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      18 Arts Organizations of Color Selected for National Initiative

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      The Wallace Foundation will fund up to $3.75 million in support for each organization, spread across the country, over the next five years.In the 1970s, a series of fires — set as arson for profit — rocked the Bronx. This story, acted out against a soundtrack of salsa and hip-hop, is currently being told by Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater at Pregones Theater in the Bronx.These are the types of stories and organizations that the Wallace Foundation, which aims to foster equity and improvements in the arts, will support in its new initiative. Eighteen arts organizations of color across the country, including Pregones/PRTT, will each receive up to $3.75 million over the next five years.“One of the things that distinguishes this opportunity is the acknowledgment that organizations of color have a certain history of undercapitalization,” said Arnaldo López, the managing director of Pregones/PRTT. “And that means that, for many years — compared to primarily white-serving organizations in the arts and culture — we worked with a fraction of the money.”The 18 grantees were selected from over 250 applicants and include 1Hood Media in Pittsburgh, Chicago Sinfonietta, the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project in San Francisco, the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., and the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb.This marks the first phase — aimed at organizations with budgets between $500,000 and $5 million — of a broader national arts initiative by the Wallace Foundation. A future phase will focus on a second, larger group of grantees with budgets below $500,000. In total, the foundation has committed to providing funding of up to $100 million.This iteration, though, was designed around a specific guiding question: How can arts organizations of color use their experience working closely with their communities to stay resilient and relevant?“It’s about: What are the aspirations for their future?” said Bahia Ramos, the director of arts at the Wallace Foundation. “And how might these resources — time and space to breathe and learn together — give them the wherewithal to meet those aspirations?”The first year of the initiative will focus on planning before the next four years of project implementation. Over the next year, grantees will map out their funding in partnership with advisers and consultants, including researchers, ethnographers and financial management planners.One recipient, the Laundromat Project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, hopes to dig deeper into its work: Helping artists and neighbors become agents of change in their own communities. The Laundromat Project was founded 17 years ago by a Black woman, Risë Wilson, at her kitchen table in Bed-Stuy, said the project’s executive director, Kemi Ilesanmi.“We have residencies with artists, we do community engagement, we have a professional development fellowship,” Ilesanmi said. “And all of this is allowing us to figure out how to do that citywide — and do it in the context of Bed-Stuy.”Grantees will also work with a research team from Arizona State University and the University of Virginia to refine their research questions and approaches. Researchers from the Social Science Research Council will develop “deep-dive” ethnographies of each organization to document their histories and practices.“All of us have a great deal to learn from organizations founded by and with communities of color,” Ramos said, “who have deep legacies of working with and on behalf of their communities.” More

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      A Starry ‘Into the Woods’ Will Play Broadway This Summer

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      The fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, will feature Sara Bareilles and a cast of much admired theater performers.A production of “Into the Woods” that garnered ecstatic reviews during a sold-out two-week run at New York City Center this month will transfer to Broadway this summer.The Broadway production, scheduled to run for just eight weeks, will again feature the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and Gavin Creel as a prince, but the other lead roles will be played by newcomers to the production — including Patina Miller, a Tony winner for “Pippin,” as the Witch; Brian d’Arcy James (“Something Rotten!”) as the Baker; Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) as Cinderella; and Joshua Henry (“Carousel”) as the other prince.“When things don’t make sense anymore, this is the show that holds our hand,” Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and the production’s lead producer, said. “That’s why it resonated so profoundly deeply, and why we need to allow more people to have that experience.”“Into the Woods,” which first opened on Broadway in 1987, is one of the great collaborations between the songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who died last fall, and the book writer James Lapine. The show, a cautionary mash-up of various fairy tales, is widely staged, both professionally and at schools, and in 2014 Disney released a film adaptation.This new production, which began as part of the Encores! program at City Center, will start performances June 28 and open July 10 at the St. James Theater. It is again directed by Lear deBessonet, the Encores! artistic director. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Alexis Soloski declared the City Center production “glorious,” and many other critics agreed.The Encores! cast featured several performers who are not joining the Broadway production because of filming commitments, including Heather Headley, who played the Witch; Denée Benton, who played Cinderella; and Neil Patrick Harris, who played the Baker.The Broadway run will be produced by Jujamcyn, Roth, and City Center, as well as Hunter Arnold, Nicole Eisenberg, Michael Cassel Group, Jessica R. Jenen, Daryl Roth, ShowTown Productions, and Armstrong, Gold & Ross.Jordan Roth said that the physical production would be the same as at City Center, with an onstage orchestra and minimal sets and costumes. “The simplicity and poetry of this production delivered this story right to our hearts,” he said.A New York City Center production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” also written by Sondheim and Lapine, followed a similar path to Broadway. That production, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, had a four-performance run at City Center in 2016, followed by a 10-week run on Broadway in 2017. More

