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    ‘The Life’ Review: Turning More Than a Few New Tricks

    Billy Porter brings a heavy-handed touch as the director and adapter of this 1997 musical about prostitutes and pimps in Manhattan’s bad old days.In case you have forgotten the premise behind Reaganomics, the musical “The Life” offers a primer right before a big number at the top of Act 2: It was based on “the proposition that taxes on businesses should be reduced as a means to stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term.”And five, six, seven, eight!Not only is this dialogue leaden — especially coming from a young pimp — but it is not in “The Life” as we know it: The musical that opened last night as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series has been drastically reconfigured from the one that premiered on Broadway in 1997.Back then, the composer Cy Coleman and the lyricist Ira Gasman conceived “Mr. Greed” as a cynical showstopper — very much in a Kander and Ebb vein — in which ’80s-era pimps and scam artists playing three-card monte explain that their best ally is the cupidity that blinds marks to their own foolishness.Now Billy Porter — who adapted Coleman, Gasman and David Newman’s book, and directed this production — puts Trump and Reagan masks on the ensemble members and has them sing and dance their denunciation of an ideology. The number is of a stylistic and aesthetic piece with Porter’s take on the show, which emphasizes systemic oppression to the detriment of individual characterizations. Whether it’s of a piece with “The Life,” well, that is something else.There are many changes to the book, but the most structurally consequential is the decision to frame the story as a flashback narrated, decades after the events, by the shady operator Jojo. He is now, he informs us, a successful Los Angeles publicity agent, but in the ’80s he was an entrepreneurial minnow in Times Square at its seediest. (Anita Yavich’s costumes are colorfully period, even if they feel more anchored in a 1970s disco-funk vibe than in the colder Reaganite decade.)Members of the ensemble portray prostitutes in the seedy old days of early ’80s Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOld Jojo (Destan Owens) acts as our guide to the characters, who include the prostitutes Queen (Alexandra Grey) and Sonja (Ledisi), as well as their protectors and abusers, like the Vietnam veteran Fleetwood (Ken Robinson) and the brutal pimp Memphis (Antwayn Hopper).Jojo also regularly comments on the action, often casting a remorseful eye on the behavior of his younger self, portrayed by Mykal Kilgore. (Owens plays other characters, too, which leads to a rather confusing conversation with Queen that makes you wonder if Porter has scrambled the space-time continuum, on top of everything else.)Unfortunately the memory-musical format only takes us out of the plot and, most crucially, the emotional impact. Every time we get absorbed in the 1980s goings-on, the older Jojo pops up with explainy back stories, ham-handed editorializing and numbing lectures. The original show let us progressively discover the characters’ distinct personalities through actions, words and songs; now they are archetypal pawns in an op-ed. One can agree with a message and still find its form lacking.Changes abound throughout the evening. Moving Sonja’s “The Oldest Profession” to the second act transforms it into an 11 o’clock number for Ledisi, a Grammy-winning singer who runs with it and provides the show’s most thrilling moment.Others can feel dutiful. The original setup for the empowerment anthem “My Body,” which the company memorably performed at the 1997 Tony Awards (“The Life” had 12 nominations), was the working women’s answer to a group of sanctimonious Bible-thumpers.Now the song follows a visit to a Midtown clinic “founded by a group of ex-hookers who found some medical folks to partner with who actually lived by that Hippocratic oath situation,” as Old Jojo explains. There Sonja gets treated for throat thrush and Queen, who is now transgender, receives injections. The segue into “My Body” feels both literal and abrupt, and we miss the antagonists.Antwayn Hopper, left, and Alexandra Grey in the musical, which was adapted and directed by Billy Porter.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a recent interview with The New York Times, Porter said he thought that “the comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice” in the original production, which was hatched by white creators and dealt largely with Black characters. But while he has added a lot of back stories, especially for Fleetwood, Sonja and Queen, his version also features quite a few new quips as well as some unfortunate broad funny business.Young Jojo is bad enough in that respect, but Memphis suffers the most. As portrayed by a Tony-winning Chuck Cooper in 1997, his calm amplified his menace: This was a Luciferian scary guy. Now Memphis is a Blaxploitation cartoon who can be distractingly flamboyant, as when he hijacks one of Queen’s key scenes by preening barechested. Hopper, who sings in a velvety bass-baritone, has such uncanny abs that for a moment I wondered whether the show was somehow using live CGI.Adding to the meta business, Memphis is also prone to winky fourth-wall-breaking asides, as when he complimented the guest conductor James Sampliner on his arrangements.Because those are new, too. Coleman, equally at ease