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      John Beasley, Late-Blooming Actor Known for Playing Sages, Dies at 79

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      A former railroad clerk, he didn’t became a full-time actor until his 40s, but he made up for lost time in films like “Rudy” and TV shows like “Everwood.”John Beasley, who left his job as a railroad clerk in his mid-40s to pursue acting full time, bringing an understated power to films like the inspirational 1993 football movie “Rudy” and television series like the WB drama “Everwood” and the TV Land comedy “The Soul Man,” died on May 30 in Omaha. He was 79.His son Michael said his death came after he was admitted to a hospital for liver tests, but he did not specify a cause.Mr. Beasley’s tenure at the Union Pacific Railroad marked just one stop on a long journey toward a Hollywood career. “I was a longshoreman,” he said in a 2002 interview with The Associated Press. “I even worked one day as a bill collector and knew that wasn’t for me. All I wanted to do was be an actor.”His perseverance paid off. Mr. Beasley became an in-demand character actor in the 1990s and went on to appear in nearly 70 movies and television shows, often playing steady, dignified men of integrity.He first drew notice for his work with Oprah Winfrey in four episodes of “Brewster Place,” a short-lived spinoff of the 1989 television movie “The Women of Brewster Place,” based on a novel by Gloria Naylor about the intertwined lives of Black women living in tenements on a dead-end street.He also earned plaudits for his work in “The Apostle,” a 1997 film starring Robert Duvall (who also wrote and directed) as Sonny, a fiery Pentecostal preacher who flees trouble with the law to start over in Louisiana. “John Beasley is especially good as the retired Black preacher who is suspicious of Sonny at first,” Janet Maslin wrote in a review for The New York Times. “‘I tell you what,’ he says, ‘I’m going to keep my eye on you. And the Lord keep his eye on both of us. And we all three keep an eye out for the Devil.’”His many other film credits included the 1992 family hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks,” starring Emilio Estevez; the 1999 John Travolta drama “The General’s Daughter”; the 2002 Ben Affleck terrorism thriller “The Sum of All Fears”; and the 2014 gore-fest “The Purge: Anarchy.”He is perhaps best remembered for his role as a kindly school-bus driver on “Everwood,” which starred Treat Williams as a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. Mr. Beasley was in every episode from the show’s debut in 2002 until it ended in 2006.Starting in 2012, Mr. Beasley also turned heads for five seasons on “The Soul Man” as the father of the R&B star turned preacher played by Cedric the Entertainer.Last fall, Mr. Beasley scaled a personal peak as a stage actor with a prominent role as the older incarnation of Noah, the love-struck male protagonist, in a musical adaptation of the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel “The Notebook,” and the 2004 film based on it, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He died before the production could make its anticipated move to Broadway.John Beasley was born on June 26, 1943, in Omaha, the oldest of five sons of John Wilfred Beasley, who owned an electrical supply business, and Grace (Triplett) Beasley.He was active in theater in high school, and after graduating he briefly studied the subject at the University of Nebraska Omaha before dropping out to join the Army.After being discharged, he married Judy Garner. She survives him. In addition to his son Michael, Mr. Beasley is also survived by another son, Tyrone; his brothers Gary, Steven and Leon; and six grandchildren, including the basketball player Malik Beasley.By 1968, he had became active in the civil rights movement, and he ended up moving his family to Philadelphia because of threats he faced after participating in protests of policing practices in Omaha’s Black community.After returning with his family to Omaha in the early 1970s, he kept his acting dreams alive by appearing in industrial films and stage productions, honing his talent locally before being cast in regional theater roles in Minneapolis, Chicago and Atlanta. Through it all, however, he stayed focused on his home life — and on Omaha.“We were going through some ups and downs early in our relationship, my wife and I,” Mr. Beasley said in an interview last year with American Theatre magazine. “There were things to work through — and we did. I felt it would be better for me to stay here with my wife and family. It turned out to be the best decision I made.” More

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      Review: In ‘This Land Was Made,’ Huey Newton Walks Into a Bar