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      A Theatrical Neophyte With the Know-How of a Pro

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      Jodie Comer, from the TV series “Killing Eve,” makes a thrilling stage debut in “Prima Facie” on London’s West End.LONDON — If you’re going to venture onstage for the first time, a nearly two-hour, emotionally fraught solo play without a break might not seem the best place to start. But the TV actress Jodie Comer, better known as the assassin Villanelle in the Emmy-winning series “Killing Eve,” has taken to the West End in just such a play, “Prima Facie” by Suzie Miller, with gleaming-eyed assurance.First seen in 2019 in the writer’s native Australia, “Prima Facie” is at the Harold Pinter Theater through June 18 — though it will presumably have more life as long as its star chooses to stick with it. “House Full” signs have marked out Comer as the box-office equal of such theatrical heavy hitters as Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” the Jez Butterworth masterwork playing just streets away.Comer is cool and commanding as a defense lawyer named Tessa who discovers, at considerable personal cost, the limitations of the law. Assaulted on a night out by a colleague whom she brings to trial, Tessa soon finds herself confronting a legal system whose strictures even a mind as shrewd and sharp as hers cannot overcome. The second half devolves into an angry broadside, but you can only commend the impulses behind a play that wants to educate as well as entertain: Audience members are handed leaflets on the way out to raise awareness about sexual consent.Justin Martin’s busy staging finds Comer leaping onto the furniture and engulfed by a brief onstage rainstorm, to keep a potentially static monologue interesting to the eye: A chair at one point becomes a toilet bowl into which Tessa is sick, and a crucial costume change is done in full view of the audience.Comer plays to all levels of the theater, often sweeping her gaze upward as if to enlist us as her jury. And though she speaks the text at breakneck speed, there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.Nicola Walker in Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Johan PerssonThe director Dominic Cooke’s revival of “The Corn Is Green,” by contrast, is a large-scale production featuring a male ensemble of lusty-voiced Welsh coal miners. But the star attraction is Nicola Walker, a 2013 Olivier Award winner whose gathering TV acclaim since is surely attracting audiences to the National’s Lyttelton auditorium, through June 11: She headlines the legal drama “The Split,” which started its third and final season on the BBC last month.Walker plays the crusading teacher Miss Moffat in “The Corn Is Green,” a 1938 play by Emlyn Williams that draws from that Welshman’s singular path toward literary self-confidence and success. A brisk, no-nonsense Englishwoman, Miss Moffat has arrived in a rural Welsh mining village at the start of the 20th century to bring literacy to a community of colliers distinguished, she’s quick to point out, by their smell. (Their daily routine is hot and sweaty.) One of these begrimed youngsters, Morgan (the charismatic Iwan Davies), displays an aptitude for the life of the mind and not just the mines, and Miss Moffat leads him toward a scholarship to Oxford that the feisty lad at times resists. Morgan is disinclined, at least at first, to be the “little pit pony” that his keen teacher would have him be, though he soon realizes that education makes an entirely new life possible.The play’s journey is preordained, and some of the bumps on the way are because of Williams, who pushes Miss Moffat in a direction — not to be revealed here — that doesn’t entirely jibe with her character. But Cooke enlivens a time-honored tale by involving Williams directly as his play’s narrator (played by Gareth David-Lloyd), setting the scene and monitoring events throughout. And a vigorous Walker invests the peppery spinster at its inspirational center with a fiercely beating heart. Morgan is better for having met her, as are we.Change hovers less happily over “Middle,” the beautifully acted new play from David Eldridge running in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, through June 18. A two-hander about a couple in crisis, the play returns to the stage another fine actress, Claire Rushbrook, who is better known for work on film and TV. (Her credits include “Doctor Who” and “Whitechapel,” two well-known British series, and the wonderful Mike Leigh film “Secrets and Lies.”)Daniel Ryan and Claire Rushbrook in David Eldridge’s “Middle,” directed by Polly Findlay at the National Theater.Johan PerssonRushbrook’s Maggie has been married for 16 years to Gary (Daniel Ryan), and the two have an 8-year-old daughter who is in bed upstairs when a sleepless Maggie enters the kitchen before dawn to inform her husband that she’s not sure she still loves him. What ensues is a reckoning across 100 minutes (no intermission) in which the pair, both nearing 50, figure out where they are heading next.Gary’s response, at least at first, is to keep things light, but that doesn’t last. By the end, tears have been shed and crockery smashed on the way to a movingly ambivalent finish. Life doesn’t always allow for tidy closure and nor does “Middle,” which suggests that muddling through is sometimes the only option. Will Maggie leave Gary for John, a policeman with whom she has gone on a date to Tate Modern? She may not know herself, and Rushbrook communicates an uncertainty that is immediately raw. Her eventual breakdown scene feels lived from within.Ryan does well, too, countering his wife’s truth-telling by saying he finds “complete honesty” overrated: He’d rather make jokes than discuss dissatisfactions that are no less real than his wife’s. (Among other things, he wanted a second child, and she did not.) Where Maggie speaks what’s on her mind openly, Gary hides his feelings behind a smoke screen of banter.Polly Findlay’s production keeps us guessing, and the emotional swerves are skillfully navigated throughout. As with Comer and Walker in their plays, “Middle” offers an actress at the top of her game forsaking the screen for the in-the-moment excitement only found onstage.Prima Facie. Directed by Justin Martin. Harold Pinter Theater, through June 18; NTLive broadcast on July 21.The Corn Is Green. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through June 11.Middle. Directed by Polly Findlay. National Theater, through June 18. More