delivering pop earworms in “Sweet Charity” and canny operetta pastiches in “On the Twentieth Century,” was one of Broadway’s most glorious melody writers, and “The Life,” orchestrated by Don Sebesky and Harold Wheeler (of “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” fame), was an interesting melding of brassy impulses rooted in a musical-theater idiom. But Sampliner’s formulaic R&B- and funk-inflected orchestrations and arrangements undermine the score’s idiosyncrasies.For better or for worse — mostly for worse here — Regietheater, the German practice of radically reinterpreting a play, musical or opera, has come to Encores. Whether that approach belongs in this series — which debuted in 1994 to offer brief runs of underappreciated musicals in concert style and has traditionally been about reconstruction rather than deconstruction — is an open question.Rethinks can be welcome, even necessary in musical theater — Daniel Fish’s production of “Oklahoma!,” now touring the country, is one especially successful example.The traditionally archival-minded Encores has broadened its mission statement to include that the artists are “reclaiming work for our time through their own personal lens.” It’s clear that the series is moving into a new phase, but for many of us longtime fans, it’s also a little sad to lose such a unique showcase.The LifeThrough March 20 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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    Review: ‘The Medium’ Is Less a Message and More a Museum Piece

    This early 1990s play, based on the life of Marshall McLuhan, is being revived by the company that created it.“You can’t go home again.”Variations on that line are uttered eight times in “The Medium,” which the director Anne Bogart is reviving this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. So it’s likely that she and her venerable experimental ensemble, SITI Company, were aware of the hazards of revisiting a play they created together and first performed in 1993.It makes utter sense that SITI would choose “The Medium” for this, its final season, as it prepares to wrap up three decades of theater-making. “Based on the life and predictions of Marshall McLuhan,” as the program puts it, the show is a cracked and heightened remix of that 20th-century communications theorist’s trenchant thoughts on technology — the ways it shapes us, and the world.The company’s first devised work, it is crammed with ear-catching observations far beyond McLuhan’s famous maxim “The medium is the message.” What better time than now — after two years in which so many of us have had to keep a corner of our homes camera-ready for work meetings — to stage a piece that helps us think about our inseparability from our devices and what that does to our interactions with other human beings?So it’s slightly puzzling that this smartly designed production, at BAM Fisher, feels labored. Starring Will Bond as a winningly hokey McLuhan in brown suit and bow tie, it is missing that ineffable ingredient that would grab us by the collar and pull us in. Intelligent though the show is, it isn’t fun, and it wants to be.Its genial McLuhan is in for a frantic evening, clicking through television channels as he has a stroke. Fragments of pop culture jostle with his own ideas in hallucinatory scenes that take the form of small-screen programming. There’s a talk show and a cooking show, a detective drama and a televangelist’s broadcast. In interstitial moments, characters move as if zombified.They are all peopled with a much-doubling, four-actor ensemble: Gian-Murray Gianino, Violeta Picayo, Stephen Duff Webber and Ellen Lauren — who, like Bond, is a founding member of the company and was part of the ensemble in the play’s 1994 production at New York Theater Workshop. (Gabriel Berry, the show’s original designer, has updated her costumes for the revival, but they’re still delightfully midcentury mod.)The McLuhan of this play does not want to be portrayed as an enemy of technology, merely someone aware of its dangers. “I feel a bit like the man who turns on a fire alarm only to be charged with arson,” he says.Yet “The Medium” is more interested in the harms of technology than in its formidable democratic powers, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and ordinary people there and in Russia have harnessed recently with such savvy through social media. A month ago, before the war, the play might have landed slightly differently.Still, we are by now so long steeped in technology, and in talk of it, that the play may be most useful for thinking about how we arrived at this point. As McLuhan says here, “Only by understanding change can you ease the burden of experiencing it.”The same may apply to “The Medium” as a means of understanding SITI Company. In 1994, Bogart told The New York Times that plays from the recent past are “memory capsules of who we are.”For Bogart and her ensemble, surely, that is what “The Medium” has become: a reminder of their origins and who they used to be. It’s instructive to see it now in the light of their subsequent influence as collective creators of brainy, physical, contemporary theater. But there is a stubborn sense of watching it from an archival distance, as if it were a live tableau in a museum and we were behind a velvet rope.The MediumThrough March 20 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Comedy Undercut ‘The Life.’ Billy Porter Looks for Its Humanity.