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      Tori Sampson’s look at the Black Panther movement is a warm sitcom that becomes a jarring inquest into a real murder.In Oakland, Calif., in 1968, Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, was convicted of killing a white police officer. In 1971, after two more trials and nearly two years in prison, he was cleared of all charges. So who pulled the trigger?That’s the question at the heart of “This Land Was Made,” the gutsy but murky new play by Tori Sampson at the Vineyard Theater. Part murder mystery and part counterfactual yarn, with generous helpings of sitcom and social drama thrown in, it doesn’t hold together in the largely naturalistic framework provided by Taylor Reynolds’s production. But several elements remain compelling on their own, especially when they acknowledge and repurpose familiar forms.Most successful is the sitcom element, which could be titled “Trish’s,” an Oakland bar where everybody knows your name. Miss Trish (Libya V. Pugh) is a New Orleans transplant with a sharp if loving tongue, serving beer and soul food to regulars who come for the schmooze as much as the fare. In one corner, her daughter, Sassy (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), trims the Afros of old-timers and revolutionaries alike.For about 25 minutes, Sampson serves up something warm and piquant at Trish’s: an interplay of zingers, flirtations, spats and politics. Sassy is being romanced by Troy (Matthew Griffin). Her flashy friend Gail (Yasha Jackson) spars with the out-of-work Drew (Leland Fowler). Mr. Far (Ezra Knight), an avuncular mechanic, smooths everything over, with one affectionate eye on Trish and one on her fried chicken.Opinion on the Black Power movement is neatly divided among them. Troy, studying government in college and planning to be a judge, has no time for performative radicalism; Drew, who styles himself a “King Black Man” and is enamored of the Panthers, calls Troy a sellout. Mr. Far doesn’t like seeing “youngins stomping round with big chests” instead of working, but is sympathetic. And Trish, who lost a son in Vietnam, is fatalistic.“They gotta give up power for you to get some,” she says of white people. “Newsflash, that ain’t finna happen.”Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the narrator, Sassy, and Matthew Griffin, left, as her boyfriend, Troy, in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Newton himself then walks into the bar seems like the setup for a joke — and, indeed, at first, he is handled cheerfully. With his swagger and charisma, and despite the bandolier of bullets draped sash-like over his leather coat, he is, in Julian Elijah Martinez’s electrifying performance, way more exciting than scary. Later, Martinez will fill in the more troubling aspects of the character, but at this point even Troy finds him impressive and approachable enough, despite their antipodal politics, to accept his invitation to a rally.Whether this meet cute of radicalism and conservatism is historically plausible, it is compelling as part of the playwright’s mission. Sampson, who grew up in a Black Power household, recently told my colleague Naveen Kumar that in writing “This Land Was Made” she “wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people.” When she intermittently achieves that sort of conversation — and in the process dramatizes the ways some Black Americans responded to the uppercase-p Panthers — the play hits a sweet spot at the intersection of fact and fiction.Then it swerves. The officer is killed and Sassy, in her secondary role as present-day narrator, sets out to reveal, as history has not, whodunit. “This Land Was Made” offers three variations on the fatal confrontation. Unfortunately, the staging, with interstitial rewinds as seen in “Hamilton,” is so unclear you may have trouble following any of the outcomes, which all involve one of the regulars at Trish’s.A bigger problem is the meaning of the invention. Is it designed to counteract an un-nuanced and possibly racist judgment on the movement as extremist and anti-American? The play’s title — taken from the song “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s bitter retort to “God Bless America,” suggests as much. But it’s one thing to probe the past and extrapolate some answers; it’s another to claim, as Sassy does, that the play depicts “the exact events” that the world has never known “until today.”Perhaps that magical yet iffy omniscience — Sassy calls herself a griot, or traditional keeper of stories — would have felt less jarring in a more abstract production. (Wilson Chin’s set, though handsome, is compulsively detailed, right down to the B.B. King showcards.) In 2019, the fable-like “If Pretty Hurts,” Sampson’s first professionally produced play, got an impressionistic staging at Playwrights Horizons that enhanced her rich language instead of fighting it. Another Sampson play that year, “Cadillac Crew,” about women workers in the Civil Rights movement, did not, and fell flat.A more ambitious work than either, “This Land Was Made” does not yet seem certain of what it wants to be. Its sitcom setup (Sampson credits Norman Lear as an inspiration) clashes with the deadly seriousness that comes later, reducing the effectiveness of both. With a killing still unsolved at its center, it can’t, as Sassy instructs, “tell it like you know it.” It can only hazard a few unsatisfying guesses.This Land Was MadeThrough June 25 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Wet Brain’ Review: A Vodka-Spiked Horror Show

