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    Review: A Star Director Takes a Back Seat in ‘The Seagull’

    Thomas Ostermeier’s surprisingly traditional production of the Chekhov classic came to life via the cast’s performances, and without radical interventions by the director.Konstantin, the aspiring playwright in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” dreams of inventing “new forms” for the theater. Sensitive, moody and a bit ridiculous, Konstantin isn’t exactly a mouthpiece for the great Russian author, although Chekhov was himself out to innovate and reform. His chamber drama, filled with unheroic, frustrated figures propelled by life’s bitter ironies rather than melodramatic flourishes, proved too much for the play’s first audience to bear.Now a canonical work, “The Seagull” remains devilishly tricky to pull off, however, not because Chekhov’s theatrical form still confounds, but because of the difficulty of corralling an acting ensemble to play off each other with naturalness and ease while slipping between Chekhov’s shifting and overlapping emotional registers.In a surprisingly traditional staging of “The Seagull” that opened on Monday at the Berlin Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier ceded the floor to the actors, in a production that was free of the directorial interventions or distractions that classic works are often subjected to on German stages. Instead, this production largely came to life with the purest and most economical of theatrical means: the individual and collective performances of the 10-person cast. (The Schaubühne staging is also far tamer than “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s irreverent adaptation, which is transposed to the Catskill Mountains and is currently playing Off Broadway.)That approach may seem surprising for Ostermeier, a director best known to New York audiences for his furious and exuberantly messy reimaginings of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Ostermeier’s more recent work has largely gone in a tamer, more conventional direction. And so it was with this “Seagull,” which had precious little to do with discovering new forms.There are some updates in this modern-dress production. In the opening scene, Masha, a secondary character who is hopelessly in love with Konstantin, vaped. At one point, the loud engine of a plane roared overhead — the only time the outside world intruded on the characters’ country idyll.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Ostermeier has allowed the Schaubühne’s ensemble of actors to tweak their lines and make them more natural, or contemporary, and this production also includes some rather blunt new meta-theatrical dialogue. (“Why perform the classics nowadays? They sell well.”) The first-act play-within-the-play that Konstantin writes to demonstrate new forms has been rewritten by the actor playing that role, Laurenz Laufenberg. Despite these emendations, this “Seagull” remains surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of Chekhov’s original.Alina Vimbai Strähler, left, as Nina, and Joachim Meyerhoff, who plays Trigorian.Joachim MeyerhoffThe most gripping thing about the staging is the space in which it unfolds, an area dominated by a massive plane tree. The seating in the auditorium has been reconfigured and the audience is arrayed around the actors, who perform in front of the imposing tree. Occasionally an actor lies on, or hangs from, its thick branches. Several characters hide behind its mighty trunk; another urinates in it.The actors frequently got up close and personal with the audience members, circling the small stage, or tearing down the aisles to enter or exit, achieving a degree of intimacy that was exciting but not without risk. Experiencing the performances at such close range meant that both their merits and their shortcomings were magnified.Such a gambit only stood a chance of succeeding with a top-flight troupe of actors. However, the cast, drawn largely from the theater’s permanent ensemble, left a mixed impression. To their credit, the cast showed remarkable cohesion — and things never got monotonous — over the duration of a very chatty show, set in a single location. But there was only one standout performance, that of Joachim Meyerhoff as Trigorian, the older writer who ends up running away with the aspiring actress Nina. Meyerhoff, one of the Schaubühne’s finest actors, injected fresh life into his character, a popular second-rater who probably suspects that he’s a hack. His performance was shot through with twitching, neurotic energy, humor, and self-deprecating charm. Whenever he wasn’t onstage, the production glowed less brightly.Laufenberg overdid Konstantin’s temper tantrums in Act I, but found a convincingly pained and broken register for the closing scene. The women in the cast fared less well. As Arkadina, an aging starlet and Konstantin’s mother, Stephanie Eidt’s histrionic performance was pitched halfway between Blanche DuBois and Norma Desmond. As Nina, Alina Vimbai Strähler never fully inhabited her complex and demanding role; her journey from wide-eyed optimism to crushing disillusion seemed largely superficial.“There are no new forms here, but simply bad behavior,” Arkadina comments after seeing her son’s play. The only time you could accuse this production of bad behavior is when Meyerhoff takes a leak against the tree. For the majority of its intermissionless 165 minutes, this “Seagull” is handsome and skillfully rendered, but curiously bloodless, much like the stuffed specimen at the play’s end. More

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    Stephen Colbert Ponders a Trump-Kari Lake Ticket

    Donald Trump is said to be considering the Arizona politician, who also denies having lost an election. Colbert says she’s the “governor of the state of denial.”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.Who’s the Lucky Lady?A report says Donald Trump is considering a female running mate for 2024, in hopes of winning over suburban white women. On Tuesday, Stephen Colbert noted that Kari Lake, who still denies that she lost Arizona’s gubernatorial race last year, was said to be a contender.“Lake lost her election and refuses to admit it, but she has got one win under her belt,” Colbert said, referring to a conservative conference in Washington where a straw poll found her to be the top choice for the vice presidency.“She must have been so honored to have MAGA voters choose her as the next vice president they try to hang.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course, since it’s Trump, he’ll make the decision after holding a Miss Vice President pageant.” — JIMMY FALLON“But Lake found a way to deny this election as well, saying through a spokesperson, ‘We’re flattered, but unfortunately, our legal team says the Constitution won’t allow for her to serve as governor and V.P. at the same time.’ That’s a good point — Kari Lake is currently the sitting governor of the state of denial.