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      A Pioneering Black Ballerina’s Life Story Comes to the Stage

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      HOUSTON — When Lauren Anderson was promoted to principal dancer at Houston Ballet in 1990, she made history as one of the first Black women to be a principal at a major American ballet company.“My goal was just to get in the company,” Anderson, 57, said in a recent interview. “My dream was to be a soloist. I didn’t expect to go past soloist.”But she did, dancing the lead in ballets like “Cleopatra” and collecting accolades. Reviewing “Cleopatra” in 2000, the critic Clive Barnes called her “the superb, stunning Lauren Anderson” and “an authentic star.” (The snake headband she wore is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Now Anderson has another kind of starring role: as the subject of a new show, “Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson,” which opened last night at the Stages theater here and runs through Nov. 13.Written by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, the first Black poet laureate of Houston, “Plumshuga” — the title riffs on one of her signature roles, the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” — features performers from the Ensemble Theater, Houston Ballet and Houston Ballet Academy. The show, which charts Anderson’s rise and career in ballet, also examines her personal life, including experiences of abuse and her struggles with alcoholism.Anderson as Cleopatra and Dominic Walsh as Marc Antony in Houston Ballet’s “Cleopatra” in 2000. Geoff Winningham/Houston Ballet
      “In approaching this work, I considered three paths,” Mouton said in an interview. “Who is she as an artist, who is she as a woman and who is she as an addict? And how do those things give us a more whole and complete understanding of Lauren Anderson — the person?”Anderson, whose repertory included works by George Balanchine and Kenneth MacMillan, was a pioneer in a field that still struggles with diversity. One of the few Black women to follow her as a principal dancer in a major company, Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theater has credited her as an inspiration. Copeland’s stardom is a welcome sign, Anderson believes, of needed change in the industry.“I think when it comes to changing things that need to be changed, the young people got it,” she said.After Anderson, a Houston native, retired from dancing in 2006 (and after revelations about her addiction became public, in 2009, when she was pulled over in Houston for speeding), she set out on a new professional path, though one in which dance remains central: She works as the associate director of the Houston Ballet’s education and community engagement program, a role that allows her to cultivate the next generations of dancers.In a recent conversation at Houston Ballet, Anderson spoke about “Plumshuga,” being a ballet pioneer and being frank about addiction. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.from “Plumshuga,” on opening night.Take me back to 1990. What was your initial reaction to your promotion?So let’s get this right. In 1990, I didn’t know my promotion was historic. I thought my promotion was that the miracle happened. I didn’t think I’d be at the top of the company. I was thinking that’s probably impossible. And lo and behold, it happened. I knew I was the first Black person to be a principal dancer. But I wasn’t thinking history making; I was just thinking, “I got to the mountaintop.” Now I know. And throughout my career, I’ve understood the gravity of it.You said in an interview, “My blackness never bothered me, it bothered other people.” How did Houston react?I’ve been here my whole life, for 57 years. The city of Houston has seen my face on the stage since 1972, because I was in Houston Ballet’s first Nutcracker. However, in 1983, when I did my first Sugarplum Fairy, when I turned to face the audience, they let out this huge gasp, because they just hadn’t seen this. And then, at the end of the show, we got a standing ovation. From that moment on, the city of Houston has had their arms open, and they have given me a giant hug.The staff had to deal with some things, though. Whenever there’s hate mail or anything of that kind, the F.B.I. opens a file, so I know Houston Ballet’s F.B.I. file on me has to be a mile high. Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesDeborah D.E.E.P Mouton, the first Black poet laureate of Houston, wrote “Plumshuga” after talking with Anderson over three years.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesYou’ve been recognized as a groundbreaking dancer with regard to race, but also challenging norms of visibility for dark-skinned Black women in the arts. How did you grapple with racism and colorism in the industry?It wasn’t an issue here at the Houston Ballet; it was an issue in other places. Because we’ve had every color brown here. But there has definitely been a longstanding issue. Beige ballerinas are allowed to be more things than dark-skinned ballerinas. There’s definitely more beige ballerinas that are at the top of their company than there are those who are dark-skinned.I see the way little girls look at me, and I’ll never forget the way the little brown girls look at me. It’s with that look of “I could be her.”How did you arrive at the decision to allow someone else to tell your life story onstage?Deborah Mouton is someone that I absolutely respect, so when she came to me and said that she’d like to write a piece about my life, I was like, “Are you sure?”What was the process?You could just really piece the pieces together, but she said, “No, I want it in your words.” So we did three years of interviews.She took my words and made them sound like cursive. She makes me sound so good. So much so that when I read it, and I hear it, some of it hurts. I get to relive and reflect and have all the feels. That’s how in my words it is.Deborah wrote it, and I changed things like the floor wasn’t wood, it was linoleum; or the wall wasn’t green, it was purple. We did a drive-through of some of the places we talked about around Houston.A scene from “Plumshuga.”Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesWhat were some of those places?We went to where Houston Ballet was when I first walked through the doors in 1972; it’s now a drive-through Starbucks. We drove by Lamar High School. We went to the house I was born in. We went by my dad’s house.You’ve been candid about your struggles with addiction. Did you feel any hesitation about that period of your life being on display in this manner?If I was going to tell my story, how could I leave that out? It was awesome in the sense that I was full, and I got to empty myself to Deborah after a certain amount of trust. One day I emptied so well, I stopped seeing my therapist. And I was scared. But when I talked to my therapist about that decision, she said, “We’re supposed to get divorced honey, it’s OK.”Are there any aspects of the performance that might surprise the audience?Everything. Some people will know these sides, but nobody knows what I was thinking or what I was feeling. I didn’t let people know what I really thought and really felt when I walked into my first dance studio. It’s the feels all the way through.Destiny McGlothen, 7, and her mother, Danielle, as the Lauren Anderson character is awarded prestigious roles early in her career.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesYou’ve been cited as an inspiration by Misty Copeland, your fellow Houstonian Solange Knowles and other Black artists. Do you feel a sense of surprise or pride for inspiring so many Black women?I’m absolutely full anytime anyone says that Lauren Anderson inspired them. But I’m just me, I’m just Lauren Anderson from the Third Ward in Houston.I remember speaking with Tina Knowles years ago at an event and she told me that she brought her daughters to see me perform. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the Solange post [crediting Anderson as an inspiration]. The last time I saw Solange, who went to school with my stepdaughter, she was a kid!How has ballet changed since you retired, and will those changes improve conditions for dancers from marginalized communities?Young people are louder than we were. Oh, this generation feels their feels, honey, and they let you know how they feel! And I love that.What keeps you in Houston?My roots are deep. The Houston Ballet, my family’s here. My parents are here and are getting older, and I want to be with them as much as possible.After the performance wraps, how do you intend to continue sharing your own story?The thing about being in recovery is that you recover by giving it away. You keep your sobriety by giving it back, just like dance. How do I keep performing? How do I keep ballet? By sharing it with the next generation. More