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      Interview: Dictating To The Estate

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      Nathaniel McBride on his new play looking at events prior to the Grenfell Tower Fire

      Dictating To The Estate is Nathaniel McBride‘s play that looks at the housing estate where the Grenfell Tower sits. But it isn’t directly about the fire, but rather the years preceeding it, when the estate underwent major redevleopment. It explores how local resident concerns were ignored and how so many factors came together that would ultimately lead the the tragic fire.

      The play felt important and one we wanted to give plenty of attention to. So as well as this written interview you can also listen to Nathaniel tell us more about it on our Runn Radio podcast here.

      You can also support the production by donating to theie crowdfunding here, this will help finance all production costs and assist the play in reaching a wider audience.

      The play looks at Grenfell pre-fire – what made you want to tackle it from that angle?

      The play is about how the fire came to happen, and that means looking at the events that preceded it. It is often said that the Grenfell Tower fire was avoidable. This is true, but understanding how it came to happen means examining the many acts that could have been taken to avoid it, but weren’t. The play is partly about these: not only acts of omission, but also positive refusals to act, which were taken by wide variety individuals, from government ministers to council officers to building contractors, over an extended period of time.

      And what can you tell us about the sources you used to research your writing?

      The main initial source was the Grenfell Action Group blog, which was kept by Edward Daffarn and Francis O’Connor, two residents living on the estate where Grenfell Tower stood. I was also able to get hold of some minutes of council meetings, as well as its regeneration plans for North Kensington. But the original problem was a general shortage of information.

      This changed when Phase 2 of the public Inquiry came to cover the events dealt with in the play. Suddenly I went from having a relative lack of material to being overwhelmed by it. Among these new documents, the most revealing were the private communications among councillors, council officials and TMO officers, which showed the real attitude they held towards the residents they were supposedly appointed to serve.

      A lot of information came from blogs published prior to the fire, have you tried to use as much of the text verbatim where possible to keep the original words?

      My method is not to add or change any words, but I do edit, often quite rigorously. From a blog post that is several hundred words long I might, for example, use just a couple of dozen words. The issue then becomes one of ensuring the edited text retains something of the essence or intent of the one on which it is based. Whether I have done this successfully will be for others to judge.

      Have you had much involvement with local residents and those affected by the fire itself during the writing and rehearsals for the play?