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mona Lisa Edition)“Sightseeing, my Black [expletive]. If you have to punch a cop on your way in, you’re not sightseeing, you fightseeing.” — MARLON WAYANS, on the Fox host Tucker Carlson’s insistence that the Jan. 6 Capitol protesters were “sightseers”“All Tucker Carson proved is that you can make anything better by not showing the bad part.” — MARLON WAYANS“You guys know we can see what you’re doing, right? Kevin McCarthy, who is Trump’s Waylon Smithers, gives all the footage to Tucker, Tucker shows only the tame parts, and then Trump claims the rioters were framed. It’s like watching a magic show where the magician is wearing sheer sleeves.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden reacted to scary new wax figures of British royalty on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSt. Vincent will perform on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutThe writer Adam Bradley offers a “new Black canon,” listing 20 undervalued books that reflect “the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.” More

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    ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy’ Review: Dreams on the Cusp of Womanhood

    In Keen Company’s revival of Lynn Nottage’s 1995 play, a Black girl comes of age amid the churn of social change in midcentury Brooklyn.If Ernestine Crump were a Hollywood actress, she would change her name to something suitably alluring.“Like ‘Sylvie Montgomery,’” she says. “Or ‘Laura Saint Germaine’ — that’s French.”At 17, on the verge of graduating from high school, Ernestine is given to celluloid dreams and other flights of fancy.“But don’t you worry yourself,” she says, all teasing practicality. “When I’m onscreen I sure can act very white. That’s why I’m a star.”In Lynn Nottage’s bittersweet memory play “Crumbs From the Table of Joy,” at Theater Row, the year is 1950. Ernestine (a terrific Shanel Bailey), our narrator, is a recent transplant to Brooklyn, where she lives in a basement apartment with her rigid father, Godfrey (Jason Bowen), and impish sister, Ermina (Malika Samuel). They are a Black family on a largely white block; few of the neighbors will even speak to them.The death of the girls’ mother was the catalyst for the Crumps’ move north from Florida. Each of them is still undone by grief, perhaps Godfrey most of all. A baker by trade, he is newly sober and celibate, clinging to the teachings of the messianic leader Father Divine, whose portrait hangs on the living room wall. (The set is by Brendan Gonzales Boston.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This Spring‘The Invisible Project’: The new show by the choreographer Keely Garfield at NYU Skirball is a dance, but it is also informed by her work as an end-of-life and trauma chaplain.Life in Photos: Larry Sultan’s photography, now starring in the play “Pictures From Home” and a gallery show, raise issues of who controls a family’s image.Musical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Asceticism is anathema to the girls’ glamorous Aunt Lily (Sharina Martin), their mother’s sister, who shows up unexpected from Harlem one day. Luggage in tow, flask ever-present, she announces that her own mother has asked her to take care of the girls.“She don’t think it’s proper that a man be living alone with his daughters once they sprung bosom,” Lily says, vividly.And that’s that, despite how objectionable Godfrey finds Lily’s fervent Communism and how disconcerting he finds her sexual availability.In Colette Robert’s quiet, mostly sure-handed production for Keen Company, “Crumbs From the Table of Joy” is a pleasure for several reasons: rarity, for one, this being the play’s first New York revival since its premiere in 1995.There’s also the fun of spotting — in a work that feels, improbable as it sounds, like a cousin to Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — glimmers of plays to come in Nottage’s oeuvre. Ernestine’s silver-screen fantasies bring to mind the satire “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” (2011), about a trailblazing Black actress in Golden Age Hollywood. And Ernestine’s dressmaker’s dummy, draped with her graduation gown in progress, prefigures “Intimate Apparel” (2003).That dress, prim and white with lace at the neckline, is as much an emblem of achievement and possibility as Lily’s elegant tailored skirt suit — though Lily’s outfit also serves as an armor of bravado over dented dreams. (Costumes are by Johanna Pan.) A revolutionary at heart, and a life-altering inspiration to Ernestine, Lily is a determined counterpoint to the version of Black womanhood that the cautious Godfrey tries to instill in his daughters: chaste, sober, grateful and with only the tamest of ambitions.Lily, alas, doesn’t have the necessary resonance in this production. There’s a hollowness to Martin’s interpretation that unbalances the otherwise strong ensemble and the dynamics of the Crump household, which Godfrey throws into turmoil when he abruptly remarries.Like Father Divine, he chooses a white woman — Gerte (Natalia Payne, excellent), who lived through the war in her native Germany. Their first meeting, by chance, on the subway, is intensely fraught: she, lost, hungry and alone; he, terrified to engage because, as he has told his daughters more than once, “I don’t want to wind up like them Scottsboro boys.”Such are the clamorous forces shaping Ernestine’s coming-of-age. In the middle of the 20th century, in a corner of the big city, she’s figuring out who she wants to be.Crumbs From the Table of JoyThrough April 1 at Theater Row, Manhattan; keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    Ben Savage, ‘Boy Meets World’ Actor, Is Running for Congress

    The former star of the 1990s-era ABC sitcom is running as a Democrat for a seat in the Los Angeles area that is being vacated by Representative Adam B. Schiff.Ben Savage, the former child actor who was the star of the ABC sitcom “Boy Meets World” in the 1990s, said on Monday that he was running to represent a Los Angeles-area district in Congress.“I’m running for Congress because it’s time to restore faith in government by offering reasonable, innovative and compassionate solutions to our country’s most pressing issues,” Mr. Savage, 42, said in a statement on Instagram.