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      The children of a severely alcoholic widower navigate his incapacity, and his legacy, in John J. Caswell Jr.’s pitch-black comedy about addiction.In the escalating series of calamities that constitute Joe’s misadventures with alcohol, his middle child, Ricky, has missed a lot.It’s been six gruesome years since Ricky last traveled back to Arizona for a family visit, after his father’s second arrest for driving drunk, and Joe has careened downhill in the interim. When he goes in search of vodka these days he goes on foot, but his sodden brain is shot: dementia, hallucinations, the kind of aphasia that means he can’t talk anymore. He grunts and lurches, vomits a lot, uses a corner of the TV room as a urinal.Ricky has kept a determined distance from it all. When he does show up one summer night — threatened into it by his exhausted sister, Angelina, their father’s live-in caretaker — the recriminations start immediately.“I can’t fly across the country every single time his organs start shutting down,” Ricky says, with the casual hyperbole of the repeatedly traumatized.“You could’ve at least come for the kidney!” she shoots back.This is a horror show, unequivocally. But John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain,” at Playwrights Horizons, is also a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment, and patterns of poisonous behavior lodged so deep they seem encoded. Also, Joe may or may not be in contact with aliens, so there’s some space travel along the way.Directed by Dustin Wills in a coproduction with MCC Theater, the play takes place in the rundown house in Scottsdale where Ricky (Arturo Luís Soria), Angelina (Ceci Fernández) and their brother, Ron (Frankie J. Alvarez), grew up, raised by their father (Julio Monge) after the death of their mother, Mona. The loss of her haunts them still, three decades later.The fallout of their father’s addiction and mother’s absence is everywhere in the lives of these siblings, each struggling with various compulsive behaviors, and possessed of a precision-honed ability to push the others’ buttons. Ron, the most like their father and the most protective of him, is also rancidly homophobic; he taunts his gay little brother, Ricky, relentlessly.As with Caswell’s political horror drama “Man Cave” last year, design is the flashiest element of “Wet Brain,” giving us a window into Joe’s hallucinations and a surreal means for the whole family to gather, Mona (Florencia Lozano) included. (The set is by Kate Noll, lighting by Cha See, projections by Nicholas Hussong, sound by Tei Blow and John Gasper, and costumes by Haydee Zelideth Antuñano.)“Why did you burn holes through your brain, Mr. Joe?” Mona asks her husband, gently.Both of them are past the point of no return. This play’s dearest wish is for their children: that they find a way to heal.Wet BrainThrough June 25 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Being Mr. Wickham’ Tracks a Rake’s Progress

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      In this “Pride and Prejudice” spinoff from Original Theatre, Jane Austen’s infamous knave attempts to set the record straight.It is a truth universally acknowledged that the human body is continually renewing itself. Billions of cells are replaced every day; by some accounts, after 100 days, enough cells will have turned over to generate an entirely new person. After 30 years: You do the math.For George Wickham, the infamous knave of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” 30 years has furnished ample opportunity to live plenty of lives. Or so “Being Mr. Wickham,” a tart monodrama written by Adrian Lukis and Catherine Curzon, would have us believe. Lukis, who played Wickham in the 1995 BBC TV adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” plays him again in this hourlong Original Theater production, not so much reprising his role as a slinky hedonist as delicately prying it from Austen’s fingers.We meet Wickham on his 60th birthday, in a more pensive mood than when readers left him. Gone are his good looks — a hall pass to caddishness in a previous life. He is still married to Lydia, the most jejune of the Bennet sisters, but he has outlived Lord Byron (his hero and patron saint of bad boys), the Regency London courtesan Harriette Wilson (a former flame), and Mrs. Bennet, or “Mrs. B,” as he fondly remembers her. More devastatingly, he finds himself sentenced to live past the Georgian era into the frowzy Victorian age, which could not suit him less, with its “sanctimonious” attitudes and “piety,” as he disdainfully proclaims.Wickham, who has been working on a memoir called “My Scandalous Life,” takes us on a romp beginning with his halcyon youth at Pemberley, the palatial estate where he was raised to be the equal of its young master, Fitzwilliam Darcy. “Darcy might have had rank and position, but I had something else: charm.”So far, so Austen. But this is a tale told by Wickham, and it doesn’t take long for his account to diverge from the novel. Of his early acquaintance with Lydia, for instance, Wickham flatters himself that it was from a spasm of “reckless good will” that he “persuaded her to take off with me, to throw her lot in with mine.” If you believe his chivalrous account, I have an estate to sell you.As Wickham decants his memories, Libby Watson’s versatile set whisks us from a study in Pemberley, where a young Wickham and Fitzwilliam engage in some illicit drinking, to the office of a sinister and abusive headmaster, where Wickham first develops a taste for revenge. Lukis’s portrayal of the head of