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      Feature: Curtain’s Up on Theatre Café Diner

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      When we got an invite to check out the new Theatre Café Diner, an invite that included some free food, we knew just the musical fanatic member of our team who would relish the chance. And so we sent Sidonie along to sample the food, sip a little drink or two and marvel at the musical themed decor before reporting back about this new venture that is already looking like the place to go for any diehard musical fan.

      Tucked away on Shaftesbury Avenue between Cambridge Circus and the Shaftesbury Theatre is a hidden gem of wonders perfect for any musical theatre fan. Daytime passers-by could be forgiven for not noticing what’s inside 154 Shaftesbury Avenue, with its musical theatre poster windows hiding the magic that only becomes fully visible as the sun sets, and the lights inside the Diner brighten the street, drawing in passers-by to find out what excitement lies within.

      The concept is simple; great food, musical theatre themed décor, and waiting staff who regularly grab a microphone and belt out a number or two. Cheesy? Potentially. But it works. The vibe is great. The staff clearly love a musical just as much as the customers, and it shows as they dance around, singing along to whatever’s playing on the jukebox while serving and chatting away with customers.

      The menu is a nice mix of diner food, with some fantastic names to boot – whoever came up with them is a genius – I can highly recommend the La Vegan Boheme (Burger) and Bruce Bogtrotter’s Chocolate Cake. The cake tastes just as I always imagined it would. There is also as a great selection of drinks, both alcoholic and non, to suit everyone’s taste. My dining companion was a big fan of the Long Island Iced Tea-nage Dream.

      A lot of thought has clearly gone into the Diner’s design. The décor is a lovely mix of iconic pieces from a both current and older musicals, including some costume pieces that fans will love getting so close to. I personally loved the Kinky Boots red boot stall seats. There are three bookable booths, which are surely going to prove extremely popular. Two are dedicated to specific shows – Six and Heathers (although both are downstairs with no lift access which is a shame) and the ‘Royal Box’ which overlooks the ground floor, although this also requires navigating a few steps to enter.

      Saluting older shows there are table areas dedicated to Cats and Joseph, both with a little extra pizazz to them, while every tabletop has a production photo from a different show. You never know whose face you will be dining off! And let’s not forget the loos, they are just as much a work of art, and whoever’s idea the back of cubicle doors was, I salute you! #IfYouKnowYouKnow and if you don’t, you must go and find out!

      If you are looking for a meal pre- or post-show, or just a good place for a cocktail or two before a night out and you love musical theatre then this IS the place for you. You can’t help but leave with a smile on your face. I’d also go as far as saying it’d make a great venue for Hen, Stag, Birthday and Christmas parties – but make sure you enquire early. I suspect the Theatre Cafe Diner is going to find itself a very busy place once word spreads.

      These, plus Kinky Boots seating photos by Sidonie Ferguson. All other images by Theatre Cafe Diner

      Location: 154 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8HL

      Opening Hours: Mon & Tues: 3:30pm to 11:30pm, Wed – Sat: 12pm – 11:30pm, Sun: 12pm – 10:30pm

      Website: https://thetheatrecafediner.co.uk/

      Pre-booking is advised, walk-up spaces are not guarenteed. More

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      Review: In ‘Everything’s Fine,’ the Discomfort of Adolescence

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      In Douglas McGrath’s one-man show, his account of an experience as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash.What’s unnerving about “Everything’s Fine” is how breezy the tone is: The story at the center of Douglas McGrath’s solo autobiographical show, set during his youth in Texas, is one of emotional and psychological distress, after all. McGrath is not exactly making fun of what happened, but he’s not not making fun of it, either. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate choice abetted by John Lithgow’s direction or if McGrath is not a crafty enough performer to shake off a naturally avuncular demeanor.But the droll tone is effective, if sometimes startling. And while McGrath may not be a superlative actor, he is a good storyteller — he is best known as the screenwriter and director of “Emma” (1996), and he wrote the Tony-nominated book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” His account of something that happened to him as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash. You might be appalled but laughing, eager to hear what happened next while also dreading it.McGrath, 64, grew up in Midland, a wind-ridden town in West Texas where many people moved to work in the oil and gas industry. Such was the case for his father, a Connecticut-raised Princetonian with “the deluxe name Raynsford Searle McGrath,” whose family included a witty wife and their three children, of which Doug, as he was known, was the eldest.McGrath sets up the scene evocatively, and for a little while, it looks as if the show will be a cozy family tale. His father had worn a glass eye since a terrible accident when he was 10, and his mother, Beatrice, had worked at Harper’s Bazaar magazine alongside Diana Vreeland and an upstart Andy Warhol. McGrath could have easily milked an entire evening out of his urbane parents living in the wilds of Texas.The focus, however, eventually tightens on eighth grade. Doug was 14, and a new history teacher, whom he calls Mrs. Malenkov, entered the picture. This married 47-year-old mother took a liking to him, to put it mildly, and started leaving notes written on blue onionskin paper in his locker. (John Lee Beatty’s set evokes a schoolroom looking half-abandoned and a little desperate.)Those were different times, and a 14-year-old boy from the early 1970s was not like our modern teenagers constantly plugged into the illuminating world of the internet. But even by the standards of his time, McGrath paints a portrait of himself as being a little slow on the uptake. “I was not precocious,” he says. “I was barely coscious.”Yet even the innocent, happy-go-lucky Doug realized that Mrs. Malenkov was not well and that the situation was untenable. When he finally came up with a way to extricate himself from his predicament, the scheme was equally laughable and cringe inducing.As our narrator, McGrath is, of course, aware he is navigating a minefield, and he does so adroitly and without judgment — if anything, he makes fun of himself the most and looks at Mrs. Malenkov in a perplexed, sensitive manner. He acknowledges the impropriety of what he is dealing with, recreating his feelings as he experienced them in the heat of the moment and as an adult looking back. But this also means that McGrath picks whatever point of view suits the story’s suspenseful unfolding, and it’s not always coherent. Sometimes he editorializes with the wisdom he has now, and sometimes he is content to remain locked in his adolescent perspective, which means ignoring glaring blind spots. What was Mrs. Malenkov’s husband up to, for example?Songs like “Teacher’s Pet” and “Come On-a My House” play between some scenes — a little on the nose, too, setting up easy chuckles. Which does not mean they are entirely comfortable.Everything’s FineThrough Jan. 22 at the DR2 Theater, Manhattan; everythingsfineplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