“It’s time for new and passionate leaders who can help move the country forward,” he said. “Leaders who want to see the government operating at maximum capacity, unhindered by political divisions and special interests.”A representative for Mr. Savage did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.Mr. Savage moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and landed a role two years later in “Little Monsters,” a movie about a boy who discovers a world of monsters under his bed. He is best known for his role as Cory Matthews on “Boy Meets World,” a coming-of-age sitcom that was a staple of ABC’s Friday night lineup for seven seasons, from 1993 to 2000. He reprised his role in 2014 in a spinoff series, “Girl Meets World.”Mr. Savage, the younger brother of the actor, director and former child star Fred Savage, submitted paperwork to the Federal Election Commission in January to run as a Democrat in the 30th Congressional District, which includes parts of well-known Southern California cities like Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena. (For those familiar with both the show and Southern California geography, the district does not include Topanga Canyon, which shares a name with Cory Matthews’s love interest and sits in the 32nd District.)Mr. Savage, who lives in West Hollywood, is running to replace Representative Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat who led the first impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump and who is now seeking the Senate seat long held by Dianne Feinstein.Ms. Feinstein, 89, announced last month that she would retire at the end of her term in 2024, capping more than three decades in office.In November, Mr. Savage ran unsuccessfully for a seat on West Hollywood’s City Council, earning less than 7 percent of the votes, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office.For his congressional run, Mr. Savage, who described himself as a “proud Californian, union member and longtime resident of District 30,” will campaign on affordable housing solutions, reforms and improvements to police-citizen interactions, and supporting women’s health rights, according to his campaign website.Mr. Savage, who graduated from Stanford University with a degree in political science, joins a growing list of California celebrities-turned-politicians.Ronald Reagan was an actor in Hollywood before his political career, serving as the governor of California and the 40th president of the United States. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican and former action-movie star, was sworn in as California’s 38th governor, serving two terms. And Caitlyn Jenner, the Republican former Olympian and prominent transgender activist, unsuccessfully ran for governor of California in 2021. More

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    Review: ‘The Great British Bake Off Musical’ Is Sweet but Underbaked

    In London, a stage show based on the popular TV series tries to capture the warmhearted appeal of the original.The first question you’re likely to ask about “The Great British Bake Off Musical” is, surely, “Is it sweet?” Such a tone, dusted with lots of sugar, has been crucial to the success of the popular TV program this new stage show adapts, and which pits amateur bakers against one another to see who can perfect the petit four or come up with the most luscious Key lime pie.And the show, which opened on Monday at the Noël Coward Theater for a limited run through May 13, really is generous-spirited. During its two-and-a-half hour running time, the musical’s likability is never in question, even if its craft sometimes is: You can’t help wishing the creators had been as exacting with their own material as some of the contestants are with their ovens.Newcomers to this milieu should know that “The Great British Bake Off” first aired in Britain in 2010 on the BBC, before moving to the commercial broadcaster Channel 4, and spawning various offshoots along the way: “Junior Bake Off,” for one, to showcase those adolescents, and younger, who have a penchant for pastry. (In the United States, the original is known as “The Great British Baking Show.”)This stage iteration, written by Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger and directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, was first seen last summer in the spa town of Cheltenham, in the west of England, and has been put together in conjunction with Love Productions, the company behind the TV show.On home turf, the TV series has regularly made headlines, but you don’t have to be familiar with the so-called “Hollywood handshake” — the gesture of approval from Paul Hollywood, one of the judges — to grasp the terrain of the musical. Devotees of its small-screen original will note various in jokes, not to mention the visual match that has been achieved between Hollywood and Prue Leith — his bespectacled fellow judge — and the musical’s co-stars John Owen-Jones and Haydn Gwynne.Owen-Jones, right, and his fellow judge in the musical, Haydn Gwynne, left, look remarkably like the TV show’s judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith.Manuel HarlanBut perhaps the biggest appeal of the TV material is the cross-section of British society the competitors represent. The musical, perhaps inevitably but also rather drippily, whisks dollops of uplift into the mix. You get a comic number in which the two judges appear as dueling scones alongside life lessons elsewhere about “the recipe of me,” and it’s suggested that baking can make you feel better about yourself.An introductory sequence announces, with mock-biblical fervor, the birth of flour and sugar. And before we know it, we’re in the show’s iconic white tent — Alice Power designed not just the sets and costumes but also the cakes — and meeting the disparate group of eight bakers who will be whittled down to one winner. Their fates are accompanied by continual innuendo about soggy bottoms, spotted dicks and any other culinary double entendres that might induce a snicker (let’s not forget cream-filled buns).The self-regarding Izzy (Grace Mouat) is so sure of her success that she gets a dance number, “Obviously,” in praise of her own bravura. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the nervous chatterbox Gemma (Charlotte Wakefield), a depressive health aide from Blackpool whose climactic anthem, “Rise,” draws directly from the “Wicked” playbook of self-empowerment. In keeping with the “Wicked” theme, the older, notably fastidious Russell (Michael Cahill) speaks separately of people “coming into your life for a reason” — a familiar sentiment from the earlier show. The pie-themed musical “Waitress” hovers in the wings, as well.From left, Hassan (Aharon Rayner), Izzy (Grace Mouat) and Kim (Zoe Birkett) are some of the characters in the musical. Manuel HarlanThere’s something of a rummage-sale feel to Cleary and Brunger’s eclectic score, which draws upon such diverse sources as Cole Porter (a jaunty duet for the judges) and Stephen Sondheim: The wonderful Gwynne starts the second act with a sequined dance number that could have come from “Follies.” She also reprises the cartwheel that wowed audiences some years back in “Billy Elliot,” and when she speaks of dipping “your little finger in my raclette,” the image sounds notably lewd.Hassan (a winning Aharon Rayner), an immigrant based in Wembley, northwest London, hankers for the smells of Syria, his onetime home, while Francesca (Cat Sandison), a teacher with infertility issues, sings of how panforte and panettone are part of her Italian heritage.I wish it weren’t quite so preordained that the outspoken, thrice-married Babs (the redoubtable Claire Moore) would get a lusty showstopper in which her libido is revealed in all its power; the song’s title, “Babs’ Lament,” nods directly toward “Guys and Dolls,” a revival of which happens to be previewing across town at the moment.And as soon as we have glimpsed the widower Ben (Damian Humbley, in characteristically fine voice), it’s clear the contest will find him a companion: he’s even got a precocious 9-year-old daughter, Lily, to urge him on his amorous path, though not before she rather implausibly rattles off a list of today’s ills, the war in Ukraine among them.This musical occupies a different, more innocent world — one in which strudels are restorative and, as the show puts it, “cake is the cure.” I’m as fully on board with that message as anyone. What’s needed is more art to accompany the heart.The Great British Bake Off MusicalThrough May 13 at the Noël Coward Theater in London; bakeoffthemusical.com More

