Theater

The Congresswoman was asked to leave after being accused of being loud and recording the show at a moment when many theaters are debating how to deal with raucous audience behavior.Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican firebrand from Colorado, was ejected from a touring production of the “Beetlejuice” musical in Denver last weekend, making her the latest case study in an evolving debate over how theaters should respond to raucous audience behavior.Ms. Boebert was accused of “causing a disturbance” at the show, according to an incident report from the city of Denver. The accusation is not an unfamiliar one for Ms. Boebert — last year she heckled President Biden during the State of the Union, and the previous year she refused a search of her bag by Capitol security.The incident in Denver, which was previously reported by The Denver Post, occurred during a performance of “Beetlejuice,” which, like the film on which it is based, is about a gleefully devious ghost haunting a suburban home. The musical had a rocky run on Broadway, but became a fan favorite, and has been enjoying a strong tour around the country.The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the Buell Theater, where “Beetlejuice” is now running, issued a brief statement saying that it has a set of guest policies and that, “We were informed that two patrons were not adhering to the policies which eventually led to them being escorted from the theater.”The city of Denver, which owns and operates the complex of buildings in which the performing arts center is located, released an incident report that, without naming Ms. Boebert, described some of the details.The report said that in response to audience complaints, officials had told a pair of patrons that “they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cellphone, and that they need to be respectful to their neighbors.” Early in the second act, after hearing complaints that the patrons were again being loud and recording the show, the theater enlisted help from the Denver Police and asked the party to leave, the report said. They eventually did. On the way out, according to the incident report, “They say stuff like ‘do you know who I am?’” and “I will be contacting the mayor.”The Denver Post identified Ms. Boebert as the person involved in the incident. Ms. Boebert’s campaign manager, Drew Sexton, issued a statement confirming the incident, but framing it differently.“I can confirm the stunning and salacious rumors: in her personal time, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is indeed a supporter of the performing arts (gasp!) and, to the dismay of a select few, enthusiastically enjoyed a weekend performance of ‘Beetlejuice,’ which the Denver Post itself described as ‘zany’, ‘outrageous’, and a ‘lusty riot,’” Sexton said. “She appreciates the Buell Theatre’s strict enforcement of their no photos policy and only wishes the Biden Administration could uphold our border laws as thoroughly and vigorously.”Ms. Boebert apparently still likes the show, even though she was kicked out.“It’s true, I did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!” she posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!”The incident comes at a time when theaters, particularly in England, have been encountering a rash of raucous behavior by overenthusiastic patrons, and have been struggling with whether and how to restrict such behavior. Those concerns also exist on Broadway, but there have been fewer highly publicized confrontations. More

In her new play, Christina Masciotti turns a keen gaze on an immigrant tailor who has woven her business into the fabric of a neighborhood.Inside an unassuming storefront somewhere in Queens is a woman you wouldn’t notice if you saw her on the street. The drape, fit and feel of clothes are her passion and her living, but her own outfit is pallid, frumpy — a kind of camouflage.This is Agata, who at 64 is a self-taught tailor with the skill of an artist and an unforgiving eye. When her apprentice, Janice, shows off a photo of her new fiancé, the unevenness of his pant legs is a flagrant red flag.“If you’re ignorant on pants, you’ll be ignorant on wife,” says Agata, a brusque Russian immigrant who married the same man twice by the time she hit 30, divorced him for good, then built an independent life. “Why you wanna take care of this loser?”In Christina Masciotti’s keen and unflashy new play, “No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh,” Kellie Overbey gives a beautifully supple, subtle performance as Agata — a survivor whose wariness of men and their havoc is a defining stance, like her willingness to reject customers if she disagrees with their requests.In a dozen overworked years, she has had only one vacation. So maybe it’s weariness that makes her hope that the talented but unserious Janice (Carmen Zilles) — a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who already has a business degree — could be a worthy successor, someone Agata might simply give her thriving business to.Directed by Rory McGregor at A.R.T./New York Theaters in Manhattan — with a bit less atmospheric poeticism than the script aims for — “No Good Things” is interested in what it means to lose a business that has quietly woven itself into the fabric of a neighborhood. That’s a resonant concern these days, as so many urban storefronts sit vacant.Masciotti, who based Agata on a tailor she met in