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      The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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      Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Making Art in a Shifting Culture

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      Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the playwright behind “A Strange Loop” and the visual artist.Although the playwright Michael R. Jackson, 41, and the visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, 36, work in different genres, they have some things in common. Both are queer Black New York-based artists who address trauma, secrets and stigmas. And both have spent most of their careers feeling overlooked and misunderstood. “As the Black gay man in the room,” said Satterwhite, “I was seen as some sort of weird exception and dismissed.”Yet since the summer of 2020 and its global protests against racial discrimination and violence, both men have been enthusiastically embraced by the public. “A Strange Loop,” Jackson’s meta-musical about a queer Black man trying to write a musical, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making its author the first Black writer to win the award for a musical. The production moved to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway two years later and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical (which it won). Next spring, Jackson’s new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” set in the world of a fictional soap opera town called Allwhite, will open off Broadway. The playwright was born and raised in Detroit and spent nearly 20 years on “A Strange Loop,” taking a variety of jobs to support himself, including as an usher at “The Lion King” on Broadway.Satterwhite, whose work has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, hopscotches across mediums — photography, performance, painting, 3-D animation, writing — to create art that raises questions about self-mythology and expression, consumerism, labor, visual utopia and African rituals. His practice defies easy categorization. This year, the South Carolina native has been building multimedia installations around the world, including at the Format music and art festival in the Ozarks, the Front International triennial in Cleveland, the Munch Triennale in Oslo and the Okayama Art Summit in Japan.The two artists met in August for a conversation at Satterwhite’s studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to discuss their experiences in a shifting cultural landscape.Jaquel Spivey in Michael R. Jackson’s musical “A Strange Loop” at the Lyceum Theater in New York City.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJACOLBY SATTERWHITE: On the night “A Strange Loop” premiered, I had a lot of projects going on and wasn’t able to make it but, three times a week, someone would approach me about it. I went in a little skeptical and thought, “I’m probably going to see something that is asymmetrical to my experience.” But what was so great about it was that it encapsulated all the things that make me who I am as an artist and how I feel as a creative producer in an art world that has shifted seismically between 2003 and now.I was in the room before we all got a seat at the table, and I experienced all kinds of resistance among white peers, as well as my own Black colleagues who have a heteronormative stance.MICHAEL R. JACKSON: I think part of the reason a lot of people connect with the show is because this piece contains almost 20 years of thought. I started working on it when I was about 23 and, even though I rewrote it, it still captures whole periods of time of Black gay thinking, feeling and living and reflecting. There’s a lot that one can grab on to.J.S.: I went to see the show with my boyfriend, who is not in the art world or a creative industry. There are times when I struggle to communicate why I am the way I am, and I’ve said things that were a bit niche and esoteric to him with regard to my experience. And there were moments during the show when he looked at me, because the scenes illustrated exactly what I said to him.M.R.J.: In a weird way, the show demonstrates my inherent outsider status that makes me incompatible with being in a relationship. That could be wrong — I could be overdramatizing — but that’s one of the loops in my life.J.S.: Before I started dating this person, I had this “I am meant to be alone” militancy. And honestly, I do feel like I have more agency when I’m alone, because I have an obsessive practice that requires me to be extremely selfish to execute. I don’t have assistants. I’m a computer animator, a painter and an experimental filmmaker, and it requires a certain kind of loneliness.M.R.J.: Yeah. One important lesson I learned about myself during the pandemic was that my instinct is far more “I” than “we.” I’ve always thought of myself as a collectivist, and it’s not that I’m not sympathetic to groups but, if I track my own actions and choices, it was always me: whether it’s me against my family, me against other Black folks, me against white folks. Whatever group it was, I always had to find a way to soldier through the group within my own “I.” J.S.: I actually share a similar sentiment. As a person who grew up with childhood cancer — twice — had chemo and was isolated from a schizophrenic mother who was in a mental hospital, I’ve always felt everything about my identity was broken. So in order to survive, I found solace in my artistic ambitions.Exploring niche illegibility and abstraction as a Black artist is radical and unpopular, and it was one thing that people scoffed at for my whole career. But the boldness to commit to something that’s illegible and unpopular is rewarding, and it actually has more impact on the collective “we.” M.R.J.: My next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is very much about the “we.” Now there’s a relationship between the “I” and the “we,” but the world is going, “Representation! Representation! Representation!” I’m like, “What is that?” That doesn’t feel true. I mean, you’re putting up what you want to see, and that’s fine. But then you want to try to sell that back to me, and I’m not giving you my money for that. That’s what I find troubling about [the focus on] representation, which is dissonant with what a lot of our culture has been saying for a couple of years.J.S.: Well, capitalism got in the way, and now you have banks saying, “We have money for trans visibility and we create safe spaces at our A.T.M.s,” or whatever.  