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    Joseph Zucchero, Whose Mr. Beef Sandwich Shop Inspired ‘The Bear,’ Dies at 69

    Mr. Beef, the Chicago restaurant Mr. Zucchero co-founded in the 1970s, specializes in the Italian beef, a classic American sandwich. The acclaimed FX series “The Bear” was partly filmed there.Joseph Zucchero, a co-founder of the popular sandwich shop that inspired the acclaimed FX restaurant drama “The Bear,” and was where much of the series was filmed, died on March 1 at a hospital in Chicago. He was 69.His death was confirmed by his son, Christopher Zucchero, an owner of Mr. Beef, the family’s restaurant in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, who said a cause was not known.The restaurant specializes in the Italian beef sandwich, a Chicago classic made with thin-sliced roast beef and giardiniera or roasted peppers. All of that is typically piled on a sandwich roll, and it is either drizzled with or dipped in beef juice.“He loved being there,” Joseph Zucchero’s son, Christopher, said of his father. “He was there day and night.”To create “The Bear,” a series about a young chef who leaves a career in New York’s high-end restaurant scene to run his family’s sandwich shop, FX shot inside and outside Mr. Beef, fictionalized as the Original Beef of Chicagoland in the show. It also created a replica of the restaurant’s kitchen in a Chicago studio, Mr. Zucchero’s son said.The series, which premiered on Hulu last summer, drew acclaim from food writers and restaurateurs. And in a fine example of life imitating art that imitated life, its success led to a nationwide surge in demand for the Italian beef sandwich, including at Mr. Beef itself.“Mr. Beef’s always going to be attached to that, and we’re very grateful for that,” Christopher Zucchero said of the TV series. “They’re together. It’s symbiotic for sure, but I don’t want it to overshadow what my dad did.”Joseph Zachary Zucchero was born on Feb. 21, 1954. He grew up on Chicago’s northwest side and started his career as a butcher, Christopher Zucchero said.In the late 1970s, Mr. Zucchero and his brother, Dominic, opened Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, a once-gritty area that has since been heavily gentrified.On a visit to the restaurant in the mid-1990s, a New York Times reporter found customers eating $3.50 Italian beef sandwiches at a Formica countertop near an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra. The short menu posted above the grill was not really necessary, because virtually everyone ordered the same thing.“You want a hot dog, you go to a hot-dog stand,” Mr. Zucchero said. “You want a beef sandwich, you come here.”In addition to his son and his brother, Mr. Zucchero is survived by his wife, Camille; his daughter, Lauren; and his sister, Claudine Grippo.Mr. Beef on North Orleans Street in Chicago in October.Aaron M. Sprecher, via Associated PressMr. Zucchero was a movie fan, his son said, and his restaurant had admirers in Hollywood. The actor Joe Mantegna and the comedian Jay Leno “would come in all the time,” Christopher Zucchero said. He said that he has been friends with Christopher Storer, who created “The Bear,” since the two were in kindergarten, and that they spent time at Mr. Beef as children.During filming, the older Mr. Zucchero visited the movie studio on Chicago’s West Side where Mr. Storer’s team had built a replica of his restaurant. What he saw made his jaw drop.“I mean, from the floor to the ceiling to the countertops to the equipment,” he told NPR last year, “you actually walked inside and walked into Mr. Beef.” More

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    Review: In ‘The Best We Could,’ the Players Follow Directions

    The playwright Emily Feldman structures this work like a personal GPS that plots the course of a family.A bare stage is like a blank canvas; it’s all potential until the artists begin to shape their work. Life can follow a similar logic, in that every move is a foreclosure of possibility, narrowing both the focus and the way forward.Ella (Aya Cash), the drifting Millennial daughter in “The Best We Could (a family tragedy),” which opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, has cycled in and out of enough careers (modern dance, a museum gift shop) that she’s written a children’s book about giving up on your dreams. (She also teaches chair yoga.)We learn all this from a narrator called Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who welcomes the audience to the Manhattan Theater Club production, introduces each character in bitingly specific detail and dictates plot and dialogue before it happens.It’s an apt mode of giving directions, as the play’s nominal throughline is a cross-country road trip that Ella takes with her father, Lou (Frank Wood), to pick up a rescue dog. At the time of their drive, Ella has just broken up with her girlfriend, while Lou, who is nearing retirement age, is angling for a research job. On the way, they visit Lou’s closest friend and former colleague Marc (Brian D. Coats), and Lou appeals to him for help in landing the gig. His wife, Peg (Constance Shulman), chimes in through phone calls to Ella and Lou and appears in revelatory flashbacks.The actors are impeccably cast and deliver unaffected and subtly astonishing performances. Their characters form a kind of Ur-family, their dynamics both convincingly particular and broadly representative of relationships connecting husbands, wives and generations.The playwright Emily Feldman achieves a captivating depth of field beyond her characters’ surface actions, and even their mordant, often bleak powers of observation. (Tragedy seems like a misnomer through most of the show’s 90 minutes, which are shot through with easy but deceptively dark humor.) Cosmic questions that lurk beneath everyday routines seem to creep in from the periphery of the director Daniel Aukin’s minimal but imaginative staging — the loudest being, is this really all there is to life?There is more to Feldman’s layered investigation of consumer capitalism, kinship and gendered power imbalances, which she brings to light throughout “The Best We Could” in the manner of family secrets: There’s no escaping the ones you love, or the truth. Though it also may be no surprise to learn that like the sort of men he represents, Lou is in a crisis of his own making.For Ella, aimlessness itself is a kind of privilege. As her father points out, there’s a reason she was able to take ballet lessons, buy whatever she wanted from the mall and drive her own car. If there’s an element of myopia to Feldman’s otherwise searingly insightful play, it’s the cultural specificity of someone with the luxury of blowing in the breeze, trying out this or that, with a safety net to catch them when they fall.The Best We Could (a family tragedy)Through March 26 at the New York City Center, Stage I; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More

