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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      Feature: What Exactly Is Fringe Theatre?

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      Sara West debates what we actually mean when we say Fringe Theatre

      This is an interesting one isn’t it? Lots of us like to talk about fringe theatre, and certainly we like to see fringe theatre, but it’s a slippery term to define. And do we mean venues, or the productions, or the creatives?!

      If we want to find a beginning, 1968 is a good year to start. Until this time the Lord Chamberlain had been the official licenser of plays and had regulated restrictions on drama since 1737, because actors are well known for being a suspect bunch of degenerates who could subvert the compliant and submissive general public if not prevented, right?! The Theatres Act of 1968 finally put an end to that and abolished theatre censorship. As a result, a whole new genre of performance exploded on to the stage starting with the rock musical Hair, which famously, shock-horror, included nude scenes.

      It was no coincidence then that ‘alternative’ theatre in London also began in the same year, when the American Jim Haynes set up the Arts Lab in Drury Lane. The Arts Lab facilitated a collaborative environment for newly founded ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ theatre groups, as well as offering free rehearsal space for companies on the condition that they performed in the Arts Lab theatre. Although the venue itself didn’t last long, it did start a movement that offered an alternative to mainstream theatre. Undeniably political in its intention, creators of theatre were supporting and reinforcing global outrage found in events like the anti-Vietnam protest movements of the mid-1960s.

      In the following year Tony Bicât and David Hare, both Cambridge University alumni, formed Portable Theatre. This was a year that saw widespread political unrest in Britain, where a youth-orientated ‘counter culture’ flourished and was seen to challenge the existing order. The two recruited actors from the Arts Lab to create a touring company, hence, ‘Portable’ theatre. They had basic costumes and minimal sets but managed to create and sustain powerful performance pieces, the like of which had not been experienced by audiences before, but which proved captivating and popular.

      And so now a pattern emerges: ‘Fringe’ theatre is most likely to be a minimal production with few actors promoting a political motivated narrative, quite possibly concerned with social injustice and always different from the mainstream – subversive even. Early fringe was also responsible for a different type of play. Starting with a generation that had grown increasingly distrustful of the way in which politics were presented and the authenticity of political life in general, shows were developed that played with form and moved away from a linear narrative. Highly surreal, comic strip and anti-naturalistic presentations became more popular and today the most interesting productions have continued that trajectory, incorporating endless forms of diverse and inclusive performance genres and delivery mechanisms.

      Another characteristic of fringe IS its slipperiness; its refusal to be defined. When content is highly relevant to the present and has a desire to break down social taboos, the raison d’etre of the performance is to prompt a response from the audience and deliberately create something that is at odds with the mainstream. If successful and the audience are informed anew, then fringe playwrights and actors tend to move on and find new subjects to bring attention to, but let’s not ignore the training ground that is fringe. All playwrights, performers and other creatives have to start somewhere. The King’s Head in Islington for example, the first pub theatre in London since Shakespeare, remains strong since its inception in 1970 and has proved an impressive training ground for playwrights, directors and performers alike. Names like Joanna Lumley, Maureen Lipman, Hugh Grant, Steven Berkoff and Tom Stoppard (to name but a few) have all graced the venue throughout its history.

      There are currently 19 or so functioning pub theatres across London, all fostering new talent. Tickets are as cheap as a couple of pints (or a large glass of overpriced wine!) and produce some of the most thought-provoking theatre. Writing in London Pub Theatres Magazine in 2019, Annie Powers declared “The joy of fringe theatre is its adventurousness and inclusiveness. I have often left a mainstream theatre feeling disappointed but have never walked away from a fringe play without feeling either exhilarated and inspired; challenged and disturbed… Fringe productions make you think and that is, in my opinion, what art should do”.

      There is more to say about fringe clearly, much more than this article will allow, and I have deliberately not written about the fringe festivals, as they are worthy of a dedicated feature all of their own. What I will say is that fringe is a fundamental part of theatre ecology and increasingly the best fringe venues are embedded in their local community, reflecting the social identity of that group. It will be interesting to see how those venues develop in the future: as their permanence within their community solidifies, do they lose the label of fringe? And does it matter? The young reactionaries who were behind the explosion of the first alternative performances are now the influential elder statesmen of the theatrical elite. As long as new talent and new ideas continue to push from the bottom, theatre will continue to reinvent itself, question the establishment and provide a voice for disaffected or marginalised communities. And that’s just one of the many joys of live theatrical performance.