Astoria, Queens, is also characteristically drawn here to the richness of language, Agata’s in particular. As when she tells Janice, “The heart shape is kind of my enemy shape.” Or when she orders Vlad (T. Ryder Smith), the handsome but unstable ex who tracks Agata down: “Stop creating all this situation.”The night I saw the show, much of the audience was so busy enjoying Smith’s performance that they didn’t notice the danger in Vlad — even though he tells Agata, moments into their reunion, that it takes just 30 seconds to knock a woman out. Agata, who cares about him still, wants only to keep her distance from him, and from men in general. Thus, I think, her dowdy get-up, hiding her form. (Costumes are by Johanna Pan.)That’s another thing this play is about, though: the siren song of men and coupledom. Agata has spent her whole adult life trying not to get shipwrecked on those rocks.No Good Things Dwell in the FleshThrough Sept. 23 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; christinamasciotti.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

With its commitment to presenting free spectacles, the event has become one of the country’s more prominent multidisciplinary events.Sweaty venues roughly the size of a walk-in closet. Eye-catchingly daft titles. Lampposts all but sagging under the weight of promotional fliers. Drunken Shakespeare mash-ups and earnest solo shows. Volunteers shooing audiences onto the street in order to air out those closet-size venues before the next performance, and the one after that, and the one after that.These are among the standard ingredients for fringe festivals, the multidisciplinary showcases that have become economic drivers in cities looking to replicate the pell-mell, “Wait, did I sleep last night?” energy of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.The Rochester Fringe Festival, which runs through Sept. 23 at 34 different venues, has all of the above features, with shows like “Shotspeare,” “A Jewish Woman Walks Into a Maloca” and “A Nerdy Gay Juggling Show” nestled alongside headliners like Garth Fagan Dance and Tig Notaro. And for this year’s iteration that list also includes acrobats and a grand piano dangling off a hot-air balloon.Those last two attractions, both courtesy of the French company Cirque Inextremiste, point to one aspect that sets the nonprofit Rochester Fringe apart from similar festivals: a commitment to free spectacles that have in the past lured crowds of 15,000. “Nobody else has these huge free public events, at least not in the United States,” said Xela Batchelder, the executive director of Fringe University, which sets up college classes at fringe festivals in Edinburgh and elsewhere.Past iterations have featured Bandaloop dancers rappelling down a 21-story skyscraper, the white-knuckle choreography of Streb Extreme Action, and an all-but-unclassifiable street parade of enormous fish puppets courtesy of the French troupe Plasticiens Volants.“We’ve gotten pretty good at working with the Rochester Police Department,” said Erica Fee, artistic director of the festival, which in just 12 years has become one of the country’s more prominent fringe events. (While the sheer number of performances and venues can make precise bookkeeping tricky, Batchelder estimates a total number of audience members and paid tickets comparable to those of more established festivals in Hollywood, Orlando and Philadelphia.) “But working out the logistics for a 60-foot whale puppet was a new one for everyone.”Among the complications for this year’s festival? “Exit,” a new Cirque Inextremiste work stemming from the company’s residency in a Nantes mental hospital, in which aerialists perform stunts using that hot-air balloon. Fee, who frequently travels to Europe in search of Fringe-worthy pieces, saw the piece in southern France in 2019 and immediately booked it for the 2020 festival. But Covid and then Covid-related travel restrictions prevented “Exit” from making the trip to upstate New York until now. This Friday and Saturday it will serve as the centerpiece of a variety of events in downtown Rochester’s Parcel 5 outdoor space.Ephemeral monuments: For Craig Walsh’s latest outdoor installation project, the faces of three Rochester residents, including Patricia McKinney, a parent liaison at a local elementary school, are being projected on three trees downtown every evening of the festival.Erich CampingUnfortunately, Parcel 5 sits just a few feet atop an underground garage, which makes digging stanchions for a hot-air balloon tricky. And the dangling grand piano was far less contentious than a much smaller stage prop, according to Yann Ecauvre, the Cirque Inextremiste artistic director.“It is forbidden to have a gun on the stage here. I thought, ‘But this is the U.S. There are guns everywhere here,’” Ecauvre said. “So now we use a banana gun.”Even with the balloon tethered for the duration of “Exit,” the elements play a major role on any given night. “It’s like two different shows depending on whether it is windy,” Ecauvre said. “If the wind is a monster one night, we just have to tame it.”Fee said that sort of flexibility comes with the Fringe territory, especially in the wake of the logistical headaches that came with planning a virtual Fringe during the pandemic.“We still have to plan four festivals at once,” she said. “Having lived through Covid and done an online festival, that mentality will probably never go away.”Batchelder of Fringe University says this mentality has helped fringe festivals, which typically have less fixed overhead and more topical programming, survive and even thrive in the post-pandemic cultural landscape. “They are nimbler in terms of advance planning, and they can often do better when these other groups struggle.”Even the seemingly more staid offerings require some legwork. Take “Monuments,” the latest iteration of the Australian artist Craig Walsh’s outdoor installations. As he has done around the world over the past 30 years, Walsh filmed the faces of three Rochesterians — among them the Seneca/Haudenosaunee storyteller Ronnie Reitter — and is projecting them as ephemeral monuments on three trees in downtown Rochester each night of the festival.“We had to audition trees!” Fee said. More