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    The New Black Canon: Books, Plays and Poems That Everyone Should Know

    A guide to some of the undervalued 20th-century works that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive.Fifty years ago, when college courses in Black American literature were rare; when Zora Neale Hurston’s novels were out of print and Toni Morrison was a book editor with one novel to her name, the job of shaping a Black canon was clear: Rediscover, anthologize, define the terms of a tradition. “The act of recovery means something different now,” says Kenton Rambsy, an associate professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington, whose research uses data analytics to tell new stories about the Black literary past. Sometimes recovery demands peering into the shadows cast by towering canonical figures. “It might mean finding that writer who is just being overlooked because of the canonicity of, say, Toni Morrison,” Rambsy says. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “We don’t have to go deep into archives to find undervalued Black authors,” says the poet and U.C.L.A. English professor Harryette Mullen. In a recent essay, I look to such undervalued authors and works as the impetus for shaping a new Black canon.What follows is a list of 20 books — works of fiction, drama and poetry, presented chronologically by category — that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive. You’ll encounter many of these works as recent reissues; others remain difficult to find or are out of print entirely. All were published last century. Their writers are genre fiction authors and experimentalists, nature poets and satirists, pulp fiction practitioners and trans-nationalists, writers of the weird, the quirky, the unsettled and unsettling. Together, they help to tell a story of Black American literature that reflects the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.FictionPauline E. Hopkins, “Of One Blood” (1902-3)In Telassar, a thriving city hidden below the Nubian Desert, Hopkins’s protagonist, the biracial Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, encounters an advanced civilization with “specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days.” This sprawling work of speculative fiction resists paraphrase, but what’s important is that it helped spawn a vast contemporary tradition: “I like to say [this book] was ‘Black Panther’ before ‘Black Panther’, ” says Eve Dunbar, a professor of English at Vassar College. “It’s got something for everyone: Black sci-fi, a passing narrative, a back-to-Africa plot, and a plantation ghost story.” Hopkins published “Of One Blood” in serialized form in the pages of the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, which she edited. Embedded in her novel’s title is Hopkins’s rejection of the pseudoscientific conflation of race with blood, a myth used to buttress white supremacy and racial division.Chester Himes, “Lonely Crusade” (1947)A first edition cover of Chester Himes’s 1947 novel, “Lonely Crusade.”A 1946 portrait of Himes by Carl Van Vechten.Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityHimes’s revival in recent years has come on the strength of his noir crime fiction. Starting with 1957’s “A Rage in Harlem,” he wrote eight books that follow detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones through the New York underworld of the 1950s and ’60s. Himes knew something of crime and punishment himself, having served nearly eight years in prison for armed robbery. His body of work, though, defies tidy categorization. After emigrating to France in the mid-50s (he lived in Europe until his death in 1984), Himes wrote perceptively about the Black expatriate experience. He also wrote about Black-white labor movements, same-sex relationships, interracial marriage and racism. “Few African American writers had his sure-handed ability to depict the nitty-gritty of Black life,” Himes’s biographer Lawrence P. Jackson says. Jackson points to “Lonely Crusade” as “his classic text.” For evidence, he cites a passage in which Himes’s protagonist Lee Gordon listens to his father, not knowing it will be for the last time: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t let nobody tell you no different. Now all you got to do is prove it.” Himes takes readers into Lee’s mind as he ponders how his father intended those words — “whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.”Fran Ross, “Oreo” (1974)Ross’s only novel was lightly reviewed and largely overlooked. “Perhaps a book like ‘Oreo’ — though I know few — gets ignored or quite purposefully sidelined because it defies the reader, the reviewer, the cultural critic, the scholar and just about anyone else who dares position it,” the novelist Michelle Latiolais recently wrote. “Oreo” is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman. (Ross herself described it as “cockeyed and nutty.”) The narrative action, such as it is, concerns a young biracial Black and Jewish protagonist’s search for her father. Most remarkable, though, is the novel’s mode of address. In 2015, the novelist Danzy Senna described the book as “a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past.” As the literary critic Scott Saul points out, though, the novel is also very much of its time. “Oreo,” he writes, “is a queer novel, written by a gay woman who, while she traveled in gay circles and revered queer writers like James Baldwin and Djuna Barnes, opted not to disclose that side of her identity when she made her literary debut.”Alison Mills Newman, “Francisco” (1974)Alison Mills Newman began her creative life as an actor. Her credits include a recurring role on the late-’60s NBC sitcom “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, a groundbreaking series that portrayed everyday Black life during a time of national tumult. Soon thereafter, in her early 20s, Mills Newman wrote her first novel, “Francisco,” which chronicles a young Black woman’s love affair with an independent filmmaker. In