      We plan to publish 26 individual features during 2023, released every other Tuesday. They are linked only by being about theatre and/ or reviewing. You can find all features published as part of this series here. More

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      Book Review: ‘Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected’ by Matthew Dennison

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      “Teller of the Unexpected,” an elegant new biography, sidesteps the ugly side of the children’s book author while capturing his grandiose, tragedy-specked life.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography, by Matthew DennisonMany young readers who love the prodigious oeuvre of Roald Dahl can nonetheless cite at least one thing within it that gives them the ick. For me it was Mr. Twit’s beard in “The Twits” (1980), so ungroomed it might contain “a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.” When millennial men in Brooklyn started growing big, bushy beards, my inner child dived under the table in horror.The ickiest thing about the life of Dahl, who died in 1990, was his well-documented antisemitism, capped by a 1983 comment about Jews to The New Statesman, in which he declared that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (That it’s custom for observant Jewish men to wear beards makes me even more uneasy about the demonized Mr. Twit.) The Dahl estate has posted an apology for his behavior on its website — linked discreetly under a Quentin Blake illustration of the author in a pink cardigan, looking beneficent and cuddly.Looking back, there were plenty of other oh-no-he-didn’t moments in the literature. The Oompa-Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” were originally African pygmies — Dahl called the actors who played them wearing orange makeup and green wigs in the 1971 movie “dirty old dwarfs.” And a rapey 1965 story for Playboy, “Bitch,” transformed its adult male protagonist into a “gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come,” as if James and his famous peach had grown up and gone horribly wrong.But none of this is lingered on in Matthew Dennison’s elegant but somewhat glancing new biography of Dahl, subtitled “Teller of the Unexpected.” His subject has sold more books around the world than is possible to count. Netflix bought The Roald Dahl Story Co. in 2021 for a reported $1 billion; “Matilda” alone is movie, musical and multiple memes. Roald Dahl — not mere author but high-yielding content farm — may simply be too big to cancel.His own story has already inspired two major biographies, from which Dennison draws: one authorized, by Donald Sturrock, who also edited Dahl’s letters to his beloved mother, Sofie Magdalene; one not, by Jeremy Treglown. All of these accounts stand as necessary supplements to Dahl’s lyrical but selectively truthful autobiographical writing; Dennison notes his tendency toward “mythomania.” He figured unfavorably in “As I Am,” the memoir by his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, whom he nursed aggressively (some would say sadistically) back to health after a stroke and then left for their friend, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland; and in a roman à clef by their daughter, Tessa. The first Mr. and Mrs. Dahl were rendered in softer focus mourning the death from measles encephalitis of Tessa’s older sister, at only 7, in the recent movie “To Olivia.”As Dennison reminds us, Roald — born in Wales, of Norwegian parentage — also lost a sister when she was 7, to appendicitis, and his father soon after. Backing into writing after a stint at the Asiatic Petroleum Company, his macabre voice and flights into fantasy were clearly engendered by brushes with death and violence.He had been caned at boarding school and, enlisting in the Royal Air Force, was burned and maimed when his Gloster Gladiator plane crashed in the Egyptian desert. After his baby son Theo’s skull was crushed after a taxi hit his pram, Dahl developed a cerebral shunt with a pediatric neurosurgeon and toymaker, like the Wonka figure he was simultaneously creating on the page. Then came Neal’s medical crisis, while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, and her rehabilitation, reenacted in a memorable 1981 TV movie, in which she was played by Glenda Jackson, and Roald by Dirk Bogarde. (Exploring Dahl’s personal and professional entanglements, you’ll tumble down an IMDB hole deeper than the giants’ in “The BFG.”)The author of previous books on Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Dennison recaps most of these extraordinary events without fuss, riffling carefully through letters, diaries and other volumes, from the looks of his endnotes, but conducting no fresh interviews; there are no new revelations that I can discern, but instead refined interpretation. From the Dahl legacy, chocolate and bile and personality sloshing messily in all directions, he molds a digestive biscuit.“Teller of the Unexpected” is maybe best capturing its 6-foot-5-plus subject as a swashbuckler: zooming around school grounds on a motorcycle or parachuting metaphorically into power centers like Washington, D.C., or Hollywood, where Dahl was courted by Walt Disney himself to develop a movie about gremlins — devilish creatures with horns and long tails blamed for R.A.F. mishaps. (Gremlins would go on to appear in plenty of movies, including a 1983 “Twilight Zone” sequence startrng the Dahl look-alike John Lithgow, but this would not turn out to be one of the writer’s many lucrative franchises.) Encouraged early in his career by C.S. Forester and Hemingway, he was notoriously abrasive to his editors and had affairs with older and married women, complaining to a friend of Clare Boothe Luce’s voracious sexual appetite. In Dennison’s telling, Dahl’s contradictions are beautifully illustrated but not particularly interrogated: He is here charitable but cruel; arrogant and desperate for acclaim; a self-declared man of action whose livelihood was language. He was an aesthete who cared deeply about his surroundings, early on collecting birds’ eggs in drawers lined with pink cotton wool and growing up to appreciate the finer things: painting, wine, the great composers. Long before it was fashionable, he made himself a man cave, a “writing hut” steps from his family cottage, whose name, Gipsy House, also offends 2023 ears.And I think he would have liked Dennison’s writing style, lush but clipped, with such phrases as “the ubiquity of caprice” and “buoyant with slang,” full of a reader’s zest. This is not a potted biography, but it is a politely pruned one, idealism washing over the ick.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography | By Matthew Dennison | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Pegasus Books | $27.95 More