      We have worked in contact with the residents we represent in the play. We asked their permission to use the evidence they presented to the Inquiry, sent them copies of the script when it was finished, and several have now met the actors who will be playing them. More generally, we have tried to keep all the bereaved and survivors involved in what we’re doing through Grenfell United, the organisation that represents most of them. We held an online reading for them last year, and this year we are holding a special performance for them at the beginning of the theatre run. We are also currently fundraising for a mental health worker to offer support to any audience members who may be affected by the content of the play.

      You’ve clearly tried to highlight that it was not one single thing that caused this tragedy – but do you point a finger of blame at individuals or have you tried to show it was not one event or one person but a series of them?

      What has most clearly come out of the Inquiry is that the failures which made the fire possible were systemic, and extended over a wide range of different institutions. It wasn’t just one thing that failed, but a whole series of things. In saying this, I don’t mean to exonerate the individuals involved,  but my own view is that it was the dysfunctional regulatory and supervisory systems, weakened over many years, that probably had  the greater influence on the outcome of events than any particular individuals. That is not to say that the arrogant and disdain attitude of the authorities towards the residents did not play a part. Nor is it to deny that, if we ask who or what made these systems so dysfunctional, we often find ourselves coming back again to certain powerful individuals. David Cameron boasting that his government would ‘kill off the health and safety culture for good’ is a case in point.

      How vital has the information that has come out during the ongoing public inquiry been?

      This has been key, and has enabled me to substantially rewrite and – I hope – improve the play. Perhaps the most important material to come out has been the revelations about what was going on behind the scenes at the council and the TMO, and in particular how senior officers and councillors were actively pursuing ways to silence residents and dismiss their concerns. At the same time, the Inquiry has been a vindication of the criticisms and concerns brought by the residents.  

      What is it you hope people who watch the play will leave thinking about?

      I am hoping the play might have particular relevance to people living in social housing, and especially those who find themselves in conflict with their landlord. I don’t know if it will be much practical use, but I would like to think that it will give them a sense that they are not alone, and that the problems they face are common. While the residents of Grenfell Tower were victims, they were not passive victims: they repeatedly warned the council about fire safety issues, and when they saw the refurbishment of their homes was not being properly carried out, they organised and fought to hold it to account.  It is important that people know this.

      And by staging it at Maxilla Social Club are you hoping that local residents will want to come and see it? Have you already had much feedback from them at all?

      This is what we are hoping. Maxilla is a North Kensington institution, and has been an important meeting place in the campaign for justice for the victims of the fire. The venue has also let us set our own ticket prices, meaning we can keep them affordable. Our hope is that some people who would not normally go to see a play at a conventional theatre will come to Maxilla.

      As for feedback, we did a stall last week on Portobello Road where we distributed flyers for the play, and I have to say the response was very positive.

      Our thanks to Nathaniel for his time to chat with us.

      Dictating To The Estate plays 31 May to 12 June at Maxilla Social Club. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      ‘Mother Courage’ Review: Selling Her Wares Amid the Havoc of War

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      Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Review: A Life Too Simplified