Illness is no metaphor, and neither is pleasure, in Annie Baker’s weird and great new play set at a fasting clinic.A woman collapsed in a chaise longue on a brick and breeze-block patio is trying to read George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda.” Over several days, various acquaintances also taking the sun will ask her what the book is about, a question she finds hard to answer as she keeps getting stuck on page 152. Still, she calls the novel “very weird and great.”“If I’m not reading it all the time it seems really boring,” she says, “but once I’m into it it’s like the most entertaining thing in the world.”This might be Annie Baker’s mission statement, and, sure enough, her latest play, “Infinite Life,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater Company, is very weird and great. Like “The Flick,” “The Aliens,” “John” and other previous work, it peeps at the greatest mysteries of life — in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common — through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior.Certainly, watching Sofi (Christina Kirk) try to plow through Eliot is no confetti cannon. Nor could you say that the four other women (and eventually one man) who show up on the patio do anything exceedingly dramatic by ordinary standards. You will be asked, for instance, to watch them sleep.Books of various sorts are also prominent. Yvette (Mia Katigbak) reads a memoir about a woman with Lyme disease who starts a white-water rafting company. Ginnie (Kristine Nielsen) ponders an existential question proposed in her paperback by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Elaine (Brenda Pressley) works at a coloring book. Eileen (Marylouise Burke) is in too much discomfort to do her own reading but asks the others about theirs.Buried in books or not, they are all looking for answers. The patio adjoins a clinic in a former motel in Northern California run by a Godot-like guru we never meet. This savior figure prescribes fasts — just water or green juice for as long as several weeks — to clear the toxins he says are the cause of this group’s various cancers, infections, autoimmune disorders, “thyroid stuff” and vertigo. Enervated by the treatments as much as by the extreme pain of their illnesses, his patients spend their days and nights in a kind of stop-and-go stupor, which is frequently, unlike the Eliot, hilarious.The excellent cast includes, from left: Kirk, Kristine Nielsen, Brenda Pressley and Mia Katigbak. “For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface,” our critic writes, “you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe get to know these women deeply over the course of 105 minutes. Ginnie is bossy about other people’s behavior and Yvette is a know-it-all about diseases, having had so many. (Baker gives her what amounts to an organ recital of maladies and medications, including a hymn to the “zoles”: “clotrimazole and econazole and fluconazole and ketoconazole and itraconazole and voriconazole.”) Elaine is very certain of everything she’s very certain of. Eileen, the eldest, is unfailingly kind but prim, especially when it comes to language.That’s a problem for her because the language becomes explicit as the play gradually reveals, beneath its accumulation of brilliantly observed details, a focus on varieties of desire. Yvette tells a story about a cousin who describes porn movies for the blind. (“In person?” Sofi asks.) The arrival of a shirtless and, at first, nearly wordless man (Pete Simpson) hilariously raises the temperature, as if a rooster has broken into what you suddenly realize is a henhouse. And in a series of cellphone messages we overhear Sofi leaving, we learn how pleasure and pain have begun to merge disastrously for her.Those messages — some to her husband, from whom she is separated — seem like a slight misstep; in a play that otherwise avoids exposition like a bad smell (we otherwise know only what the women tell one another) they are too on the nose. Still, they serve a purpose, besides being harrowing, in that they propel the play into its final third, in which the discussion of desire gives way to an opportunity to enact it. But if you think you see where that’s going, you will be both right and wrong; Baker’s structures are so strong and yet open that, within them, anything or its opposite may happen at any moment.Maintaining that tension between plot and anti-plot, while using it to deepen our engagement in a story that seems random but isn’t, requires the most exquisite directorial care. “Infinite Life” (a co-production with Britain’s National Theater) gets that and more