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      Interview: Let’s Take A Brief Moment For This

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      Writer Judi Amato talks to us about For a Brief Moment and Never Again Since

      When we came across Judi Amato‘s honesty in talking openly about the financial challenges faced in bringing a show to the VAULT Festival it certainly caught out attention, raising that always tricking subject of money and the arts. It seemed a good enough reason to grab some time with Judi to chat about her upcoming show For A Brief Moment and Never Again Since, to find out not just about the financial difficultes but more importantly, the show itself.

      Hi Judi, Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about the show?

      My name is Judi Amato and I’m the writer and producer of For a Brief Moment and Never Again Since. The play revolves around a young couple and how their lives are affected when one of them goes to jail for a highly publicised crime. The play aims to offer an insight into the complexities of relationships within the prison system, and how the family members of convicts are often assumed to share their guilt, to have known about their crimes or to condone it somehow.

      Was there a particular case or incident that inspired the show then?

      I came across a podcast by a woman whose husband was in prison. Throughout the podcast she mentioned again and again the stigma and backlash she’d been facing since her husband’s arrest: the constant accusations of having been complicit, of having enjoyed the results of his crimes, the way even some family members had become suspicious of her. This prompted a wider research into crimes and the way the family members of convicts (and in particularly women) are often dragged through the mud and looked at with suspicion based on the assumption that “they must’ve known”. I can remember cases in which I myself have thought “well there is no way you wouldn’t notice if your spouse did this”. Why would I think that? Why would anyone? That’s the assumption I wanted to question in myself and others. So the play wasn’t inspired by a particular case, but rather by the fallacy of guilt by association itself.

      The show is directed by Lisa Miller who is on her third season directing at Vault Festival. That sounds like some great experience to have onboard?

      Photo Credit @ Henry Roberts

      Lisa is an incredible human. Having her on board as director and dramaturg has been the best part of this generally incredible experience. She is passionate, brilliant, and she loves the play. Her background and lived experiences share similarities with the characters’, so she brings a real honesty to it. You can tell she wants it to be the best it can be, and that she’s putting her whole heart in it – and donating her time. Someone like her did not need to do that. I’m grateful to have her. And since this is my first experience and I’ve found myself having to produce the play, her knowledge has made the process a thousand times easier.

      We’d love to ask about a Tweet you posted recently

      We are about 80 tickets from breaking even. At times it feels daunting, at times it feels within reach. Both times I’ll talk about it, because maybe I wouldn’t be so scared if other creatives had talked to me about the process. #openbooks #theatremaking— Judi (@Judi_Writes) January 5, 2023

      What are the challenges that a show like yours faces in coming to the VAULT Festival?

      Honestly there’s a million challenges. Your first time showcasing your work is bound to be nerve-wrecking. Now add the lack of funding, and all of a sudden you are wearing all the different hats. I can’t focus on the jitters because I have to produce, invite people, monitor our sales, ensure complete transparency in our books, do all our P&P… It’s overwhelming. I wake up and check our income. I’ve been picking up a lot more shifts at work just in case we don’t break even. All the while I am teaching myself how to do all these things. So it can be extremely challenging. But I have to say, we’ve been lucky because we’ve had some complete strangers offer their help. So it has also shown me there’s a lot of solidarity between new creatives.