Doctor Hitchen’s Academy for Young Gentlemen, among other minor characters, is especially haunting, summoning, with an economy of words, a villain worthy of Dickens and making us see how some acts of depravity get tattooed on a developing brain.For all its jagged descents into darkness, “Being Mr. Wickham” ends somewhat improbably on a note of storybook tranquillity: with Darcy and Wickham reconciled, like “two blazing furnaces that in time have lost their heat.” Austen famously characterized “Pride and Prejudice” as “rather too light & bright & sparkling.” The description perhaps underrates her novel, but is a fitting epigraph for this play and its decorously debauched protagonist.Being Mr. WickhamThrough June 11 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Putting Putin Onstage, in ‘Patriots’

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      Will Keen embodies Russia’s president in a West End production. “It’s been fascinating how the perception of him and the play keep changing,” he said.On a recent evening, the British actor Will Keen was onstage at the Noël Coward Theater in London playing one of the world’s most divisive men: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.For much of the first half of “Patriots,” which is largely set in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Keen portrays the character sympathetically — as a minor politician who could only afford cheap suits and whose success was dependent on a friend’s largess. Later on, when an adviser suggests Putin, now president, should keep his enemies close, Keen’s portrayal becomes chilling. “Why would I want to do that,” he replies, “when I can simply destroy them?”Written by Peter Morgan, the creator of “The Crown,” “Patriots” stars Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky, a real-life oligarch who made a fortune in post-Soviet Russia, only to fall out with Putin and end up exiled in London, where he died under mysterious circumstances, in 2013.Despite that focus, it’s Keen’s performance that has grabbed attention since the play debuted at the Almeida Theater, in London, last June. Arifa Akbar, in The Guardian, said that even when Putin “grows more megalomaniacal, Keen avoids caricature and keeps his character’s self-righteous desire for Russian imperialism convincingly real, and chilling.” Matt Wolf, reviewing that production for The New York Times, said that Keen “astonishes throughout.” In April, Keen won the best supporting actor award at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.In a recent interview at the Noël Coward theater, where “Patriots” is running through Aug. 19, Keen said that, although the script was written long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the war had changed the feel of the play, making it seem as much Putin’s “origin story” as the tale of an oligarch’s demise. Keen, 53, said that his performance made some audiences uneasy, but it was “nice to be in a show that’s asking questions, rather than providing answers.”In an interview, Keen discussed what he’d learned by getting inside Putin’s head. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.Keen, right, and Tom Hollander, who plays Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch who died in London under mysterious circumstances in 2013. Marc BrennerWhy did you want to play such a figure?Well, I first learned about it in 2021 — so before the invasion. It didn’t feel as present as it does now. He felt like an autocratic and terrifying figure, obviously, but he didn’t feel like an autocratic and terrifying figure who was also impinging on the world’s safety. It’s been fascinating how the perception of him and the play keep changing.You’re often played villains or antiheroes, including Macbeth and Father MacPhail in “His Dark Materials.” Do you worry about being typecast?As a citizen, I might look at these people as villains, but as an actor, I can’t do that. I want to be as sympathetic as possible to the character — or as empathetic, at least. Putin is a baddie, but I don’t want to be playing him as a pantomime.I’m really interested by our perception of autocrats. From our side, it’s an image of immorality. But in order to do the things that he’s done, he must have an incredibly intense sensation of his own morality — an idea of justice, an idea that he’s setting wrongs right.Some political commentators say Putin is motivated by a desire to restore the Soviet Union. Is that what you mean by setting wrongs right?I’m not in any position to comment politically, but my sense of the character is of somebody who has a particularly deeply sensitized attitude to betrayal. It’s a bit like the medieval idea of kingship, where the king becomes the country in some way: There’s this sense in which Russia — the land — is his body and there’s an absolutely personal, almost physical betrayal, in the break up of the union.What Peter Morgan does so brilliantly in the play is show how Putin’s personal friendships, and the betrayals he experiences in them, impinge on the political sphere too.Theater critics have praised you for mimicking Putin physically, as much as the emotion of the performance. How did you prepare for this?Well, I read and read and read and watched and watched and watched.Physically, what was most useful to me was just observing him in press conferences — I got this enormous sense of inner turmoil, covered by an incredible physical stillness. There’s a sense of containment to him, like he’s trying to hold everything inside.A lot of people have noticed that stillness, especially of the right hand not moving in his walk. And there are other ex-K.G.B. people who have the same thing. The K.G.B. also talk about channeling your tension into your foot. And you do observe his right foot moving very slowly in interviews under the table. Onstage, I also find that tension in him coming out in my fingers.As a citizen, I might look at these people as villains, but as an actor, I can’t do that,” Keen said. “I want to be as sympathetic as possible to the character.”Marc BrennerAs the invasion unfurled, did you change anything in your portrayal?Of course you think about the conflict, but we didn’t discuss, “Let’s make him more chilling” or anything like that. The way the play’s written, it’d be chilling whenever it was performed.I think it’s actually dangerous to think about the effect you’ll have on audience. All you can think about really is, “Is it true?”This isn’t the only recent play in London featuring Putin. In 2019, Lucy Prebble had a hit with “A Very Expensive Poison” about his involvement in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a spy-turned-whistle-blower. Why do you think Putin is becoming a staple of British theater?Well, I don’t know whether he’s becoming a staple. But it does seem that what has happened in Russia lends itself to extremely interesting plays — this ideological battle that’s going on with incredibly high stakes.And theater since time immemorial has studied autocrats, and strong and violent authority is a productive, dramatic force against which to set any kind of dissident opinion.All the characters that one has played sort of talk to each other, at some level, but I would compare Putin to Macbeth, of course. They’re obvious autocrats, but for Macbeth the great motivator is fear, whereas, here, I’d say it’s perceived injustice. The result in both cases is a sort of very performed manliness.What have audience reactions been like?Absolutely wonderful, although sometimes it does seem people don’t know what to do at the end: Should we clap? A lot of Russians have said they feel like he’s in the room, which is incredibly encouraging.I don’t think I’ve spoken to any Ukrainians about it. I’ve had boos, definitely, at the end. But I don’t know whether that was a Ukrainian boo or a British boo. There’s a kind of international language of booing.Has the role affected you personally?No, I wash him off at the end of the show. But it is a bleak place to inhabit — not because of a sense of guilt, it’s the agony of being someone who is obsessed by betrayal and vengeance. More

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      Michelle Ebanks Named President and CEO of the Apollo

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      Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, will assume the role in July.Michelle Ebanks, who most recently served as the president of Essence Communications, the global media and communications company dedicated to Black women, will be the next president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the organization announced on Tuesday.“I have a deep understanding of the value of cultural institutions and their profound impact on individual lives and society, and the Apollo Theater as one of the nation’s greatest cultural institutions,” Ebanks said in an interview on Monday.Ebanks, 61, replaces the theater’s longtime leader, Jonelle Procope, who announced last year that she planned to step down this summer after nearly 20 years steering the Harlem organization, which she transformed from a struggling nonprofit to the largest African American performing arts presenting organization in the country.The appointment comes at a critical time for the theater, which is wrapping up an $80 million capital fund-raising campaign to fully renovate its 109-year-old building, with construction set to begin next year and the first cultural programs in the new space planned for spring 2025. Along with a new lobby cafe and bar that will be open to the public, plans include added and upgraded seating, new lighting and audio systems and updates to the building’s exterior. The main theater will be closed during at least part of the renovation, but programming will be presented at the Victoria theaters, and will also continue at the Apollo.Ebanks, who holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Florida, led Essence Communications for 18 years and helped grow the company into a global franchise that now includes Essence, the life-style magazine for Black women; Essence.com; and the Essence Festival, the brand’s annual live music event that draws hundreds of thousands of people to New Orleans each year.It was her experience with the Essence Festival specifically that was one of the primary draws for the Apollo, said Charles E. Phillips, chairman of the theater’s board.“She understood really well the kind of artistic content that people would respond to with the Essence Festival,” he said in a phone interview on Monday. “At the same time, she has business experience as well.”Her focus, she said, will be on continuing the existing partnerships the Apollo has with early-career creators and organizations in Harlem and the nation, and expanding them.“I want to reach as many different audiences as possible,” she said. “The impact of arts and music on society is immeasurable, and we need as many stories told from those emerging artists as possible.”Ebanks will assume her new position in July. More