her foreword to a 2023 reissue (the book, long out of print, was originally published in 1974 by R. C. & J., an independent press founded by the writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson), the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes it as being in the style of a Künstlerroman: “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself.” The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. Writing of “Francisco,” the novelist William Demby observed that it’s “the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s — a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.”James Alan McPherson, “Elbow Room” (1977)“There never was a nationwide coalition that looked unwaveringly at Black storytelling,” the cultural historian Wil Haygood tells me. Haygood — who’s written biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall — understands the responsibility of telling Black American stories on the page and onscreen, not only in the United States, but around the globe. “You have a world market from Japan to Australia to France that has access to streaming services and wants to see Black stories,” Haygood says. That storytelling necessarily involves engaging history-shaping social and political movements: the civil rights struggle, the Black Power era, the recent uprisings for racial justice. But Haygood is also drawn to quieter, though no less radical stories, found in the fiction of the Black quotidian. He particularly likes this collection of restrained, elegant stories that find high drama among ordinary people. You should read McPherson’s stories, Haygood says, “because the Black characters do things that the outside world doesn’t think that they’d ordinarily be doing, like listening to and falling in love with country music.”William Demby, “Love Story Black” (1978)“By some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement,” writes the scholar Nathan A. Scott Jr. in his foreword to the 1991 reissue of Demby’s second novel, “The Catacombs” (1965), “the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves.” More than thirty years after Scott wrote those words and nearly ten years after Demby’s death at 90, the canon may finally be catching up to Demby. An international conference in 2018 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a recent issue of the literary journal African American Review, both dedicated to his work, provide evidence. His third novel, “Love Story Black,” is at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd. Asked to describe Demby, the writer Ishmael Reed, his near contemporary and a professor at California College of the Arts, put it plainly: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”J. California Cooper, “The Wake of the Wind” (1998)Cooper’s dedication to “Wake,” her saga of slavery and freedom, says it plain: “I WILL NEVER BE ASHAMED OF MY ANCESTORS. IF YOU ARE … YOU ARE A FOOL.” In scope (it begins, “Once upon a certain year, 1764 or so, 200 years ago”), and in story (the book opens in Texas with two enslaved people falling in love, ignorant of the fact that the Civil War has brought slavery to an end), “Wake” is the perfect book to celebrate Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday. Though some critics have called Cooper preachy, many readers find her inspiring and profound. “Cooper always writes about love. This [book] is steeped in the power of family love, one of the things that no one could ever take away from Black folks,” the novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke says.DramaJean Toomer, “Balo” (1922)A circa 1925 portrait of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionThis year marks the 100th anniversary of “Cane” (1923), Toomer’s generically mutable masterpiece of fiction, poetry and drama. His one-act play “Balo,” written the previous year and staged by the Howard University Repertory Company during its 1923-24 season, is no masterpiece. However, its imperfections (most notably its tortured dialect) show a young writer endeavoring to capture his experience of unfamiliar places and voices. Both works are set in Georgia, where Toomer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., spent several weeks during the fall of 1921, on a trip to visit the birthplace of his estranged father. The play follows a day in the life of a Black sharecropper and his family, living amid the ruins of an old plantation, alongside a poor white family who reside in a decaying slave mansion. Whereas “Cane” often bends toward tragedy, “Balo” chooses reverie: “AUTUMN DAWN,” the opening stage directions read. “Any week day. Outside, it is damp and dewy, and the fog, resting upon the tops of pine trees, looks like fantastic cotton bolls about to be picked by the early morning fingers of the sun.”Eulalie Spence, “The Starter” (1923)Déja Denise Green and SJ Hannah in a scene from Eulalie Spence’s “The Starter” (1923), one of three plays in “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City through March 12.Kat duPont VecchioForgoing propagandistic “problem plays,” Spence modeled a style of politically and humanly engaged Black theater that paved the way for Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and their contemporaries. After emigrating as a child from the Caribbean island of Nevis to New York in 1902, Spence absorbed the speech patterns of her adopted community and gave them expression in plays written in one act, to meet the requirements of the contests to which she often submitted her work. In “The Starter,” Spence stages a comic tale of courtship written in an eye dialect that calls out for gifted actors to make stilted symbols into natural speech: “Y’know, kid, I bin thinkin’ — Say, why don’t we get married? Huh?” asks T. J. of his beloved, Georgia. “Ah dunno, ’cept yuh never mentioned it befo’, ” Georgia replies. To appreciate these lines, one must hear them performed onstage. Fortunately, “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” a production of three of Spence’s plays (including “The Starter”), is running through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York. The director, Timothy Johnson, says he enjoys how “in this one-act form she’s able to give you a whole life. … There’s such vibrant specificity about these characters that makes ordinary people extraordinary.”Lorraine Hansberry, “Toussaint” (1961)Above: Lorraine Hansberry in a 1961 clip from the series “Playwright at Work” discussing her play-in-progress, “Toussaint.”