    The actor is directing an Encores! revival of the 1997 musical, updating it to confront hard truths about racism, poverty and carceral injustice.When “The Life” opened on Broadway in 1997, the sex trade in Times Square that it depicts was no longer a prominent feature of the area. Like an increasingly polished Midtown Manhattan, the musical, about the women and men who once made it a prostitution capital, was sufficiently family-friendly for my parents to take me to see it, at the age of 15, as my first Broadway show.We came to New York to see “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s portrait of la vie bohème, which had opened the previous year. After reading newspaper listings, my father chose “The Life” as another show for us to catch while in town. And despite its ostensibly R-rated subject matter (which we assume he somehow overlooked), it was perhaps no more adult in theme than “Rent.” Set circa 1980, “The Life” is also about lovers and strivers doing their best to survive a harsh and unforgiving city.But the Broadway production of “The Life” shared more DNA with droll Gotham fables like “Guys and Dolls” and “Sweet Charity,” another musical about dreams of escaping the sex trade composed, some 30 years earlier, by Cy Coleman, whose score for “The Life” is filled with magnetic melodies and brassy hooks. A hybrid comedy-drama, “The Life” was jazzy and jaunty, with a touch of vaudeville and the blues.Porter with Ledisi, the soul and jazz singer who is taking on the role played by Lillias White in the original 1997 production.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWith lyrics by Ira Gasman, and a book by Coleman, Gasman and David Newman, “The Life” imagined the sex workers who populated Times Square as showbiz types with verve and moxie. (Vincent Canby’s critic’s essay in The New York Times praised the production’s “go-for-broke pizazz.”) Propelled by electric performances, “The Life” was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won two, for best featured actor in a musical (Chuck Cooper) and for best featured actress in a musical (Lillias White, whose volcanic rendition of “The Oldest Profession” was the first time I’d witnessed a show-stopping ovation).Though my life could not have been further from “The Life,” there was a restlessness and defiance to the characters that I recognized in my own, as the gay son of immigrants growing up in a mostly white Michigan suburb. Listening to the cast recording, I channeled my angst and alienation into songs like “My Body” and “Why Don’t They Leave Us Alone,” anthems of autonomy and self-determination.Lillias White received a Tony Award for her portrayal of a sex worker in the Broadway production of “The Life.”Associated PressAnd while I could easily relate to yearning for love and escape, “The Life” was not the lesson in hard truths — about racism, poverty and carceral injustice — that it might have been. Though the musical ended in tragedy, comedy kept the so-called hookers and pimps, and their dire straits, at a wry remove. The characters seemed designed for the purposes of entertainment, not to inspire understanding of their interiority and circumstances.“The comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice,” said Billy Porter, who has reconceived a new production of “The Life” for New York City Center’s Encores! series. The show, which begins performances on Wednesday, will be his Encores! directorial debut.The ensemble members Tanairi Vazquez and Jeff Gorti during a recent rehearsal.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLike most writers working on Broadway at the time, the creators of “The Life” were white men; their story didn’t ask audiences to consider why its mostly Black characters, many of whom are women, were trapped to begin with — only that they wanted out. With his revision, Porter, 52, said he intended to make “The Life” a darker and more clear-eyed drama, humanizing its characters and foregrounding their social disadvantages.Porter, who last year concluded his run as Pray Tell on the FX series “Pose,” played a principal role in early developmental workshops of “The Life” but was not ultimately cast when the show moved to Broadway. He says he believes in the purity of its creators’ intentions. “They wanted to be allies, and they were,” he told me during a lunch break at a recent rehearsal. “The music is extraordinary, that’s why we’re doing it at all.” Still, he noted that this story was problematic in the absence of more context.In reimagining the show, Porter said the humor would come from the characters’ often painful truths. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEncores! first approached Porter about directing “The Life” in early 2020; inequalities exposed by the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have only fueled the urgency behind his vision for the show. “We have to make sure everybody understands that there are systems of oppression and erasure and caste in place, where if you’re born in a system, you stay in that system,” he said. “We can’t unsee it anymore.”The plot remains largely intact, but characters stuck in “The Life” are presented in more fleshed-out detail — not only with back stories and more vivid inner lives, but with fates beyond the action onstage. Much of this information comes from the narrator, Jojo, originally played by the white actor Sam Harris. In Porter’s iteration, the role has been expanded and will be played by Destan Owens, who is Black. “I wanted the narration to be told through our eyes and our voice,” Porter said.Reflecting on the summer of 1980, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, Jojo tells the audience, “We were all like crabs in a barrel,” scratching and clawing to get out. (Jojo made it to Los Angeles, he says, where he now runs his own P.R. firm.)Porter’s revision has the support of Cy Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere’s Fleetwood (Ken Robinson), a Vietnam veteran succumbing to the city’s crack epidemic, and his lover Queen (Alexandra Grey), who learns that her cash from turning tricks has not been going to their escape fund. There’s Memphis (Antwayn Hopper), the fly, ruthless kingpin who drives a wedge between them for his own gain. And there’s the worn out and weary Sonja (Ledisi, in the role originated by White), whose character has been deepened from soulful comic relief into a tragic harbinger of what’s to come.Where the original subtly hinted that Sonja is suffering from H.I.V., the first cases of which were diagnosed around the time “The Life” is set, Porter foregrounds her declining health, adding a scene in which the women receive supportive services at a community clinic. That’s where Queen, who is transgender in Porter’s revision, also receives hormone treatments. To Porter, these aspects of the characters’ lives come with the clarity of hindsight.The music of “The Life” also aims to be more reflective of post-disco New York, in new orchestrations and arrangements by James Sampliner. While honoring Coleman’s original melodies, Sampliner said the revival’s sound, which he called “down and funky,” would be far from the original’s big-band jazz, citing sonic influences like Earth, Wind & Fire, the O’Jays, Chaka Khan and Isaac Hayes. “It’s just got stank all over it,” he said.“It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said of the production. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Encores! series, which began its first season under new leadership last month with “The Tap Dance Kid,” has long welcomed substantial revisions to its short-running revivals of American musicals (as the book is often the problem with those rarely seen). But preserving original orchestrations and arrangements has also been part of its mission, so “The Life” represents an artistic departure.It is also the first of what the artistic director, Lear DeBessonet, and the producing creative director, Clint Ramos, call an auteur slot, giving artists like Porter the encouragement to reimagine works from their personal perspective. Porter’s revision has the support of Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content.Will “The Life” still have laughs? “It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said, adding that he considers himself a hopeful entertainer. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.” The humor won’t be put on to make anyone feel more comfortable, he added. Rather, it will come from the often painful truths of the situation (like Sonja asking for a doctor’s note to show her pimp).The grit and perseverance that women like Sonja and Queen taught me at a young age remains as well — lessons perhaps rendered more poignant by a fuller picture of the odds stacked against them. And “The Life” may also speak with hard-fought wisdom for troubled times, to a city emerging from another difficult chapter.“We choose hope, not because things are joyful or hopeful,” Porter said. “But in order to live.” More

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    Stars Battle It Out on London Stages

    In West End productions, Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton play a fighting couple, and Kit Harington from “Game of Thrones” plays the warrior king in “Henry V.”LONDON — There’s no nudity in “Cock,” the 2009 Mike Bartlett play that opened Tuesday in a starry revival at the Ambassadors Theater here. But by the time its 105 minutes, no intermission, have come to an end, you’ve seen its characters stripped emotionally bare.The play has had quite a trajectory, from its London origins in the Royal Court’s 80-seat studio space to a run in New York (where it had the longer, less provocative title “The Cockfight Play”) and now to a commercial West End perch where tickets are going for three figures — prices you might find for a big musical like “Cabaret.”The show’s director, Marianne Elliott, is a significant force in London theater, and the cast is led by Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton, two theater-trained actors more widely known these days onscreen. Bailey came to prominence in the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” while Egerton was a hugely charismatic Elton John in the biopic “Rocketman” and has starred in several of the “Kingsman” films.The play’s author has enjoyed his own ascent. He won acclaim in London and on Broadway for “King Charles III,” which predicts how England’s monarchy might evolve after the queen dies, and has two new plays due in London this spring, one of which, “The 47th,” imagines Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency. (That one opens next month at the Old Vic.)