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      ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Star Shows Off Her Snug Upper West Side Rental

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      Bonnie Milligan, a star of the musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” has been the lucky occupant of a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan for 15 years.Bonnie Milligan, an actress known for her vocal range and belting voice, shares a snug rental on the Upper West Side with a college friend who is also a performer. Ms. Milligan’s bedroom is sufficiently small that she has to leave to change her mind. The kitchen and living room are pretty much one and the same space.But the 30-something Ms. Milligan, a Tony nominee for her performance as the shifty, shiftless Aunt Debra in the musical “Kimberly Akimbo” (the awards ceremony is scheduled for June 11), isn’t much for trafficking in discouraging words. Thus, she quickly points out her building’s admirable location (handy to both Lincoln Center and a subway stop) and eagerly enumerates the desirable features of the apartment complex. A concierge across the street “collects packages for us, which is a huge thing,” she said. There’s a washer and dryer in the basement, and workout equipment in the courtyard.As for the apartment itself: Ta-da! It’s rent controlled.“Over the course of the 15 years I’ve been here, it has gone up $550 in total,” Ms. Milligan said.Bonnie Milligan, a Tony Award nominee for her performance in the musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” shares a rental on the Upper West Side with a college friend. “I feel comfort here,” she said.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesBonnie Milligan, 30-somethingOccupation: ActressTwo’s company: “My apartment mate and I have both gone out of town on jobs. I’ve been here alone, or she’s been here alone, and we think, ‘I really like the comfort of living with my best friend.’ That’s the long and short of it.”“We have all these amenities that would mean a skyrocketing price if we went elsewhere,” she added, while declining to reveal her current rent. “Every time we’ve looked somewhere else in the neighborhood, we end up thinking that we might as well stay here.”And even if the Tony nomination is great and validating — and, perhaps, a sign of lucrative things to come — Ms. Milligan knows that the one certain thing in an actor’s life is uncertainty. She made her Broadway debut in 2018 in “Head Over Heels,” a musical that combined a Renaissance pastoral romance with the music of the Go-Go’s. When it closed (barely five months after it opened), she had a year of readings and workshops, and “maybe a demo here and there, and I think maybe I shot a little TV,” she said. “But I was hustling to get money for my bills.”Ms. Milligan comes honestly by her modest housing expectations.She spent her formative years in a double-wide trailer behind her grandparents’ home in central Illinois. “I had friends — not even the mean kids, but friends — who would say, ‘We love coming to your house. Yours is the only one with license plates and taillights.’ Those little jabs were hard,” said Ms. Milligan who, after her parents’ divorce, moved with her mother to a small house in northwestern Ohio.Next stop, in 2007: Manhattan.“I remember trying to decide if I wanted a bigger apartment, but this feels like home to me,” Ms. Milligan said.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“I’d been there before on some trips as a teenager, and I just knew it was where I wanted to be to do musical theater. I was a small-town girl, but New York was always my heart,” said Ms. Milligan, who initially sublet space in a three-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side. “During my first six months in New York, I lived in every one of the bedrooms as people came and went.”She found stability when some college pals invited her to take over a recently vacated room in their three-bedroom Upper West Side apartment. “That was February 2008, and I’ve been here ever since,” she said.When one of the original residents moved out some years ago, a procession of subletters took over the third bedroom. “I got to a point where I said, ‘Let’s not do this anymore,’” Ms. Milligan recalled. Now that spare room is an office.By necessity, the apartment is light on furniture. A blue love seat in the kitchen/living room is the spot to sit, eat or watch television. A small bookcase near the front door holds Ms. Milligan’s alphabetized DVD collection of 1960s and ’70s television series, most snagged from the $5 bin at Target. Another small bookcase with more DVDs — “Taxi,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show”— sits in her bedroom, along with the bed and bureau from her teenage room in Ohio.The refrigerator is covered in a very tidy array of magnets.