M.R.J.: You saying that has me thinking about [the 1990 documentary about New York City drag culture] “Paris Is Burning.” What’s actually been most interesting to me, but doesn’t get talked about, is that the group of people in that documentary — and so many more who weren’t in it — were imitating an imitation of an imitation in the Reagan era. All these people in the 1980s were reorienting because of the actual politics of the time, and the things that led to this era of excess and austerity. When I look at these queens, they want to be fictional characters. That has always been a beautiful dissonance.I went to the National Museum of African American History & Culture [in Washington, D.C.,] for the first time recently and found it fascinating. We start in the 1400s with the slave trade and then there’re all these moments in history where people are fighting bitterly to be free. Then in the 1960s and ’70s, it got real hot with the Black Panthers and all these radical groups starting to collaborate, and the government is like, “We have to break that up.” The Panthers are gone and suddenly we’re in the ’80s and it’s Oprah, Bill Cosby, superstars everywhere.An installation view of Jacolby Satterwhite’s “at dawn” (2022) at JSC Berlin. Shown here is Satterwhite’s “Birds in Paradise” (2019), a two-channel HD color video and 3-D animation with sound.Photo: Alwin Lay. © Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New YorkIt seems like the powers that be realized that, to keep the world order, they had to deliver these fantasies to people to confuse them and get them off the scent. And honestly, looking at today, a lot of that stuff’s only continued, and now people have taken those fantasies and pumped them into this idea of radicalism. Within that there’s stuff that’s real, and then there’s stuff that’s not real. But you can’t tell it apart unless you look at it with hard eyes.J.S.: My whole existence is that era. My mom named me after a character from [a spinoff of the 1980s soap opera] “Dynasty.” She was obsessed with Republicans and the Middle East, so my middle name is Tyran [a reference to Tehran]. This was down to her schizophrenia. She made 10,000 schematic diagrams of common objects in the house that she was trying to submit to the Home Shopping Network to get invented. She became so obsessed with imitating and copying the infection of capitalism — it ended up shaping me as a human being, and my artistic pursuit. And it’s interesting to see how my peers don’t even know what they’re imitating now.M.R.J.: For me, that raises the question of who my people are. I started this conversation by saying that I’ve been having complex feelings, and that’s part of it. I thought I knew who my people were, but now I find myself feeling a bit alone.I keep watching the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) because the idea of pod people resonates with me — this idea of people who’re doing the same thing and trying to get you to be like them. There’s something in me saying, “I can’t trust anyone, because they might pull me into some pod people stuff — I’ve been a pod person before. And it sounds like paranoia, but I also see how people are inconsistent because I see how I can be inconsistent. When I look at other people not recognizing how they can be inconsistent, I worry how we can progress in this self-deluded world that’s constantly having ideas delivered to you from culture, politics, whatever, that’re purposely trying to keep you uninformed and confused.J.S.: I’ve always welcomed erasure and am constantly trying to shift skins. I had a traveling museum survey that started at Carnegie Mellon [in 2021] and, when I went to that survey, I almost cried. I saw a whole room of works from seven years ago that were completely out of context for the person I am today. But they were a part of me. I’m going to spend another seven years making something that represents the stage I’m in now, and those works will have a conversation with each other. What I’ve learned to do is be messy: There’s no such thing as mistakes, because everything can be recontextualized.M.R.J.: The tricky part of it is when other people try to hold you to what you said as evidence in the court of public opinion, [assessing] whether or not you’re a hypocrite.Social media culture has become so horribly linked to what art and entertainment are being made, how they’re viewed and how they’re produced. So much of my voice as a writer was developed on social media and specifically Facebook. That box that said, “What’s on your mind?” I took that as a personal challenge; I have a catalog of every thought I’ve ever had. Sometimes I’ll cringe because I don’t know who that person was, but it was part of my development.J.S.: I mean, the world’s in pain, especially after the pandemic, where lots of jobs were lost and isolation caused a lot of mental illness. We’re in the revenge generation. [But] that doesn’t leave room for artists to grow. We’re eradicating problematic people as if the person who’s throwing the stone isn’t problematic. But everyone is.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