“Cock,” by contrast, features no real-life characters. Only one of them gets an actual name: John (Bailey), a young man in crisis as he pivots between the affections of his male partner of seven years, a broker known simply as M (Egerton), and a female teaching assistant, W. After John and W have sex, he begins contemplating a new life.Jade Anouka acquits herself beautifully as the outsider to a gay relationship on the ropes: a woman who asks for courtesy from M and is met with condescension and worse. He dismisses her job in the classroom as “babysitting,” and some of his euphemisms for the female anatomy will raise an eyebrow or two.Bailey and Jade Anouka in “Cock.”Brinkhoff-MoegenburgThis defining trio widens in a climactic dinner party scene to include M’s father, F (a feisty Phil Daniels), who arrives in time for his son’s home-cooked beef and a “goopy” cheesecake that hasn’t gone quite according to plan. Not that we ever see food or, indeed, props of any kind. In keeping with the stripped-back demands of the writing, the action plays out on a curved bare set, designed by Merle Hensel and illuminated from above by the tubular rods of Paule Constable’s lighting.The playbill credits a gender and sexuality consultant to the production, John Mercer, and includes a glossary of “LGBTQ+ terms,” such as “asexual” and “polyamory.” Some of those weren’t much in use when the play was written, but John would probably have rejected them, anyway: Asked repeatedly to decide who, or what, he is, he simply cannot answer, preferring an identity beyond labels.I must confess to wondering midway through whether John was worth all this fuss. If this production is less moving than the Royal Court original, that may owe something to a different emphasis in the casting. In that show, the wraithlike Ben Whishaw fit perfectly with John’s pencil-drawing wiriness as described in the text. A vigorous, muscular Bailey, by contrast, looks more than able to take care of himself, and he brings to the part the same manic energy that distinguished his bravura performance in Elliott’s 2018 West End production of “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.Egerton made headlines early in the show’s run when he fainted during the first preview, but he recovered quickly enough to joke about it on social media. Inheriting a part originated by Andrew Scott, Egerton brings a sad-eyed defensiveness to his role, reminding us that, in British parlance, to make a mess of things is “to cock things up.”Kit Harington in “Henry V,” directed by Max Webster at the Donmar Warehouse.Helen MurrayAnd things get really messy in the play’s final scene. “Off we go into battle,” remarks F as the episode begins. His readiness would be equally at home on the battlefield of “Henry V,” currently lit up by some star wattage of its own through April 9 at the Donmar Warehouse, where the “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington is in firm command of the challenging title role.Presented in modern dress and with multiple gender flips (as is the Shakespeare norm in London these days), the production charts a neat path between the potential jingoism of a play celebrating England’s military prowess and the dubious aspects of its martial conquests. England’s success comes at sizable cost to France, whose princess, Katherine (Anoushka Lucas), is more or less ordered to be Henry’s bride, without much say in the matter.The play is from the same director, Max Webster, whose show “Life of Pi” received nine Olivier award nominations last week; that adaptation of the Yann Martel novel, still running in London, features inventive puppetry and stagecraft. In “Henry V,” however, the impact comes from the characters, particularly Henry, who abandons his drunken, carousing ways to become a man of war. If Harington finds a compelling ambivalence in the role, that’s because Henry, rather like John in “Cock,” discovers he is a man divided: a sensitive soul whose legacy, he comes to realize, is forever linked to slaughter.Cock. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ambassadors Theater, through June 4.Henry V. Directed by Max Webster. Donmar Warehouse, through April 9. More

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    Trevor Noah: Addressing Congress, Zelensky ‘Knew His Audience’