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesThe tidily arrayed magnets on the front and side of the refrigerator clue visitors in to her heroes in the most compact way possible. Her beloved maternal grandmother, Betty Jean Meador, loved cardinals; thus, the cardinal magnet. There are Lucille Ball and Gilda Radner magnets, “because both of them were influences on me,” Ms. Milligan said.Doris Day also figures prominently. “I’ve been a huge fan since I was a kid,” she said. “I used to take my allowance money and go on eBay and buy magnets from her movies.”At its most essential level, the apartment is mixture of where Ms. Milligan came from and where she is. The quilt on her bed and the Afghan slung over the sofa once belonged to her grandmother. So did a tin in the living room and the jewelry box atop the bureau. “We were very close, so I like to have a lot of her around,” Ms. Milligan said.The bureau is also home to a small stuffed teddy bear previously owned by Ms. Milligan’s father, a pastor and talented singer, as well as a photo of Ms. Milligan’s mother and grandmother. Nearby is a hatbox that was a prop in “Head Over Heels,” and a small wooden chest that a friend’s grandfather made for Ms. Milligan as an opening night gift.The bedroom walls, on the other hand, tell the story of Ms. Milligan’s life in New York — show posters, fan art, awards, caricatures by Justin “Squigs” Robertson, a theatrical illustrator, and a drawing, commissioned by a friend, of a raccoon garbed in the same warehouse-store vest that Ms. Milligan sports in the last moments of “Kimberly Akimbo.”“My friend and I love raccoons in general, and we’ve always believed that Aunt Debra is an absolute raccoon,” she said.On the morning the Tony nominations came out, three of Ms. Milligan’s college friends came over to watch the announcement on CBS, bringing along coffee, bagels and champagne (just in case there was reason to pop a cork).“It was really beautiful being with dear friends that I met at the Ohio State University,” Ms. Milligan said. “They’ve known me for, like, 20 years. So it was my past and present all together in one place. And that’s the whole thing of my apartment.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      Ama Ata Aidoo, Groundbreaking Ghanaian Writer, Dies at 81

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      A playwright, novelist and poet, she was a leading African writer who explored the complexities faced by modern women living in the shadow of colonialism.Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She was 81.Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several of Ms. Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.Throughout her literary career, Ms. Aidoo sought to illuminate the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacies of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch.”Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man.In this work and many others, Ms. Aidoo chronicled the fight by African women for recognition and equality, a fight, she contended, that was inextricable from the long shadow of colonialism.“Our Sister Killjoy” was Ms. Aidoo’s debut novel.Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates.As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including stints as a writer in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and as a visiting professor in the Africana studies department at Brown University, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation.“I have always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt some kind of patriotic sense of guilt. Something like, Oh, my dear! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”Whatever her feelings about life abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times recounted how her appearance at a New York University conference for female writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”Although she never rose to hold that title, she had been Ghana’s minister of education, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all. She resigned after 18 months when she realized the many barriers she would have to overcome to achieve that goal.Ms. Aidoo’s novel “Changes: A Love Story” won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa.After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidoo developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the nonprofit sphere, founding the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.She was a major Pan-Africanist voice, arguing for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. She spoke with fury about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.“Since we met you people 500 years ago, now look at us,” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monsters You Made” by the Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum.”“Everything you have is us,” she continued. “I am not saying it. It’s a fact. And in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.”Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Ms. Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.”She said she had felt a literary calling from an early age. “At the age of 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how, I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”Four years later, she won a short story contest. On seeing her story published by the newspaper that sponsored the competition, she said, “I had articulated a dream.” More