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      This New York City Children’s Theater adaptation of Maya Angelou’s celebrated memoir faces the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain.They were such tiny little kids to put on a train by themselves from Southern California to rural Arkansas — Maya Angelou only 3, her big brother, Bailey, all of 4. Each wore a wrist tag spelling out who they were, where they were headed and who would take care of them there.It was the early 1930s, their parents were splitting up and the children were off to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in a town called Stamps, where she owned a general store.“The store was my favorite place to be,” the grown-up Maya says in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a new play adapted by Idris Goodwin and Janna Segal from Angelou’s memoir of the same name.For most of a decade in her young life — long before she became a famous poet or received a Tony Award nomination for acting in a Broadway show that ran for one performance — it was a place where she was safe, and loved. And in Khalia Davis’s production for New York City Children’s Theater, it is the place to which she returns, stepping back into that empty store and unfurling her memories as monologue.The Maya (Cherrye J. Davis) of this oversimplified play is in her 40s, just as Angelou was when the book came out in 1969 and became a best seller. In the decades since then, it has been a frequent target for book banners — because of its visceral depictions of everyday hatred and brutal violence in the virulently racist Jim Crow South, and for its frank discussion of rape and sexual abuse.With those elements in mind, New York City Children’s Theater recommends its production, at Theater Row, for ages 16 and up. Still, it is a difficult piece to translate to the stage; while a book can be read in private and put down at any point, the audience at a play can’t stop the action if it becomes too intense. There is also the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain — along with humor and joy and tender affection — without reducing it to a Black trauma narrative.In both script and staging, this 55-minute show feels foiled by all of that, its characters and incidents too briefly sketched to gather the necessary force and weight.There are moments of vividness in Maya’s recollections, like crowding around the radio to hear the boxer Joe Louis fight for a championship — the thrill of his victory for Black listeners, and the danger underneath: “It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.”But the production, and Davis’s performance, have an insistently perky gloss that reads as condescending, while the script sometimes trims details to the point of dumbing down.When Maya speaks of the vitalizing effect of books on her young self, she likens the escape they offered to “a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead or a hot cup of tea and milk.” In the memoir, Angelou’s words are “a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.” Can that really be too sophisticated for a teenage audience, especially in talking about the awakening of a writer’s mind?The play is gentle yet unambiguous in recalling Maya’s rape at age 8 by her mother’s boyfriend. There, too, though, the editing feels off, condensing discrete episodes of sexual abuse in a way that acknowledges the child’s pleasure at being held by this man yet elides mention of the physical pain he caused, which Angelou describes in the memoir as a “breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.”From the cheerful outfit (by Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez) that the grown-up Maya wears and the ease she has in her body, we are reassured from the very start of the show that she came through even the worst of her childhood ultimately OK. But in paring her story down rather than distilling it, this play never manages to convey a sense of the whole of her.I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThrough June 5 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      New York Theater Workshop Names Patricia McGregor as Artistic Director

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      The freelance director will succeed James Nicola, who has led the Off Broadway nonprofit since 1988.Patricia McGregor, a freelance director who has worked Off Broadway and around the country, has been named the next artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, a midsize nonprofit with an outsize track record of producing important work.McGregor, 44, will succeed James C. Nicola, who has served as the theater’s artistic director since 1988. Nicola, 71, announced last year that he would step down this summer; he is being honored next month with a special Tony Award in recognition of his successful tenure.New York Theater Workshop, founded in 1979 and located in the East Village, has a long track record of discovering, developing and supporting new plays and musicals, but it will forever be known as the birthplace of one huge hit, “Rent,” which opened there in 1996 and, after transferring to Broadway, spun off royalties for years that helped the theater flourish.The theater has had several other notable Broadway transfers, including the Tony-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown,” as well as the acclaimed plays “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It has also staged a large volume of adventurous work that has remained downtown; among the artists who have worked there often are the writers Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill and Mfoniso Udofia and the directors Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Rachel Chavkin. (Chavkin was one of two leaders of the artistic director search committee.)McGregor has been affiliated with New York Theater Workshop as a “usual suspect,” which is the theater’s term for artists with whom it maintains an ongoing connection. She plans to assume the artistic director position in August; Nicola has programmed next season, including revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” starring Daniel Radcliffe and “Three Sisters” starring Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac. McGregor will choose the programming starting in the fall of 2023.And what will her programming look like? “Visceral, relevant, challenging, joyful, delightful,” she said. “And really looking at fusions of form.”Her directing career has focused on new American plays, but she said she also has an affection for classics (she directed a mobile unit production of “Hamlet” for the Public Theater in 2016) and musicals (she worked as an associate director of “Fela!” on Broadway). Among her New York credits was a 2012 production of Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village” at Signature Theater; she is currently finishing work on three projects, including an oratorio about gentrification, called “Place,” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Old Globe in San Diego, and her first feature film, “1660 Vine,” about social media influencers.McGregor was born in St. Croix, the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, and moved frequently as a child, living in Hawaii, California, Illinois and Florida. Her father, who is from St. Croix, is a fisherman and engineer who served in the Navy, and her mother, born in England, is an artist, teacher and union organizer; when she assumes her new role McGregor will become one of only a handful of Black women serving as artistic directors of nonprofit theaters in New York City.“I have a pretty broad range of lived experiences racially, economically and geographically,” she said. “I think a lot about the Workshop being both hyperlocal in its roots and international in its reach, and that feels very aligned with my lived experience and appetite to know about and engage with the world.”McGregor said she embraced theater as a middle school student in Florida, where she first encountered Shakespeare in a theater class. “I loved it,” she said. “I had seen a production of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in this terrible-acoustics auditorium, and there was something both athletic and magical. I said, ‘I can tap into this.’”She studied theater at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and then studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. She lived in New York off and on for 16 years; she has spent the last seven years in California, and now lives in San Diego, where her husband, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, is an associate artistic director at the Old Globe; they have two young children.Working with her sister, Paloma, she co-founded an organization called Angela’s Pulse to produce performance work that highlights stories about Black people. She has also worked with Arts in the Armed Forces, an organization founded by the actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker.“My mom said, ‘What tools do you have to build the world that you want?’” she said in an interview. “And the tool that I have is being an artist and being a community builder through art.”New York Theater Workshop has a staff of about 45 people and an annual budget projected at $10 million next year. The organization has three buildings on East 4th Street, including a 199-seat mainstage theater and a smaller venue that can accommodate up to 74 patrons.McGregor said she views the leadership transition as a “baton pass,” noting that she already knows many people who work at the organization. She said among her priorities will be broadening the theater’s audience. “If there’s one thing I want to revolutionize, it’s that point of accessibility and welcoming,” she said. “It’s not a quick ‘We send you a flier and you come to the show.’ It’s a long-term process.” More