from James Macdonald, who has notably staged plays by Baker in London and by the British playwright Caryl Churchill here in New York. Indeed, “Infinite Life” most closely reminded me of Churchill’s great “Escaped Alone,” in which four women sit in a garden chatting into the apocalypse.But Macdonald understands that Baker’s practice is not the same as Churchill’s. The women here (if not the man) are fully, almost floridly conceived, not just elements slotted into a formal conceit. Baker’s is a rich minimalism, as if the characters in a Tennessee Williams melodrama found themselves in an Albee one-act. Despite the difficulty of realizing that, the cast of six New York regulars is excellent: as good as I’ve ever seen any of them, and in the case of Nielsen, so wonderfully restrained, even better. For all the detailed behavior that shows up at the surface — the various ways the women sip from their water bottles, the shuffling or striding or creeping to their chaises — you always sense the greater weight of whatever lies beneath.That the characters also live in a world of ideas gives the play its intellectual heft and complex texture, both light and profound. The contrast is beautifully maintained by the physical production, in which even the breeze-block wall framing the patio, by the design studio dots, is on point: a tracery of concrete and air. The women’s stretchy sweats, batik pajamas and lightweight cover-ups, by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, signify comfort but also the need for it. Birdsong and road noise are the poles of Bray Poor’s bifurcated sound world. And in Isabella Byrd’s lighting design, the minute we get used to the nearly invisible night, with just a cellphone to see by, we are snapped into the harsh May sun of the following midday.They are all expressions of Baker’s refusal to reduce the world to a unitary lesson; “Infinite Life” offers moral philosophy but no moral. (If pain “means anything at all,” Sofi says, “then I don’t know if I can bear it.”) Illness, after all, is no metaphor. It has no purpose, is no judgment, cannot be done right or wrong; it is only itself, incomparable (though some of the characters compete over whose wretchedness is worse) and uninterpretable.Which does not mean it is useless to think about. (When first announced for 2021, the play was called “On the Uses of Pain for Life.”) Understanding suffering, like understanding desire, may help us when we face it, or when others do, and with any luck afterward. Which, by the way, is what “Daniel Deronda,” past page 152, is about — and “Infinite Life” is always.Infinite LifeThrough Oct. 8 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

The jury for the memoir category had raised concerns that the citizenship requirement was excluding a large part of American culture.The board that administers the Pulitzer Prizes announced on Tuesday that it would expand eligibility for the awards to authors, playwrights and composers who are not U.S. citizens.Most of the awards for books, drama and music had been open only to American citizens, but beginning with the 2025 prizes, the board will consider works by permanent and longtime residents of the United States.Expanding the eligibility is a significant evolution for the Pulitzers, which were established in 1917 by the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who emphasized that the prizes were intended to celebrate distinctly American works.The journalism awards have long been open to people of all nationalities whose work is published by American media outlets. But with the exception of the history prize, the literary categories, as well as the music and drama awards, have been limited to American citizens.The board began discussing the possibility of expanding the eligibility in December, after the jury for the memoir category raised concerns that the citizenship requirement was excluding a large part of American culture, said Marjorie Miller, the administrator for the prizes. When the jury members brought that issue before the board, she said, a consensus quickly formed that the criterion should be changed.“This emphasizes the American nature of the work rather than the individual,” Miller said. “You can be American and write a book or play or a piece of music that is American without being a U.S. citizen.”The board is not setting firm boundaries of long-term and permanent residency, leaving the determination up to authors and publishers.“I think it’s defined by the identity of the writer: Do you consider the United States your permanent home, and is this a work that in some regard would be considered American?” Miller said.The decision was celebrated by artists and writers who have lobbied for the prize to be expanded.“We’re just beginning to recognize that migrant literature is American literature,” said Ingrid Rojas Contreras, a Pulitzer finalist this year for her memoir, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds.” “The role that these prizes have in curating the literature we will read in the future is immense.”In August, a group of authors posted an open letter to the Pulitzer board and asked for the prize to be opened to immigrants and undocumented writers.