, a friend from college, and eventually became the network’s national political correspondent. In that role he hosted “Bode’s Journal,” a weekly segment of the “Today” show, on which he explored, among other issues, voting rights violations, racial discrimination and patronage abuses, as his longtime producer Jim Connor recalled in an interview.Mr. Bode left the network a decade later to teach at DePauw University in Indiana, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Media. While at DePauw, from 1989 to 1998, he commuted to Washington to host “Washington Week in Review” and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992).Beginning in 1998, he was dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years and remained a professor there until 2004.Mr. Bode said he retired from broadcast journalism for family reasons. “I was raising my kids from 100 airports a year,” he said. As he told The New York Times in 1999, “I knew then that my problem was, I’ve got the best job, but I’ve also got one chance to be a father, and I’m losing it.” More

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    N.Y.U. Names New Performance Space After Nation’s First Black Theater

    The university is commemorating the African Grove Theater, part of a new building opening in 2023.A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theater” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely considered to be the first Black theater in the United States, the university announced on Wednesday.Supported by a $1 million donation, the theater is on the fourth floor of a new multipurpose educational building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in spring 2023. It also will house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the university’s Tisch School of the Arts.Where there was once merely a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there will be space to host theatrical performances, lobby displays, educational seminars and an annual symposium on the history of Black theater and culture.“This theater wasn’t ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “It has been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”“Felicitous is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.The original African Theater was started in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward who started hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where Black patrons could enjoy leisure arts.In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Streets — where the new performance space will stand next spring — expanding to a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by Black performers for Black audiences and, later, integrated audiences. The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater faced harassment from white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further ravaged the theater, which closed two years later. The last known playbill for an African Theater production was dated June 1823.The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in the culture of New York City that has often been disregarded and overlooked and not understood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater that in its early time, was really creating a model for what the American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what happens culturally” for students who learn about the theater and understand that they are performing in a place that is “historic and sacred and new, at the same time.” More