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      ‘Islander’ Review: Two Young Women Lost and Found at Sea

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      This gentle musical, a hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, combines Scottish folklore and live looping technology.The island of Kinnan is grievously underpopulated. The school has closed. The last farm struggles. The mainland calls to anyone with the wherewithal to move. But in “Islander,” a gentle new musical that arrives after runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at London’s Southwark Playhouse, that population seems to swell. Using live looping technology, its two young performers, Kirsty Findlay and Bethany Tennick, aided by the sound designers Sam Kusnetz and Kevin Sweetser, double and redouble their voices until Playhouse 46 reverberates with bright sound.The premise of “Islander” is a little mystical, a little misty, a little silly. If you can put your cynicism on hold for an hour and a half, it offers a sweet-natured portrait of characters trying to hold onto a sense of place and home in a threatened world. (A petite and more woo-woo “Come From Away?” Sure.) Drawing on Scotch-Irish folk tradition — selkies, merpeople — the musical tells the story of an island split in two. Some occupants took to the land; others turned to the sea. That division remains until two teenagers meet on a beach.Each actress plays about 10 characters (humans, nonhumans, whales), but Tennick typically appears as Eilidh, the island’s last remaining child, a sensitive 15-year-old who lives with her grandmother, and Findlay most often plays Arran, a young woman (or is she?) who washes ashore one morning. United by a beached whale calf, they fall into a quick-blooming friendship that helps each of them recover from past losses and face down new ones.Conceived and directed by Amy Draper, the musical has songs by Finn Anderson and a book by Stewart Melton. The music borrows from folk and pop, with just a whiff of electronica and maybe some whale song, too. It is often beautiful, especially when Findlay and Tennick twine their echoing voices, though the lyrics are mostly generic, with evocations of light and dark and land and sea and song. Melton’s book is livelier, relying on regional Scottish dialect. There are a few earthy elements — a running joke about a garden gnome, an islander’s late-term pregnancy — that help to balance the more fanciful aspects. This mythical world could feel more dimensional and specific, but that’s not really the way of myth. Here, the creators have flavored it with a modicum of ecology, though the emphasis is ultimately less on global climate than on small instances of mutual care and communion.The physical production is spare, with the audience ringing a bare stage (Hahnji Jang, who also designed the costumes, is credited with environmental design) lit with oddly blinding lights (Simon Wilkinson). I saw at least one woman holding a program up to her face, shielding her eyes from the glare. And yet, the overall effect of the show is atmospheric rather than narrative. “Islander” is, as the kids say, a mood.Who better to magnify that mood than Tennick and Findlay? Tennick, with her wild wavy hair and patched cardigan, brings real feeling to Eilidh, who resents her mother moving to the mainland for work. And Findlay, spruce in a blue jumpsuit, grounds Arran’s fable-like qualities in legible emotion. When they stand, on a diagonal, and sing into twinned microphones, their golden voices fill the room and this blank, low-ceilinged space feels crowded with life.IslanderAt Playhouse 46, Manhattan; islandermusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More