“Whether undocumented writers are writing about the border or not, their voices are quintessentially part of what it means to belong and struggle to belong in this and to this nation,” they wrote in the letter, which drew signatures from hundreds of writers, including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Angie Cruz and Fatimah Asghar.Javier Zamora, who signed the open letter, helped drive activism around the issue with an opinion essay he published in July in The Los Angeles Times, in which he lamented that his acclaimed memoir, “Solito,” was not eligible for a Pulitzer Prize because of the citizenship requirement.In an interview, Zamora said he hoped the change would help expand definitions of the American literary canon to include more work by undocumented writers and immigrants.“This tells them, ‘Your story also matters — that your story could be part of a canon,’” he said.The Pulitzers are the latest literary awards to redefine or expand their citizenship requirements. The Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation have both opened up their prizes to immigrants with temporary legal status. The National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award also opened their prizes to noncitizens.When the first music Pulitzers were given, in the 1940s, the United States had become a haven for European artists — such as Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill and Erich Wolfgang Korngold — who had emigrated in the shadow of fascism and World War II. Despite their successes abroad, though, Pulitzers went largely to stalwarts of the American academy.The citizenship change will expand the group of eligible composers to those who were born abroad and have settled in the United States; Thomas Adès, one of his generation’s most celebrated composers, was born in London but lives in Los Angeles. Some winners of the similarly prestigious, globally reaching Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition could also now be considered.Joshua Barone More

The show, with a group of circus artists as part of the cast, is adapted from Sara Gruen’s best-selling novel.“Water for Elephants,” Sara Gruen’s novel about a Depression-era veterinary student whose life is transformed when he joins a circus, became a surprise best seller after it was published in 2006. Five years later came a film adaptation, and next spring, a spectacle-rich stage musical version will open on Broadway.The musical, as befits a show set primarily at a circus, will feature seven circus performers, who make up about one-third of the onstage cast. As in the novel, the story is told through the recollections of the main character in his older years.“Most people think of the story as about this young man who jumps on a train and joins the circus, but I’m really compelled by his older self, looking back on the chapter that changed the course of his life forever,” said the musical’s director, Jessica Stone, who also directed “Kimberly Akimbo,” the winner of this year’s Tony for best musical. “The show is about the kind of person you are when you lose everything, and it’s also about chosen family, and the choices you make with the time that you have.”“Water for Elephants,” a big-budget musical that has been in development for about eight years, had an initial run in June and July at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. After some reworking aimed at strengthening the storytelling, it is scheduled to begin previews on Feb. 24 and to open March 21 at the Imperial Theater.The musical is set largely in 1931; its book is by Rick Elice (“Jersey Boys,” “Peter and the Starcatcher”) and the score is by PigPen Theater Co. The circus design is by Shana Carroll, who is an artistic director of The 7 Fingers, a prestigious Montreal-based circus collective; Carroll is also collaborating on the choreography with Jesse Robb.The show is being capitalized for up to $25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could make it the biggest-budget production of the current Broadway season.The producing team is being led by Peter Schneider, a former Disney animation executive who played a key role in bringing “The Lion King” to Broadway, and Jennifer Costello, a former executive at the John Gore Organization, where Schneider is the chairman of the board. The other lead producers are Grove Entertainment, Frank Marshall, Isaac Robert Hurwitz and Seth A. Goldstein. More

The theme “No Place Like Home” will drive shows and festivals in both large cities and rural locales of this country on July 27, 2024.One night in the fall of 1936, with Fascism rising in Europe, theaters in 18 cities and towns across the United States staged productions of the dystopian play, “It Can’t Happen Here,” under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, which was created to provide Depression-era artists with work.Now, inspired by that moment, organizations in 18 American cities and towns are planning a contemporary version of that endeavor: On a single day next summer, they will each present a participatory arts project responding to a more hopeful prompt, “No Place Like Home,” from the “Wizard of Oz.”Given the atomization of American culture, the communities will not present a single show — in fact, many of them are not staging shows at all — but they will each come up with ways to express something that connects notions of home with culture and with health on July 27, 2024. In Chicago, the city will establish artist apprenticeships at mental health clinics; in Tucson, Ariz., Borderlands Theater will create a “theatrical showcase” including a play about mental health and healing.The initiative is the brainchild of Lear deBessonet, a New York-based director who created Public Works, a program of the nonprofit Public Theater that develops musical adaptations of classic works and stages them with a combination of professional and amateur actors. The Public Works model has been adopted by theaters in other American cities, and in London.