“A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered on Broadway in 1959, is a work of such canonical consensus that it risks subsuming its creator. It marked the commercial and critical high point of a career cut short by illness. In her literary afterlife, Hansberry “becomes boxed into ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in a way, which is both to her benefit and to her detriment,” explains Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of the 2021 Hansberry biography “Radical Vision.” “Raisin” remains an indispensable work; reading beyond it, however, one discovers the politically radical, formally experimental writer that Hansberry was becoming. In “Toussaint,” a completed 1961 scene from her play in progress about the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hansberry claims her identity as, in Colbert’s words, a “freedom writer.” In critiquing the legacy of colonialism and understanding that this, too, is part of the Black American story, Hansberry offers an animating insight for her time and for ours.Charles Gordone, “No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy” (1969)The playbill from the 1969 Broadway production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place To Be Somebody.”© PlaybillIn 1969, Amiri Baraka (publishing as LeRoi Jones) released “Four Black Revolutionary Plays,” a series of one-acts obsessively, at times brilliantly, circling Black-white racial conflict. That same year, Gordone’s “No Place” debuted Off Broadway. The two works embody a fundamental tension: Baraka’s favors confrontation while Gordone’s displays a humanistic impulse to see dignity even in seeming degradation. Gordone peoples his play with pimps, prostitutes and hustlers, both Black and white. As Phyl Garland wrote in Ebony, Gordone “came equipped with a loaded pistol and a whole barrel of ‘MF’s’. ” Debuting at the Public Theater, founded by the towering New York theater figure Joseph Papp (a student of Eulalie Spence at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School in the 1930s), “No Place” earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970, becoming the first work by a Black playwright to do so. “No Place” blends comedy, tragedy and melodrama. In doing so, it shares with then-emergent Blaxploitation cinema a revolutionary sensibility that seeks not to counter Black stereotypes but rather to annex them, revealing the complexity beneath their distorting masks.Adrienne Kennedy, “An Evening with Dead Essex” (1973)The cast of “Ohio State Murders,” which was first published in 1991 and debuted on Broadway just last year, pays tribute to its playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, in December 2022.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesKennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (1991), which made its belated Broadway debut last December, closed early, on Jan. 15, after just 44 performances. In a video posted to Instagram, the play’s star, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, paid tribute to Kennedy. “More of her work deserves to be produced commercially,” the actor said, “and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about … how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is.” Kennedy’s career spans seven decades, beginning with “Funnyhouse of the Negro” in 1964. Her style is often described as surrealist — a central quality, but only a part of her varied aesthetic. Among the most striking of her early plays is “An Evening with Dead Essex,” first performed in 1973 at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play joins documentary with imagination: It concerns the factual account of a Black Vietnam vet named Mark Essex who returns from war and commits a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring more before being shot by police. The play takes place in a film production studio, with Kennedy insisting that “actors use their real names and the director should get the actors to play themselves.” The action consists of the actors and filmmakers, all but one of whom are Black, reconstruing Essex’s life so as to make some sense of the violence of his death — and of the violence that surrounds us all.Andrea Hairston, “Lonely Stardust” (1998)In the stage directions to “Lonely Stardust,” Hairston describes how she wants her audience to relate to her play. “The Audience,” she writes, “should be embedded in a corner of this galactic wonder. … Occasionally comets whiz by. Periodic showers of Stardust should be arranged. The Traveler has journeyed billions of miles and landed in Springfield, MA, USA. …” Through this asymmetry of scale — the cosmos and a town in western Massachusetts — Hairston opens up points of entry into the everyday and the ineffable. A nameless traveler, searching for life at the end of his own, speaks in a hip vernacular: “When you spiral down that image of lonely, there’s the beginning. Or the end, actually. Buggin’ out.” Sheree Renée Thomas, author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including the short-story collection “Nine Bar Blues” (2020), sees Hairston as the too-often overlooked link between her generation and that of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. “Andrea Hairston has had her pulse on the science fiction community since the 1970s,” Thomas says. “She was always in that liminal space with her work: too Black for the science fiction community, and too science fiction for the Black drama community.”POETRYEsther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934)Esther Popel’s poem “Flag Salute” on the cover of the November 1940 issue of The Crisis.Dickinson College Archives & Special CollectionsIn November 1940, a little more than a year before the United States entered World War II, The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reprinted Popel’s “Flag Salute” on its cover. Popel’s poem intersperses phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of a Black man’s lynching. When it first appeared six years earlier, the poem was responding directly to the Oct. 18, 1933, murder of George Armwood, a 27-year-old Black farm laborer from Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had been arrested for “grabbing the arm” of a white woman on a public road. “Flag Salute” was newly relevant in 1940, The Crisis editors noted, because of the fact “that the federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in the Senate and that Negro Americans would be segregated and discriminated against in the U. S. armed forces.” Embodying the ambivalence of being both Black and American, Popel’s poem communicated across decades with Harryette Mullen, whose poems “Waving the Flag” and “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” bear its influence. “Popel was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Mullen says, “where she lived near my great-grandmother, although I can’t be certain they were acquainted.” Reading Mullen’s poems beside Popel’s is a form of acquaintance, too.Bob Kaufman, “The Collected Poems” (1965-78)“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.” These three lines conclude Kaufman’s 19-line poem “Dolorous Echo,” first published in his book “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness” (1965) and now included in the remarkable 2019 edition of Kaufman’s collected poems. The lines have proved prophetic. Kaufman died in 1986 at 60, in his adoptive city of San Francisco (he was born and raised in New Orleans), after struggling for decades with mental illness, addiction, arrests and housing precarity. A careful poetic craftsman, he could nonetheless be a reckless steward of his own work, scrawling poems in the narrow margins of newspapers, reciting words in coffee shops and at house parties. A founding member of Beatitude, the seminal Beat periodical, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and others, Kaufman is sometimes shorthanded as the “Black Beat.” While he helped define the Beat aesthetic, Kaufman was also a surrealist, a poet of blues and jazz and a spiritualist (he practiced Buddhism). “Kaufman’s poems use the most far out and surreal tools to render frighteningly honest, terrifying and delicious portraits of people and the world,” the poet Danez Smith tells me.Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca” (1968)A 1960 portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks on the back steps of her home in Chicago.Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesBy some measures, Brooks is about as canonical as it gets. Her poem “We Real Cool” (1960) is a high school staple, likely because its brevity lends itself to classroom reading and because its sharp enjambments invite close analysis of form. “Most young people know me only by that poem,” Brooks once told an audience. “I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I had written a few other poems.” Among Brooks’s many other poems, her long sequence “In the Mecca,” featured in a collection of the same name, is among her finest. Released in 1968, after a nearly decade-long publishing hiatus and just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “In the Mecca” is both intimately focused on domestic life and urgently engaged in the politics of the moment. The poet Major Jackson, who this year will publish a collection spanning his own two-decade career, says that the poem “reads like a contemporary ballad, where one discerns Brooks’s gift for incisive and stark language as well as a sweeping social vision married to modernist sensibilities.”Ishmael Reed, “A Secretary to the Spirits” (1978)A first edition cover of Ishmael Reed’s 1978 poetry collection “A Secretary to the Spirits,” illustrated by the artist Betye Saar.Betye Saar’s original cover illustration “A Secretary to the Spirits (from the series ‘A Secretary to the Spirits [for Ishmael Reed]’)” (1975).© Betye Saar. The Morgan Library & Museum, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los AngelesThe richness of the 85-year-old Reed’s ever-expanding catalog (from his 1967 debut novel “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” to his play “The Conductor,” which premieres at New York’s Theater for the New City on March 9) is such that one might overlook the slender 17-poem, 42-page volume he published 45 years ago with NOK, a Nigerian publisher. Julian Lucas, who has written often about Reed, considers “A Secretary to the Spirits” to be “criminally underrated.” The book is long out of print and difficult to find; all of the poems, however, are available in Reed’s “New and Collected Poems” (2007). But if you’re lucky enough to find a copy of the 1978 original, you’ll experience them as Reed intended, in call-and-response with illustrations by the Black Arts Movement assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar’s full-page panels depict Egyptian motifs juxtaposed with the Cream of Wheat chef, dancing Jazz Age silhouettes beside the Eye of Providence. Reed’s poems are sly and confrontational. In “The Reactionary Poet,” he claims that title in opposition to self-styled revolutionaries whose orthodoxy chokes out creativity and joy. He writes: “In your world of / Tomorrow Humor / Will be locked up and / the key thrown away / The public address system / Will pound out headaches / All day.”Dolores Kendrick, “The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women” (1989)“The Women of Plums” is theater living inside poetry. Kendrick understood as much, adapting her collection for the stage, where it won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. She writes in dialect, but not in the caricatured deez and doze of the minstrel stage; instead, much as Toni Morrison did two years earlier in “Beloved,” she employs shifts in syntax, rhythm and diction to render speech that lives beyond the page. Kendrick wrote the poems as a kind of alternative history of the United States, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, in the voices of 34 enslaved Black women. These voices are so strong that they have even been adapted as an opera, which opened in New York in the spring of 1995. “Soon I’ll go for a stroll / in my blue silk dress, / go into town / and buy myself a plum, / the blackest from the bush,” one of her speakers proclaims.Melvin Dixon, “Love’s Instruments” (1995)Dixon, a novelist, poet and scholar, published only one poetry collection in his lifetime, “Change of Territory” (1983). A posthumous collection, “Love’s Instruments,” released three years after his death at 42, is a playful and poignant tribute to the lives of gay Black men. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon uses line breaks to generate a syncopated rhythm that unfolds a narrative of regularity and revelation. This is how it begins:Work out. Ten laps.Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.Hard nodes. Beware.Test blood. Count cells.Reds thin. Whites low.Just months before Dixon died of complications related to AIDS, in 1992, he addressed the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in Boston. He warned his fellow writers to “guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives” and to claim responsibility for the future of literature. “I come to you bearing witness of a broken heart,” Dixon said. “I come to you bearing witness to a broken body — but a witness to an unbroken spirit.”Ai, “Vice: New and Selected Poems” (1999)Born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas in 1947, Ai chose a name that means “love” in Japanese, one of several lineages that the mixed-race poet could claim. Ai was part of a generation of post-Black Arts Movement figures who now occupy canonical places: Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen chief among them. Though Ai, who died in 2010, achieved distinction during her lifetime — she was the first Black recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, for “Vice” in 1999 — she is less well-known today. None of her poems appear in the major anthologies of African American and American literature. Perhaps that should change: Ai is among the pre-eminent practitioners of the dramatic monologue — a persona-driven mode of poetic address exemplified in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning. “I want to take the narrative ‘persona’ poem as far as I can,” Ai said. “All the way or nothing.” In “Vice,” she does just that, inhabiting the persona of a Black woman in love and trouble, writing past respectability to the hard truths of lived experience. More