    Ukraine’s president must have researched American history before his speech, said Noah (who speculated about how it “could have gone very wrong”).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.Target AudiencePresident Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed Congress by video link on Wednesday, pleading for more help in his country’s fight against Russia. On “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah said that “based on his references to American history, it was clear that Zelensky knew his audience.”“Yeah, that’s right, Zelensky brought out all of America’s major moments: ‘I have a dream,’ 9/11, Mount Rushmore. You know he was on Wikipedia last night planning this out: [imitating Zelensky] ‘OK, Pearl Harbor, Boston Tea Party — should I mention Hulk Hogan sex tape, maybe?” — TREVOR NOAH“And by the way, props to him, I mean he knows way more about America than most U.S. senators know about his country. Like, can you imagine how they would sound if they had to give an inspiring speech using Ukrainian history? [imitating U.S. senator] ‘Uh, people of Ukraine, remember the vision of your founder — I want to say Daniel Ukraine?’” — TREVOR NOAH“I’m also impressed that Zelensky was able to dodge so many land mines in his research, because you realize this could have gone very wrong: [imitating Zelensky] ‘And now to 9/11, which as we all know from YouTube was inside job. I see you, Bush.’” — TREVOR NOAH“But Zelensky appealed directly to Congress. He said, ‘We need you right now.’ And Congress was like, ‘Listen, we’d love to help, but we just made daylight saving time permanent and we are wiped out, so.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Zelensky asked America to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which we’re reluctant to do because it could result in nuclear war. But we are willing to wear blue and yellow lapel pins at all the awards shows this month, so that’s something, right?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Standing Ovation Edition)“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a virtual address to Congress this morning and received a standing ovation, making him the first comedian to actually deserve one.” — SETH MEYERS“I can say with absolute certainty, that’s the warmest reception anyone has ever received on Zoom.” — SETH MEYERS“You know it is powerful when that many old people jump to their feet. There are knees in that room that were alive during the Roosevelt administration.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He got two standing ovations, which was nice. I think he’d rather get fighter jets, but the standing ovations were good.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats stood for him, which is almost impossible. It’s like getting Kim and Kanye to agree on a day care situation — it’s very difficult.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn “The Late Show,” Michael Bublé and Stephen Colbert sang a Canadian sea shanty.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightNormani will perform her new single on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This Out“I think we Americans just love lead characters we can root for,” said Feig, who worked on the American adaptation of “The Office.” “We’re too young as a country to be overly cynical yet.”Todd Midler for The New York TimesThe director Paul Feig returns to television with the small-town mockumentary-style comedy series “Welcome to Flatch.” More

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    Jussie Smollett to Be Released From Jail On Appeal, Court Orders

    The appellate court ruled that he be released on bond pending his appeal of a judge’s sentence that he serve five months in jail.An Illinois appellate court ruled Wednesday that the actor Jussie Smollett be released from jail on bond pending his appeal of his conviction for falsely reporting that he had been the victim of a hate crime.Mr. Smollett was sentenced last week to five months in jail, but his lawyers quickly asked a panel of judges to stay the sentence while they appealed the conviction.Mr. Smollett’s lawyers had argued in court papers that the sentence should be stayed because his term would likely be finished before his appeal was completed and that being incarcerated threatened his health and safety.Nenye Uche, Mr. Smollett’s lead lawyer, said in a video posted to his client’s Instagram account, “They released him and that says a lot about what the appellate court thinks of this case.”In the six days since Mr. Smollett was taken into custody, his family has been pleading for him to be freed and urging the public to call the county to seek his release.“It’s absolutely ridiculous that he’s in there,” said Jocqui Smollett, one of Mr. Smollett’s brothers, in an Instagram video. “You should be terrified of the precedent this sets.”Prosecutors, who had argued at sentencing that Mr. Smollett’s offense warranted incarceration, wrote in court papers that by the defense’s logic, every short term of imprisonment would be stayed pending appeal.