“Art, by necessity, must look different in every place, to reflect its own community,” deBessonet said. “Our projects are not exclusively theater, or even predominantly theater, but really are reflecting the unique voice and character of the people in each of these places — they are making things that only they could make because they’re making them in direct relation with the people of their place.”DeBessonet, who is now the artistic director of the Encores! program at City Center, is working with Nataki Garrett, who just wrapped up a fraught run as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Clyde Valentin, who previously led Ignite/Arts Dallas at Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. They are the artistic directors for a program called One Nation/One Project, and are calling the initiative “Arts for EveryBody.”“How do we solve these problems that are happening within these large-scale organizational structures that are not moving in the direction that we need them to move in?” Garrett asked. “One way that you do that is, you go meet the people at their source — you go where they are and you engage with them in the way that they have been engaging outside of our museums and theaters and other spaces.”The endeavor, which is inspired by a “Wizard of Oz”-based prompt, has been designed with a belief that participating in the arts can improve health outcomes.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesThe program has set a goal of a $14 million budget. Unlike the Federal Theater Project, which was government-sponsored, as part of the Works Progress Administration, the current initiative is being supported primarily by contributions from foundations and individuals and is sponsored by the Tides Center, a nonprofit philanthropic organization that supports social change. Many of the projects are collaborations between arts groups, local governments and community health centers.The endeavor, working with the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, has been designed in the belief that participation in the arts can improve health outcomes, and the organizers have commissioned studies to research that connection.The 18 communities chosen to take part are a mix of urban and rural, large and small, from Honolulu to the South Bronx; the National League of Cities helped with site selection and project design. Valentin said one priority was to “not have it be something that’s just in the coastal elite cities — geographically we think there’s profound diversity.”Three cities — Chicago, New York and Seattle — that were in the 1936 project are taking part. Some of the communities are planning work that will call attention to local challenges: Phillips County, Ark., will highlight issues with the local water supply; Oakland, Calif., will focus on housing costs; and Utica, Miss. is seeking to generate conversation about food insecurity associated with the lack of a local grocery store.“I think this is a much needed departure from the divisiveness we see,” said Carlton Turner, a co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, which will be organizing a food and wellness festival, with lots of music, in the rural community of Utica. He added, “This opportunity to bring these 18 communities together is a way to heighten our commonalities, versus homing in on the things we disagree about.” More

Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the “Kitchen Table Series” artist and the theater and film director.George C. Wolfe can pinpoint the exact moment that sparked his career as a director and dramatist. When he was a fourth grader, his all-Black elementary school in Kentucky was preparing for a visit to a nearby white school to mark what was then known as Negro History Week. “We were supposed to sing this song,” recalls Wolfe, 68. “And our principal told us that when we got to a certain line, we should sing it with full conviction because it would shatter all the racism in the room.” To this day, he can remember standing with his classmates singing, “These truths we are declaring, that all men are the same,” and then suddenly belting out, “that liberty’s a torch burning with a steady flame.” “That’s why I’m a storyteller,” he says. “Because someone told me when I was 10 that if I fully committed with my passion and my intelligence and my heart to a line, I could change people.” That belief led him to become both a Broadway powerhouse — a co-writer and the director of the hit musical “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992) and the director of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (1993) — and the producer of the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, for which he conceived “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk” (1995). In recent years, he’s devoted more time to making films, including “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2017) and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020). His latest, “Rustin,” executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and coming to theaters on Nov. 3 and to Netflix two weeks