      As for the tweet you mentioned… People will showcase their wins and hide their losses. It’s self-preserving, and it makes sense when we are constantly judged on how much we achieve. But it’s extremely discouraging for people trying to get into the industry. If nobody talks about the rejections, the months you are too drained to write, the terror of losing all of your money if you don’t break even, then people like me coming into the industry might think they are the only ones experiencing it. They might feel very alone, or scared to ask for help – because if nobody else is struggling, then surely that means you are the one doing it wrong. But I’m too much of an oversharer to keep the process for myself, so I’ll be as honest as I can and hope it helps someone out there – and if I take a hit because of it… I think it’s still worth doing.

      Is this a conversation that you think should be happening more widely among creatives to help or even just reassure younger or up and coming creatives?

      Absolutely. New creatives are making such a difference in the industry anyway – they cast differently, they talk about money more openly, advocate for more diversity at all levels. But we’re also all fighting against the fact that there’s hardly any space for us, and even less money going around. So of course talking about your struggles feels terrifying, because if people begin to see you as “weak”, then there’s a hundred other people desperate to do what you do. But when you do talk about it absolutely makes a difference. And if we all start doing it, then that shows the downside of the industry – but also that you can overcome it, and that struggling doesn’t change your worth.

      Photo Credit @ Henry Roberts

      Photo Credit @ Henry Roberts

      How have rehearsals been so far?

      We had one rehearsal at Stratford East – the venue donated the space to us, and it was an amazing place to rehearse in. We got to take some incredible rehearsal shots in a place that looked and felt lively and professional, so we are very grateful for their help. All our other rehearsals have been at The Questors in Ealing. I wrote to them shortly after being denied funding, terrified of having to find affordable spaces in London to rehearse, and they couldn’t have been more accommodating. They gave us an amazing price, they let us rehearse later than their closing time, and have generally been brilliant help for us. We’ll be back.

      What’s next for you and for For A Brief Moment?

      Exciting news – we’ve been offered a transfer to a theatre for a short run! I’m not sure I can be more specific at the moment, but follow our socials for the announcement coming soon.

      Finally, do you have any recommendations for other shows to check out at VAULT Festival?

      SO MANY. Caligula and the Sea, Butchered (check out our interview here), Honour-Bound, Caceroleo, Hyena, Thirst, Right of Way, Sluts with Consoles, In Good Spirits, I F*cked You in My Spaceship, The Good Women, Gray Area, No I.D. – I’ll have to clone myself to see them all!

      Our thanks to Judi for taking the time to have a chat with us. For a Brief Moment and Never Again Since plays VAULT Festival 2023 on 28 and 29 January. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      As ‘A Strange Loop’ Ends, Its Creator Looks Back on a ‘Supernova’