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      John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Peerless,’ Elite College Admissions Are Something Wicked

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      The playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth” transports the characters from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school.Toil and trouble? That’s how you brew a witch’s charm — and gain admission to elite schools. M has perfect SATs, a zillion Advanced Placement credits and extracurricular activities for days, but her application to her dream college has been rejected. So what’s a girl and her scheming sister to do? Commit murder. Maybe more than one.These are the broad outlines of “Peerless,” the playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth,” which is being presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. Transported from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school, “Peerless” places the tragedy’s moral quandaries into the mouths and miniskirts of M (Sasha Diamond), a senior, and L (Shannon Tyo), her twin. L is a junior, having stayed back a year to increase their chances of getting into what they refer to only as “The College,” which accepts only one student from their school per year. But those plans go awry when The College accepts their classmate D (Benny Wayne Sully) instead. D has a lower G.P.A., but he is Native American. Though M is a girl and Asian American — “double minority,” as she puts it acidly — she believes that D outranks her in terms of racialized admissions policies.From left, Diamond, Benny Wayne Sully, and Tyo. The play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points.James LeynseSmartly — because Park is very smart — the play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points. There’s no Birnam Wood here, no spots to out. Macbeth’s bestie, Banquo, is now BF (Anthony Cason), M’s barely there boyfriend. Instead of the three witches and Hecate, there’s only a single classmate known as Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, delightful), costumed by Amanda Gladu in a witchy black trench coat. The set, by Kristen Robinson, shows a school hallway at an angle, with cutouts for a living room and a bed, as needed, while Mextly Couzin’s flashing, deep-hued lights nudge the environment toward the uncanny.In place of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, Park writes in sharp, staccato rhythms, with short lines that drive through the scenes a few syllables at a time. The actors, under Margot Bordelon’s direction, tear through them like so many high-carb snacks. (This is a feature of the adaptation: Who needs a dagger when you have a victim with a tree-nut allergy?) They’re having a very good time. In the case of Sully’s manic, excitable D, arguably too good of a time. Bordelon gives her young cast the trust and space to show what they can do, which, in a homecoming scene, includes some very silly dance moves.Not every part of “Peerless” works. There’s a lot of talk about M and L’s twinness and their ability to switch places, but Tyo, excellent in “The Chinese Lady” and nicely malign here, and Diamond, a fine actor last seen in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” look very little alike. And as Park spends a lot less time than Shakespeare probing psychology and motive, the characterizations come across as thin.At times, the production suggests a richer and spikier play about the ways in which members of Gen Z rehearse, perform and weaponize identity, and about the sacrifices that we make in the present to secure an increasingly insecure future. There are arguments — fruitful, if undigested — about prejudice, both external and internalized. But “Peerless,” nasty and glossy, lives mostly on its impish surface. It’s something wicked, certainly. It could be much more.PeerlessThrough Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Dodi & Diana’ Review: Two Relationships, Linked in the Stars