“That simply is not, and cannot be, the rule,” wrote Sean Wieber, one of the prosecutors.Two out of three of the justices on the appellate panel agreed that Mr. Smollett should be released from custody after he posts a $150,000 recognizance bond, agreeing with the defense’s argument about the short sentence and acknowledging that Mr. Smollett’s offense was nonviolent. One justice dissented.Mr. Smollett’s incarceration on Thursday started with his announcement in the courtroom as he was led to jail that he was not suicidal and that if anything happened to him, it would not have been by his own hand, a statement that appeared to put the authorities on notice. He also repeatedly declared his innocence.Judge James B. Linn granted his lawyers’ request for protective custody, and according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Mr. Smollett was being kept in a private cell in the Cook County Jail with security cameras and an officer stationed at the entrance.His family had been arguing on social media that he was the target of “vicious threats” on social media and was at risk. They expressed concerns about his treatment in the jail. Jocqui Smollett said on Tuesday that his brother had been sleeping in a “restraint bed” but had recently been moved to a cell that “actually has a bed.”Mr. Smollett’s appeal is based, in part, on the idea that the actor’s recent sentence violated the legal concept of double jeopardy because he had already surrendered a $10,000 bond and performed some community service in 2019. Prosecutors have argued that those measures were voluntary and not a punishment.The case drew national attention, and Mr. Smollett was initially widely viewed as the victim who had been beaten and targeted with racial and homophobic slurs. Then the police began to question his version of events.At the trial, prosecutors told the jury that Mr. Smollett had instructed two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, to attack him near his apartment in Chicago, where they placed a rope around his neck like a noose and yelled, “This is MAGA country.”Both brothers testified. Abimbola Osundairo, the younger of the brothers, said Mr. Smollett had asked him to “fake beat him up.”The prosecution’s evidence included video surveillance of the men meeting up for what the brothers said was the “dry run” and Instagram messages from Mr. Smollett to Abimbola Osundairo shortly before the attack in which the actor provided updates on the timing of his flight back to Chicago.The defense disputed that Mr. Smollett had planned the attack, arguing that both the messages and the footage were evidence that he had been interacting with Abimbola Osundairo because he had been providing the actor with fitness training.Mr. Smollett, 39, who in 2019 was best known for starring in the music-industry drama “Empire,” maintained his innocence during the trial.During seven hours of testimony over two days, he insisted that the attack had occurred as he described. But both prosecutors and Judge Linn had cited Mr. Smollett’s testimony as an aggravating factor that led them to pursue incarceration.Judge Linn called Mr. Smollett’s hours on the witness stand, during which he denied planning the attack, “pure perjury.”Bob Chiarito contributed reporting. More

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    ‘Hart Island’ Gives Voice to Stories That Might Otherwise Be Lost

    Tracy Weller’s new multimedia theater piece focuses on those buried in New York City’s potter’s field and the inmates who dug the graves there.What we know about Hart Island, one of the largest mass grave sites in the country, we know from fragments. Fragments of history, memory, testimony.Since the 1800s, this potter’s field in Long Island Sound has been the final resting place for the marginalized, the unidentified and the sick. New York City’s homeless with no next of kin, stillborn babies and victims of epidemics, including yellow fever, tuberculosis, AIDS and Covid-19, have all been buried at the 100-acre cemetery.Until just a few years ago, the city’s Department of Correction used to send inmates from Rikers Island each week to dig trenches and heave pine boxes for 50 cents an hour at the site, half a mile east of the Bronx. That all changed in 2019, after Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill to transfer jurisdiction to the Department of Parks and Recreation; penal control of Hart Island officially ended on July 1, 2021.Inmates digging trenches for mass graves at potter’s field on Hart Island as correction oficers keep watch.Department of CorrectionThe story of Hart Island is the story of over one million lives anonymized by time and misfortune. How do you tell the stories of something unknowable, or of someone whose existence may no longer even be a memory?Kristjan Thor and Tracy Weller have found a way in their multimedia production, “Hart Island.” Thor, the director, recounted the vision Weller shared for the play. She said, “‘There are so many stories that need rescuing,’ and I thought it was such a beautiful way to think of it,” he explained. “There are so many stories that could be lost. The aim is to both rescue and revitalize and give voice to those stories,” he said.Several years in the making, “Hart Island” was inspired by an investigation into the mass graves by The New York Times in 2016. After reading it, Weller said, she stood in her kitchen holding the paper in her hand, heart