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      Michael R. Jackson discussed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical, which closed Sunday after a nine-month Broadway run.The musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize even before it got to Broadway, and then it won the Tony Award for best musical shortly after opening. But on Sunday, it closed after only a nine-month run.It has been a tough theater season all around — “A Strange Loop” was one of six shows that closed Sunday — as the industry continues to face audiences that are smaller than they were before the pandemic.But “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a gay, Black musical theater composer endeavors to write a show about a gay, Black musical theater composer, exited at a high point: During its final week, it pulled in $955,590 at the box office, which was the highest weekly gross of its run, and which set a new house record for the Lyceum Theater.The final night was a celebration: The playwright Michael R. Jackson, who began developing this show when he was 23 and who is now 41, got a standing ovation when he took his seat. There were more standing ovations for the show’s three Tony-nominated performers, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison.Minutes after the show ended, Jackson sat for an interview about the run, the closing and his next project, in a hideaway up a spiral staircase above the stage. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Jackson and the director of “A Strange Loop,” Stephen Brackett, at the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThis show has been part of your life for 20 years. What was this night like for you?It was emotional, and it was a reminder of why I even began to write it. I wanted to fill an empty space that I saw, both in myself and in the world. And so to see that realized and to see everybody filling in that space in all these colorful ways that are even bolder and more beautiful than what I started with was so powerful and so affirming and so necessary.There’s so much anger and pain in the show. Was that anger and pain yours, and do you still feel it?I have access to it. It’s one of many of the colors in the crayon box. But it doesn’t motivate me. There was a time in my life where the anger was the thing that propelled me forward, but I think harnessing it and digging into it and questioning it and living with it and subverting it and making fun of it and then ultimately accepting it really helped me become the artist that was able to write it.The show won the Pulitzer and the Tony but is closing earlier than you would have wanted. Do you think of the show as successful or not?The more that I’ve reflected on it, it really makes sense to me that “A Strange Loop” would be a supernova that cuts across the firmament and then explodes. It’s not necessarily a piece of art that’s meant to fill a commercial need indefinitely, and I now can’t imagine how it would do that without compromising its artistic integrity. So I consider it to be a fantastic success because that’s how I define success. And I’ll always prioritize the artistic integrity over the commercial and the financial.Jackson embraces the actor Jason Veasey at the party after the final performance.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMany people imagine that your parents are like Usher’s parents, who can’t accept his homosexuality and are skeptical of his career ambitions. I gather that’s not the case.Everything in the show is a fiction, even if it’s drawn from life. Whatever experiences I had with my parents, I took them in as I saw them, and I remixed them into a story. That’s not my parents, which I think is one reason my parents are able to watch the show and see its success and cheer for me so loudly.Do your parents accept you both as gay and as a musical theater writer?They do.I gather the show has led you to meet some famous people.As a child, I adored Whoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple” and “Soapdish” and “Sarafina!” I thought, when I heard she was coming, that when I met her I would see that lady from “The View.” But the minute I saw her eyes, she was that wonderful performer from my childhood, and that brilliant artist, who loved my show, and it was such a beautiful moment to meet her and to talk with her about the show. And then there were people who didn’t see the show, but who I got to meet as a result of it. I got to spend time with my idol, Tori Amos, and that was a life-changing experience.One person who didn’t come is Tyler Perry, who is mentioned repeatedly in the show, often critically.The interesting thing there is that he and I have a phone relationship. He called me right after I won the Pulitzer, and we text every once in a while, and we spoke recently. He’s probably one of the most complex relationships in my life with someone who I’ve never met. He has a kind of phobia around “A Strange Loop,” without having ever seen it, whereas I’ve seen most of his work. We’ll see where that relationship goes. Maybe it’ll go nowhere. I told him we need to sit down and have dinner.In the last year and a half there have been a record number of shows by Black writers on Broadway. Many have struggled at the box office, but so have a lot of other shows. What’s happening?We need to look at the larger economic realities that are happening in the world more broadly, and the ways those trickle down. A lot of people get very confused in thinking that theater and Broadway live in their own separate economy, outside of everything else, and it doesn’t.Jackson onstage with cast members at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThroughout its run, the show faced a number of cast absences. What do you think was going on?Coming out of the pandemic, there’s been illness, there’s been all kinds of things going on, and people are taking care of themselves. And I think that’s going to be a new normal: People taking care of themselves, and shows will have to adapt to that.One of the adaptations was that the weekend before the closing, you went on as Usher for three concert-style performances. What was that like?It was really cathartic and terrifying and thrilling. I went from having to live the role to having to play the role, and bringing those two halves together gave me tremendous closure. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had some daily self-loathings that come in and say “Maybe the show’s not that good,” but once I stepped into it, I was again reminded of its power and of its audacity and of its singularity, and I sent daily self-loathing packing.This show has a white director and a white lead producer, which I understand has led to some pushback.There’s this hunger to infantilize me, or any Black artist, for making the choice to collaborate with who they want to collaborate with, and always wanting to use race or gender or some identity marker as an assumed obstacle, when it may not be at all. I wish that people would respect the choices that artists make and not want to undermine them by assuming that there’s some sort of racial discord that is always waiting to tear people apart or animate their artistic decisions. I’m a grown man, and I stand behind my artistic choices.Your next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” starts previews Off Broadway in March. What is it about?It’s a soap opera fever dream about representation in storytelling.I know it’s prompted in part by your own affection for soap operas. If you were a soap opera character, who would it be?Sammy Jo Carrington. She was on “Dynasty,” played with great aplomb by Heather Locklear. She’s a troublemaker, but she always gets what she wants.Jaquel Spivey and John-Michael Lyles take their bows at the final performance of “A Strange Loop.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDo you see any thematic overlaps with “A Strange Loop”?In some ways I’ve been thinking of it as a companion piece. It’s not a sequel. It’s not direct. But there’s themes that I’ve been working through on “A Strange Loop” that I expound upon in a larger way in “White Girl in Danger,” if that makes any sense. You’ll have to see it.What’s next for “A Strange Loop”?I’m really hoping that people will pick it up and make their own interpretations of it. It’s a story that is like a jewel that has many facets, and you can hold it up to the light and you can see different things in it, depending on how you interpret it. So I really hope that regional theaters and colleges and universities and whoever else decide to take the risk on doing it, and really put their own stamp on it. More

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      Edie Landau, Film Producer Who Was Ahead of Her Time, Dies at 95