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      A husband and wife who may be the “astrological doubles” of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed head toward a crisis in this new play by Kareem Fahmy.In an expensive hotel room touched with old-fashioned elegance, a husband and wife growing ever antsier in each other’s company keep the floor-length drapes drawn against the City of Light. It is the tail end of August 2022, they are New Yorkers spending just three days in Paris, but the astrologer who prescribed the trip has ordered them to remain inside.“Stay in the room with the curtains shut until Jupiter completes its transit,” he told them. “No communication with the outside world. No email. No phones. No TV.”Jason, an investment banker with a disciple’s faith in his planetary adviser, is anxiously eager to follow the instructions, though he makes an exception for chatting up the bellhop, who he’s hoping will bring him some drugs. Samira, Jason’s actor wife, is semi-willing to obey the rules, but not to the extent of ignoring her phone, which she uses on the sly, trading messages with her rep about a career-changing new screen role.She is understandably skeptical of the notion that she and Jason are “the astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed” — though that is apparently why they have been sent to the Ritz Paris, where they are awaiting a convergence in the 72 hours before the 25th anniversary of the Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, the son of the hotel’s owner.In “Dodi & Diana,” Kareem Fahmy’s new two-hander at Here, car crash is the rather crass operative metaphor — as in, Samira and Jason’s relationship of seven years is headed for a smashup. From the start, it’s evident that something is badly wrong with the would-be intimacy between them, and it becomes increasingly clear that they have very different dreams.For one thing, Jason (Peter Mark Kendall) wants loads of babies, and Samira (Rosaline Elbay) wants to keep building toward stardom while she’s still young enough to get the gigs. Already she’s reached the stage where she’s a little bit famous, and recently she and Jason endured an excruciating episode with the tabloids — a private horror involving him that made lurid headlines only because of her nascent celebrity.“The more famous you get,” he says, “the more our lives become a minefield.”Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for her company, Colt Coeur, “Dodi & Diana” is a sort of pre-mortem of a relationship — a much longer romance than the princess and Fayed enjoyed, yet with assorted elements in common: not just fame and wealth, seductive even at sub-stratospheric levels, but also race, bigotry and otherness. Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt; Samira in the United States, to Egyptian immigrant parents. She and Jason, who is white and Canadian, never have found a comfortable, trusting way to live with their racial and cultural differences.As characters, Diana and Dodi exist for most of the play in voice-over, between scenes, when lighting (by Eric Norbury) and sound design (by Hidenori Nakajo) evoke their visit to Paris in August 1997: the pop of flashbulbs, the sweep of headlights, the roar of engines going too fast.Eventually, Diana (Elbay) and Dodi (Kendall) materialize — glamorously, aside from a jarring clip in her hair — in the hotel room. (The set is by Alexander Woodward, the costumes by Dina El-Aziz.) It’s the high point of the play, partly because of a question that the persecuted Dodi asks Diana — about the paparazzi, or the British people, or both: “Do you intend to defend me to them?” Shades of Sussexes to come.Any parallel between the play’s two couples is forced, though. One relationship is intrinsically compelling, even in this imagined version of it, while the other has too little heft to hold our interest. Whether Samira and Jason stay together is a question without urgency.So the car-crash metaphor feels unseemly — borrowed from the horrific deaths of real people, but for what?Dodi & DianaThrough Oct. 29 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More