later, tells the story of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist who was instrumental in planning the 1963 March on Washington, helping to recruit his friend Martin Luther King Jr. to take part. But Rustin, who was, in Wolfe’s estimation “about as out as a Black man could be in 1960s America,” was largely pushed aside by civil rights leaders who feared that his sexuality would bring shame on the movement. “Here was this monumental human being who changed history, and then history forgot him,” says Wolfe, himself a gay man, who has lived in New York City since 1979. Telling stories like Rustin’s, he says, is “a means to share, to inform, to challenge, to confront the world.”For the multidisciplinary artist Carrie Mae Weems, 70, those same objectives have influenced more than four decades of photographs, installations and performances exploring themes of class, gender and, most notably, race. The first Black artist to have a retrospective at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum (2014’s “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video”), the Portland, Ore., native who now lives between Brooklyn and Syracuse, N.Y., not only built her reputation as one of America’s most influential photographers but has also elevated fellow artists like Julie Mehretu and Lyle Ashton Harris with her convenings, for which she recruits artists, writers and scholars to come to various institutions for multiday conferences. With works like her “Museum Series” (2006-present) — for which she photographed herself, back to the camera, standing in front of institutions, including the Tate Modern in London and the Pergamon in Berlin — and “Thoughts on Marriage” (1989), which depicts a bride with her mouth taped shut, she has created indelible images of humanity in the face of injustice.Though contemporaries in adjacent disciplines, Wolfe and Weems had never had a real conversation before meeting on a steamy July day in a downtown Manhattan studio. Here, the two discuss their childhoods, art as activism and what they feel is still left to accomplish.Carrie Mae Weems: Let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from, George? George C. Wolfe: I’m from Frankfort, Ky., which was segregated for the first eight years of my life. I went to a grammar school that was part of a Black university, Kentucky State. And I went [to college] there for one year but ran away because I wanted to become another version of myself. I went to Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and then to Los Angeles. At a certain point, it became clear that I needed to leave L.A. [to direct theater], so I came to New York, and that was that. C.M.W.: What made you want to make this new film? G.C.W.: I wanted to explore the brilliance of this organizational mind who put together the March on Washington in seven weeks. It’s about the idea that activism is not a noun or a title; it’s a verb — it’s the doing of. There’s a scene in the film that was inspiring to me, where Bayard [who is played by Colman Domingo] is talking to young kids who’re organizing, and he tells them that every night they should think through every detail and ask themselves what they’re missing, what they haven’t thought about.Colman Domingo (standing) as Bayard Rustin in “Rustin.”David Lee/NetflixC.M.W.: When did you learn about Bayard Rustin? I didn’t know anything about him.G.C.W.: I helped create a museum in Atlanta called the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, which opened nine years ago, so I got into some of these stories that I didn’t know, like Jo Ann Robinson, who was the brain behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her bus seat before Rosa Parks. I became obsessed with ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Often, history forgot them.C.M.W.: Yes, so many people! I knew very early on that whatever I did as an artist, I wanted to broaden the field. So I would pick up the phone and call these museums and say, “I love your collection, but I noticed there are actually no women or African Americans. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research in the area, and I’d love to come by and share with you what I have.” And they were like, “Who? What?” I was just 23. But I’d say, “OK, you don’t have any idea who I am, but I do know that this work is important, and I absolutely need you to look at it.”G.C.W.: And what would they say?C.M.W.: “Wellll, OK.” That’s how I became known as a photographer, by doing all that work. I started reading about all these artists when I was a young person, and I made little video projects about people like [the Harlem Renaissance photographer] Roy DeCarava. It was born out of deep curiosity: “Who were those who came before you? Who widened the path? And how do you acknowledge them? And then who’s coming behind you? And how do you broaden the path for them?” In 2014, when I became the first African American to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim, I thought, “This is kind of cool, but it would be really great to have a fabulous convening of a couple of hundred artists and bring all of them to the institution for four or five days and just rock it out.” I continue to do that. I’m doing another one in the fall [at Syracuse University, centered on contested monuments].G.C.W.: I’m obsessed with one aspect of your “Museum Series”: You have your back to us, looking at these buildings, and what it ignites inside of me is, “Are you going to invade it? Are you going to tear it down? Are you going into it, and will it change you? Or will you change it?” Those questions are born out of your proximity to the buildings. If you were farther away, it would say something was keeping you from going in. If you were closer, it would tell the viewer you’d already made the decision to enter. There’s a danger and a possibility of being in the in-between. Carrie Mae Weems’s “Museum Island” (2006-present).© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New YorkC.M.W.: It allows so much for the viewer. I started making those pieces in 2006, and it’s only recently that institutions have begun paying attention to them. Artists are often ahead of the curve in the ways we pose questions; museums are just now arriving at that moment of interrogation. I always think of George Floyd as the straw that broke the camel’s back. His death [in 2020] allowed so much to be brought into focus.G.C.W.: What is your responsibility [when infiltrating] these institutions? It was made very clear to me at a young age that if you come with a certain skill set, it’s your responsibility to invade.C.M.W.: To engage. G.C.W.: For me, it was very specifically invading. Get inside, open up the doors and the windows so that everybody else could come in. C.M.W.: I understand, but I think about it slightly differently. For me, it’s not invasion; it’s claiming of space. It’s really understanding the uniqueness of this voice and what we have to offer — our right to be in that space and to change it by our very presence. I’ve started to think about resistance as an act of love. G.C.W.: And commitment.C.M.W.: And commitment, always. I think this is both our gift and our burden. You’re never just George. You’re always in a group. It’s a part of the condition of being African American in this country. You’re forced by your identity to negotiate the space between who you are, what the group is and what your responsibilities are in relation to both. This has given us, as a people, ingenuity — a level of inventiveness, expansiveness, artistic integrity and a grace that’s truly profound. Without us, this nation would truly suffer. Are you an activist?G.C.W.: I think my work is activism. I do my job with a sense of joy and aggression and defiance.C.M.W.: I was very lucky that I had my father [the owner of a salvage company] and my mother [a seamstress] and my family. My father would say, “Remember that you have a right.” My earliest memories are of that. So that’s given me a sense of confidence, that I just feel very comfortable in the world, wherever I am. I love knowing about other cultures, but our quest to be human is what interests me. I think we are still crawling toward our humanity. We haven’t arrived yet.G.C.W.: My theory is that everything is a muscle. Love is a muscle. If you don’t use it, it atrophies. And curiosity is one of the most important muscles, curiosity about the world and about others. My first memory was of George Wolfe, whom I’m named after, my grandfather [a carpenter]. He would build a big tower of blocks and then I would knock them down and he would applaud. Defiance! C.M.W.: At this stage, my concerns are more focused on the spiritual dimensions of my life. I made a small performance piece called “Grace Notes: Reflections for Now” [for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C.] after the 2015 killings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. At the funeral of one of the victims, [President] Obama came to the stage, spoke for a while — and then, finally, the only thing he could do was sing “Amazing Grace.” He had to go to a spiritual place in order to deal with the tragedy of that event.Over the past few years, I’ve collected over 400 photographs of primarily Black men who’ve been killed in the United States since around 2000. I’m chronicling this history of violence. There are days when I have to leave the studio early because I’ve been looking at murder all day. Ultimately, artists deal with similar ideas over and over during the course of a lifetime, so there’s a set of primary ideas that you’re always coming back to. For instance, I produced [an installation and performance] piece called “The Shape of Things” (2021), which looks at the circus of politics and the rise of Trumpism, and the extraordinary violence that has been inflicted on people of color as the country moves from white to Black and varying shades of brown. But even though you’re looking at tragedy, the real work is to find where hope resides within that tragedy.G.C.W.: This country is at its most interesting when people cross borders. The culture that phenomenon creates is astonishing. So the stories of my family are driving me now: the monumental, ordinary, astonishing, brilliant people who said, “The border that you’ve crafted doesn’t serve my definition of myself, so let me go charging through it.” That’s what Bayard did. It’s what our ancestors did. They said, “I’m bigger than your definition of me.”C.M.W.: I decided there’s a part of what I’m doing that needs to be done out of my human ingenuity, but I’m not interested in persuading anybody about anything. The work has within it all kinds of questions, but the way in which the vast majority of America views me? I couldn’t care less. I just want to get this work done.This interview has been edited and condensed.Hair: Kiyonori Sudo. Makeup: Linda Gradin More