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      She and her husband invented a model for faithfully adapting acclaimed literature, illuminating an alternate path for independent cinema.Edie Landau, who in the 1970s and ’80s was one of the few women producing films, working outside the studio system with her husband, Ely Landau, to offer unconventional movies to a mass audience, died on Dec. 24 at her home in the Century City section of Los Angeles. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her son, Jon.In the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie film was associated in the public imagination with writer-directors too young and eccentric for the studio system. In the years before that period, the Landaus produced artistically ambitious indie movies that followed a different model, adapting great works of literature into movies for the big and small screen.Their focus was plays. In the 1970s, the Landaus started the American Film Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to regular screenings of movie versions of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.There had long been movies based on great plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” that fully translated theater into the idiom of cinema. But the American Film Theater tried something different, faithfully abiding by the plays’ texts in simple, inexpensive productions.The Landaus produced more than a dozen films, often featuring eminent figures in surprising roles. In 1973, the tough-guy movie star Lee Marvin appeared in a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The next year, in an unusual turn as a film director, Harold Pinter oversaw the adaptation of Simon Gray’s “Butley.”Zero Mostel and Karen Black in the 1974 movie adaptation of the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” one of the first productions of the Landaus’ American Film Theater.Looking back at the project in The New York Times in 2003, the film historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that were “close to God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful movie making.”Ms. Landau frequently acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, but over time she took on an increasingly creative role in her partnership with her husband, particularly after he had a stroke in the 1980s.She took the lead in putting together “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an original HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the writer Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel “The Chosen” into movie form in 1981 and into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.“It was a given that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very beginning, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the idea two and a half years ago,” Mr. Potok told The Times in 1987.Richard F. Shepard of The Times praised the movie version for recreating 1940s Brooklyn “with such fidelity that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the particular Jewish life on them seem to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”A scene from the 1981 film version of the Chaim Potok novel “The Chosen,” produced by the Landaus.Analysis FilmEdythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later worked as a projectionist at Manhattan movie theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mother, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an office clerk.After graduating from Wilkes University with a bachelor’s degree in education in the late 1940s, Edie moved to New York City. She worked as an assistant at radio and television production companies, hoping to move up the corporate ladder. While working at the television distribution company National Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of the company’s founders. They married in 1959.That year, WNTA, a New York television station owned by National Telefilm, began airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology series that anticipated the American Film Theater. Ms. Landau worked her way up to become executive vice president of National Telefilm and oversaw some of its original programming, including “Play of the Week.”The Landaus’ children followed them into careers behind the scenes in the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son Jon produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the recently released “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a prominent theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is executive director of the Manhattan arts organization Symphony Space.Jon recalled how being able to work on the movie adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his own producing career, and how his parents invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a performance of a play written by Tina and performed at her high school, which led to its staging in a professional Los Angeles theater.Mr. Landau credited his mother with those breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make things happen,” he said.Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits. The men in this undated photo include her husband, seated second from left.via Jon LandauMs. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, ended in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s children survive her, along with a stepson, Les Landau; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.Photographs from her days as a film producer reveal that Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits.She hit back at what she plainly called “discrimination of women” in 1958, when she filed a formal complaint against United Airlines for not permitting her to board a Chicago-to-New York “executive flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for men only. Ms. Landau — who later earned a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles just for fun — told the airline that she was an executive, too.The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that finally led to scrapping the flights in 1970.After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please remember that I was once a major executive, not just a house wife,/So please trust me now to be C.E.O. … of my own life.” More

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      Interview: A Bucket Load Of Butchery

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      Nic Lawton and Ezre Holland on Butchered.

      We were excited by Expial Atrocious‘ trailer for BUTCHERED which plays the first weekend of VAULT Festival (28 & 29 January). Defying the the old aphorism about watching the sausage being made we caught up with co-artistic directors Nic Lawton and Ezra Holland to find out a little more about their show, their experiences with butchery and some of their VAULT Festival highlights.

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      First off, tell us a bit about BUTCHERED? What can audiences expect in the Vaults in January?

      “BUTCHERED” is a physical, absurdist horror unlike anything you’ve seen or heard before. Set in a dingy kitchen basement, Master Sausage only knows one thing. Eat, sleep, sausage, repeat. They cannot imagine their life beyond the butchery. But when a babbling, fresh-faced Apprentice arrives, a harsh reality is brought with them. As tensions rise, sinister questions rear their heads. What does it mean to be happy? Is there more to life than this? What’s in those sausages anyway?

      If audiences want to see a show that is visually and audibly immersive and will leave them thinking “what the f*ck?”, then have we got the show for you… Expect stomach-churning sound design, a heart-felt reimagining of absurdist theatre and the want to have a shower afterwards.