pounding. She said she felt “an imperative” to create a piece of theater that “meditates upon some aspect of this place and the experiences connected to it.”The result, a collaboration with the immersive theater company Mason Holdings, opened this week at the Gym at Judson in Manhattan. With mantra-like narration, distorted audio, flashing visuals and an earthy set, it explores the connections between humans and islands as it aims to animate the loved ones of the buried and the inmates who dug their graves. Nora Cole, seated in the foreground, and Weller, as the narrator, in a recording studio above the stage.Maria BaranovaA mulch-filled lot scattered with memorabilia (a video game controller, a frayed yellow cooler, a tattered life vest) sits center stage, flanked by two ladders that seem to reach up and away from the cemetery, somewhere beyond the graves. A cast of seven tells the story: The narrator (Weller) presents cold, clinical facts (one plot can hold 150 adult corpses — or 1,000 infants), and six somber archetypes provide piecemeal anecdotes — including one about a Rikers correctional officer rallying his detainees for a day trip, another about the nurse of an elderly patient who passed away with no family to bury her and a third about a mother whose newborn died three days after birth.Thor said he was struck that the island was relatively unknown, despite its proximity. “It’s a huge piece of humanity that’s sitting inside of our city that nobody knows about,” he said. “That feels like a tragedy to me.”As the city continues to bury victims of Covid-19, the island’s history holds a mirror to pandemic quandaries of late. How do we isolate the diseased? How do we isolate ourselves from the diseased?Above all, how do we go on?In spring 2020, as Covid-19 overwhelmed morgues, interments on Hart Island increased about fivefold to 120 per week from 25. As many as one in 10 people who died from the virus in New York City may be buried in the mass graves, according to one analysis.Reflecting on the past two years, Weller said, “We know death in a way that we didn’t before; we know isolation in a way that we didn’t before.” She added, “We need to know death. The more we look at death, the more we understand life.”David Samuel and Daniel Kublick digging trenches in the play.Maria BaranovaIt wasn’t until April 2020 that the city began hiring hazard-suit-clad contractors to replace the incarcerated workers. Until that point, inmates exposed to the virus at Rikers could have potentially been digging their own graves — a point that stuck with Weller.The play poses a range of questions, about the dead and the living: among them, why is death an event so many cannot afford? But the backbone of “Hart Island” is the narrator, an actress played by Weller who arrives at an audition for a voice-over job she knows nothing about. She puts on her best smooth jazz radio timbre and falteringly reads a script on the history of New York City’s islands with the precision of a PowerPoint presentation.“In the East River tidal strait where New York Upper Bay, the Long Island Sound and the Harlem River meet, the turbulent convergence of tidal forces is responsible for thousands of shipwrecks and sailor ghosts.”From a recording studio that looms over the set like a guard tower, she calls up dark accounts of Rikers Island (“a troubled place built on troubled land”); Roosevelt Island (“a place of sickness but not necessarily of healing”); Randalls and Wards Islands (“islands of undesirables”), and the accompanying histories of psychiatric compounds, smallpox outbreaks and juvenile correctional facilities. Images of hospitals and penitentiaries flash in succession behind the narration, each fact interspersed with the click of a camera shutter or the blare of a jail cell buzzing to release an inmate.Both the narrator and the audience are left with information overload and a feeling of “‘It’s just too much,’” Thor said.The tale of survival, of coping with being alone, is all too familiar. A haunting line of the narration cuts to the core: “No matter how we might try to bury the past, it somehow always revisits us.” More

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    in Theater

    Margaret Atwood and Others Confront Grief in ‘The Nurse Antigone’

    A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Johns Hopkins Hospital, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the author Margaret Atwood.Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”Clockwise from top left, Amy Smith, Charlaine Lasse and Aliki Argiropoulos.Theater of War ProductionsWhile most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand … and on the other.’”The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.Bryan Doerries, center bottom, with, clockwise from top left: Marjolaine Goldsmith, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Nyasha Hatendi and Frankie Faison in a reading Sophocles’ works in 2021.Theater of War ProductionsIn May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King,” starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said. More