      Have either of you worked in a kitchen – should we be worried that “BUTCHERED” might be based on your real-life kitchen experiences?

      Ez: I worked in my mum’s cafe when I was younger but luckily the kitchen in BUTCHERED isn’t one that we would experience in real life (or at least you hope it wouldn’t) However, I did make a trip to my favourite butchers at Greendale Farm Shop down in Devon to learn how sausages are made and it was certainly an eye opening experience. The butchers there were incredible and even let me go into the big carcass room! It was amazing but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were slightly confused by my enthusiasm!

      “BUTCHERED” is less about haunting kitchens and more about the things that haunt our characters. Being stuck in an endless work cycle, struggling to voice your passions and doing what you need to do before you can do what you want to do are some of the main themes in the show – themes that we feel everyone can relate to in some way.

      BUTCHERED is the second show from Expial Atrocious, right?

      Yes, our first show as a company was a digital production we wrote, filmed and edited ourselves called Hear. Speak. See. for Edinburgh Fringe’s online festival in 2021. It’s a very weird and wonderful show and spearheaded our journey to find our niche. We started leaning into the horror side of theatre from that point, and after a long discussion about creating a thrilling narrative, poignant imagery and a shockingly emotional conclusion in a room full of whiteboards, “BUTCHERED” was born. It’s Hear. Speak. See.’s big, scary brother and we adore it.

      It sounds to us like playing the “Pit” in The Vaults might fit really well with your themes and your atmosphere, would that be fair?

      That’s spot-on! As the show is set underground, this will be the first time we’ll get to perform it beneath the surface… We can’t wait to truly immerse the audiences at VAULT Festival in the world of Master Sausage and their Apprentice, in the place where our show is meant to be. It’s dark, it’s dingy, it’s home.

      Photo credit @ Moments to Media

      Photo credit @ Moments to Media

      In 2022, BUTCHERED went to Edinburgh Fringe, how did that go? Have you continued to develop the show since then?

      Edinburgh Fringe was the best experience we’ve ever had. We had a blast and audiences from varying backgrounds and theatrical tastes took something from the show, which is exactly what we were hoping for! This may be a monster of a show with what seems to be a slightly ridiculous premise, but the message is universal and important.

      The show will always receive tweaks here and there, and Edinburgh was a great time for us to receive feedback, especially from fellow artists who we met there and are still in contact with today. Overall, Edinburgh was filled with happy crying, lots of nerves and a bucket load of butchery and we couldn’t have asked for a better experience to kickstart the show!

      Your trailer highlights some of the physical storytelling in BUTCHERED and suggests plenty of work has gone into your choreography, can you talk a little about that?

      We love working physically when devising, and we thrive in the development of finding a language for a performance. “BUTCHERED”’s language contains a heaping of dynamic physical theatre, an abstracted sense of time and is set to a killer soundtrack. We’re all about the sounds and the visuals in this show, as we relish in creating lasting moments for our audiences while presenting the familiar in unfamiliar ways. That’s a big part of our company’s practice – showing how the scariest being on the planet doesn’t live under your bed. The monster is man itself.

      What’s next for both BUTCHERED and for Expial Atrocious?

      We had a small taste of Edinburgh Fringe last year and are hungry for more. We’ve got plans to make “BUTCHERED” even bigger and better and have a longer run at EdFringe 2023. We’d also love to tour the show to venues who support new writing, fringe theatre and something very out of the ordinary.

      As for the company, we want to keep pushing and making even more nightmarish theatre.

      Finally, do you have any recommendations for other shows to check out at VAULT Festival?

      We recommend Holly Delefortrie’s Sex-Ed Revisited, (you can find our interview with Holly here) “Caceroleo” by Rhys Hastings and Nastazja Domaradzka, “Sluts with Consoles” by our good friends Dogmouth Theatre and the incredible Ugly Bucket with their techno, emotional masterpiece “Good Grief.”

      Our thanks to Nic and Ezra for finding time to chat with us. Butchered plays VAULT Festival 28 and 29 January, further information and tickets can be found here. We are looking forward to meeting Master Sausage so do check back for our Everything Theatre review. More

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      Interview: Learning About Malay

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      Mohamad Faizal Abdullah on Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? (Who Took My Malay Away?)

      What’s so amazing about theatre, and especially Fringe Theatre, is the diversity of what we can experience. And the VAULT Festival makes that even more noticeable as over it’s run, we can see shows from all around the world all in one place.

      One such show is Mohamad Faizal Abdullah’s Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? (Who Took My Malay Away?) which plays for four performances between 28 January and 5 February (full dates and info can be found here). Billed as a lecture-performance inspired by Mohamad’s own experiences of living in London, it explores what it means to be Malay and what it then means to be Malay in Singapore.

      Always keen to expand our knowledge of other cultures, we caught up with Mohamad to find out more about the show and Malay.

      The play is about your experiences of living in London as someone from a different culture. What made you want to explore this theme on stage?

      It’s an opportunity to hear a Malay voice, a Malay perspective, see Malay aesthetics, sensibilities, on a London stage. We don’t often see that. And even more uniquely, a Malay person from Singapore. I think people from the UK might know Singapore, but not so much the Malay Singaporean. It’s not so much about setting the record straight, more of ‘here is what you might have missed’.

      What more can you tell us about the play, what do you hope it says to an audience?

      It’s him sharing his culture and history, giving the audience an insight but it’s also a chance for him to look at himself as a Malay, a Muslim and a Singaporean, who is living in London. As he is sharing, he is also discovering. It’s about his sense of self, of belonging and his place in this world and whether it matters or not if people allow him the space. Or if he should not wait for that space and instead fight for that space and own it.

      You’re originally from Singapore, and describe yourself as Muslim-Malay, what can you tell us about the Malay aspect of your culture?

      The ‘Muslim’ and ‘Malay’, for me at least, they both complement each other. Islam is my faith and Malay is my ethnicity. I have found it very beneficial how elements of one feed into the other. In my case, I find it hard to separate the ‘Malay’ and the ‘Muslim’ in me. And being a Muslim-Malay from Singapore, that is another layer that I need to work through. If we’re talking specifically about Malay, I love the colours, the flavours and community. We are warm and generous. We defer, but we’re not weak.

      You have made theatre in both Singapore and the UK, how do the two differ, if at all?

      The audiences are definitely different. And especially with the kind of work that I like to do and this performance especially, I think the question of who I’m making it for becomes very important. Theatre in Singapore is still young, growing and finding its footing, whereas theatre in the UK is more mature and has a longer and more varied history. That age and history is also a factor when it comes to making work and the kind of work you make. The opportunity and accessibility to make theatre also differs. Although the challenges differ, it is as challenging to make theatre in Singapore as it is in the UK.

      Do you feel it important that London theatre embraces the wide range of cultures that are present in the city?

      Yes. Ideally I would not like to explain why I think so, but I feel like I have to. We should happily embrace the range and diversity that is present in London. It might not always be our cup of tea, we might not agree with what is onstage, but we are in the ecosystem, and we need to find ways to co-exist. And the ‘ecosystem’ is not just the artists. It includes venues, producers, companies, drama schools/ universities, ACE, funders and just as importantly, the audience.

      And we talk about diversity all the time, but is there enough opportunity for people such as yourself to present work from other cultures?

      There will never be enough opportunities. We can always do more. I think the dream is for there to be a day where we don’t have to specifically create opportunities for a marginalised or under-represented groups; each work is chosen and judged based on the merit of its quality, creativity and craft. That is the goal. We’ll get there hopefully.

      During lockdown you put on Keturunan Ruminah: A WhatsApp Play, which, as the title suggests, was a play presented over WhatsApp! What was that experience like, and do you have plans for anything similar in the future?

      It was the first time we tried anything like that, and we were experimenting and learning together as we went along. And there were many things that we learned that we are keen to keep exploring as we go along. It was also an opportunity to understand how an audience takes in a performance and what their expectations and thoughts are. I was recently awarded the DYCP grant that I will be using to explore creating digital performances. As well as participating in Camden People’s Theatre Starting Blocks programme – a collaboration with Hector Manchego, a fellow theatre maker whom I met at the Royal Court’s No Borders. We will be experimenting with digital and non-conventional ways of making performance and see how that will affect the audience experience. Making and experimenting with digital performances is my new infatuation.

      What else do you have planned for 2023 then? Will we be seeing Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi elsewhere once the VAULT Festival is over?

      I’m manifesting for a more creative year in 2023, be it as a theatre maker or an actor. The creative team and I hope that this run at the VAULT Festival will open more doors for Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? We are definitely looking to tour the performance across the UK and stage it for a longer run in London. We are also looking at conducting workshops about learning Jawi, Bahasa Melayu and the different aspects of Malay culture that will run parallel to the performances and tour.

      Our thanks to Mohamad for his time. Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? plays 28 & 29 January and 4 & 5 February at 4.15 each performance. Further information and bookings can be found here. More